Fempreneurs and Digital Feminist Publishing

Abstract

Through semi-structured interviews, online ethnography, and secondary data analysis of a wide range of popular feminist blogs from Canada, the US and UK, this article teases out connections amongst ‘the business of feminism’ (Young 1989) between traditional print and contemporary digital feminist blogs. While both forms of publishing are highly affective, precarious and often rely on unpaid labour, feminist bloggers face some unique challenges, such as finding sustainable ways to digitally archive and preserve content, and developing digital defence and management strategies to tackle the rise of coordinate online misogyny. Marked by the continued erosion of the welfare state and the rise of neoliberal ideologies, this article demonstrates how enterprising feminist bloggers—or ‘fempreneurs’—are finding many creative ways to sustain their activism.

Keywords:

• feminism
• blogs
• digital publishing
• activism
• labour
• trolling
• precarity
• archive

Funding Models

It is clear from reading through accounts of feminist presses from the 1960s onwards, that feminist publishing, in nations around the world, has long remained a precarious endeavour, relying on unpaid labour endured through a political commitment to feminism (Menon 2001; Murray 2004; Young 1989). As Ritu Menon, co-founder of India’s Kali for Women feminist press recalled:

In many ways this was ‘shadow work’, women’s work, done for very little money, mostly undertaken voluntarily. Often, the women who set up small presses or started a magazine had no previous publishing experience, and operated on very small budgets. (177)

Through interviewing others involved in feminist presses, Menon went on to note, most of these endeavours were collectives, and didn’t pay living wages to anyone. The rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s contributed added pressure, as the government grants which many feminist presses of the time relied on, diminished, and the welfare state became eroded (Menon 2001; Murray 2004).

Although I attempted to answer questions about finance, wages, and funding in my research, this information is not always easily available. Instead, I have resorted to interviews, sifting through the blogs, and other secondary sources to find information about fees, salaries, or sources of funding. Like the feminist presses of the past (see Murray 2004), my research reveals a plurality of funding models for feminist blogs, in which some are completely independent, while others have become registered non-profits, and others still receive financial support or investment from wealthy individuals, venture capitals, or organizations.

Six of the eight blogs in this research (The Feminist Current, Crunk Feminist Collective, Feministing, The Vagenda and The F-Word) could be classified as ‘independent’ in that they are not affiliated with any organization or institution, where most revenue is generated by some, or all of the following: individual donations, advertisements, public speaking, or the sale of merchandise. This income then goes towards website running costs, infrastructure, and the occasional re-design. In many cases, these sites are subsidized by the founders’ jobs (as journalists, copyeditors, academics and administrators). Although these jobs don’t generate revenue for the site, they provide income (and at times ideas) that supports their blogging work.

As with feminist presses of the past, it is common for these feminist blogs to experiment with different funding sources over time, abandoning those that clash with their politics or potentially limit editorial freedom. As Meghan Murphy explained, at one point the Feminist Current generated revenue through advertising: ‘we didn’t get that much revenue … but we got enough that it was worth it’. However, this changed after a conflict with the advertising network who suddenly pulled their revenue after a complaint from a member of the public. Recalling this experience, Meghan shared:

I was like nope, this isn’t worth it. I am not going to be dependent on people who cave to misogynists. I don’t want to have to think about our content in that way. I want to be able to publish independent content.

Such conflicts are not new. Well-known feminist magazines such as Ms famously altered their funding model away from advertisements as a means of giving them more editorial control in the 1970s (as Melanie Waters discusses in this issue). This editorial control was also important for Britain’s The Feminist Times. In a news article (Moss 2014) detailing the publication’s closure—a mere nine months after its launch—the editorial team admitted its refusal to accept commercial sponsors or engage in ‘native’ advertising—a ‘form of paid media where the commercial content is delivered within the design and form of editorial content’ (Conill 2016: 905)—played a significant role in its demise. Instead, The Feminist Times, like many traditional and contemporary feminist publications, relied on monthly membership or donations. Because the blog content was free at the point of access, ‘membership’ offered readers extra perks, such as free swag, special offers or discounts to feminist events.

