Political Creativity and Affective Networking in Australian Feminist Blogs

University of New South Wales Discursive politics online: political creativity and affective networking in Australian feminist blogs

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Frances Shaw 30 August 2012

Discursive politics online: political creativity and affective networking in Australian feminist blogs

Frances Shaw

August 2012

Department of Politics and International Relations School of Social Sciences Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences University of New South Wales Sydney, Australia

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Politics and International Relations

Contents

List of Figures 3

Acknowledgements 4

Introduction 6

Chapter One: ‘These wars are personal’: methods and theory 33

Chapter Two: Conceptualising social media and social movements 64

Chapter Three: Identity and political subjectivity 88

Chapter Four: Affective community 124

Chapter Five: Discursive interventions 165

Chapter Six: Discursive activism in Australian feminist blogs - Sense-making, self-making and community-building 198

Conclusion: The evolution of a discursive movement in blogging networks 225

Appendix A: Letter & Consent Form 236

Appendix B: Sample Interview Guide 239

Appendix C: Network Maps 242

References 251 List of figures

1.1. The initial crawl of interconnected blogs and sites as of December 2008. 37

1.2. December 2008. Australian general and political blogs removed, leaving only feminist-identified sites. 38

1.3. December 2008. Australian feminist-identified blogs only 38

1.4. December 2008. Indicates blogs in the initial network with participants who were interviewed as part of my research. 39

1.5. The network as at June 2009. 40

1.6. November 2009 41

1.7. Australian feminist bloggers November 2009. 41

1.8. Showing new blogs in network, difference from December 2008 to November 2009.

1.9. Showing bloggers interviewed from November 2009 network map. 43

3.1. Anti-feminist Bingo. 109

3.2. Anti-breastfeeding bingo. 118

4.1. A LOLcat meme image satirising ‘concern trolls’ and their tactics. 132

4.2. Dastardly donut. 158

5.1. Timeline of posts – ‘disabled parking schemes’. 173

Acknowledgements

My fondest thanks to all of my friends and family for their support during my doctoral candidacy. I began it in late 2008 after an 18 month working holiday. You all helped me get back on my feet and back to work. Special thanks go to Penelope Robinson for drawing my attention to the project. You have been so influential in my life and you still are. I am very proud and excited for you and Sasha and your Critter!

Thanks also to my living companions (and fellow travellers on the Graduate degree path) Marlaina Read and Michael Gratton. And especially Kristian, my husband, for all your love. Thanks for riding the rollercoaster with me.

My warmest thanks also to both of my supervisors, Sarah Maddison and Kate Crawford, for your generous attention and support – both personal and professional - throughout this project. You were the perfect supervisory team, with your complementary expertise and talents in knocking my work into shape. You always had my back, and I will be forever grateful.

Thanks to my family, my mum Jan, and my sister Anna and brother-in-law Steve, for hundreds of veggie meals on weekday evenings. Ethan and Zoe reminded me of life beyond the PhD, whenever it threatened to overwhelm me. Thanks to Kristian’s family also for their pride and belief in me. Thanks to Dad and his wife Janice and also to my sister Miranda who gave birth to a lovely daughter Bianca last year. Thanks to Kathryn, and love to you always, and your beautiful sons Gus and Darwin. I wish so much that they were still with us.

Thanks to my friends (and genius scholars) Melissa Gregg, Ann Deslandes, Paul Byron, Catherine Flick, Penelope Robinson, and Kathleen Williams for their generous reads and edits in the last frantic weeks before submission. Thanks to Claire Nemorin, Chloe Coulthard, and Alice Davey for your friendship and for being such ace women. Thanks to everyone I met at conferences for their gracious feedback, particularly Megan Boler at Internet Research 10.0, Sonja Vivienne, Jenny Kennedy, Kenzie Burchell, Tracy Ann Kosa, Jun-E Tan, Daiana

Beitler, and Kevin Guidry at the Oxford Internet Institute Summer School, and Brady Robards at TASA 2009 and IR 12.0. Thanks to everyone at Microsoft Research New England for your stimulating conversation and feedback.

Thanks to the other members of the Finding the Australian Women’s Movement team, including Marian Sawer, Sarah Maddison, Kirsty McLaren, Catherine Strong, and Merrindahl Andrews, as well as the discussants in the FAWM workshop in early 2012, who provided me with a sense of completion and of the future.

And last but not least, thanks to the participants, for letting me into their homes and lives, for their conversation, enthusiasm, and generosity, and their amazing politics. You have all changed my life forever, and I thank you.

Introduction

Around the 5th of each month, somewhere in Australia or New Zealand, a feminist blogger posts a curated list of links under the heading the Down Under Feminists Carnival. Blog entries or posts are submitted by other bloggers as the best of Australian and New Zealand feminist writing. Once these links have been curated each month, the Carnivals are linked to and shared by feminist blogging sites, and women bloggers have access to both new and familiar feminist voices in Antipodean blog networks. The next month the cycle of creation, sharing, linking, recommendation, curation, posting and linking happens again. Hosts of the carnival group links thematically, which gives the Carnival the structure of a dialogue about contemporary feminist politics, each blogger addressing the theme in turn in their own ways and in conversation with other bloggers.

The Down Under Feminists Carnival began in June 2008, and since then has been hosted by over 30 different bloggers across 42 months as of December 2011. It was originally started and organised by ‘Lauredhel’ at the Australian blog Hoyden About Town, and is now organised by another Australian feminist writer and blogger, Chally Kacelnik. Carnivals like the Down Under Feminists Carnival allow bloggers to aggregate and juxtapose blog posts in a way that builds a coherent sense of purpose and political discourse out of diverse viewpoints. The DUFC helps to build continuity and belonging within Australian and New Zealand feminist blogging networks. Bloggers are able to submit their own work and the work of other new voices, helping the blogging network to evolve as new people become part of it. The Down Under Feminists Carnival is one lens on the feminist blogging network, and is an instance of the community engaging in self-curation and definition of its own boundaries and concerns as a collective of writers and activists. Through bringing in new voices and ideas, Carnival curators continually negotiate a diverse but collective understanding of feminist discourse. This helps participants develop a sense of boundedness, while also stretching the limits of these boundaries, and develop shared purpose between bloggers.

My argument in this thesis is that bloggers in networks such as this are engaged in acts of political creativity, negotiation, dialogue, and productive disagreement about contemporary feminism. Bloggers create spaces of safety and risk for feminist politics, and the process of creating these spaces is tied up with affective relationships and feminist identity. Bloggers engage both in solidarity work and in conflict and negotiation about what constitutes feminism. Conflict within blogging networks is part of the discursive politics of social movements, and allows for productive changes in priorities and intersectional discourses.

In semi-public networks, minority cultures can develop counter-hegemonic discourses and engage in discursive activism. Bloggers in Australian feminist blogging networks engage in discursive activism by negotiating counter-hegemonic discourses and generating feminist claims. Feminist theory can contribute to an understanding of subjectivity in which there is a space for political agency and capacity to effect discursive change. This thesis brings together theories of radical democracy, feminist understandings of subjectivity, and theories of political affect, in order to provide a theoretical model for an exploration of discursive activism in Australian feminist blogging communities.

The thesis addresses two research needs in this area: the first is discursive activism in online networks, and the second is the need for research into the state of feminist politics in contemporary Australia more generally. Recent commentary on feminist social movement activity has suggested that in contemporary public discourse, feminism is ‘dead’, in the past, in abeyance, has won, or has failed (Walby 2011, 1). As Dux and Simic (2008, 4-5) explain, the assumption is that ‘we have arrived at the last stop on the feminist train’, and ‘real feminist spokespeople have largely disappeared from the media’ (Dux & Simic 2008, 8), replaced by counterfeit feminists who lay blame on feminism for society’s ills. Many commentators of contemporary feminism have noted that women ‘often seem allergic to the very word feminism’ (Caro & Fox 2008, 203). In alternative media, however, feminist politics are thriving (Dux & Simic 2008, 46).

