Happy Six Years of Gender Focus

Gender Focus turned six years old on July 17, 2015. In celebration, here’s a look back at some of the highlights from the past year.

• In February, the fabulous Lyndsay Kirkham joined me as co-editor! Lyndsay runs her own awesome blog Syndications on the Rights of Women, which grew out of her feminist parenting blog Our Feminist Playschool. Lyndsay has taken on a bunch of work coordinating Gender Focus contributors as well as writing some awesome pieces herself, on issues ranging from Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum, to Bud Light rape culture beer labels. I cannot thank her enough for her help.
• For their 2014 awards, the Canadian Weblog Awards decided to cut the Best Feminism Blog category due to limited entrants. Gender Focus was instead nominated in three larger categories and ended up taking home the first place award for Best Politics Blog and Best Social Justice & Activism Blog.
• This spring we started a new series of posts celebrating contributors’ early feminist role models. So far in the series we’ve had posts on such diverse inspirations as Frida Kahlo, the Spice Girls, Anne of Green Gables, and Captain Janeway.
• Sarah Sahagian started writing for Gender Focus in September 2014 and has quickly become one of our most frequent contributors, helping our readers stay up to date with feminist analysis of shows like Girls and The Mindy Project, in between covering heavier issues like the niqab ban, rape culture on campus and missing and murdered Aboriginal women.
• Jennifer Jones joined us in October 2014 with a powerful piece on the response to Jian Ghomeshi and the way that survivors of sexual assault are almost never accorded the same presumption of innocence as suspected perpetrators.
• Gender Focus partnered with Vancouver’s DOXA film festival to put on a screening of She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, a documentary about the rise of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 70s in the US.

I can’t name all the contributors and readers whose work and support helped go into keeping Gender Focus running over the past year, but thank you to you all. I look forward to the next year together!

If you want to be a part of Gender Focus moving forward, check out our submission guidelines and write about what you care about. Or join in the conversation by commenting on our articles here or on our Facebook page.