Andi Zeisler
Quick Facts
Biography
Andi Zeisler (born c. 1972) is a co-founder and creative/editorial director of Bitch Media, a nonprofit feminist media organization based in Portland, Oregon. Zeisler's writing, which focuses mainly on feminist interpretations of popular culture, has been featured in a variety of publications including Mother Jones, the San Francisco Chronicle, Utne Reader, The Women's Review of Books, and Ms. She is a former pop-music columnist for the SF Weekly and the East Bay Express, and also contributed to the anthologies Young Wives' Tales, Secrets and Confidences: The Complicated Truth About Women's Friendships (both from Seal Press), and Howl: A Collection of the Best Contemporary Dog Wit (Crown). She is the coeditor of BitchFest: 10 Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine, and a book about feminism and popular culture for Seal Press, Feminism and Pop Culture. She frequently speaks on issues of feminism and popular culture on college and university campuses.
Bitch Media
Bitch Media is a 501(c)(3) non-profit feminist media organization. Bitch Media is in print with Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, online at bitchmedia.org, on the air with our podcasts, Popaganda and Backtalk, and on campuses around the world via Bitch on Campus. The organization offers writing fellowships and internships on a quarterly basis. The magazine was originally conceived by Zeisler and friend Lisa Jervis in 1996 as an all-volunteer zine with a circulation of three hundred copies, and is now internationally distributed with a circulation of more than fifty thousand. Bitch Media's mission is to provide and encourage an engaged feminist response to pop culture.
- "A fresh, revitalizing voice for feminism. One that welcomes complex arguments, showcases witty and whip-smart critiques of popular culture, and refuses to ignore the contradictory and sometimes uncomfortable details that constitute the realities of life in an unequivocally gendered world".
The magazine publishes columns, features, and interviews—all of which tend to be fairly wordy—as well as shorter, snarky pieces of media response and analysis.
Published Works
BitchFest: 10 Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine: Published in 2006, BitchFest is a compilation of memorable articles from Bitch Magazine throughout its ten years of circulation.
Feminism and Pop Culture, published in 2008, traces the impact of feminism on pop culture (and vice versa) from the 1940s to the present and beyond. With a comprehensive overview of the intertwining relationship between women and pop culture, this book is an ideal introduction to discussing feminism and daily life.
We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement:
Available May, 2016 from PublicAffairs, We Were Feminists Once explores the commercial co-optation of feminism.