Feminist bloggers are engaged in discursive activism, and in maintaining a space for feminist thinking in Australian culture. Bloggers in this community, far from being allergic to the word feminism, use it explicitly to characterise their engagement with politics. The Down Under

Feminists Carnival is a space for conversations about feminism, at a time when the mainstream Australian media fails to take feminist politics seriously. The research presented here provides a much-needed exploration of positive feminist developments in contemporary Australia.

Australian feminist blogging networks constitute an active feminist movement. These blog networks critique the ideology of mainstream discourses at least partly with the aim of changing them, by changing the kinds of conversations that are possible. Australian feminist bloggers criticise the mainstream press from the perspective of feminism, although intersecting with multiple identities and critical of multiple systems of oppression (Mowles 2008, 36). My analysis in this thesis focuses on discourses generated within Australian feminist blogging networks that respond to events in Australian popular media. Feminist bloggers disrupt mainstream discourses that are repeatedly used, and participants develop alternative discourses within their own spaces. They use the word ‘commitment’ to describe this work, but also describe it in terms of the depression and frustration that causes them to speak out against these discourses.

Australian feminist blogs engage with politics of disability, race, transgender rights and discrimination, queer politics, and many other issues relating (in particular) to difference and exclusion. In this way these blogs can be understood as discursive activism. Australian feminist bloggers, while not always acting with purely political intent, act politically through the discursive interventions that they make in response to discursive crisis, that is, the disjuncture between discourses in feminist blogs and circulating political and social discourses in popular media.

Research Questions

The three central research questions at the beginning of this study were:

x What role do feminist blogging networks play in the development and continuity of Australian feminism? x How do blog networks contribute to social movement continuity, identity- building, and discursive politics?

x What are the motivating and constraining factors for individuals who participate in Australian feminist blogging networks?

My research into Australian feminist uses of the internet was a qualitative study. This was most appropriate for this research because I wanted to understand the motivations and affective relations of the people involved in the community and develop a theory of online political community inductively from my findings. I wanted to know what made them want to blog. Once they started blogging, why did they continue? How did their blogging practices change as a result of their changing investments in the community and did the development of a collective identity impact on that? What is the relationship between this identity and the development of a social movement grounded in 'digital dissent' (Boler 2008)?

The above research questions were developed from literature on contemporary feminism, particularly works identifying a need for further research into young women’s activism and social movement activity, and research into how the internet is being used for feminist activism in Australia. Of particular relevance was the literature surrounding submerged networks, collective identity, and abeyance structures (Maddison 2004; Melucci 1996; Taylor 1989). While I still aim to answer these questions, a number of other questions and concerns suggested by findings have arisen over the course of my research. How can social movement theory contribute to our understandings of online political communities, as they continue to impact upon national political debates in unexpected ways? What role do online political networks play in the maintenance of social movements and the development of social movement frames and discourses, and how can the existence of these communities contribute to our understandings of contemporary social movements generally? And finally what is at play in discursive activism and how can we conceive of these processes and their relationship to social change?

The Australian feminist blogging network is composed of women writing on feminism and social prejudice against women and other intersecting identities, as well as providing a supportive community sharing personal stories and support for one another in the face of backlash against feminist ideas. Bloggers also lobby and share information about political issues that are relevant to women. The network is connected to the United States and

international feminist blog network and also the progressive political blogging network in Australia and globally, however network analysis shows (in Chapter One) that a significant proportion of linkages are internal, and that the strength of these connections have increased over time. Blogs also link to Australian and international media content, and comment critically on both popular culture (TV shows, advertisements) and on news reports and opinion pieces.

Social movement studies into online movements have by and large focused on online activism’s ability or inability to mimic the functions of traditional public protest (Earl et al 2010). I focus instead on feminist communities of discourse and practices to build and maintain activist discourse and commitment, as this thesis describes. Feminist online communities are engaged in these practices at a time when feminism is being described as ‘dead’ in the media, levels of visible, public protest are down, and ambivalence to feminist ideals is widely touted among young women (Dux & Simic 2008).

I found that through participation in online communities, people are able to come into contact with non-mainstream political ideas, to pursue political interests that may be under- or unrepresented in majority publics, and to develop links with others who are thinking and writing on similar themes. This has lead to the development of new communities of discourse within and between generations of Australian feminists. As Rupp and Taylor (2005, xiii) urge, ‘contemporary feminists are finding innovative ways to further the goals of the movement’. This thesis provides a critical framework to recognise these political practices.

Blogging as a field of study

Feminist bloggers have adapted to blogging platforms to make use of a range of both personal diary-like and aggregative forms of blogging, and to build social networks. I review the literature on the blog as a media form, and then draw out the ways that feminist bloggers have made use of these features. Simply put, blogs are ‘frequently updated, reverse-chronological entries on a single Web page’ (Blood 2004, 53). The word ‘blog’ was coined originally by Jorn Barger in the form ‘Weblog’ to describe a web page that chronicles all the web sites that a Weblogger finds interesting (Blood 2004, 54). Weblogs, in those early

days, were distinct from the online journals and personal homepages that preceded them (Blood 2004, 54; Rettberg 2008). Weblog editors would use blogs to bring together links to articles or other items of interest on the web, sometimes using other links and discussion to contextualise an article ‘by juxtaposing it with an article on a related subject’ (Blood 2000, 3). In this way, blogs are a form of ‘networked expression’ (Coleman 2005, 274).

The scholarly literature on blogs covers blogs as genre or as a form of rhetoric, blogs as politically significant phenomena and as sites of activism, and blogs as sites for community formation and social networking (Rettberg 2008; Gurak et al 2004). I draw particularly on recent work that explores discourse and rhetoric in blogs (Giltrow & Stein 2009; Myers 2010), and I also explore the historical development of blogs in relation to other internet genres and in relation to the introduction of particular websites and blogging platforms (Blood 2004; Rettberg 2008).

Feminists have used internet technologies to hold debates, organise, and build solidarity long before blogs became popular. Websites, mailing lists, newsgroups, and ‘riot grrrl’ e- zines are some examples of the way the internet has been used by feminists from the early days of the internet (Kellner 1999, 108). Australian feminism was no exception to this, with the GeekGirl e-zine active in the late 1990s providing access to feminist thinking and debate for young women in Australia (Driscoll 1999; Harris 2003). Thinking and research around cyberfeminism was particularly active during the late 1990s and early 2000s as feminist scholars became hopeful about the potential of the web for creating safe spaces for women and feminist thought. Some of the early utopian expectations in this regard have faded over the years, as it became clear that even (or perhaps especially) online, women had to fight to have a voice (Herring et al 2004, 12).

Also in the 1990s, activists were excited about the potential of the internet for political protest. The Zapatistas’ use of the internet to broadcast their activist messages to a global audience gathered particular attention from internet researchers (Kahn & Kellner 2004, 87). By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Indymedia platform was being used by a multitude of activist groups, with particular focus on the uses of these platforms for the anti-globalisation

and anti-Iraq war movements. Kahn and Kellner (2004, 90-94) argue that in the early 2000s the development of blogs and wikis led to an intensification of oppositional politics online.

Blogs have their ancestry in a variety of different genres including online diaries, personal webpages and newsgroups, and they have generic elements in common with other social networking sites such as Livejournal.com, Facebook, and Twitter, including profile pages and a fixed link to a particular personal identity or identities. For example, one early form of blogging might include the practice of building personal homepages but having these pages continually under construction, containing pages on which to collect links and chronological pages that add more content over time on a particular theme (Rettberg 2008, 23-24).

