Professor Bilger To Be Part of Ms. Magazine
Writer's Workshop and Blog

Associate professor of literature Audrey Bilger has earned a double honor: In addition to being invited to become a regular contributor to the newly launched Ms. Magazine Blog, she's also been selected for a media training program, sponsored by the magazine, called the Ms. Writers Workshop for Feminist Scholars. The workshop, she says, provides media training for women's studies and gender studies scholars.
Bilger, a subscriber to Ms. Magazine since her graduate student days in the mid-1980s, says the workshop and blog invitations are unrelated. "I applied to each in response to two separate calls for submissions and was selected for both."
For the workshop, Ms. Magazine canvasses leading feminist scholars who teach and write in the field of women's studies, and who have an interest in publishing in the magazine.
A co-coordinator of the Gender Studies sequence at CMC and an active member of the Intercollegiate Women's Studies community, Bilger teaches several courses that connect literature and gender studies, and was an ideal candidate for inclusion in the workshop.
She mentions two courses that are particularly relevant to Ms. Magazine: Women's Magazines and the Female Journalist (Lit 175) and Feminist Theory (Lit 166).
In addition, Bilger has published two booksLaughing Feminism, a study of Jane Austen and her contemporaries, and an edition of Jane Collier's 1753 Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting. Her work also has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, and ROCKRGRL magazine.
Bilger says that the call for applications to the workshop defined the purpose of the workshop as seeking to "advance public knowledge by making women's studies and feminist scholarship more accessible to a mass audience," and providing scholars with the tools to express themselves in a variety of media formats.
The workshops will take place in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and consist of a series of webinars (that have already taken place), culminating in a live two-day workshop/conference, May 6-8.
"In the webinars we learned about the workings of the magazine and received on drafting a pitch' for an article we will bring with us to the workshop to present to the group for feedback," Bilger says.
In all, 26 scholars from around the country were chosen to take part in the workshop, in a variety of fields, including government, law, sociology, anthropology, psychology, English, religious studies, African American studies, and mass communications.
"This workshop will be incredibly useful to me in the Women's Magazine course, both in terms of increasing my understanding of magazine publishing, and in assisting students who have an interest in journalism with some of the basics of magazine writing," Bilger says. "It will also be of value to me in my Feminist Theory course, in which I teach students how to read and understand difficult theoretical texts and to recognize the place of theory in a variety of fields and contexts within and outside of academia."
Bilger says she is most looking forward to "meeting with other feminist scholars from around the country, sharing our research, and discussing our work as public intellectuals."
Regarding the Ms. blog, Bilger says the opportunity surfaced while waiting to hear back about her acceptance into the workshop; she spotted a call for applications to join a team of bloggers that was being assembled in preparation of a planned March launch of the new blog.
According to Bilger, the blog (which is a group endeavor and not the kind of site where individuals post daily entries) heralded itself as a "source of expert commentary on feminist news and culture, as well as breaking stories of feminist interest not yet covered in the mainstream media or the feminist blogosphere."
For her part, Bilger posts stories at least twice monthly.
To date, she has written on topics such as marriage equality (http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2010/03/09/wedding-bells-ring-for-d-c-lesbian-brides/), Rachel Maddow (http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2010/04/01/happy-b-day-rachel-maddow-you-put-the-ms-in-msnbc/), and the cartoonist Jen Sorensen (http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2010/04/07/jen-sorensen-cartoonist-with-conscience-and-wit/).
"The article I'm working on for the workshop is about antifeminism in the discourse of groups who campaign against same-sex marriage rights," she says.