Homing blogs as ambivalent spaces for feminine agency

Abstract

This article discusses a form of lifestyle blogging where women blog about their homes and everyday lives. In these homing blogs, selfrepresentations are characteristically spatially demarcated within the private sphere of the home. As these repeated representations of women in their homes take place in the public space of the internet, homing blogs work towards naturalizing the home as a women's sphere. Written and commented on mostly by other women, homing blogs represent a feminine form of self-expression and communication that functions as a discursive expression of ongoing social, economic, and cultural changes in affluent Western societies. In this article, Finnish versions of these homing blogs are analysed in the cultural and political context of contemporary Finland, and discussed as a form of intimate publics that reverses the gender politics of other historical, semi-public spaces for the exercise of women's agency, such as the salon.

Visualizing digital discourse: interactional, institutional and ideological perspectives Visualizing digital discourse: interactional, institutional and ideological perspectives , edited by Crispin Thurlow, Christa Dürscheid and Federica Diémoz, Berlin/Bosten, Walter de Gruyter, 2020, 273 pp., $114.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-5015-1874-4

“…These developments are interesting from the point of view of social class: it seems that the women who have been retreating to the home are primarily middle-class women ("modern, educated women"), who "can negotiate and share their "return" to the private sphere of the home with their peers" via, for example, blogging about it (Jäntti et al 2018: 890). Blogging, for them, thus offers a collective means for synthesizing and blurring the public and the private (Thurlow (2013: 244), for justifying and authenticating their "choice" (Jäntti et al 2018). The classed nature of these mediatized re-enactments of domesticity can, however, also imply that there are other womenwomenwhomaynotbe(seenas)equally "modern and educated"-who do not have a similar motivation or set of resources to make their situations publicly as visible and sharable via social media.…”

Fulfilling the self through food in wellness blogs: Governing the healthy subject

“…Scholarly investigations of the feminine (food, DIY and lifestyle) blogosphere have been largely shaped by the dominance of postfeminist ideology or sensibilities in the discourses of women's lifestyle blogs (e.g. Duffy and Hund, 2015;Jäntti et al, 2018). According to Gill (2007: 162), postfeminism is an articulation between feminist and anti-feminist ideas, which is expressed through a (neoliberalist) grammar of individualism.…”

“…The data analysed in this article consist of 170 blog entries from three individual wellness food blogs authored by Finnish women in English for an international audience. Blogs relevant for thorough analysis were identified by selecting a key site or an 'entry point' via which the rest of the data were then chosen and gathered for analysis (see Jäntti et al, 2018). The data gathering originated from arguably the most popular and most frequently awarded (SAVEUR Food Blog Awards and Blog Awards Finland) Finnish wellness food blog, Vanelja.…”

Introduction: Turning to the visual in digital discourse studies

“…Accordingly, Leppänen argues that these revisualizations end up challenging neo-conservative ideological assumptions concerning the nuclear family and notions of good mothering. They also challenge the aesthetics of home purported in such popular social media genres as the 'homing blogs' of young women who have created highly aestheticized life journals of their home-based lives and lifestyles (see Jäntti et al, 2017). Ultimately, and following the work of Thurlow & Jaworski (2017) on elite discourse, Leppänen argues that social media parodies of motherhood nonetheless remain ambivalent and elitist in the way they orient to motherhood as a classed category.…”