Blogs in their current form take previous genres of chronological sites and make them social, so that ‘blogs employ old and new media towards new effects of media’ (Cohen 2006, 162). Blood (2000) describes how, in her words, a community sprang up around early hand-coded blogs in the late 1990s. Participants were able to ‘amplify’ different voices through linking practices (Blood 2004, 54). However, when Blogger.com appeared in 1999, blogs began to take on a diary-like form as a result of new users coming in who did not maintain this practice of linking (Blood 2004, 54). This also led to the successful proliferation of blogs due to the ease with which they could be created and maintained (Kahn & Kellner 2004, 91). Linking returned to some degree with the development of different blogging software platforms that re-enabled it, and the introduction of commenting capabilities changed blogging cultures once again. In early 2000 permanent links enabled stronger community- building by encouraging interlinkage between individual blog entries (Blood 2004, 54). Blood (2004, 55) argues that now ‘Weblogs are unthinkable without comments and the community of readers that comments make visible’.

Today, a multitude of networks cover a multitude of different areas of interest and affiliation, across a multitude of platforms. These include political groups. Many studies have been done on blogging networks including hate groups (Chau & Xu 2007), technical and educational support communities (Nardi et al. 2004), and others (e.g. Doostdar 2004; Jackson et al 2007; Miller & Pole 2010). The highly social and discursively active core of extremely popular blogs actually makes up a small percentage of blogs, but the less engaged

periphery (including occasional bloggers, bloggers with smaller readerships, and readers of blogs who do not have blogs of their own – whether they comment on other blogs or not) is equally important and makes up the blogging network, forming ‘its own unique mediascape’ (Lampa 2004, 3).

In interview for this thesis, bloggers described having had their own web sites, being active in newsgroups and/or Livejournal.com prior to or concurrently with writing in blogs, and keeping an active Twitter or Tumblr account alongside their blogs. I will include some discussion of these architectures and genres as well as blogging networks as they are conventionally understood, but will limit myself to those sites and forms that my research subjects have described as being influential or important to their development as internet users. In discussing other tools of communication besides their blogs, all but one blogger interviewed in this study said that they used Twitter to maintain relationships with other bloggers. I will explore this use of Twitter and other ‘backchannels’ further in Chapter Four. Other internet researchers have had a tendency to separate research on blogs and Twitter, but many researchers incidentally mentioned how people use Twitter to follow their favourite bloggers, in some cases using Twitter instead of or like an RSS feed1 (Hannon et al 2010). Unsurprisingly, a Pew Internet & American Life study found that blogging increased the likelihood of an individual using Twitter (Lenhart & Fox 2009, 5).

Blogs and other online media serve quite different purposes to, for example, newspapers and news television. Bruns (2006, 16) argues that news reporting on blogs is ‘a far more discursive form of news reporting than can usually be found elsewhere’. They are also much more likely to be social places, as much to do with mutual support and friendship as with pedagogy and information. They contain much more in the way of ‘suggestions, reviews, outcries, rants’ and other expressions of opinion (Myers 2010, 10). Individuals are able to ‘construct their social world through links and attention’ (boyd 2009a). So, in addition to being a genre of website based on chronological text entries, blogs are also social, and are constitutive of a kind of social world (Myers 2010, 21).

1 An RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed provides updates for subscribers about new posts or changes to content on blogs and other websites.

The networks that form between blogs are dense and highly informal (Lovink 2008, 38; Rettberg 2008, 57), but also resilient, due to the practice of providing lists of links or blogrolls on each blog. It is the day-to-day interlinking and exchange between bloggers that make blog networks a medium for the political. Nearly all bloggers link to other bloggers, even if the network of interlinked blogs is small (Myers 2010, 30; Rettberg 2008, 63). Lin et al (2006) have shown how blogging communities can be located and mapped by demonstrating mutual awareness through comments, trackbacks, and links. Instead of the traditional top down media model, individuals can become nodes in a network in which the audience becomes capable of broadcasting back. They thus become active agents in discourse, or ‘connected and networked interlocutors’, interacting with one another and the mainstream media to negotiate positions (Hartley 2009, 95) and to make sense of the world (Packwood 2004, 4). Blogs have a ‘culture of desired affiliation’ and are a ‘deeply social commitment’ (Lovink 2008, 2; 38).

The creation of social ties is essential to building deliberative capacity, as well as ‘feelings of trust, social connectedness, and cooperation’ (Harrison & Stephen 1999, 229). However, in many regards this social connectedness is an end in itself, even if it has political effects. Although much of the literature focuses on blogs as popular media texts, the majority of blogs are written by ordinary people for small audiences, often limited to friends and family (Nardi et al 2006, 41). In their examination of the genre of blogging, Miller and Shepherd (2004, 10) argue that although the content is outward-looking:

Because the personal form of the blog is what seems to both motivate and satisfy the readers and writers of blogs and thus to have particular evolutionary survival value, we suspect that the generic exigence that motivates bloggers is related less to the need for information than to the self and the relations between selves.

Blogs add another layer of interpretation to traditional political discourse, and are self referential in that they link to earlier posts as well as posts by others (Vatrapu et al. 2008, 12). The layer of interpretation that Australian feminist bloggers add to Australian (and international) political discourse is informed by feminist principles, and in this way they

challenge and disrupt mainstream public discourse that is sexist or antifeminist. The engagement of blogs with one another, as well as the engagement of blogs with the mainstream press, leads to changes in both Australian feminist discourse and in the way that network participants relate to and consume media. In this way they ‘expand discursive space’, ‘aid in the definition of identity’, and finally ‘enable new political ways of being’ (Fraser 1990, 67; Palczewski 2001, 165; Warner 2002, 57). As Mowles (2008) argues in the case of Feministing,2 blogs can reshape conventional political discourse.

The internet has become the site of major political discourse, and of the development of political cultures, and it is the national and local level at which this occurs that makes it so interesting for researchers of social movements (Everard 2000; Goggin 2004, 5). Internet communities have effects on the development of national political discourses (Mitra 1999). Lovink (2008, 205) argues that although the realm of decision-making power still largely exists autonomously in ‘face-to-face’ settings, the decentralised networks of online communities are developing their own forms of power in the meantime; ‘The Internet can be secondary while becoming powerful at the same time’ (Lovink 2008, 203). Online culture ‘makes possible a reconfiguring of politics [and] a refocusing of politics on everyday life’ (Kahn and Kellner 2003, 14). The increasing capacity of the ‘social network marketplace’ online has the potential to increase the productive and progressive capacities of social movement networks, by broadening spaces for discourse (Hartley 2009, 47-49).

Blogs and politics

What is the relationship of the internet to politics? How can researchers move from blogs as social networks to ‘actual social transformation’ (Langman 2005, 67)? The internet can only affect the world through the ways that it is appropriated, and ‘it is appropriated in so many different ways that nobody has enough information to add them up’ (Agre 2002, 316). Studies of blogs have mainly found that blogs either allowed bloggers to echo and amplify issues already in the public sphere, or to encourage others to participate directly in politics. Agre (2002, 317) writes that ‘[t]he Internet changes nothing on its own, but can amplify

2 A United States feminist blog, available at: http://feministing.com/

existing forces, and those amplified forces might change something’. McKenna and Pole (2008, 97-98) found that the political uses of blogs varied depending on ideology and traffic levels, varying from an ‘echo chamber’ or amplification role, drawing attention to particular articles and blog posts, detecting errors and biases in the media, and less commonly calling people to political action. According to the bloggers surveyed in that study, nearly two thirds reported ‘encouraging their readers to vote or to contact an elected official’, suggesting that bloggers at least partially ‘see their roles as motivators or advocates of political participation’ (McKenna & Pole 2008, 102-103).

