Elisa Kreisinger: Badass Activist Friday

It’s Friday, and we all know what that means! Interviews with your favorite badass feminists and activists. Whether social media queens and kings, creative artists, sex educators, or just kick-ass personalities, these people harness righteous anger, instigate movements and inspire cultural change. We’re here to honor them and their work, but more importantly, to highlight how we can all get up, plug in, and Just Start Doing.

Today’s badass activist is pop-culture pirate Elisa Kreisinger. She remixes pop cultural texts on her own website, reappropriating them for a female/feminist audience. She is also a Media Fellow at the Center for Social Media at American University and works with the Women’s Media Center and conducts workshops.

Let’s hear what she says about her work!

You call yourself a Pop Culture Pirate. What is it that you do, and what do you hope to achieve?

I’m a writer 2.0: I ‘write’ with video with the goal of creating better stories with more complex female characters that don’t revolve around men or babies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I use the word ‘pirate’ based on a Mary Daly’s words of wisdom:

“..It is necessary to Plunder — that is, righteously rip off — gems of knowledge that the patriarchs have stolen from us. Second, we must Smuggle back to other women our Plundered treasures. In order to invert strategies that will be big and bold enough for the next millennium, it is crucial that women share our experiences: the chances we have taken and the choices that have kept us alive. They are my Pirate’s battle cry and wake-up call for women who I want to hear.”

My work is protected under Fair Use.

How does one become a Pop Culture Pirate? When and how did you decide on video remix as a medium for activism?

I wanted more stories about other women that didn’t revolve around men. The only way to do this is was to make the stories myself. Remix allows me to create tangible examples of what these stories might look like without the old ball and chain of the traditional production system. When people don’t like my version, remix culture encourages them to make their own.

I particularly liked your project on Sex and the City.  I found SATC  to be a particularly frustrating show because it had so many good starting points and followed through on so few of them. How did you create this project? Did you see the queer moments as you were watching, or did they emerge when you set out to create the remixes?

Thanks for the compliment. I agree with your point that it started so well and then became disappointing. The Queer Carrie Project started as an experiment in remix storytelling. I wanted to see how far I could push the genre and if it would hold together. I have some second thoughts, looking back on the project, there’s things I would’ve done differently but the original intent was to look at how the show appropriated the language of radical feminist politics only to retell old patriarchal fairy tales. I really wanted to know why these women, in all their sexual candor and sexual frank-ness, had to abandoning their post-feminist thinking?  Why is it so easy to use the language of radical feminism but so hard to give up on those patriarchal fantasies? So I attempted to deal with that through remix.

You also conduct workshops and work with children and teens. How do they respond, and what insights have you gained from working with them? Do their perspectives inform your remixes at all?

Remix changes the focus of learning from something that’s individual (like taking notes) into an act of community engagement. Students  are asking questions of each other and helping each other troubleshoot. I’m just really guiding them and making sure that the computers actually turn on, we can get online and YouTube isn’t blocked.

I find that remix is the spoon full of sugar that makes the media literacy and critical thinking theory go down easier.  I’m just wrapping a lesson plan into something they can digest.

Are you working on any new projects right now, or is there anything you’ve felt inspired by recently? OR, can you recommend any shows/movies/series that don’t need any remixing because they already explore feminist/queer potentials?

That’s a really good question; I think every show deserves to be remixed, whether it’s as an homage or a critique of that show. It’s important to remix as a means of talking back to pop culture through a common language. Perhaps most importantly, it’s the important tech skills along the way, especially for women, that matter most. Being able to talk back in a public space like YouTube is quickly becoming the new ‘literacy’ and we need more women there.

Right now I’m working on a Mad (Wo) Men project that will debut at SXSW in March. Each part of that project will be revealed in the weeks leading up to the Mad Men premiere on March 25th. In watching the show over and over, I have to say it’s hard to remix because it is so well done. I have issues with it; who loves something unconditionally? But it’s hard to re-edit as they attempt to explore (or circle around) feminist issues. I look forward to seeing a contemporary show that dives in head first.

 

Thank you for your time!

Tags: activism, art, elisa kreisinger, media art, pop culture, remix, writing