Some feminist blogs in this study, such as Feminist Frequency are officially registered as not-for-profit organizations, with their own Board of Directors. Others, such as Feministing and The Establishment list, or give thanks to key funders on their site, ranging from wealthy individuals to established feminist organizations. Although it is rarely clear which blogs pay their staff, including contributors, this information is evident on some. The Establishment, for example, paid $125 (USD) for feature stories or op-eds, and $500 (USD) for longer-format stories. In their farewell blog post in 2019, they proudly declared that the site was responsible for ‘4,000 stories by 990 writers, to be exact. (And we paid every single writer and creator)’ (‘Farewell to The Establishment’ 2019). In a similar vein, The Feminist Times co-founder Charlotte Raven wrote about how the publication refused to draw from ‘slave labour’ of unpaid interns, opting instead to pay everyone involved with the publication (Raven 2014).

These publications however are the exception, and in many ways, buck trends increasingly seen on even popular, mainstream sites such as The Huffington Post which does not pay any contributors, despite as Novoselova and Jenson note, ‘making a considerable profit’ (2019: 269). Addressing concerns that feminist bloggers are driven by a pursuit of capital, rather than social justice, Feministing poses the question in bold, capitalized letters on the FAQ section: ‘ARE YOU GETTING RICH OFF OF THIS BLOG? HOW IS FEMINISTING FUNDED?’ to which the editors respond: ‘Hardly. For ten years, Feministing was run as a labor of love. Contributors and editors all had other full-time jobs, and the revenue we got–mostly from advertising–went mainly toward covering the costs of running the site.’ (FAQ 2020). Similar sentiments can be found under a tab titled ‘Submissions’, The Vagenda not only offers guidance on how to pitch a story, but a side note stating: ‘Oh, and being as it is that we are two young women working out of our kitchens, we are unable to offer employment, work experience or internships—sorry’ (‘Submissions’ n.d.). The F-Word’s website also states that, while it would make them ‘very, very happy indeed if you wanted to contribute anything to the site’, they are unable to ‘pay for submissions. Everyone who contributes to the site is a volunteer’ (Write for Us 2001–2018).

Indeed, a common sentiment of feminist publishers, past and present, is that the work they do is not for profit, but is instead a ‘labour of love’ (see Novoselova and Jenson 2019; Menon 2001; Murray 2004; Young 1989). In Feministing’s farewell post, the editorial team wrote of the challenges they faced in keeping the blog alive:

Feministing remained completely independent over 15 years of publishing, resisting the pressure to tone down our message or avoid ‘controversial’ topics to appeal more to corporate or venture capitalist dollars or merge with a less outspoken non-profit or other entity. Our team blogged and managed the site while holding down other, full-time jobs. It was truly a labor of love. ((B)logging off: Feministing forever 2019).

Many, though not all of those contributing to feminist blogs did this work in addition to forms of paid employment. Former editor of The F-Word Jess McCabe worked full-time as a journalist while in charge, and former rotating editor Holly Combe did copyediting work, while several members of the Crunk Feminist Collective work full-time as academics or in the non-profit sector. As I will discuss further below, some bloggers have found ways to earn a living wage from their blog, but these are few and far between.

That contemporary feminist blogs feel the need to articulate their political commitment to feminism and their shoestring budgets reflects this ‘impossible line’ that Murray (2004) identifies between ‘political authenticity and commercial viability … between ensuring sufficient turnover to remain solvent on one hand, and, on the other, disguising any too flagrantly profitable operation for fear of imitation’ (26). This reflects a longstanding tension about feminisms’ role in capitalist marketplaces (see Eisenstein 2005; Fraser 2009; Hammad and Taylor 2015; Taylor 2016; Zeisler 2016). While some, such as Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer (2017) call out the ‘market-based production and reproduction of a feminist politics’, others, such as Taylor (2016), are more optimistic, arguing that: ‘we should not presume that this is inevitably limiting to feminism’ (7). As Taylor elaborates, it is incorrect to assume that a feminism not ‘implicated in systems of celebrity and commodification is morally and superior to those that more blatantly exhibit this investment’ (2016: 30). What she as well as others caution, however, is a recognition of the ways an imbrication with capitalism can make radical, intersectional critiques more challenging, and instead exacerbate ‘patterns of exclusion and privilege’ (Novoselova and Jenson 2019: 261) which shape whose voices we hear, and which issues become elevated (see also Loza 2014; Mendes et al. 2019b; Munro 2013; Thelandersson 2014).

