Relevant Feminist Theories

Female Blogging: Issues of Identity,
Relations and Play

note: This is the eighth in a series of the MotherPie Blog Study, following:
Introduction
Mom Bloggers: Intensively Engaged in the Blogosphere
Theories of Engaging, Immersing, Linking & Networking...
Blogging Motivations
The Commercialization of the Female Blogs
Social Theory and the Female Blog
Identity and the Self in Blogging

Relevant Feminist Theories

    Virtual, the word, is derived from the Latin virtus/virtualis, meaning strength or power. The ability to harness power in real life via the interaction between the real and the virtual has political implications. It is a phantom reality, only latent, exactly like the real but missing the tangible existence which is a new dynamic of collaboration, writes Pierre Levy (Levy). Women bloggers seem to come at the dimension of blogging as a play thing and a place to expand the concept of self. It is a long road and in some ways a different dialogue than what noted feminist Selma James wrote, “our identity, our social roles, the way we are seen, appears to be disconnected from our capitalist functions.” But how do they fit, today? In an attention economy, James’ ideas might now, though, be newly relevant: “The work you do and the wages you receive are not merely “economic” but social determinants, determinants of social power.”

    While this new medium, blogging, can be seen as one of a bridge between and connecting the identities - online and virtual - how this might mean something particular in light of feminist theories is something that I examined in researching these issues while I was studying content on "mom blogs" and conducting a survey of bloggers.  Can virtual identity be a powerful tool for the (female) self?

Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa wrote more about a woman’s place in 1972 in their seminal book, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community. They struggled to define and analyze the “Woman Question” and to locate this question in the entire “female role” as it has been created by the capitalist division of labor. They placed the housewife as the central, primal figure irrespective of work outside the home. “On a word level, a quality of life and the quality of relationships which it generates, that determines a woman’s place wherever she is and to whichever class she belongs,” they wrote. However, today, with the platform of blogs, the place of a woman, a housewife, is not necessarily bounded to the home. How does this inversion or convolution rework or revise these theories? James and Dalla Costa believed that the capitalistic structure had to dissolve the preexisting community structures in order to recreate the modern family and the housewives’ place in it.

Dalla Costa wrote further in a paper in June 2003, “despite the deep transformations that later occurred in the mode of production, this cornerstone of feminine responsibility in the mode of production and the importance of the labour of reproduction remain unresolved problems, thus reproducing the persistency of a fundamental binarism…..But binarism, above the entire masculine and the feminine, is in my view inscribed in the universe."(Dalla Costa, et. al)”

It is perhaps this binarism that maybe evolves from the masculine linearity of thinking rather than the wholistic concept of women. Women live in cyclical patterns and stages, not linear constructs. Perhaps the platform of blogging and the technology evolution will enable the lives of mothers to be lived, energetically, in fits and starts and patterns more visually represented by a curvilinear, looping cocentric line rather than the binary terms.

Some of the elder bloggers see the cultural and social aspects of feminism as topics for the blogs. A Little Red Hen writes in her post, Vegan Fox* and The Life, Retired, “Socially, I found a resonance between identifying myself as retired and the time I was a youngish mother at home. Another form of what Betty Freidan spoke of in The Feminine Mystique. We become invisible without a paid work role. Please tell me you're okay with being more visible-- on your blog, in the public square. To paraphrase ACT UP, ‘We're here, get used to us!’” One of the comments on the post was from Ronni Bennett: who writes Time Goes By and considers herself a member of the Elderbloggers, “In my mid-thirties, I took some time off for six or eight months to mostly work on my country house and its gardens. It was shocking then how less interested people became in me and equally shocking that when I returned to work, I returned to the world in the eyes of others - even some of the same ones who ignored me when I was (by choice) unemployed.”

