The Digital Feminist Magazines, a Reformulation of Women's Press From South to North: The Cases AzMina and Madmoizelle

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse how engaged media appropriate the format of so-called women's magazines to propose new models for feminist digital publications. I look at feminist media activism as a space made up of the interstice between other social worlds, such as journalism, digital activism and political activism. To understand the strategies for reformulating the magazine format from print to digital and from a perspective of reflection on gender issues, I compare, in a transnational approach, the digital magazines AzMina (from Brazil) and Madmoizelle (from France) using theories on gender studies and feminism as bibliographical support and the methodology of in-depth interviews with actresses and actors who participate to different degrees in the composition of the social world - content producers and support teams - to develop an analysis of the ways in which individuals are inserted into the context of these magazines. The results indicate that the interviewees rely on forms of writing and news gathering based on the reporting model both to write their content and to consume it. There is an inspiration in the pattern of so-called women's magazines for those who write the texts - and follow these writing patterns - and for those who read them - and create expectations of finding similarities with this writing pattern in the digital feminist media.