Jervis, Lisa

Lisa Jervis (1972–) is a prominent writer and feminist activist, widely acknowledged for her work in the areas of media advocacy and reform and her work in independent media. She is perhaps best [Page 183]known as the founding editor and publisher of the zine-cum-magazine Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture. She also has served as a founding board chair of Women in Media and News, a group targeting media analysis, education, reform, and outreach, as a member of the advisory board of outLoud Radio, as the finance and operations director at the Center for Media Justice, and as an editor at large for LiP: Informed Revolt, an alternative magazine that started as a zine in Chicago. Her commentary has appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Ms., the San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Bust, Utne, and Salon. Her work has been published in books such as Body Outlaws (2000), The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order (1999), Tipping the Sacred Cow (2007), and Yes Means Yes: Visions of Sexual Power and a World Without Rape (2008). Jervis has also coedited both Young Wives' Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership (2001), a collection of contemporary, personal feminist writings on love and relationships, and Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism From the Pages of Bitch Magazine (2006), which was published in honor of the tenth anniversary of Bitch. Both Jervis and commentators situate her as an active participant in the movement toward a type of protest that operates outside the confines of traditional activism. Using popular culture as the locus of action, she sees her work in media literacy and reform as inherently political.

Jervis was born in Boston in the early 1970s and spent a portion of her childhood in Los Angeles before moving to New York City at the age of eight. She graduated from Oberlin College in 1994, with a major in English and a minor in creative writing, and interned with her Bitch cofounder Andi Zeisler at the now defunct but much-heralded teen magazine Sassy. Chronologically, she is part of feminism's third wave, a term Jervis herself notes is helpful in situating herself as part of a movement at a particular time but that falls short in conceptualizing the scope and nuance of beliefs and approaches among feminists of her generation.

Jervis's work is an outgrowth of her belief in popular culture as an important site of feminist activism and emblematic of “indie” movements within progressive communities. It is in her work with Bitch that both of these notions collide. Attempting to engage in a more public way with their self-defined love/hate relationship with popular culture, high school friends Jervis and Zeisler (with Benjamin Shaykin signing on to design) founded Bitch in 1996 in the San Francisco Bay Area, distributing the first 300 copies from the back of Jervis's station wagon. Inspired by various other outlets such as Ms. and Sassy and the burgeoning zine culture, the magazine was designed to be a feminist critique of mediated products, featuring columns, interviews, and reported pieces that analyzed representations of gender and feminist politics in various media.

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