Feminist Friday

Feminist Friday at Confabulous.ca from Sabine Hikel on Vimeo.

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Okay, okay. I never said I was an interweb guru. So sue me for just finding out now about Wikigender, a project launched in March 2008 by the OECD. Wikigender is a wiki, which means it’s written by regular users like you and me. As the site says,

Wikigender is your online platform to find and exchange information related to gender equality. Users are invited to comment on or improve existing articles, and to create or upload new documents.

This is the coolest feminist project I’ve seen since–well, since last week’s golden Rebick award winners. Check out this week’s article of the week: Trousers and Gender Equality, or check out country guides (here’s Canada’s) with a full slate of indicators for how women are doing. You could spend a long time here getting getting educated and contributing to the conversation.

I also wanted to award a golden Rebick to something called The Belly Project, a site dedicated to pictures of women’s bellies. It’s great, and a great antidote to a steady diet of photos of protruding celebrity ribs and ripped abs. The day my kid inevitably starts complaining she’s fat–you know, when she’s about 8 years old–I’m going to sit her down with this site and use it as a teachable moment.

Tagged as: Feminist Friday

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This week, Confabulous is awarding three golden Rebick awards (yes, I totally just made that up myself–like it?) to honour two different things we read about this week that made our jaws drop–in a good way.

The first golden Rebick is awarded to–and get ready for this–the duo of UNESCO and L’Oreal. I know, UNESCO and L’Oreal are about as likely a couple as J-Lo and Ben Affleck, right? But it turns out that together, they award 15 annual fellowships to young women researchers from all over the world who are working in the life sciences. The UNESCO website says:

It is hoped that in this manner impetus can be given to research in life sciences and to enhancing the involvement of deserving young women scientists in research that can contribute actively to the solution of challenging problems.

The awards are given to doctoral and post-doctoral researchers, and each one has won up to $40,000 USD over two years. If you want to see each of the women’s names, her country of origin, and the title of her research, go here. And if you want to be cynical about this, go ahead, but in my digging around on the interwebs, I could find nothing suggesting that the money could not be used to research why multi-national cosemtic companies are evil.

The second golden Rebick goes to BlogHer, who, it turns out, has awarded an international activist BlogHer scholarship to five worthy bloggers from all over the world. Click the link to discover some women bloggers from Nigeria, Malawi, Bahrain, Bolivia and India. Coolness!

The other Feminist Friday golden Rebick award goes to Andrea Wachner and a woman named Cricket, who Suzanne Reisman writes at BlogHer this morning. Wachner, as the clip below explains, played a genius hand when she opted not to attend her 10-year high school reunion and send a stripper named Cricket in her stead. Wachner video-ed the results and produced a documentary about it. Watch the trailer and see how incredibly brave, hilarious and clever Cricket is. Guerilla filmmaking at its finest? Eat your heart out, Michael Moore.

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We’re introducing a new feature here at Confabulous by throwing our two cents into the Feminist Friday meme (which you’ll find over at Feministing and the like). The big plan is to put up short Feminist Friday videos each week, but for now, we’re going to play it texty style by shining our spotlight on five of the most interesting feminist projects we’ve discovered on our weekly trawl through the internet (or in this case, four feminist-fuck-yeah and one feminist-fuck-you). Do you have a project you want us to know about? Don’t be all girly and fail to toot your own horn! Email Sabine (sabine [at] confabulous [dot] ca) and I’ll try to include it in the following week’s FFF!

Here’s our top picks for the four coolest feminist projects–and one barf-worthy mention–we found out about this week:

1. Dr. Sharon Collingwood, a Canadian teaching women’s studies at Ohio State University, dropped us a line to let us know about two nifty things. First of all, she teaches an intro-level women’s studies course in Second Life. But she’s also working on a site for the Canadian women’s site on Second Life. You can find out more about Dr. Collingwood here.

2. Okay, this is kinda old news, but it’s new to Confabulous–and it’s kinda old skool fabulous. Back in March, a group of protesters distrupted the Miss University London pageant by letting off stink bombs, jumping on the stage and scattering an open letter to the attendees. There are full details with a video and the text of the letter here at their own blog. We think Gloria Steinem would be proud.

3. We’ve also just found out about 52 Acts, a site dedicated to “acts of cyberfeminist creativity.” They’ve got feminist cookies!(h/t to Greenshoes5).

4. skirt! is looking for some feminist men for their July edition.

5. Finally, we’re squeezing in a Feminist Friday Fuck You here to the National Post, not only for running this gratuitous bum shot of Carla Bruni and Spain’s Princess Letizia, but for running it with the headline, “Carla Bruni: Bad for Feminism.” Hello, author Anne Marie Owens. It’s not Bruni who’s bad for feminism–it’s the media coverage of her (her wardrobe, her face, her husban’s hand on her ass) that’s deplorable.

Tagged as: Feminist Friday

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