TW for sexual assault“Why Diversity? Because it’s f*cking 2015.”&ldquo

TW for sexual assault“Why Diversity? Because it’s f*cking 2015.”“LA’s Out of the Binders was the first West Coast conference for BinderCon, a group of feminist-minded writers whose name harkens back to Mitt Romney’s unfortunate comment about having “binders full of women” during the 2008 presidential race. Fueled by the underrepresentation of women in media, BinderCon is a burgeoning community bent on supporting women who work in all facets of journalism, film, and TV. The two-day conference pulled in some big supporters, including the Harnisch Foundation, TinyLetter, and the Knight Foundation. Keynote speakers included poet Claudia Rankine (be still, my heart) and OpEd Project founder Katie Orenstein, whose talk on the gender disparity of editorial pages hit home a main theme of the conference: What goes down in our cultural memory as significant depends on who is writing our history.So many social and economic issues play into the lack of women and people of color in our media that the problem can sometimes feel too big to take on. But each of the talks and panels at Out of the Binders offered proactive ways to move forward, without painting too rosy a picture of our current reality. Orenstein, for example, noted that in 2008, only 15 percent of people being published on opinion pages nationwide were women. That was due in part to the fact that 90 percent of op-ed submissions were coming from men. “What is the cost to society when so many voices are missing from media?” asked Orenstein. Under her direction, the OpEd Project trains and encourages women and people of color to write and pitch editorials. By 2014, the number of women on op-ed pages had grown to 21 percent. That’s still not great—but it’s a step. “You cannot win a game if you’re not playing it, and this game is called history,” said Orenstein.The key issue of the need for diverse representation in media wound through every discussion at Out of the Binders. On a panel about how improve media’s handling of sexual assault, Yale law student and co-director ofKnow Your IX Alexandra Brodsky noted that reporters often reduce survivors of sexual assault to that singular identity. “I found that many journalists treated being a survivor as a totalizing identity,” said Brodsky, referencing a time when a radio program invited her to do an interview about new policies affecting sexual assault, but only if she would also talk about her personal history with assault. Filmmaker Amy Ziering added that she keeps that multi-faceted identity at the center of her work as the producer of films The Hunting Groundand The Invisible War. “Sexual assault is something bad that happened to you, like a car accident. It’s not necessarily the defining part of your identity… Each person is much more than just a ‘rape survivor,’” said Ziering.  Even though women are still a minority of voices in media, what’s clear from Out of the Binders is that many people are working to build the media landscape we want, instead of consigning themselves to the media we have. As author Erika Wurth summed up very succinctly about the need for more diverse voices in fiction, “Why diversity? Because it’s fucking 2015 and we’re in America.”Read the full piece herePhoto 1: Claudia Rankine (with mic) and author Tisa Bryant at Out of the Binders. Photo 2: Alexandra Brodsky, Amy Ziering, and reporter Katie J.M. Baker on a panel about how media can report better on sexual assault.  All photos by Rebecca Aranda. -- source link

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