In this light, in the section below I develop the concept of fempreneur and detail some of the creative ways contemporary bloggers (including feminists) sustain their blogs and earn a living from their activism.

Fempreneurial Activities

In recent years, there is increased evidence of the ways activist identities, style and symbols have become commodified. Although this is true for many activist identities, it is particularly true for feminism, which has experienced a spectacular revival in recent years (see Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer 2017; Gill 2016). The commodification of feminism is nothing new (see Goldman et al. 2009) but has certainly intensified in recent years as the movement has gained popularity (Zeisler 2016). Indeed, as King and Busa write (2017), ideas and practices developed by social movements are frequently ‘taken up by the market and commodified’ (549). Like other social movements, feminists have over the centuries, developed their own symbols (Rosie the Riveter), slogans (‘my body, my choice’) and colour schemes (violet, green and white for suffragettes), which are increasingly being commoditized. For example, in 2014, in their ‘Feminism’ issue, Elle magazine promoted T-Shirts saying: ‘This is what a feminist looks like,’ which retailed for £45. In their 2017 spring/summer line, Dior included T-Shirts sampled from the feminist author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s work, saying, ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ retailing at £490.

Although these are just two examples of the ways corporations are cashing in on feminism’s popularity, it is worth noting that enterprising individuals or collectives who identify as feminists, or what I term ‘fempreneurs’, are also capitalizing on feminism’s popularity and entering the market, filling a demand for contemporary feminist content, symbols, products, and services. Rather than simply dismiss contemporary fempreneurs for capitalizing on ‘the business of feminism’ (Young 1989), we must remember that fempreneurial activities are increasingly necessary to generate or supplement income, as neoliberal governments around the world withdraw welfare provisions and support (see Eisenstein 2005). In the following sections, I detail some of the creative ways feminist bloggers, who I argue could be classed as fempreneurs, have sustained their publishing through many means, including the development of literary and public speaking skills, and the sale of merchandise.

Developing Literary and Public Speaking Skills

As scholars have recently noted, many bloggers write without the expectation of getting paid, but as a form of ‘hope’ (Kuehn and Corrigan 2013) or ‘aspirational labour’ (Duffy 2016) in which they use a range of literary skills developed through their blogging ‘to gain exposure and receive feedback in lieu of compensation’ (Novoselova and Jenson 2019: 263). This was certainly the case for co-founders of The Vagenda, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter, who, since the launch of their blog, have gone on to successful media careers, writing for publications such as The Guardian, and publishing a book based on the blog (Baxter and Cosslett 2014). Such success was also found amongst members of the Feministing, such as Jessica Valenti, who has subsequently published five popular feminist books, and written columns for The Guardian and Medium.

Indeed, a New York Times article which discussed the closure of Feministing in 2019 noted how many contemporary feminist blogs were ‘undone by their own popularity’ as larger media organizations ‘like The New York Times, The Washington Post and Condé Nast took notice of the rising generation of women journalists — and hired them’ (Goldberg 2019), mirroring a similar trend during the second feminist wave. And while some of these feminists stepped away from blogging to take prestigious posts with mainstream media, others have found creative ways to carry on with their blogs, and earn a living through public speaking engagements on the back of these blogs. This includes delivering TED talks (presenting ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’), organizing public speaking tours around universities and Colleges or being available for general punditry.

In addition to undertaking paid work for radio stations such as the BBC, writing for publications like The Guardian, Scarlet Magazine, and Yahoo, and engaging in public speaking events, The F-Word’s Holly Combe, used her experience with the blog to hone her editing skills, noting how it has turned into a career for her: ‘So I’ve been able to find work that pays through the experience that I gained at the F-word.’ However, through our discussion, it became clear that Holly is not as optimistic about the potential to engage in what Duffy (2016) terms ‘aspirational labour’. As she explained, she qualified for benefits during her early years of volunteering for The F-Word, but recognizes that such opportunities to voluntarily do work that one loves and finds important are diminishing in our current age of austerity where ‘the whole benefit system’s been eroded’. As Holly went on to explain, this means that the only people ‘who will have time to be creative or who will be able to be creative on their own terms will be rich people—people who are supported by a partner, or by family’. Given the current economic and social climate, it is therefore no surprise that feminists, particularly those without secure sources of financial support, are increasingly forced to become more entrepreneurial as a means of sustaining their activism, including through the sale of merchandise.

