Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 29 June
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
The problem of verbal and emotional violence against women online remains insufficiently – or often, mistakenly – addressed. Headlines about online harassment continue to focus on victims rather than perpetrators, while platforms like Twitter and Facebook struggle to define and act upon the difference between free speech and abuse.
But there’s also the upside: social media’s potential for women who are seeking to mark out a space of debate, discussion and disagreement. Largely unmediated, social platforms offer the promise (if not always the purest realisation) of ideas being able to speak for themselves. Women are able to connect with each other, and with their publics, in ways that transcend the ‘motherhood penalty’ and other gendered factors of the traditional workplace.
Jane Gilmore, Rebecca Shaw, Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Lucy Valentine are writers who put their words, beliefs and opinions on social media – with the intention of connecting, challenging others and pursuing change. With host Sophie Black, they’ll talk about #writingwhilefemale. How do women participate in digital discussion? How do they end up in arguments, decide when to continue them … and what do they do when argument becomes abuse? And, in this odd amalgam of public and private space, how do women edit their own balance of the political and personal?
Featuring
Jane Gilmore
Jane Gilmore is an author and ex-journalist from Melbourne. Her book, Fixed It: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media was published in 2019. Her latest book, Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your ...
Rebecca Shaw
Rebecca Shaw (aka brocklesnitch) is a writer and creator of the parody Twitter account @NoToFeminism, which was developed into an illustrated book. She was on the writing team at Tonightly with Tom Ballard and has written for Hard Quiz and Get Krack!n. She was a writer for the Backburner and deputy editor at SBS Comedy. She’s a Contributing Editor at Kill Your Darlings and has written for the Guardian, Pedestrian, Junkee, Ten Daily and most other places you can think of. In 2018 a song she co-wrote won the 2018 ARIA for best comedy release.
Sophie Black
Sophie Black is a writer, journalist and Crikey’s editor-in-chief. She has worked in senior management across cultural and media organisations, and has written for outlets such as The Guardian and The Monthly. As the Wheeler ...
Lucy Valentine
Lucy Valentine is a Melbourne based comedy writer and enemy of the state. She writes regularly for SBS Comedy and co-hosts the Boonta Vista Socialist Club podcast.
Yassmin Abdel-Magied
Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a Sudanese-born Australian mechanical engineer, writer and social advocate.
Yassmin worked on oil and gas rigs around Australia for almost half a decade before becoming a full-time writer and broadcaster. She published her debut memoir, Yassmin's Story, at age 24, then became the presenter of Australia Wide, a national weekly current-affairs show on the ABC and Motor Mouth, a podcast on becoming an F1 driver. After hosting the documentary, The Truth About Racism, she created Hijabistas for the ABC, a series looking at the modest fashion scene in Australia. Her writing has appeared in publications like Teen Vogue, London's Evening Standard, the Guardian and numerous anthologies.
With over a decade’s experience in non-profit governance, Yassmin founded her first organisation, Youth Without Borders, at the age of 16. She has since served on numerous board and councils, including the Council of Australian-Arab Relations and ChildFund, and also serves as the Gender Ambassador for the Inter-American Development Bank.
Yassmin has been awarded numerous awards nationally and internationally for her advocacy, including the 2018 Young Voltaire Award for Free Speech and Queensland Young Australian of the Year in 2015. In 2017, Yassmin created Mumtaza, dedicated to the empowerment of women of colour, and most recently founded Kuwa, a platform tackling cultural change around sexual harassment in workplaces.
Yassmin has delivered keynotes in over 20 countries on unconscious bias and leadership. Her TED talk, What Does My Headscarf Mean to You?, has been viewed over two million times and was chosen as one of TED’s top ten ideas of 2015. Yassmin is currently based in London.