Today, I attended the Women, Action & the Media Conference that is put on by the Center for New Words in Boston. Yes, those are superfluous exclamation points in my blog title. I find unnecessary punctuation to be a viable means of personal expression. You wanna fight about it? ! ? . ¿ ¡
Going through the material that they gave us and thinking about what sessions I want to go to, I realized that I don’t really think about this sort of stuff all that often. And by “this stuff,” I mean the feminist perspective, the role of women in media, that sort of thing. I’m not sure why, I used to think about it all of the time. Somewhere along the way, some sort of switch got flipped in my brain and I just didn’t focus on that perspective.
Working in male-dominated fields (computer science, then IT, then A/V), it has probably been a bit of a self-preservation method. If you start asking “What Would Bella Abzug Do?” all the time, eventually your male coworkers start to tune you out. If you’re lucky. I much prefer silence to open mocking. But perhaps that’s just personal preference.
To be honest, that’s all horribly unfair to the majority of my coworkers who are lovely people and who I really should feel comfortable talking to about this sort of thing.
I’m looking forward to learning a lot this weekend. I’m also looking forward to (hopefully) reawakening that little part of my brain that thinks critically about women’s issues and the media.
And if I manage to sell a few CDs? Well that’s just icing on the cake.