Sale of Merchandise

Nearly as common as the presence of ‘donate’ buttons on contemporary feminist blogs, are ‘merchandise’ sections, where readers can support the blog through purchasing a range of feminist themed goods such as T-shirts, tote bags, badges, jewellery and mugs. That many feminist blogs now sell ‘merch’, often emblazoned with their own logo, is an unsurprising trend when looking across more mainstream public marketplaces. In addition to mainstream vendors selling feminist T-shirts, sites such as Etsy reveal a whole plethora of feminist-related swag, including pussyhats, #MeToo merch, suffragette imagery, and a range of items emblazoned with calls to ‘smash the patriarchy’.

Yet the sale of merch appears to be a reluctant move by some, such as Meghan Murphy, who, when I asked her about the decision to sell it, explained:

We don’t pay much attention to merch, but I guess we started doing it a couple of years ago, and that was just because there is demand—people wanted to have merch, so we came up with a few different things. But, we don’t make that much in terms of revenue and I don’t really push it too much to be honest—I don’t have time to pay too much attention to merch stuff. I am more interested in the content on the website.

Yet the longstanding relationship between consumerism and feminism, stretching back to suffragette shops (Goring 2002; Mercer 2009), is a stark reminder that fempreneurial activities are not new, but are increasingly normalized and capitalized upon within increasingly neoliberal cultural, political, and economic climates. Rather than dismiss them outright, as John Mercer argues, the sale of feminist merchandise may indeed offer a ‘more optimistic story of consumption as an attractively styled introduction to public activism’ than is credited (2009: 309).

It is also worthwhile noting that engaging in fempreneurial activities may not be enough to sustain a site. Writing in The Establishment’s farewell post, after trying ‘just about everything’ from ‘events, subscriptions, branded content, swag, gated content, and good ol’ fashioned donations and desperate pleas to the Internet Gods’, the editorial team rhetorically asks in capitalized letters: ‘WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT’S DIFFICULT TO MONETIZE INTERSECTIONAL FEMINIST MEDIA?!’ (‘Farewell to The Establishment’ 2019). Finding a sustainable funding model had proven instead to be a ‘Sisyphean feat’ (‘Farewell from The Establishment’ 2019). Of course, such challenges are neither new nor unique to feminist publishers, but a much more systemic issue within the publishing industry (Novoselova and Jenson 2019). Indeed, in recalling her involvement with the Indian feminist press in the 1980s, Ritu Menon noted how many were kept alive through ‘running with bake sales and dances’ (Menon 2001: 177). What these findings highlight however is that, like feminist presses of the past, feminist blogs do operate in competitive marketplaces, and as such, their labour, funding models, work conditions and enterprising activities are worthy of investigation (see also Novoselova and Jenson 2019).

While this article has thus far outlined connections between ‘the business of feminism’ (Young 1989) within blogging and print feminist publishing, I want to finish by discussing some unique challenges faced by contemporary feminist bloggers—namely issues around archiving and the rise of organized misogynist trolling.

Archiving as a Feminist Issue

In recent years, a number of scholars have explored the relationship between archiving and feminism (Dever 2017; Eichhorn 2010; Geiger and Hauser 2012; Withers 2015), noting the ways that what gets preserved, where and by whom is most certainly a feminist issue (Moseley and Wheatley 2008). Feminist archives play an important role in ‘passing on women’s history, particularly in documenting and increasing the visibility of the women’s movement’ (Geiger and Hauser 2012: 73). While resourcing and managing feminist archives has long been a challenge, there are particular issues attached to digital artefacts. Digital technologies are inherently unstable and thus, feminists and archivists need to ensure ‘that the important resources and projects that make up the emerging feminist digital footprint do not disappear’ (Dever 2017: 2).

