Subversive Texts: Mommyblogs to Blog-Books in Spain Catherine B

Subversive Texts: MommyBlogs to Blog-Books in Spain Catherine B. Ross Southwestern University Lauren Fellers Southwestern University Abstract This article examines the importance of the mommyblog as an active way of questioning maternal norms, the consequences of the blog being published as a book, and the areas of maternal questioning highlighted in these books. Through an examination of these blog-books by Isabel García-Zarza and Eva Quevedo, we iden- tify three significant issues: a sense of isolation, a fear that they do not fit into the mold of the ideal mother, and a desire to subvert traditional perspectives of motherhood. These books mark an important change in the way in which motherhood has traditionally been represented in Spain, moving away from the self-sacrificial version of motherhood to a supportive, interactive new maternal norm. These blog-books illustrate the wide interest in re-examining maternal roles, focusing on issues that were formerly only part of the private sphere. The way women approach motherhood is changing. No longer a societal requirement, motherhood has become a choice for many women in Spain. These changes in the way women mother have come about through many different channels, such as better access to healthcare and family planning, laws encouraging gender equality, and the internet. The mommyblog is a recent phenomenon that connects with many women because of its accessibility and autobio- graphical content. In Spain in the past few years, two mommyblogs, Blog de madre: desdramati- zando el mundo maternal and Mi vida con hijos: una visión irreverente de la maternidad, have been published as books titled Blog de madre (2012) and Diario de una madre imperfecta (2010). This article examines the importance of the mommyblog as an active way of questioning maternal norms, the consequences of the blog being published as a book, and the areas of maternal questioning highlighted in these books. The books share many themes, such as the fear of being a bad mother, the pressure to be a supermom, and the struggle to deal with the gap between their own experience of motherhood and the ideal promoted by society. By sharing their stories with their readers and by interacting with their readers on their blogs, these two bloggers, Eva Queve- do and Isabel García-Zarza, assume a mutually reassuring position that yes, we all do all that we can, as imperfect as we might be. The blog-books that stem from their online blogs illustrate the wide interest in re-examining maternal roles, focusing on issues that were formerly only part of the private sphere, such as fear of not fitting the maternal mold, changing family dynamics, and loss of self. These books mark an important change in the way in which motherhood has traditionally been represented in Spain, moving away from the self-sacrificial version of motherhood to a supportive, interactive new maternal norm. Spain’s perspective on mothers is unique due to its recent history of dictatorship and peaceful transition to democracy. In the past forty years, Spain 269 - Hispanic Studies Review - Vol. 2, No. 2 (2017): 269-286 has transformed from a conservative, fascist regime to an egalitarian nation whose laws strive to support equality between women and men both in the public and private spheres. These rapid changes have caused what John Hooper terms a leap “from pre-feminism into post-feminism without having really experienced a feminist upheaval,” which has the consequence that “pro- foundly sexist attitudes have survived into an era in which women are acquiring much genuine freedom and equality” (Hooper 130). Traditional expectations for women as mothers persist des- pite the fact that they no longer match Spain’s cultural and economic reality. Spanish psycho- logists Sara Berbel Sánchez and María Teresa Pi-Sunyer Peyrí recognize that women “han parti- cipado activamente en la vida pública a costa de grandes esfuerzos personales y, …la sensación general es desaliento: ahora que legalmente hemos alcanzado la igualdad, las mujeres seguimos sin encontrar nuestro lugar” (91). While Spanish society has changed from a conservative, oli- garchical structure to a liberal, democratic one, women still struggle to find balance among all of the different roles they inhabit. Mommyblogs provide a space for women to voice these concerns and create virtual communities of support for women as mothers, partners, workers, and women. What is a Mommyblog? A weblog or blog is defined by Meredith Nelson in “The Blog Phenomenon and the Book Publishing Industry” as “a frequently updated Web page that includes stream-of-consciousness entries by a single writer or group of writers” (Nelson 1). Blogs first began to be published online in mid-to-late 1990s and were often used to link to and discuss content from different sites and articles (Tucker 5). They increasingly began to form interconnected communities that