Blogging Solo: New Media, ‘Old’ Politics

Abstract

This article focuses on the blogosphere as an oppositional field where the meanings around contemporary Western women's singlehood are contested, negotiated and rewritten. In contrast to dominant narratives in which single women are pathologised, in the blogs by, for, and about single women analysed here, writers aim to refigure women's singleness as well as providing resources, support and a textual community where others can intervene and contribute to the re-valuation of single women. These blogs also function as alternative forms of knowledge, seeking to (re)legitimise women's singleness and to trouble their aberrance and social liminality. Rather than only considering the form in isolation from its content, this article analyses the discourses deployed by bloggers and within blogs and how women bloggers publicly perform their very singleness as part of a personal and political strategy of re-signification. In this way, while cautious not to overestimate the democratic potentialities of the so-called blogosphere, it underscores the important cultural – and indeed political – work being undertaken by single women therein. Moreover, by demonstrating how these blogs use discursive tactics commonly associated with feminism's second-wave – women's consciousness-raising; identity politics; deploying and reiterating the famous feminist dictum: ‘the personal is political’; naming discrimination; and empathy and community-building – it argues that they are using so-called ‘new’ media for what is now problematically believed to be ‘old’ (feminist) politics.

Stop waiting! Hegemonic and alternative scripts of single women’s subjectivity

“…Taylor stresses that taking up these subject positions are politically important as:“These bloggers write themselves into being as an oppositional gesture; these public identifications as unashamedly single are politically important in that the blogger refuses to recognize the aberrance of being single and instead works to normalize it as an identity. In so doing, they also provide a forum for others to become part of a public forged from this shared recognition of singleness as more than a default way of being in the world.” (Taylor, 2011: 90)Indeed, these blogs can be read as significant sites for political resistance, as they expose the social relativity of time and waiting time. Indeed, as the single population continues to grow, one can find more therapists, coaches and various experts who promote a different view of waiting.…”

“…“These bloggers write themselves into being as an oppositional gesture; these public identifications as unashamedly single are politically important in that the blogger refuses to recognize the aberrance of being single and instead works to normalize it as an identity. In so doing, they also provide a forum for others to become part of a public forged from this shared recognition of singleness as more than a default way of being in the world.” (Taylor, 2011: 90)…”

“…Such an example can be found in Jerusha Stewart’s self-help book a Single Girl’s Manifesta . The message “don’t wait” is rehearsed again and again in different guises throughout the book:“Don’t wait till you are tying the knot to celebrate your marvellous self” (p. 172), “[You are] the head of the household you can buy a home on your own, invest for yourself and in your future”, “Don’t wait for someone else to make this timely decision” (p. 129), “Making choices in your life equals gaining control over your future” (p. 130).In her analysis of Stewart’s self-help book, Taylor (2011: 177) correctly argues that Stewart advocates a new kind of identity politics for single women. 3 According to Taylor, this kind of strategic deployment of choice—one which views singlehood as a chosen way of being—is an important political gesture, especially given that the idea is rarely deployed in relation to public understandings of female singlehood.…”

“…An important contribution to understanding the ways in which cultural texts like self-help books and blogs resist dominant familial orders can be found in Anthea Taylor's (2011) work. In her analysis, Taylor argues that single women bloggers deploy a feminist interpretive lens, through which they make sense of their singleness and challenge the way single women are positioned within language, politics, and culture.…”

Digital feminisms and the split subject: Short-circuits through Lacan's four discourses

“…An emerging field of scholarship engaged in the study of what I broadly call 'digital feminisms' canvases a variety of feminist discourses and practices that use digitally mediated platforms and services to mobilize feminist agendas, protest, and praxis. With some speculating that the affordances of digital media technologies have generated a fourth "wave" of feminism (Phillips & Cree, 2014: 938) that challenges mainstream media representations of a post-feminist era (Gill, 2016: 613), this field of scholarship has focused on organized "hashtag" feminisms (Portwood-Stacer & Berridge, 2014) and networked communities in the form of blogs, as well as activist and pedagogical websites, YouTube channels, tumblrs and memes (for example, Baer, 2016;Fotopoulou, 2016;Khoja-Moolji, 2015;Pruchniewska, 2016;Scharff, Smith-Prei, and Stehle, 2016;Seidman, 2013;Taylor, 2011;Thrift, 2014;Vivienne, 2016). Included in these forms of digital feminisms are moments when feminist discourse is invoked (and re-distributed) in digitally mediated spaces to express feminist knowledge and assert feminist identities in ways that may or may not be organized or intended forms of feminist praxis or pedagogy (see, for example, Dobson, 2015;Keller, 2016;Thelandersson, 2014).…”