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The Rhetoric of Mom Blogs: a Study of Mothering Made Public

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The Rhetoric of Mom Blogs: a Study of Mothering Made Public Syracuse University SURFACE Writing Program – Dissertations College of Arts and Sciences 12-2012 The Rhetoric of Mom Blogs: A Study of Mothering Made Public Madeline Yonker Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/wp_etd Part of the Rhetoric Commons Recommended Citation Yonker, Madeline, "The Rhetoric of Mom Blogs: A Study of Mothering Made Public" (2012). Writing Program – Dissertations. 34. https://surface.syr.edu/wp_etd/34 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Arts and Sciences at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Writing Program – Dissertations by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract This dissertation examines the phenomenon of mom blogs to determine their handling of conventional motherhood and the rhetorical nature of their discourse. Unlike other prior studies of blogs and specifically of mom blogs, the dissertation examines both the blog entries themselves and the many comments such entries generate from readers. In addition, it seeks to determine the values and rhetorical practices of any community that might be established through such blog commenting. To accomplish these aims, the dissertation focuses on the entries and comments from three particular blogs chosen to represent the network of mom bloggers. The commonplaces or ideals of the conventional motherhood narrative are first established as they have been identified in existing scholarship on mothering. This provides a framework against which the rhetoric of the mom blogs can be compared to determine the picture of motherhood identity presented by these mom blogs in relation to the societal norms of motherhood. Research on the diary style blog is surveyed as well to establish the mom blogs’ potential to support particular emotional interaction between the writer and readers, and the ways such interaction can serve the production of community. Additionally, this chapter considers some established defining characteristics of online communities. Moreover, the diary style blog and online community share similar rhetorical features. A grounded theory analysis of a year’s worth of entries the mom blogs reveals they present/perform motherhood identities via an ethos of inexperience or lack of knowledge. They struggle with the judgment of others based on cultural expectations for body image and performance of motherhood, and they themselves struggle with their own tendencies to judge other mothers similarly. The content analysis of the comments from the same three blogs indicates that readers most often respond with affirmation of the writer, either through the sharing of similar experiences, through the extension of the original entry topic, or through the mirroring of the blogger’s rhetoric. The analysis concludes that the mom bloggers and their audiences do react against cultural expectations that they are unable to fulfill, but that they do not overtly resist or interrogate those expectations. In fact, the communities that emerge among the writers and readers seem to serve a support group function. The comments offer affirmation for the bloggers, but there is no indication that their interactions with one another, alone, will prompt significant cultural change. However, the simple scale of participation presented in this dissertation—the three bloggers combined with the large number of commenters’ contributions—indicates that ideal motherhood is not operative for a significant number of mothers. THE RHETORIC OF MOM BLOGS: A STUDY OF MOTHERING MADE PUBLIC By Madeline Dahlke Yonker B.A. Norfolk State University, 1999 M.A. Old Dominion University, 2001 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric in the Graduate School of Syracuse University December 2012 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Copyright 2012 Madeline Dahlke Yonker All Rights Reserved Table of Contents Introduction..................................................................................................................1 Contentious Words.............................................................................................................. 6 The Radical Mom Blog ..................................................................................................... 10 Overview of Chapters........................................................................................................ 16 ! Chapter 1: The Construction and Expectations of American Motherhood ............................20 Formative Scholarship on Motherhood........................................................................... 21 The Paradox of Motherhood: A (Necessary? but) Unattainable Ideal......................... 23 Effects of the Unattainable Ideal: Guilt and the “Bad Mother” ................................... 28 Effects of the Unattainable Ideal: The Invisibility of Motherhood............................... 35 Effects of the Unattainable Ideal: Loss of the ‘Self’ ...................................................... 41 Overcoming the Unattainable Ideal................................................................................. 45 ! Chapter 2: Diary-Style Blogs and Online Communities............................................................48 The Rise of Personal or “Diary-Style” Blogs ................................................................. 48 Diary-style Blogging as Immediate (Exhibitionism/Voyeurism) .................................. 52 Blogs as Social Support/Community Building................................................................ 58 Chapter 3: Methods of Analysis...................................................................................................67 Using Network Models to Limit the Large Corpus........................................................ 67 An Introduction to the Blogs Studied in this Dissertation............................................. 77 Analysis of the Entries....................................................................................................... 79 Analysis of the Comments................................................................................................. 84 Defining the Units ...................................................................................................... 85 Defining the Categories (Constructing the Codes)..................................................... 86 Revising the Code Categories for Reliability and Validity ....................................... 91 ! Chapter 4: Analysis of Mom Blog Entries: How Do the Bloggers Address Motherhood?....97 Negotiating Inexperience and Mistakes (Perceived Mothering Incompetence) .......... 98 Negotiating Identity and Compromising Personal Preferences.................................. 109 Struggles with Body Image and Appearance................................................................ 116 Judging Motherhood; Being Judged as Mothers ......................................................... 121 ! ! "! Chapter 5: Analysis of Mom Blog Comments: How Do Readers Respond? ......................128 High-Comment Entries ................................................................................................... 131 High-Comment Entries for Liz Gumbinner’s Mom-101 ......................................... 131 High-Comment Entries from Marsha Takeda-Morrison’s sweatpantsmom ............ 141 High-Comment Entries from Izzy Dean’s IzzyMom ............................................... 151 Summary of Comments on High-Comment Entries ................................................ 155 Overall Commenting Strategies ..................................................................................... 157 Examples of General Affirmation ........................................................................... 160 Examples of Layered Complexity and Couched Disagreement .............................. 170 ! Chapter 6: Are Mom Bloggers Radically Revising Motherhood?.........................................179 Confession ....................................................................................................................... 180 Humor .............................................................................................................................. 182 Does a Meaningful Community Emerge? ..................................................................... 189 Are These Mom Blogs Radical? ..................................................................................... 194 ! ! ! ! ! ! "#! List of Figures Figure 1. Flattened Hierarchical Model of one Blog’s Blogroll Links.......................... 72 Figure 2. [Truncated] Circular Representation of Links from Her Bad Mother......... 74 Figure 3. The Six Blogs with 18 Incoming Links ........................................................... 76 Figure 4. The trajectory of comment numbers for the year 2006 from Liz Gumbinner’s blog, Mom-101. ........................................................................................ 132 Figure 5. The trajectory of comment numbers for the year 2006 from Marsha Takeda-Morrison’s blog, sweatpantsmom.. ................................................................... 142 Figure 6. The trajectory of comment numbers for the year 2006 from Izzy Dean’s blog, IzzyMom................................................................................................................... 152 ! ! ! List of Tables Table
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