But another question might be to ask whether bloggers always wish to speak to power, in the sense of directly affecting political institutions. Bloggers show a tendency to associate with others who share their opinions, and to seek out information that reaffirms their existing beliefs (Lawrence et al 2010, 142-143; MacDougall 2005, 579). Debates tend to occur within relatively homogeneous blogging networks (Lovink 2008, 21). These studies acknowledge that the purpose of debate on blogs is not only instrumental but also a social activity. It is socially awkward and unpleasant to debate with people who do not share core values and beliefs, so people seek out like-minded individuals and groups (Lawrence et al 2010, 144).

However, I also argue that bloggers gather in like-minded groups for reasons of discursive politics, in order to generate political claims and respond to hostile discourses. This is not a purely insider/outsider relation – disagreement also occurs within blogging networks. As Lovink (2008, 241-242) argues:

Network users do not see their circle of peers as a closed sect. Users are not like lifelong political party members. Quite the opposite. Ties are loose, up to the point of breaking up. To understand networks, we have to study slackness and the pleasure of resignation. The default user is the lurker. Engagement is the state of exception and, as in political philosophy, an interesting one indeed. [...] Networks long for peaks in traffic and rhetoric yet are fully geared to survive long, dull periods of radio silence and never-ending streams of banality. Networks thrive on diversity and conflict (the ‘notworking’ aspect), not on unity, and this is what community theorists have been unable to reflect upon. For community advocates,

disagreement equals a disruption of the constructive flow of dialogue. It takes effort to reflect on distrust as a productive principle.

Networks are thus flexible and responsive to conflict and disagreement, in some cases to the point of breaking up, but more often – if there is a commitment to maintain community, as feminist bloggers described in my study – to the point of shifting alliances and levels of participation. Bloggers withdraw from particular conversations only to return to other conversations once the non-productive aspects of conflict have passed. These conflicts take their toll on the community, but while there remains a sense of commitment, affective ties and supportive networks with other bloggers, most people are motivated to remain for as long as disagreement is productive.

While scholarship on blogs describes a diverse variety of blogging practices, scholarship on the political significance of blogs tends to focus on A-list political blogs rather than blogs as political discursive communities or small ‘submerged networks’ (Melucci 1989, 345). For example in the work of Coleman (2005), Coleman and Wright (2008), and Farrell and Drezner (2008), the focus is on the capacity for A-list blogs to effect political change through government-type channels due to their influence among ‘journalists and other political elites’ (Farrell & Drezner 2008, 15). What is left out here is how the political is negotiated at the level of discourse, changing the conversation and creating the spaces in which new conversations can take place. These negotiations happen not in A-list blogs with direct influence on institutional politics, but through discursive change and negotiation in counter- hegemonic communities, such as the network that is the focus of this thesis.

The linking practices of early Weblogs were a political practice with which bloggers were able to reveal media bias through ‘the selection and juxtaposition of links’ (Blood 2004, 55). Linking and juxtaposition practices are still common in feminist blogs, often aimed at media bias and media problems. But these links are also juxtaposed with personal diary-style blogging and the implicit or explicit politicisation of these forms. Feminist bloggers have adapted to blogging platforms (though they are not unique in this) in ways that use the affective and discursive strengths of both diary-like and aggregative forms of blogging.

Blogging communities and intimacy

Web diaries and blogs of a certain genre are a form of ‘public privacy’ (Kitzmann 2002, 86), in which users are able to control and sculpt their own publicity in a place that is in some way safe, either because of a small readership, anonymity or restricted access (Lange 2008, 369). Miller and Shepherd (2004, 1) point out that frequently this sensation of safety and privacy can be illusory, but that nonetheless the way that people are negotiating such boundaries within blogging networks is fascinating and contradictory. The paradoxical nature of this publicity is also explored by Bell (2007, 96), who argues that young girls’ uses of the blogging format ‘problematise notions of private and public’, and Ben Ze’ev (2003) who explores the concept of detached attachment, in which internet users are able to be extremely intimate with strangers in ways that they cannot be with those with whom they have attachments in the everyday. Serfaty (2004, 13) explains:

The screen seemingly offers a protection against the gaze of others, enabling each diary writer to disclose intimate thoughts and deeds, thus attempting to achieve transparency and breaking the taboo of opacity regulating social relationships.

I would argue that although this is still the case, the potential for online intimacy has decreased, and there is less (perceived or real) privacy in public space online than there once was due to its present-day ubiquity. For example, full names are used as standard on social networking sites such as Facebook and Google+ and accounts are often linked between different sites. Recent ‘real name policies’ – such as the policy of Google+ to disallow pseudonyms - have attempted to institutionalise the movement towards the non- anonymous internet (boyd 2011; Ruch & Collins 2011). In addition many people use blogs to keep in touch with family and friends rather than only to communicate with strangers, which leads to intimacy in a different sense but not necessarily in the sense meant by Serfaty (2004) and Lange (2008) above (Stefanone & Jang 2008). Bloggers must negotiate different levels of privacy and publicity whilst writing in blogs (Ben Ze’ev 2003).

In networks where people develop attachments of intimacy and identification, there is a degree of affective investment that leads to ‘risk’ as well as ‘safety’. Australian feminist

bloggers discuss the development of ‘safe spaces’ for feminist discourse, at the same time that they talk about the risk and restraints of intimacy and the political in these very same spaces. The development of intimacy brings with it a sense of risk, in terms of exposure to harassment and trolling particularly, but also in terms of being careful about speaking or writing without thinking because of the way that acceptable discourse is defined within the community. This finding will be discussed further in Chapter Four.

The internet has resulted in a renegotiation of notions of privacy and publicity that vary across genres and communities. Kitzmann (2002, 95) shows how these forms of connected privacy allow for people to create ‘identity networks’ through which participants can discursively negotiate their worldviews and politics with others to whom they are presenting themselves. Such discursive negotiation is crucial to the formation of networks online (Kolko 2001, 1). However, it also leads to the sense of risk described above, in which people navigate their sense of publicity and privacy in those terms (boyd & Hargittai 2010). Individual participants must negotiate the privacy of their personal information and impression management within and between their various network memberships (boyd 2008). As a result there is a lot more to the genre of the so-called online diary than the uploading of a paper diary into an online form – the audience is anticipated and, if not always addressed, then certainly always implicated (Kitzmann 2002).

Women and Blogs

In blogging research, there has been a privileging of the male authoritative-voiced political journalist blogger over the personal-voiced young female online journal-keeper (Bell 2007, 97). A bias against personal writing has often led to the exclusion of women bloggers from lists of blogs that are considered political, because of the inclusion of a ‘domestic or personal sphere of reference’ in their blog content (Bell 2007; Gregg 2006, 151). Gregg (2006, 158) and Goggin and Noonan (2006, 166) argue that the dichotomy between political blogs and a- political online journals needs to be revised to ensure that political uses of personal journaling are not overlooked. There has been an overemphasis on A-list blogs that leads to the reification in blogging networks of existing hierarchies of power and privilege (Bell 2007,

108; Russell 2009, 8). Bahnisch (2006), who runs one of Australia’s mainstream progressive political blogs Larvatus Prodeo3 acknowledges that:

In the masculine tone of many political blogs, and the dominance of male commenters and bloggers, blogs are very much embedded in and part of their environing society. (Bahnisch 2006, 145).