In addition to social isolation theories as a blogging motivational factor, feminist theories are factors to consider in studying mom bloggers. Betty Friedan in her classic book, The Feminie Mystique, (1963), defined the "feminine mystique" as "the problem that has no name"--i.e. what women think when they realize that being a housewife (or what we call today a stay-at-home mom) is not enough for them. That they want more--that they need more. That they need to be given all the same opportunities to develop their personhoods as men have to develop theirs. When published, her book was the number one best-selling paperback and it has helped women appreciate the costs of being defined only as a wife and a mother. “The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own,” Freidan wrote. Other feminist scholars addressed the role of women, including Harvard-educated journalist Susan Faludi, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of two well-known books: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1992) and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (1999).Changes in American society have affected both men and women, she concludes, and it is wrong to blame individual men for problems they did not cause and from which they suffer as much as women. Other feminist writers have attacked the exploitation of women. Rhodes Scholar Naomi Wolf, educated at Yale and Oxford, wrote in Fire with Fire that women’s experiences matter and women have the right to tell the truth about their experiences.

    Moms Rising is one of the strongest activist organizations online that deal with issues on a societal and governmental level. Built upon, and in conjunction with the ideas put forth in their 2006 book, The Motherhood Manifesto: What America’s Moms Want – and What to Do About It, the authors, Joan Blades and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner have taken the ideas further with the online site and organization, Moms Rising.

Much of the debate in the last couple of years has centered around career mothers versus stay-at-home mothers. Mothers who have contributed to these debates and have received a lot of buzz in the blogosphere include Caitlin Flanagan who writes for The New Yorker, and her book, To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, which came out in April 2006. Leslie Steiner Morgan, who was formerly in advertising sales at The Washington Post but now writes their mom blog for working women, On Balance (supported by regular weekly writings by a stay-at-home-Dad), flamed the binary rhetoric with her book, The Mommy Wars, which, in ways further than just the title, pitted stay-at-home moms against the career moms.

    How will the blogs fit into the public forum landscape for feminist ideas and theories? Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels wrote in their 2004 book, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and how it has Undermined All Women, how and why motherhood has become the number-one media obsession during the last three decades. Perhaps the moms, in writing the truth as everyday moms experience it, will combat the idealized images that Douglas and Michaels believe have actually harmed childless women, working mothers, and stay-at-home moms that the powerful conservative subculture determined to "re-domesticate the women of America through motherhood."

    The ability of blogs to paint a public picture of what was formerly private or unpublished ruminations or perspectives, perhaps the reality of the roles and the social strictures may alter, break, or become less rigid. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James wrote in 1972: “In the sociality of struggle women discover and exercise a power that effectively gives them a new identity. The new identity is and can only be a new degree of social power." (Dalla Costa, et al.)

The “cult of the new momism” as Douglas and Michaels write, is a trend in American culture that is causing women to feel that motherhood and the perfection of it is where happiness resides. Can women “have it all?” As technology has extended ourselves, umbilically we are more attached to our progeny through cell phones and online communications. Some media entities, such as Newsweek, have called the attached parent (or enmeshed, due to technology) the “helicopter parent” phenonmenon. Technology adds a dimension to the parenting self. What will the ramifications be?

    Elizabeth Grosz writes about Jacques Derrida and his interpretation of feminism in terms of a difference – a differentiation in becoming. “The act of tearing, inscribing, categorizing and sorting, creating new alignments and new organization in an idea of “difference” which generates and destabilizes both representation and what it represents. She addresses Derrida’s ideas along with other French feminist theorists in constructing difference as the central tenant of understanding the relation of the sexes."(Grosz)” The construction of gender and roles, such as those in the mom blogs or the female blogs (which tend to associate the female identity along with a specific interest, such as “elder blogger” or “artist”) may allow more freedom of construction of self when the body is detatched from the mind/emotion/presentation and the interaction is not predicated on the physical.

    It is perhaps that women who have known cultural restrictions for women in the workplace that the feminist theories might resonate and through the format of personal publishing, find that their voices are not lonely ones in our society. Ronni Bennett's Blog, As Time Goes By, writes on Choking on Being Retired: “Like almost every elder I know who qualifies as retired through having no full-time work and/or having reached the age of receiving Social Security benefits, I have never been more intellectually engaged in life and in the world around me. And if the thousands of comments and discussion on this blog over several years now is any indication, I am hardly alone.”

