Blog Review: Feministing

Feministing is a blog that focuses on analyzing world events from the feminist perspective. There is a wide variety of topic that it covers; abortions, reader’s pieces, immigration, etc. While reading this blog it is evident that the blogger is trying to jump start action by using a forceful tone and selective information sharing. A large goal for the blog seems to be verbally tugging at people’s emotions to get them to support the cause. Lets take a look at the non-verbal cues that this blog is giving off.

This blog frequently includes pictures along with the written post. A lot of the pictures are bright and colorful and some are even contain mobile parts. These images seem to serve the purpose of provoking thoughts and interests in the piece. This blog is very text heavy and I found myself scrolling through it until I came to something that caught my eye. The people in the images are generally doing unique things (posing) or have some sort of caption that does not make sense with out the content of the blog post, in turn leading to and increased reading rate. I believe the purpose of the pictures raise a level of confusion in order to draw people into the article.

Through out the blog there are posts that extract terms from through out the content and present them in an isolated fashion. In turn you can click on these words and be linked to additional articles. The fashion and manor in which these words are phrases are isolated provokes a deeper interest in readers and leads them to feeling or happiness, anger, confusion, or sadness depending on what the post is. For example, one of the isolated sentences read:

“Accidental Racist” is just… racist.

The term accidental racists may provoke a feeling or anger due to our nations history with the topic. Our nation is still striving to put and end to discrimination and racism. This term is associated with a deeply rooted history for lots of people.            This blog also attempts to appeal to the reader’s emotion by writing about and creating situations in to evoke an emotional response in readers. The initial emotion is what really draws readers into the topics and articles, because of this Feministing places a lot of focus and emphasis on articles titles.  The titles are presented in a much large font and in a different color in order to get the readers attention. For example, one of the titles read: This is how you teach rape culture to 12-years-olds. This title jumps out at readers not only in the way in which it was physically present but also in the content. When the issue of rape is presented a long side or in connection with young children it tends to invoke fear and create a sense of activism.

            Like many other blogs Feministing effectively creates an online environment that catches peoples interest by the manor in which it presents topics and opinions.

(photos from Feministing blog http://feministing.com/)