Harp and Tremayne’s (2006, 247) study on gender inequity in blogs showed that despite the high numbers of women bloggers, only 10 per cent of top or A-list bloggers were women. The perception among bloggers commenting on discussion forums about ‘where are the women?’ was that:

[T]here simply are not as many women as men blogging about politics, with three variations on this theme: Women are not as interested in politics as men; women do not like the nature of political and opinion writing; and women, because of their social realities, don’t have time for blogging. (Harp & Tremayne 2006, 254).

This gender inequity becomes apparent in the ‘Where are the women?’ debates that occur regularly within blogging networks, started by ‘widely-read male bloggers who do not encounter women’s weblogs in their daily reading’ (Ratliff 2006, 1). Harp and Tremayne (2006, 255-256) also found the belief that blogs by women about politics were not as high quality, and that blogs by women were linked to and sought out less by readers. Herring et al (2004, 3) showed that while the number of blogs by men and by women are roughly equal, the focus on ‘filter blogs’ - blogs that aggregate interesting news links - in the discursive construction of weblogs have left women and young people out of the picture. This also relates to earlier work showing the way that gender inequalities play out in newsgroups and online forums, where women are subject to male resistance to their participation, or experience high levels of trolling4 (Herring et al 2002).

3 Available at: http://larvatusprodeo.net/

4 Trolling: the act of posting inflammatory, abusive, or disruptive comments or posts on the internet in order to provoke response, disrupt discussions, or distract others.

Nonetheless, over the period that I have been researching this community in the Australian context, an increasing amount of research has been produced on the international feminist blogosphere, particularly US-based blogs and blogging networks. For example, there has been work on ‘mommy blogs’ as sites for feminist politics (Friedman 2010), while Mowles’ (2008) research on the American feminist blog Feministing is a precedent for my work on feminist blogs. Feministing is one of the internet’s most popular US feminist blogs (Mowles 2008, 33). Mowles links the growth of feminist blogs and the political blogosphere more generally to alienation and dissatisfaction with the mainstream (Mowles 2008, 34). She explains that:

Even as negative gendered stereotypes have so far prevented many women’s blogs from gaining popular and critical attention, Feministing belongs within a burgeoning feminist blogging movement which employs particular third-wave strategies to engage reader’s politically. (Mowles 2008, 35)

The ‘third-wave’ political strategies that Mowles identifies include pop culture and gender analysis, and she analyses the blog in terms of ‘quiet’ activism or ‘echo chamber’ politics (Mowles 2008, 35-43). In her research she focuses on the themes of community, intersectionality as a feature of third-wave feminism, accessibility, and strategies. She acknowledges that ‘the potential activist power of online activism, particularly through blogs, remains an elusive and difficult question’ (Mowles 2008, 43). She concludes that politics is increasingly mediated, and blogs have the potential to ‘[reshape] our conventional political discourse through their interactive nature’ (Mowles 2008, 47). Similarly, Hardin (2011, 48) in her work on sports feminism in blogging argues that blogging ‘can be a concrete practice of self-production/transformation’. She explored how blogging was changing the lives of men and women through conversations about sports and gender (Hardin 2011, 49-55).

The term has also crossed over into everyday vernacular to refer to the act of provoking or harassing others in all contexts.

The work on feminist blogging thus far touches on questions of what Mowles (2008) calls ‘quiet activism’ and allows for the possibility that blogging changes individual lives. But there is little work engaging with social movement studies and whether or not blogging constitutes a social movement. No other work addresses the question of what networks of feminist bloggers mean in the domestic political context, as a force for social change and for the continuation of feminist goals and discourse.

Defining the network

The blogging network that I have researched is has built from a wide range of informal loose affiliations. Blogrolls are lists of links maintained by bloggers often in the sidebar of the website, so that readers can find other blogs with related interests and networks. By linking to one another and discussing one another’s writing, and including each other’s websites in their blogrolls, they create ‘networks of attention’ (Lovink 2008). The websites are sometimes individually written, and sometimes collectively run, and cover a range of topics varying from political analysis and feminist claims-making, to posts about their life, popular culture interests, family, cooking tips, and cats. Regardless of the topics of discussion, their conversations are informed by a progressive and feminist perspective. The definition of a feminist perspective is broadly interpreted and shifts from blog to blog.

Australian feminist bloggers connect with the international feminist blogging network and various other progressive and minority blogging communities all over the world (particularly New Zealand and the United States). I have chosen this blogging network for the study of discursive feminist activism in Australia because it is engaging in feminist activism within different contexts and using different platforms and strategies for engagement with and criticism of mainstream public debate.

I use the terms blogging communities and blogging networks over words like blogosphere. This is because the term ‘communities’ most accurately reflects how bloggers talked about their experiences, and the word network describes the un-bounded, shifting structure of the relationships between blogs. When interviewees used the word blogosphere, it was more often in the context of global feminist and political blogs. What happens within and between

Australian feminist blogs was described in more intimate terms, as a 'community'. I also use the term community in the concept of the ‘discursive community’, that is a community that is defined by the discourses shared and recognised among participants.

The word community, used on its own in reference to networked publics, is in many ways inaccurate, because networks extend and overlap beyond a simple bounded understanding of a singular community. I use community or communities on the understanding that this is not a bounded, enclosed space for sociality, but rather a networked one. Similarly, I share Dean's (2010) concern with an understanding of blogging networks as a 'sphere', contained and knowable from all angles. In fact blogging networks are fragmented and look different from different perspectives – each blogger will have their own strong or weak links with other blogs, and the ego network of each blogger will change significantly.

The Down Under Feminist Carnival began only a few months before my research, making it an ideal case study. The carnival is posted once a month, and as noted earlier is now in its 43rd edition as of December 2011. Each month a different volunteer feminist blogger puts together and hosts the carnival. Over the course of my study this carnival became the starting point and the defining decentred centre for my research and my choice of subjects and texts for analysis.

Networks of Australian feminist blogs form part of global feminist blogging networks. In particular, Australian bloggers have links to blogs in the United States, linking frequently and being linked to by major American feminist blogs, as well as guest blogging and regular blogging on international feminist group blogs such as Feministe. 5 Chally Kacelnik, who has written for several international group blogs including Feministe and FWD: Feminists with Disabilities for a Way Forward6, believes that the Australian and international communities are both distinct and connected. She explains that ‘there’s a distinctive Australian feminist community, as solidified quite a bit by the Down Under Feminists Carnival’ but also that ‘we

5 Available at: http://www.feministe.us/blog/

6 Available at: http://disabledfeminists.com/

interact quite a bit with the American side of things, and I think we’re getting increasingly integrated into their community even as we take on their words and link to them a fair bit’. She feels that ‘there’s a fair bit of overlap between Australian and American blogs, but I think we do have a distinctive grouping’ (Chally Kacelnik, in interview, 2009). ‘Spilt Milk’7 feels similarly:

I think it’s kind of like intersecting, like a big Venn diagram, you know? Because I feel like there’s an Australian community, with the Down Under Feminist Carnival and things like that, but then there’s a lot of back and forth between them. (‘Spilt Milk’, in interview, 2010)

However, ties are strong between Australian blogs, forming a network of Australian, or perhaps Antipodean, strengthened by activity such as the Down Under Feminists Carnival. 8 Even the most popular Australian feminist blogs have a much smaller readership than the bigger blogs in the United States.