This is certainly the case for the innumerable feminist blogs that have come and gone over the past twenty years. Unless someone commits to manually archiving the blog via screenshots or sites such as WayBackMachine, or renewing domain names, the content risks becoming lost forever. The Feminist Times, for example, remained accessible for over a year after its closure, but its digital footprint has today almost entirely disappeared, aside from a few Google Images and an inactive Twitter account. Its most visible remnants are in the form of mainstream media reports of its launch and subsequent closure nine months later. The importance of archiving these publications is not lost on all. As Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, co-founder of The Vagenda, which stopped publishing in 2015, told me, her dad continues to pay the domain name and web hosting fees. She went on to add:

[W]e [Rhiannon and co-founder Lucy Baxter] didn’t really want to take it down. I plan to keep it up for as long as we’re around. The cost at the moment isn’t prohibitive … it costs £30 per year £40 per year, and it’s worth it because I think it’s something that helps both of us in terms of our careers, because people can look it up and be like, ‘oh look, they built this website.’ You know, it also seems, as a publication, formed quite a formative part of people’s experiences of coming to feminism. They want to go back and look at it and feel nostalgic about it, they can.

While the pleasure and nostalgia of going through feminist archives are well documented (see Eichhorn 2010), it is worrying that feminist labour, theorizing can be lost forever once these blogs close and domain names are not renewed. Some, such as Feministing, trail their plans to archive at least some of this work: in their farewell post, the editors wrote: ‘Plans are also in the works to ensure that the site archives will remain available in some capacity’ (‘(B)logging off: Feministing forever’ 2019). Similarly, The Establishment’s final post signed off reassuringly:

PS: Please rest assured that all Establishment content will remain in the digital universe for perpetuity—we will be maintaining the site at theestablishment.co and medium.com/the-establishment, just without publishing new content, so you can continue to read and discuss the brilliant words of our extraordinary writers. (‘Farewell to the Establishment’ 2019)

However, issues of power and privilege permeate archives, both in terms of which items are considered worthy of saving but also in terms of resources needed to preserve content. Although we may think that digital archives are cheap and affordable, Dever (2017) demonstrates this is not the case and, as many libraries and institutions face significant budget cuts, digital archives present only an ‘illusion of secure preservation’ (2).

Another option is to rely on feminist communities, who have long played a key role in archiving zines, magazines and other ephemera (Eichhorn 2010). These could digitize feminist blogs, through screenshots or using internet archival tools such as Way Back Machine. However, as Dever warns, although communities may be interested in engaging in ‘crowdsourced’ (Eveleigh 2014) digital archiving projects, we must be mindful of how such work becomes yet another form of invisible, precarious and exploitative ‘digital labour’ (see Andrejevic et al. 2014) which not everyone can afford to engage in, and which therefore privileges some forms of cultural artefacts over others.

While preserving digital feminist blogs is one new and important challenge, so too is the rise of misogynistic trolling.

Rise of Misogynistic Trolling

Alongside the visibility of contemporary popular feminism, we’ve also seen what Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kate Miltner (2015) call a ‘popular misogyny’, manifested in online harassment or trolling of feminists (see Balka 1993; Citron 2014; Jane 2017; Mendes 2015; Mendes et al. 2019b; Penny 2013; Poland 2016; Powell and Henry 2017). While misogynistic speech is nothing new, the internet and digital technologies have provided new avenues for this abuse. As Adrienne Shaw highlights, ‘people are jerks not only when they are in anonymous Internet spaces, but also when they are in spaces where they can get away with being jerks’ (2014: 274). While feminist presses and publications of the past undoubtedly faced misogyny, digital technologies not only make the transmission of such abuse easier and faster but also opens new forms of harassment, such as ‘mobbing’ and organized cyberattacks.

