Pink-illuminated skyscrapers greet me in downtown Philadelphia by night, and packages of pink-frosted cupcakes entice at my local Acme by day. It seems there’s no corner of our culture that’s NOT reminding us it’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month. First established in 1985 to encourage women to get mammograms, it has metastasized into a […]

By Guest Blogger Joanna Chiu

As a journalist who writes about feminism, gender and sexuality, I have been keenly interested in SlutWalk, a protest against victim-blaming which first took place in Toronto on April 3, after a local police officer said at a safety seminar that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to […]

Every year on 9/11, corporate media push the PTSD buttons they installed in us on that first day, and those first few weeks, with 24-7 looped coverage of the Twin Towers getting struck by the planes, bursting into flames, and falling down, set to the backdrop of mass screaming, sobbing, confusion, panic.
Amid my own […]

It happened again. Another violent guy shot and killed his wife — and went on to gun down six other women unfortunate enough to be in his path before committing suicide. Four women are now dead; three others are in critical condition. And some media outlets (such as the AP story on Yahoo! News, “5 […]

In 1973, the federal government started to pay for abortions for very poor women under Medicaid. It took three years until the Hyde amendment put a stop to it.
In addition, abortion services are not […]

As I sit against the florescence of the television screen, watching the conservative Fox News pundit Glenn Beck drive political nails into progressive leaders using the fear of U.S. blacks and immigrants of color as his hammer, my memory harkens back to the year in which the book Push was set, 1987. During that time, […]

Sotomayor’s elevation to the high court should inspire the many she is said to represent –women, Latinas/non-whites– and the nation that has presumably been enriched by the social advancement that her confirmation heralded, to embrace the challenges that were left in the wake of “progress.”

Earlier this week, the National Hispanic Media Coalition submitted the following letter to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, regarding the role of telecom in hate crimes. Women In Media & News, the media analysis, education and advocacy group that hosts this blog, was among the signers of the letter.
August 11, 2009
Mr. Lawrence Strickling
Assistant […]

Quick hit: Sex Workers and Media at the Allied Media Conference
I’m attending an enlightening discussion about the impact of corporate media coverage of the sex industry on the lives of sex workers — and the reasons why sex workers have created their own media to tell their own stories, on their own terms, to expand […]

OK, let’s get this right: Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is making the rounds of the Capitol this week and some jackasses are still saying she has to explain her “wise Latina” comment?
In a 2001 speech Sotomayor said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often […]