Grab those pens, rad fems!

Rebekah Wershbale heads up a panel of impressive names judging a new competition for women

Rebekah: 2022 has gotten off to an interesting start, hasn’t it?

In the midst of this monsoon of unsure happenings, shaky victories and seeming disappointments, let me invite you to this serene and sunny island of contemporary radical feminism where we’re attempting to distil some of the hope, rage, solutions and visions into something very special.

We’ve looked at the landscape both online and off and seen some incredibly talented and articulate women with some powerful and profound messages and stories to tell. So we wondered, what can you do when you’re not bound by the frustrating constraints of a meandering argument thread? Or restrained by a character limit? Or having to temper what you really want to say because you’re held captive by Talk Guidelines, Goddess help us! What can happen when the current politics are disregarded and ideas can flow creatively? What would you do with that freedom to explore whatever the hell you like?

We want these stories. Loads of them. We want to take a snapshot of the mood and feeling of radical feminism in the early 21st Century, and preserve it so we can show future generations of feminists that it wasn’t all protests and grind. We want to show that every great women’s movement contains a glittering, breathtaking vein of ideas and prosaic expression, and that it complements the activism perfectly. Our aim is to capture this and anthologise these stories so they’re born into the world and never lost.

To make this project even more interesting, we’re doing it in a competition format. Yes, I realise that it’s not in keeping with feminist principles to pit women against one another, but in the interests of honouring this groundswell of herstory, can we get away with it just this once? There’s prizes!

Here’s the link to the competition page where you’ll find the conditions, the criteria, the prizes and meet the judges. We’re so excited about this project, we really hope we can ignite something monumental, but we need your help to do it.

Hope to hear from you soon!

For more details, click here!

Rebekah is heading up the judge's panel, in which capacity she hopes to convince the world that radical feminists are the future of speculative fantasy, and not just gobby campaigners. Of course, her hope is that these two positions are never mutually exclusive.

(Also nice to see friend of the Update and occasional contributor Jo Bartosch is also judging!—GL)