Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

More about Grassroots Feminism:

Grassroots Feminism: Establishing a transnational community platform and living history archive

The preconception of youth, and in particular of girls and young women, as culturally unproductive and as passive consumers of mass culture and media is still very much ingrained today. However, girls and young women are capable cultural producers who create a wide variety of their own films, music, media, and festivals. To gain insight into and to document the cultural spaces girls and young women create and the meaning they have, it is vital to look closely at their own cultural spaces - and not only at media produced for them (which is done more frequently).

Contemporary cultural productions by female youth have rarely been collected in libraries as they are not seen as worthy of the canon of “high literature”. While I was working on the Grrrl Zine Network project the past years I realized that it is not only zines - or other independent media for that matter - but feminist cultural productions and activities overall that are not archived or made accessible to a larger audience and that an interactive feminist community portal was missing. Hence, I decided to create a central and interactive community platform for transnational grassroots feminist archives, projects, and resources.

Grassroots Feminism: Transnational archives, resources and communities takes as a starting point that today’s oppositional cultural practices by girls, young women and transgender folks are worthwhile to be documented and that we need to collect them as important social movement artifacts. By providing an interactive network portal and research platform at the web site, the goal is to make contemporary cultural spaces and practices by feminist and queer youth more accessible to diverse communities, activists and researchers, as well as to establish a “living history” archive. Working towards the recognition and renewal of the contemporary transnational feminist movement, the aims of the web site are:
- to archive activities of the grassroots feminist movement worldwide (be it cultural, activist or political)
- to provide and share information and resources on feminist practice and theory
- to offer possibilities for exchange, networking and interaction so we can connect across borders and re-envision feminist politics
- to encourage the participation and acknowledgment of young feminists

Its overall vision is to establish a non-hierarchical network of communication between feminist activists throughout the world.