Networks that develop online are dynamic and mutable spaces. In the period of time that I researched Australian feminist online communities, the network changed in shape, size, focus and participation type. Since I began to research the network, new people have begun to blog and to receive exposure and inclusion in the community. Others, such as Hell on Hairy Legs9 have stopped blogging or reduced the frequency of their posts significantly. Several other bloggers in my core network, including one interviewee, have now made their blogs private. The platforms and manner in which people in the community have related to one another has also changed, with the use of backchannels such as Twitter and Tumblr becoming a commonplace locale for more informal socialising and for comparing notes in the midst of blog ‘wars’. Offline meetups ebb and flow. New links have developed with international blogging networks, one notable example being the FWD: Feminists with

7 Note the choice and use of names for my interview participants in this thesis will be discussed in Chapter One.

8 Available at: http://downunderfeministscarnival.wordpress.com/

9 Available at: http://hellonhairylegs.wordpress.com/

Disability for a Way Forward10 blog, an international group blog composed of feminists blogging on disability issues, including several Australian participants but also many people from the USA and other international locations.

The structures and platforms that are mobilised and utilised by community members have consequences for the way that the community has emerged and evolved, its uses for community members, and its political outcomes. I have excluded from the core network of research for this thesis blogs on platforms that have a tendency to form strong internal communities. Specifically, I have excluded the long-lived journaling site LiveJournal.com (launched in 1999) and its open source alternative Dreamwidth, and the newer Tumblr.com (launched in 2007 and taking off in popularity since 2010). Both have a number of Australian feminist writers using the services and building links within them, including building international networks. Livejournal blogs tend to be a mix of publicly available content and filtered, 'friends-only' content, and for this reason were excluded unless linked to in the Down Under Feminist Carnival11 or directly discussed in interview. Tumblr tends to be a space of rapid, ephemeral engagement, with a convention of increased anonymity, and difficult to follow conversations. I made the decision to exclude these both out of respect for the conventions of privacy of these spaces, and due to the logistical problems involved in studying these networks. Having said that, I made a point of discussing these aspects of community interaction with my interviewees.

There are several overlapping communities involved in these blogging networks and feminism is not always the only relevant category for all Australian blogs that I have included. For example, the popular blog Hoyden About Town12, while explicitly holding feminist values, is also host to various other overlapping internet communities such as science and scepticism, comedy, science fiction fandom, disability activism, and mainstream political debate. Similarly, there are feminist bloggers in Australia who form slightly different

10 Available at: http://disabledfeminists.com/

11 Available at: http://disabledfeminists.com/

12 Available at: http://hoydenabouttown.com/

sub-communities that have a different focus and different readership, for example radical feminist bloggers, who tend to have a different readership and a different set of links. Although some of the bloggers in my study identify as radical feminists and are located within that network, the network I have mapped through participation and inclusion in the Down Under Feminists’ Carnival, as well as through network analysis, looks different.

Therefore, the network is an Australian feminist blogging community rather than the Australian feminist blogging community. In fact there are several feminist blogging communities in Australia, some more popular and populated than others. These communities of bloggers prioritise some feminisms over other feminisms. Many bloggers also have links and a historical relationship to political blogs with focuses other than feminism, such as Australian progressive political blogs. In particular several Australian feminist bloggers also post at the group blog Larvatus Prodeo13. When I asked the people I interviewed, including those who do post at that blog, how they felt about the relationship between Australian feminist communities and these other Australian political blogs, some expressed an explicit reluctance to read those blogs, or explained that they held no interest or relevance for them personally:

I find they tend to focus on the concerns of white straight middle class men, and that’s not really the perspective I’m inclined to engage with any more than I have to already just going through the world, really. I mean I do read a few men who fit that criteria but I’m really wanting to centre voices of people I don’t hear, I’m trying to seek those voices out. I find it a bit irritating being in a space that is a progressive space that is so... that so echoes what I see in the world around me. (Chally Kacelnik, in interview, 2009)

For many in the network, an interest in blogging came out of their involvement in broader Australian political blogging networks, and they maintain links to those networks. However, these bloggers acknowledged tensions between the mainstream progressive and feminist progressive sectors of the Australian blogging network, and discussed a movement away from, or selectivity of engagement with, those blogs and bloggers. These connections

13 Available at: http://larvatusprodeo.net/

remain visible on the network maps and network analysis that I have performed on the community, although the connections have weakened over time (see network maps in Chapter One). In addition sub-communities within the network have developed, and over time the links between Australian feminist blogs and international - particularly North American – blogs have strengthened. These changes and developments can be seen in the network analysis in Chapter One.

Bloggers engage in political negotiation and renegotiation within the community, and intersectional debates are active in feminist blogging networks. For example, the intersecting debates of disability, fat acceptance, and feminist parenting were some of the most prominent topics for discussion during the research period. These sub-communities build up through the identification and negotiation of particular claims within feminist networks. Throughout the thesis I explore these sub-communities as spaces for political negotiation for online feminists.

Discursive activism and the political online

I understand feminist blogging as an example of discursive activism. Discursive activism can be defined as political speech that works at the level of language to change political cultures. I draw on agonistic democracy and new social movement theory to argue this point. Feminist bloggers act politically to reproduce, challenge, and develop counter-hegemonic claims and discourses. Such an understanding of the political involves ‘seeing politics as a constant process of action in which people act and dominating discourses are (re)produced and challenged’ (Ronnblom 2009, 107). In conceptualising discursive activism in online spaces, I use a political ontology that takes into account features of online discourses such as conflict, processes of exclusion, and power relations.

Rancière (2010, 37) describes politics as ‘the instituting of a dispute over the distribution of the sensible’ and dissensus is the ‘demonstration [...] of a gap in the sensible’. ‘The sensible’ in this case refers to what is intelligible in discourse. The distribution of the sensible refers to the way that discourse can be restructured in such a way that things can be understood differently, and that different things are intelligible in mainstream discourse. Politics, then, is

the project of making different claims and understandings of the world possible as a ground for action. The distribution of the sensible is re-negotiated through discursive activism.

Discursive activism redefines what it is possible not only to say, but to be heard to say, in public. Bloggers are seeking a ‘transformation of the terms of reading’ (Tomlinson 2010, 1- 30). The distribution of the sensible means the boundaries of discourse that define what is heard and what is not heard, what is visible or invisible, who is counted and who is not counted. Rancière’s (2010, 152) ‘[re]distribution’ and Tomlinson’s (2010, 1-30) ‘transformation’ are related in that they refer to the creation of new horizons of possibility of what is heard in discourse. Rancière’s idea of the distribution of the sensible is very closely linked to how I am framing discursive activism in this thesis.

As an example, it is discursively impossible in most public discourse to be heard saying ‘I am overweight and healthy’ in a way that is understood. This is the concern for the women and men in the Health At Every Size (HAES) movement, who act discursively to make it possible for them to be heard, to re-distribute ‘the sensible’ in such a way that this statement ‘makes sense’ enough to be heard. This is not simply a matter of speaking truth to power, but involves much more complex rhetorical strategies, because at the moment this truth is ‘in excess of our codes’ (Lather 2007, 107):

The goal is to shape our practice to a future that must remain to come, in excess of our codes but, still, always already: forces already active in the present. Perhaps a transvaluation of praxis means to find ways to participate in the struggle of these forces as we move towards a future that is unforeseeable from the perspective of what is given or even conceivable within our present conceptual frameworks. [emphasis mine]

Social movement action has a part to play in processes of meaning-making and sense- making that are political in themselves. Melucci's (1996) 'challenging codes' refers to this practice by social movements. As Melucci (1995, 13) explains it ‘Movements, characteristically, must devote a considerable share of their resources to the task of managing the complexity and differentiation that constitutes them’. However, this labour goes beyond the role of self-management within movements, and spreads out to the

engagement of movements with media and mainstream discourse, and the micro-politics of challenging the problematic beliefs of others. In terms of discursive politics, it is not the individual blog post that is politically significant, but the network of interlinked blog posts on a shared topic (Bruns 2006, 12). These blog networks function to critique the ideology of mainstream discourses in order to change them, that is they have an instrumental goal (or more than one instrumental goal). In this way, blogging is a political act (as opposed to being simply about the political) that has an instrumental political motivation; that of social change (Mowles 2008, 45).

