Feminist media products: alternative voices, participatory spaces

Due to its general distrust of the mainstream counterpart, the Feminist Movement has a long history of creating media products in order to educate, mobilize, and coordinate its actions. The Feminist Media Products (FMPs) continue to exist and thrive in the digital age. This paper examines how FMPs fit into existing models of alternative media framed within Atkinson’s three definitions of alternative media, (2011) and Lievrouw’s Genre Framework for alternative and activist media (2011), and showcases how online platforms function as participatory spaces for their users, as outlined by Jensen et al. (2006). A content analysis of 50 FMPs found that FMPs fit into models of alternative media, with some variations. In the case of Atkinson who states the content is what makes media alternative, the findings argue that it is rather the perspective with which the content is presented that makes it alternative. In the case of Lievrouw, the findings show that FMPs are far more permanent rather than ephemeral. It was also found that online platforms have allowed for the creation of participatory spaces, and that the founders of FMPs prioritize this as a goal.