linked to one another's posts and, when the technology became available, engaged an active dialogue with fellow bloggers via comments. As blogging became more popular, bloggers split off into many different subgroups, including topics as diverse as political blogs, writing blogs, hobbyist blogs, and our area of interest, mommyblogs (blogs de mamá in Spanish). While they may take many forms, in this paper a mommyblog is defined as a blog written by a mother about her experiences with topics such as pregnancy, childbirth, and raising chil- dren.1 While blogs were at first the province of the technologically savvy, as early as 1999, and to an even greater extent today, a number of popular platforms such as Blogger, Wordpress, and Tumblr began to offer bloggers premade formats that reduced the level of technical skill needed to produce content (Friedman and Calixte 5). This made blogging more accessible to the average user and broadened the range of those who could participate in the blogging scene, although the digital divide can still limit the voices of those from lower socioeconomic classes or other marginalized groups who may not own computers or have regular internet access. Blogging as a practice has continued to grow in popularity over time, and in their book The Elements of Blogging Mark Leccese and Jerry Lanson note that the number of blogs has jumped from an es- timated 23 in 1999 to over 240 million as of 2013 (Leccese and Lanson 2). 1 It is important to note at this point that there is some controversy around the term “mommyblog(ger),” which has been criticized as infantilizing mothers, reinforcing traditional narratives of motherhood, and triviali- zing their writing (even as the act of mommyblogging may be empowering), as discussed in Gina Masullo Chen’s “Don’t Call Me That: A Techno-Feminist Critique of the Term Mommy Blogger” (Chen 511). Nonetheless, it is by far the most common and accepted term in use both within and without the community, and in the interest of clarity we will continue to use it here. 270 - Hispanic Studies Review - Vol. 2, No. 2 (2017): 269-286 What are the Politics of Mommyblogs? Today, as Judith Stadtman Tucker frames it in Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the Mommyblog, the blogosphere is “principally a repository for tens of millions of first-person monologues on the subject of everyday life” (Tucker 1). However, the structure of blogs is very different from that of that of traditional media such as published autobiographies or newspaper columns, and this can have implications both for blog authors and for the audiences that they attract. Some salient features of blogs as opposed to print media in the case of mommyblogs are their reverse chronological ordering, their interactive nature, and the ease of distribution and accessibility of content. To expand on these points, posts are displayed in reverse order from traditional media such that someone first visiting would see the most recent posts rather than the earliest one, which prevents mommyblogs from presenting readers with a linear narrative of their experiences. Tucker criticizes the way that blogs can present mothers’ narratives as disconnected: “For better or worse, weblog structure--as well as received elements of blogging culture--favor the representation of maternal experience as a series of casual, disjointed events, rather than as a connected, complex whole” (Tucker 7). This can undermine attempts by mothers to present a cohesive alternate narrative of motherhood to readers. But this necessarily fragmented style, as opposed to a more traditional, cohesive narrative that appears in, for example, the book adapta- tion of García-Zarza’s blog, is not necessarily a weakness. In her article “Blogs of War,” Melissa Wall views the fragmentary, interconnected nature of blogs as essentially postmodern and sug- gests that these aspects can actually help direct focus to “small, local stories” that “give rise to non-official voices and versions of events” not represented in the mainstream (Wall 185). While Wall is interested specifically in blogs discussing the Iraq war, it is an argument that applies to the format as a whole. Because mommyblog posts are created as a reaction to current events in the blogger’s life rather than being laid out after the fact, they open up active discussions in the moment that invite participation and support, allowing mothers to generate their own narrative about events and concerns particular to them. In this view, the incomplete and intertextual nature of blogs can be viewed as a positive; it opens up avenues for new voices and directs readers to other such voices and stories. This interactive nature inherent to blogs manifests in a number of ways. Most directly, blogs include a comment section inviting readers to weigh in on the topic of the post, and the writer of the post often responds to and interacts with her commenters.

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