The role of emotion and affect were prominent in my research findings. In my thesis I have considered affective dimensions of political communication such as passion, care, fear, shyness, anxiety, kindness, anger, and hatred. This is because I have held women's experiences of blogging as crucial to any understanding of its political importance. hooks’ (2006 [1994], 289-298) work on love and community has been influential in this part of my research. I have assumed that affective investment in political community and networks of attention and investment that are developed in the blogging community are as important politically as they are personally.

I draw on academic work on the role of emotions in politics (e.g. Ahmed 2004, Massumi 2002), drawing predominantly from cultural theory and social movement theory (Goodwin et al 2001; Jasper 1997; Polletta 2006). Deborah Gould, who crosses both fields, argues that social movements can help ‘‘make sense’ of inchoate affective states and authorize selected feelings and actions while downplaying and even invalidating others’ (Gould 2010, 33). This view of affect and its relation to social movements is closely linked to the role of discursive activism in the authorisation and validation of such feelings, in the ‘redistribution of the sensible’ (Rancière 2010, 152) in terms of both what is understood and what is felt or allowed to be felt.

Political agency is enacted in discourse, and activists try to intervene in discourse through the creation of counter-discourses. Norval (2007, 11) argues that crucial to understanding politics in this way is ‘the role of practices, passions and the visceral dimensions of identification in their formation and maintenance of democratic forms of subjectivity; and

the characterization of the relations between democratic citizens’. Agonistic democracy as a political ontology provides an understanding of political discourse, agency, and power that is compatible with my research findings. In agonistic democracy, power relations are politically constitutive, and counterhegemonic discursive struggle is fundamental to democracy (Laclau 1996, 53; Mouffe 2005, 18). This theory informs my understanding of discourse and the political.

The findings of social movement theorists on the relevance of emotions in social movements support my findings around the importance of building community and awareness around particular issues. I also apply new social movement theory to this online political community. In particular, the work of Melucci (1989, 1996) on collective identity contributes to my findings on the importance of subjectivity and aspect change in the community. New social movement theory contributes to this thesis by providing an explicit link between the personal and political action toward change. However, I am sometimes critical of the epistemological assumptions of much social movement theory, which divides political action into the conventional and the peripheral.

My understanding of social movements is derived from some of the more radical and interesting conclusions of the new social movement (NSM) theoretical approach. In particular I draw on Young (1997), Melucci (1989; 1996), and McDonald (1999; 2006). Melucci's work is particularly useful in terms of defining a social movement. He uses the term not as an empirical category of behaviour but as an analytical concept that is not represented by particular uniformity of action. Seen in this way, the concept of social movement is far broader than organised protest action directed at states. Melucci sees social movement action as defined by three characteristics: conflict, a breaching of systems limits, and solidarity (Melucci 1996, 26). This is what separates it from other forms of collective activity such as ‘ritual’ or ‘cooperation’ (Melucci 1996, 33).

While I draw on concepts of social movement from writers like Melucci, I share many of Young's (1997) criticisms of this approach, and pay more attention to the discursive aspects of protest. Young's concept of social movements frames the discursive construction of

identity and subjectivity as political action, in which movement actors ‘analyse in social and political terms oppression and resistance grounded in identity’ (Young 1997, 21). Also, like Gould (2010), I draw on affect theory and other understandings of emotion in discourse, particularly from within rhetoric studies, to frame my argument.

Overview, implications, and significance

This thesis is a qualitative account of Australian feminist blogs that combines face-to-face semi-structured interviews with case studies of specific discursive interventions in the mainstream. I interviewed 21 bloggers and analysed just over 40 different blogs during my study. I selected interview participants on the basis of their position in the social network of the Australian feminist blogging community, trying to achieve a representative spread from the very active and central, to more casual and peripheral participation styles. Chapter One provides greater detail of the methods and methodology of my study. The second chapter will provide a literature review of social movement theory and research that is relevant to this study, in particular possible applications of social movement research into internet- based social movements. Chapters Three to Five are grounded in what bloggers had to say about their involvement.

Australian feminist bloggers are engaged in discursive activism: activism that intervenes in mainstream discourses, for themselves, in their own spaces. This is important because it keeps the space open for feminist politics at a time when feminism is not taken seriously in mainstream discourses (particularly the mainstream press). There are affective dimensions to this activism that cannot be explained with contemporary social movement theory. The creation of feeling is part of the work that bloggers do. Related to the previous point about discursive activism, bloggers create safe spaces for feminist politics, and this is an affective process. On the corollary, blogs are also spaces of ‘risk’ as well as ‘safety’, and this is affective. Bloggers talk about the risk of speaking in the context of the community, but also mention that it is a productive risk. There is a sense of discipline and care that is part of participation.

I argue that bloggers are engaged in acts of political creativity and subjectivity change that are tied in with activism, affect, and their sense of self-as-feminist (feminist identity). Political creativity involves the maintenance of a demand, of higher expectations of mainstream discourses rather than simply a cynical refusal of them. A blogger defines themself in opposition to the mainstream, but also makes demands on that mainstream. The demand that feminist bloggers make on mainstream discourse is an act of dissensus, a clash of sense with sense.

What I argue for in this thesis is that particular types of activism be given greater value as part of the political. To ask simply ‘What are the demands of these activists? What are the effects of their activism (on governmental politics)?’ elides the social change that takes place at the level of discourse, the act of changing the conversation and creating the space for conversations. I am also placing a demand on social movement theory to see affective dimensions of social movements not simply as productive of other forms of activism but as part of the work of movements. The valuing of intra-social movement discourse contributes to our understanding of the work of conflict and discussion within social movements rather than focusing only on outward actions.

Blogs are becoming sites for the negotiation of a wide range of political affiliations, and for feminisms in particular. I locate my study in a particular regional network of blogging affiliations, but my research has wider implications for the study of the spread and maintenance of social movements in blogging networks, and indeed for the role of discursive activism in the political.

Chapter One: ‘These wars are personal’: methods and theory

These wars are personal. They make me who I am; they throw me into inherited obligations, whether I like it or not. These worlds at war are the belly of the monster from which I have tried to write into a more vivid reality a kin group of feminist figures. – Donna Haraway (2004, 1)

Introduction

I not only make my research, but my research makes me. My participations as reader and researcher and online feminist ‘throw me into inherited obligations’ (Haraway 2004, 1). My writing and research into this community is coloured by my own participation and my own feminist politics. While this thesis is not an auto-ethnography, my own experience as a researcher necessarily feeds into and informs my conclusions. I have made it a priority to understand where I am located in the community, and where the discourse within the community locates me politically. My methodological approach requires me to centre the experiences of the participants in these networks, while also recognising my own standpoint and experiences of researching and writing these communities. Like Haraway (2004, 1), I now ‘want to know how to help build ongoing stories rather than histories that end’. I have become enmeshed in the affective and discursive politics of the community, as ‘the feminist research process is itself an emotional, political endeavour’ (Letherby 2011, 74).

Alongside the noble aim of the researcher to ‘write into a more vivid reality a kin group of feminist figures’, Haraway’s (2004, 1) words also evoke something darker in the practice of research. While Haraway speaks of literal wars, what are the ‘worlds at war’ that the researcher must contend with? Will the researcher get caught in the crossfire? What is the ‘belly of the monster’, and will the researcher get lost there? The quote hints at the way that research and writing is always relational, always affective. Likewise, Haraway prefigures the

findings of my research, in which bloggers inherit feminisms not only as ideology and received discourse, but also as kinship and community, and the ways in which these relations can be risky, threatening, or dangerous. Discourses become imbued with affect, both personal and shared with kin. Haraway hints at the more difficult affects of writing community, in which both the bloggers and I are engaged.