    Schueller writes about race and color in the cyborg body and the analogy to white feminist theories, and in doing so she touches on bell hooks, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, influential gender theorists such as Teresa de Lauretis, Elizabeth Grosz and Donna Haraway. She posits that racial incorporation continues in gender and sexuality theory and in analyzing Haraway’s cyborg ideas which promise possibilities beyond those based on ‘maternal’ and ‘pre-Oedipal’ in the pleasure of confusing the boundaries and promotes the possibility of the ‘dream of everywhere’ and she denigrates Haraway’s idea of the chimerical self in the cyborg body(Schueller). While I am not an expert on feminist theory or race and racial constructs, I do believe through the study of the feminine blogs and the sub-genre of the mom blogs that the identity is more ephemeral in traditional constructs although if a predominant style were to be said to be used, it would be that modeled on the 50’s white female mother model. I think this is made with a sense of irony in the construction and a sense of play with the modern overlapping the real and projected in contraposition to what was and what is being unfurled.

    There is also a sense of play against the commercial constructs of how society terms and designates “being female”. “Going Grey is a feminist act” is the title of a post by Grace Davis, a mom blogging out of California. She wrote, “It was a good move, giving up my highlighting habit. It's also good not to give into the notion that it's unacceptable to be an older female in this culture. We must appear youthful at all costs. If I have the audacity to appear my actual age, the culture will render me invisible.”

    According to other feminist theories, dominant discourses are a prominent feature of feminist theories of social construction as the product of social relationships and practices. They become meaningful through interpretive frameworks. Marilyn Friedman writes that the construction of identities is not passive, but active and she does not think the idea that women together can redefine themselves a paradox. She analyzes feminist constructs by critiquing the ideas of Nancy J. Hirschman and believes that Hirschman’s ‘imaginary domain’ is a social process in which people acting together – though not always in agreement – work to change context so as to produce new meanings and possibilities and she notes Hirschman: “So, physics may reveal a reality that is not entirely socially constructed…the barrier to freedom is thus not women’s pregnant bodies but, rather, patriarchal social attitudes and customs pertaining to pregnancy and women.”(Friedman)

    Being able to have public conversations outside of the mainstream media on issues that are important to women and mothers raising women is of interest to this genre and to this study. Izzy Mom wrote a post, Damn that Dirty Dancing. “But hello? High school girls in bars when the parents thought they were safely tucked away in bed? That’s stupid AND dangerous. The semi-controlled environment of a school dance seems downright safe in comparison. I may be way off base but I just find it hard to get too worked up over dancing, particularly when these kids are not to blame. I prefer to save my ire for the bigger issues at work here.”

Perhaps the feminist theories can hold up in the virtual spaces when it comes to the construction of identity, roles and the discussion of issues that are not related to the capitalistic functions. Perhaps blogging is a way to merge the conversations.

Next: Theories of Attention and Engagement

Comments

[tut-tut]

Close to the beginning here, you mention an "attention economy." Can you explain?

[Panhandle Poet]

Maybe blogging is a way to preserve sanity in a world of confused gender roles. Maybe it's a way to feel a sense of contribution to the greater good -- beyond the construct of boundaries imposed by holding multiple roles as mother and co-bread-winner. Maybe it is just a way to vent from that suppressed ego that arises from the conflicted reality within which she finds herself bound. But again, what does my male mind know -- I'm just a linear thinker.

[MotherPie]

Tut-tut --- I have a post coming up on Theories of Attention and Engagement as part of this study -- it comes up on the 18th. It is very interesting. I could write a lot on this subject of attention -- from multi-tasking and attention spans to the economy of attention (think about how Paris Hilton has risen to stardom only by her ability to capture attention and now a coterie of starlets in NYC hope to follow in her footsteps...).

[Panhandle Poet]

Do you think they'll follow her right to jail???

[MotherPie]

hahaha.