I’m Co-Founding a Feminist Media Collective: Here’s Why Disability Will Be All Over It from the Start

I’m Co-Founding a Feminist Media Collective: Here’s Why Disability Will Be All Over It from the Start

 

s.e. smith

 

Fifteen years ago, in October 2009, a mostly feminist group of comrades and I started Feminists with Disabilities for a Way Forward, quickly shortened to FWD, in response to a prominent feminist blogger who responded to an open letter raising concerns about the lack of disability inclusion in mainstream feminism and feminist publications with “well, make it yourself then.”

So we did. And after two years of harassment, cold shoulders, and sniping, we closed it. We lacked the clout, connections, and reach of the person who had told us to “make it yourself” and, like so many other people who have been told the same thing in other contexts, never stood a chance.

FWD had a profound impact on disability feminism, and feminist thought and cultural criticism more broadly; I still see people referencing our work, sometimes unknowingly, and we indisputably moved the needle when it comes to talking about disability, laying critical groundwork that others built upon (with and without attribution). The conversations we sparked are still happening today, even as I also see the same circular arguments about disability inclusion coming up again and again, along with very basic errors such as mistaking disability justice as a synonym for disability rights as white, middle class, cis, straight voices still prevail.

Most of FWD’s cofounders are no longer on the internet, or keep low profiles, have pivoted to other work and industries — though Anna Hamilton and I are still working as writers and cultural critics in a media and feminist landscape that is, by and large, still hostile to disability, especially complex, nuanced conversations about disability identity and culture. 

So when Andrea Grimes approached me in December 2023 about an “unnamed feminist bloggy project,” I was deeply hesitant. Andrea told me she wanted to recapture the good parts of the early aughts feminist blogging landscape, something many people remember fondly, perhaps through rose-colored glasses. Those good parts included provocative, interesting writing produced by people writing for themselves and their readers, not bosses, and having open, interesting conversations. They included outstanding singular blogs as well as diverse, engaging collectives of people who found commonality with each other and built intimate communities with readers. They included solidarity and mutual aid, vulnerability and support. The bad parts included prominent bloggers telling critics to “go make it yourself” in response to calls for more intersectional discussions of feminism.

We also talked about the decline in independent feminist media, probably best exemplified by the closure of Bitch Magazine in 2022 and the subsequent disappearance of their archives, an outstanding and invaluable body of work by an incredibly diverse array of talent. We talked about the gaping hole in vitally-needed cultural criticism, the number of pieces we struggle to place because there’s no home for them anymore. We talked about how the media increasingly caters to a ruthless algorithm, producing things that aren’t based on what actual humans want and need, relying on ragebait and very topical, superficial content – because that’s what we do now, we make and consume “content” in a vicious cycle rather than thoughtful, nuanced writing.

Andrea is someone I have orbited and been friendly with for years, a sharp feminist who has done incredibly important work around abortion organizing, with experiences deeply rooted in her home state of Texas, where she continues that work today. Andrea is, in short, a real one.

So I took a chance: I said “yes.”

Ten months later, a cohort of ten writers and artists, including Andrea and me but also Aria Velasquez, Christine Grimaldi, Chrissy Stroop, Evette Dionne, Katelyn Burns, Nicole Froio, Rommy Torrico, and Tina Vásquez, launched a Kickstarter for our “Unnamed Bloggy Project,” now known as The Flytrap, promising feminist cultural criticism against the algorithm. Within days, we were fully funded, generating an absolutely giddy day on Slack as we watched the numbers go up, and up, and up, surrounded and uplifted by support from fellow feminists and accomplices, journalists, and independent media organizations such as Flaming Hydra. We’re hyped at the prospect of hitting stretch goals that will allow us to fund a freelance budget, a key component of a sustainable future and also a core value for me. I want to create a space for emerging voices and work you can’t find anyone else, to give writers and artists the exposure they deserve and the money to go with it, to extend my hand, not pull the ladder up after me, to pay it forward, a nod to the numerous people who took a chance on me and contributed to where I am today.

At the same time, we get press requests that position us as a “style” story because we are an explicitly feminist and adjacent publication, and therefore not Serious Media.

The Flytrap consists of an absolutely banger array of talented and amazing humans who, by our nature, bring adiverse assortment of lived and professional experiences to a project we are immensely excited about. We’re here for what I affectionately call the “cold give,” the antidote to the hot take. We’re here to write what we want to see, not to respond to Chartbeat or hop on the latest viral social media phenomenon with a facile 800-word post churned out to grab eyeballs. We are here to write 3,000 word paeans to pop culture we love, to go in deep on cultural phenomena shaping the world around us, to simply have fun, and to do it with readers. 

We’ve learned from our experiences as feminist bloggers about some of the things that did and didn’t work about that era, and we’re taking notes from the people kind enough to spend time with us talking about their experiences with feminist blogging and/or independent media. We remember the names of incredible writers and thinkers who disappeared from the internet or went pseudonymous in the wake of marginalization, abuse, and struggle. And we also know what it’s like to try to run a media organization in the current climate, one in which it is incredibly difficult to cultivate financial sustainability, even as we’re seeing amazing promise in indie media comrades such as Defector, The Aftermath, 404 Media, and Hearing Things. 

There’s still no robust, widely-read disability-focused independent publication, and there’s a different conversation to be had about whether siloed publications based on identity are the way forward. (I don’t think they are.) 