Indeed, the experience of trolling ranged from what Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett described in our interview as ‘the odd crazy email from a misogynist’ to much more sustained and coordinated attacks. The Feminist Current, for example, invested in extra security software to combat the regular cyberattacks made against the site. Founder Meghan Murphy considers the ‘many attacks’ as either coordinated by Men’s Rights Activists or farmed out to professional trolls. Her response is a familiar one in over 50 interviews I have conducted with feminist leaders in the past decade. As Meghan stated: ‘People had paid other people in like China or somewhere, to attack us over and over and over and over again.’ This response highlights the ways trolling generates broad economic value for media corporations. This is because even data created through trolling (including location, social networks, preferences) can be ‘sold to advertising clients as a commodity’ who then target ‘users interests and behaviours online’ (for a broad discussion, see Fuchs and Sevignani 2013: 237). In this case however, ‘troll farms’ profit as they are paid specifically to disseminate hateful and abusive speech which has the potential to side-line or silence feminist debate (Lumsden and Morgan 2017; Mahtani and Cabato 2019).

As I found in my previous research with feminist leaders (Mendes 2015; Mendes 2019b), there was a wide mixture of reactions to trolls—from those that regarded them as annoying, but ultimately harmless, to those such as The F-Word’s Holly Combe, who, while fully recognizing the harm trolling can cause, at times welcomed the ‘intellectual challenge’ a troll might bring. As she explained, in certain cases, trolls can be useful for interrogating established norms. In such cases, ‘the troll comes along and has a little poke and shows that maybe these people may need to be thinking a little bit more about something’. She went on to add:

[T]o a certain extent it was quite invigorating. I quite enjoyed some of those trolls we had. I enjoyed the game playing, the—you know—catching them out and thinking ‘Oh, that’s so and so again’ and actually showing, that ‘We are switched on. I see what you’re trying to do there, and actually we are switched on.’ And I would argue with them. And I know a lot of people say don’t feed the trolls, but I think sometimes it can be a fruitful exercise for all concerned.

Although none of the feminist bloggers I interviewed for this project were traumatized enough to quit blogging, several have. In a 2015 Washington Post article titled ‘Feminist writers are so besieged by online abuse that some have begun to retire’ (Goldberg 2015), well-known feminist bloggers such as Feministing co-founder Jessica Valenti, Jezebel’s Lindy West and Feministe’s Lauren Bruce spoke about the ‘nonstop harassment that feminist writers face’. As Valenti explained, it’s ‘not just the physical safety concerns, but the emotional ramifications’ of seemingly ‘round the clock’ abuse that was hard to manage (Goldberg 2015). In fact, the following year, she quit Twitter and tightened privacy settings on other social media accounts after death and rape threats were made against her 5-year-old daughter (Chasmar 2016). For black, LGBTQ+ writers, online sexist abuse is compounded by racism and homophobia. Anti-feminist sentiments are not new (see Faludi 1992), but feminists today face ‘the existence of organized misogyny’ made up of cadres of angry men, who, thanks to social media, are often able to gather unprecedented amounts of personal information, including photos, addresses and names of family members, which they use threaten feminists (Goldberg 2015).

Conclusions

Although contemporary feminist blogs may not intuitively be regarded as a form of feminist publishing akin to the feminist presses of the past, this article has sought to trace connections in their affective bindings to their work, their modes of operation, working conditions and need to engage in ‘fempreneurial’ activities to sustain their activism. In doing so, I have sought to demonstrate how scholars interested in feminist publishing or ‘the business of feminism’ (Young 1998) need to recognize feminist blogs as its latest iteration, and regard them as a serious site of academic inquiry.

Although there are many lines of continuity, including feelings of deep attachment to these projects, the belief that feminist writing is one means of fostering social, political and cultural change, a reliance on precarious and un- or underpaid labour, and engagement with ‘fempreneurial’ activities to sustain their activism, feminist bloggers face some unique challenges. These include serious issues around how to digitally archive and preserve content, and the need to develop ‘digital defence’ strategies to manage, cope, and deflect the barrage of often highly coordinated online misogyny levelled at these sites or individuals involved.

While feminist publishing in all forms has long remained a form of ‘unremarked or unacknowledged work’ (Menon 2001: 182), this article has sought to document and historicize some feminist blogs, noting the important role they play in feminism’s long history of cultural production.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is, however, worth mentioning that Crunk Feminist Collective published their blogs in book form (with The Feminist Press), in which names in full three founder authors are listed inside. The book echoes the blog content, and is intensely anti-capitalist as well as exploring black women’s diversity. At the same time, it is stylishly produced with the aesthetic of ‘cool’ DIY throughout.