Feminist eZine set for relaunch

So its 6 AM in the morning here and I've been up all night.

I just can't sleep. (If I make any spelling or grammar mistakes here its because I am a bit sleepy.)

Just too dang excited, but do you want to know why?

Its because the Feminist eZine is set for a relaunch of sorts. We're updating all the old website templates, making it easier for the website to navigate, and once all the old pages (all 370+ of them) are updated to the new template we will be redoing the index page in a more "magazine esque" or "wikified" style, instead of the current routine which is just lists of links to feminist articles by category.

True, its easy to find stuff under the current system and we will still have all the links organized by category, but once the main page is in stage 2 of the relaunch each category will include a paragraph or two on the category topic.

There will also be a new section for "recent additions" to the Feminist eZine.

Its all very exciting to me. I've been writing / editing things which ultimately became part of the Feminist eZine for 11 years now. Its good to have a big relaunch.

A big part of this is we're going to be trying to bring in more volunteer writers to the Feminist eZine. We're all volunteers, but we need new blood.

Sad to say it but as we get older we feminists sometimes lose the itch to write. We get caught up with work, children, love, our obsession with healthy eating or something equally fascinating.

Take Victoria Van Dyke for example. She used to be a regular to the Feminist eZine / Lilith eZine. Now she has gone back to university, has "settled down" a bit and has lost some of her radical edge. Keeping in mind here this is the same girl who once jumped in front of a subway in an attempt to kill herself, professed for years to be a cannibal, had herself committed in a mental asylum and later chopped off her little toe, stuck in a jar and called it art. So yeah, to say that she has settled down feels a bit like an understatement.

So yeah, even the most hardcore / die hard / sometimes outright insane feminists eventually settle down. (Although the words "die hard" and "settle down" do seem to contradict themselves, don't they?)

I am sure, deep down, she is just as die hard as ever. The difference is that she doesn't write or make art much any more. Lost the itch.

And that is just the way it goes for some feminists. Like tonight I was browsing a bunch of feminist blogs... some of the blogs date back years ago and the feminist bloggers have since stopped writing. Its a crying shame from my perspective, but its something we have to learn to deal with. The feminist bloggers in question lost the itch.

But the real question is how the torch is passed on... which is why websites like the Feminist eZine are so important. They create continuity between historical feminist writing, especially a lot of the feminist writing from the 1960s to 1970s, as well as more modern feminist writing from the 1980s to 2000s... all the way up to our current era of feminist bloggers / writers.

The Torch of Feminism must be kept lit for each generation of feminists to follow.

Anyone interested in writing / submitting articles to either the Feminist eZine (or to Feminist Truths) can contact me at suzannemacnevin {at symbol} gmail.com

Maybe now I can sleep...