Updates…

*Jill at Feministe has given me the opportunity to be a guest blogger over there for this week and other weeks to come in the summer. Please have a look at the blog if you have a chance: it is fresh, full of punch and wit and covers interesting debates concerning women.

*Ndesanjo at Jikomboe has also given me the opportunity to be a contributor to Global Voices Online which is exciting and fun. I shall be doing roundups of what African female bloggers are dissecting on their pages.

*I have been swamped with dissertation work of late but blogging is just what makes the 3000 word essay seem less boring and painful to write. My dissertation is focused on the black francophone press aimed at women: are they glossy images bound together or does content exist in them?

*I have been published in Subtext magazine and Words of a Wicked Woman! I am so happy as my dream is to be a journalist. I would like to thank Gill at Subtext and Tammy and Words of a Wicked Woman for reading my work.

*My Parisian adventure is nearing its’ end. I shall be leaving the French capital next week to start summer holidays before returning back to Britain in October to commence my final year of university.

*I am hoping to start a women’s group at my university when I go back to England. I have not a clue how to go about organising this since I don’t think it is going to be wildly popular. I thought of organising weekly debate meetings where we would discuss issues such as rape, domestic violence, beauty standards, double standards etc. I’ll keep you all updated as I try and sort this out but if no one is interested at the university, I’ll still blog about those issues. Does anyone have any ideas on how I should look for members? I thought about emailing departments or emailing societies. I also emailed the Womens Officer and I am awaiting a response from her.

*My friend Natacha and I are avid fashion and culture junkies. We can spend days reading fashion magazines. I do not understand why or where it came from but I even remember being at school and cutting out pictures from fashion and music magazines and sticking them inside notebooks and writing captions next to them. I can spend hours at a newsagent reading magazines.

We have decided to start a little magazine chronicling culture, current affairs and fashion. It won’t try and be Vogue. It will just be the stuff we like and we are going to get started on it when we are back in England this autumn. For now, we have a blog set up called Volte Face for the magazine and please send anything through! We are all about analysis of current news and culture. Everything is a work in progress: the blog will focus more on the culture aspect and current affairs and we hope our print version will focus on fashion.

–Aulelia