As Alice Wong has shown with the Disability Visibility Project and her enthusiastic support of disability culture and media, disability should be everywhere, embedded into every production company and publication, raised at every editorial meeting, woven into the very fabric of media and pop culture. And at times when I have struggled with my own career as a visible and outspoken disabled person in media, Alice has always been there to support me, to push me, to give me hope even when I’m despairing in texts at 2 am. Her spirit moves with me through all my work, and it’s what drew me to The Flytrap: The ability to return to what I do best, which is getting disability all over your feminism, and creating a feminist media project that disabled people would be able to see themselves in, would feel explicitly part of, would find work to treasure and value and delight in and argue with, would feel comfortable pitching to, knowing that they would be treated with dignity and respect.

Disability, as the tagline on my personal website read for many years, is a feminist issue, and you can’t talk about disability, or disability feminism, without a disabled person.

What The Flytrap is doing is what I see as an iteration of a profound shift in feminist culture and media; we are flowing in the wake of pioneers such as Flavia Dzodan, who famously wrote that “my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit,” pushing for a more expansive version of feminism that explicitly engages with the plain fact that a feminism focused on “women’s issues” does not serve women or the world at large. Being alive and having a body is a women’s issue. The ramifications of living in nonnormative, marginalized bodies are therefore women’s issues and, by extension, the business of feminism. 

At a moment when I am reflecting on the work of 15 years ago, The Flytrap is the natural successor to that work, because disability must be a core feminist issue, especially at this moment, with COVID still menacing communities all over the world while people taking basic infection precautions such as masking encounter hostility and abuse – including from people and institutions on the ‘left,’ the very “progressives” they thought would be supportive. (And those who sneer at masking sing a different song when they end up with long covid and are suddenly deeply in debt to the disability community and independent living movement for the gains we have fought for, tooth and nail, written in blood, that they take for granted.)

Disability in mainstream feminist spaces is sometimes presented as a problem to be solved, something that “touches” people but is not a direct part of their lived experience, as for example in conversations about the gendered and racialized nature of caregiving, or prenatal diagnoses of disability – both of which assume disabled people are not caregivers or parents. Disability is treated as an object, rather than a core component of human experience and identity, and one that is extremely, expansively diverse. Disabled people make up 20 percent of the population. To say that the experience of disability is tremendously variable is an understatement.

To be in a media collective that explicitly engages with disability from the start without being a disability-specific publication is nothing short of revolutionary. To be in a space where basic facts are a subject of mutual agreement, not debate, is a healing shift from my first foray into feminist blogging. I do not have to discuss whether trans and disabled people have a right to exist, whether abortion is health care, to question whether systemic racism is a profound, pernicious influence on society and culture. I also don’t have to explain the impact of eugenics on social attitudes or make a case for ensuring that disabled readers have equal access to our work. We are truly building the work and readership that we want to see with The Flytrap, and I am so excited to share it with the world. 

This is, in one obvious sense, a plea for your money: Please join us as a subscriber at The Flytrap, so the more sustainable we will be, and the more likely we will be able to build up a footing as an independent publication with staying power. We keep hearing that this isn’t possible in the current media landscape, with a dwindling number of publications, competition for bylines that’s more like musical chairs, an ever-growing number of individual newsletters, but we know that’s not true. Defector, for example, just produced an annual report on their fourth year of operation showing how they made their work a growing concern, and how it’s still growing; maybe not the hockey stick growth that venture capitalists want, but the sustainable growth that can keep the lights on and ensure that journalists are paid fairly for their work. We know that thoughtful enterprise reporting and commentary builds community and drives memberships, with people invested in the publications they are reading.

But this is also to make a case for building the media landscape we want to live in, for working with co-conspirators to bring projects to life, to say fuck the algorithm and take a chance, to insist, vibrantly and from the start, that we owe readers a duty of care and there is an urgency to produce work that explores the whole of human experience, not a narrow slice, not a comfortable or nonthreatening view, not dull and formulaic arguments about representation. 

It is also a rebuke to traditional media. Telling people to “build it yourself” rejects the role of power and inequality in media that has long dictated which voices are heard and which are silenced, but those of us who are building it ourselves are a direct counter to things such as access journalism, punishment for speaking out in support of Palestine, both-sidesing, myths about “journalistic objectivity,” and editorial interference from owners, publishers, and investors. We are demonstrating that the things wrong with journalism are about capitalism and white supremacy, that it is possible to resist both of these things as worker-owned collectives of people working in solidarity with each other and the communities they report with — not on, or about. At The Flytrap, we believe that shared identity with subjects and sources is an asset, not a liability, that freelancers should have the opportunity to work with editors who share their lived experiences, that if the work does not challenge you, you are doing it wrong. 

I’m sure the person who told me to “build it yourself” — who has since gone on to enjoy a meteoric career characterized by mid, superficial, lowest common denominator work — has entirely forgotten that moment, but I haven’t. 

And before you ask: The Flytrap is extremely fucking not on Substack. 

 

ABOUT

 

s.e. smith is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist based in Northern California. smith’s cultural criticism and reported work on disability, gender, labor, animal welfare, and a wide variety of other beats has appeared in publications such as the Washington Post, The Nation, Bitch Magazine, The Verge, and Rolling Stone. smith is also a co-founder of The Flytrap, a ten-member feminist media collective coming to inboxes near you on November 5, 2024. 

 

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