In honor of Domestic Violence Awareness month we have a guest post from Rachel Griffin who you can learn more about from her Feministing Five interview. Rachel Alicia Griffin, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech Communication at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

I confess. I am an academic scholar who reads “trashy” magazines and by “trashy” I mean the tasty non-academic and deliciously saturated ones with the latest fashion trends, celebrity gossip, and the occasional real-life read.  Sometimes my trashy treats are Cosmo or In Style but I am seduced the most by People. With the arrival of Domestic Violence Awareness month, I felt beckoned to return to a hard moment that involved me, a treadmill, ...

“In the age of the internet, women in countries far away who used to be the objects of white people’s gaze with no right of reply now have access to the representations that are made of them, and the technological means to answer back.”

-Statement by VAMP, part of the Indian organization SANGRAM, a grassroots organization working with sex workers and other diverse populations and communities to fight HIV/AIDS in a rural context.

A recent controversy over a 30 minute documentary called “Prostitutes of God”, produced by VBS TV, an arm of Vice Magazine (a publication that already has a controversial history of covering race), demonstrates that the-times-they-are a-changin when it comes to transnational activism, especially as it relates to feminism, media, and ...

“There is, as yet, no Concerned Women for Britain, or Mums for Basingstoke.” We repeat: as yet.

High school cheerleader says, “I don’t feel comfortable wearing this,” to the school board RE her uniform.

A heartwarming story about community and intergenerational goodness.

The White House is going solar.

Get yourself an IT GETS BETTER t-shirt.

And check out this cool video to teach kids about what probono work is all about:

Mommy & Daddy Do It Pro Bono from Aaron Hurst on Vimeo.

This photo is a fair representation of how I’m feeling about ABC Family’s announcement that it has canceled Huge, the teen drama set at a weight loss camp that surpassed my cautiously high expectations. The network has announced that the show, which stars Nikki Blonsky and a cast of unknowns as teens struggling with all the things teenagers usually struggle with, because being fat doesn’t make you any less of a human being, will not be returning for a second season. Which breaks my heart, because Huge, while it wasn’t perfect, broke some important barriers. As Dodai Stewart at Jezebel writes, there are no spaces on television where fat people are allowed to just be people who ...