My approach begins with feminist research methodology (Bar On 1993; Brooks 2006; Devault 1990; Haraway 2004; Hekman 1995; Hennessy 1993; Hesse-Biber 2007; Ramazanoğlu & Holland 2002; Smith 1987; Sprague 2005; Taylor 2000), combined with the reflexive approach to internet research advocated by qualitative researchers in the field of internet studies (Baym 2000; Baym 2006; Hine 2000; Markham 1998; Senft 2008; Sundén 2003; Turkle 1995). The understanding of politics informed by feminist standpoint epistemology necessitates an awareness of the researcher’s own situatedness and a recognition of research itself as part of discourse (Ramazonoğlu and Holland 2002, 63; Sprague 2005, 52-54). Knowers are ‘specifically located in physical spaces, in systems of social relations, within circulating discourses’ (Sprague 2005:47).

My approach brings together new discourse theory, constructivist grounded theory and feminist social movement studies methodology. This is compatible with a view of subjectivity that allows for discursive political agency, to include considerations of affect, inequality and power relations in the study of online communities (Dean 2002; Ferree & Merrill 2004; Mouffe 2000; Wajcman 2004, 42). Feminist epistemologies provide an understanding of subjectivity and agency that supports an understanding of discursive politics as activism, and that the capacity to act and notions of individual agency are informed by power relations rather than assumed to be equal and universal (Hennessy 1993, 67; Hirschmann 1989). In a feminist epistemology, knowledge can be understood as socially determined (Tanesini 1999, 12). Hekman (1995, 161) advocates a ‘politics of difference’ for feminist researchers, that is ‘a politics in which differences among women are confronted and theorised rather than ignored’.

Recent work on the role of affect explore dimensions of communication such as passion, care, fear, shyness, anxiety, kindness, anger, and hatred, as well as the ways that power

relations affect social expectations of being heard and the choice to engage in discursive activism. An assumption of the link between politics and affect is compatible both with the politicising aims of new discourse theory (Laclau & Mouffe 1985) and the ethical expectations of feminist standpoint theory (Davion 1998; Devault 1990). It takes into account power and the construction of political subjectivities that are formed in terms of affect. I discuss this aspect of my theory further in Chapter Four, on affect and subjectivity.

As Hesse-Biber (2007, 16) writes, feminist research has maintained ‘a close link between epistemology, methodology, and methods’. Methods, as Sprague (2005, 2) argues, ‘are saturated with issues of philosophy, politics and core values’. Acknowledging this recognises the political nature of research. A research process that is divorced from political action ‘can devolve into a form of intellectual game conducted by a privileged class of knowledge producers with no relevance to most everyday actors’ (Sprague 2005, 39). In the following sections I describe how my methods have been chosen, and with what motivations, and how the scope of my research was defined.

Methods

Locating and defining the network

Online discussions between community participants, and interviews with a number of those participants, form the bulk of the qualitative data for analysis in this thesis. The choice of texts included in my research was made through the navigation of the Down Under Feminists Carnival, along with the navigation of the community through blogrolls and links to other women's blog posts. In this way I gained an understanding of how bloggers in the community interacted with one another and the level of their interaction. The Down Under Feminists’ Carnival combined with network analysis was crucial to narrowing down the study. However, the use of such a selection tool has the result of excluding other feminist bloggers in the Australian context, those who do not identify with the Hoyden About Town community that largely makes use of and contributes to the DUFC, and links to and from that network. This was necessary to narrow down the field of study, but it is important to acknowledge as a factor in my research process and outcomes.

Network analysis in social movement studies involves the use of network maps to question and discover how the network location of individuals shapes their actions and behaviour (Diani 2002, 174). Internet researchers have developed several ways to map and visualise online networks, with the development of software that assists in the visualisation and conceptualisation of these networks (Bruns 2007). In this way internet and social movement research agree on the usefulness of network theory for the understanding of social networks. Social networks are significant for the study of social movements because within these networks are developed the stories, discourses, practices and shared meanings that are required for collective action (Taylor 1996, 68). Although social movement theorists have often been sceptical of the potential for the internet to facilitate movements, online social networks should be taken seriously in the study of activist cultures (Wilson & Peterson 2002, 456-457).

Network analysis makes visible the structure of the community, as well as some of the ways that the blogging community links together with other blog networks. It can show what sections of the community are more close-knit and central (for example through dense and frequent linking patterns), and where factions and divisions may lie, which will leave room for analysis of whether these divisions are based on conflicts, affective relationships, demographics, or different political priorities.

I have used IssueCrawler14 as the initial web program with which to analyse the network. I chose this service for its user-friendliness and because data can be exported for analysis using other network visualisation programs, which makes it a flexible option. In my case, I used UCInet15 for network visualisations (Borgatti et al 2002). Bruns (2007) had previously shown that the IssueCrawler program can be successfully used for the purpose of mapping blog networks in Australia. The program provides basic network maps and data about the number of linkages, describing the main hubs in the community, and the sites and

14 Available at: https://www.issuecrawler.net/

15 Available at: https://sites.google.com/site/ucinetsoftware/home

participants that have the closest linkages to one another. It can also show the ways that the community changes and develops over time. This network analysis method uses automated snowball sampling and analysis of link frequency to delineate the limits of the network. The program works by using seed links (chosen by the researcher) and crawling those sites for links to a set depth, and determining those sites’ place in the network as a result of the links between nodes and link strength (number of links) between nodes in the network.

The first network was crawled in December of 2008, with seed links taken from a selection of the more prominent Australian feminist blogs. With automated snowball sampling, a representative list of links from the particular network is developed and then the interlinkages between these actors are counted. The shape of the community in this first analysis looked like this (PLEASE NOTE: Network maps in colour. Full size landscape-oriented maps in Appendix C.):

Fig. 1.1. The initial crawl of interconnected blogs and sites as of December 2008. The colours of the nodes in the network show different genres and origins of sites, as shown in the key.

With the blue (Australian general and political blogs) removed, leaving only feminist- identified sites, the network looks as follows:

Fig. 1.2. Australian general and political blogs removed, leaving only feminist-identified sites.

With international, New Zealander, and blogs that do not identify as feminist removed, the network looks like this:

Fig 1.3. Australian feminist-identified blogs only

Of the 21 bloggers that I interviewed, 11 of them wrote or contributed to these blogs, as shown in hot pink below:

Fig 1.4. Shows in pink those blogs in the initial network with participants who were interviewed as part of my research.

The network illustrated in these network visualisations (Figures 1.3-4) is a comparatively small one compared to the overall network shown in Figure 1.1. In the overall network, the most interconnected part is an Australian general political blogging network, with Australian feminist and international feminist blogs a smaller, less cohesive part of that network. However, because I continued to crawl the blogs over a period of time, I was able to show the way that the community changed, grew, and consolidated. Using seed links iteratively collected from previous crawls, the network looked different six months and a year later:

Fig. 1.5. The network as at June 2009.

In June 2009, the centrality of Australian feminist bloggers is much stronger than in the previous overall network map. Again in November 2009, the map showed increased link density and cohesion, as well as fewer links with other Australian political blogs and closer integration with international feminist blogs:

Fig. 1.6. The network as at November 2009

Compared with Figure 1.3 from December 2008, a year later the Australian feminist blogging network is larger, more cohesive, and has stronger links between blogs:

Fig. 1.7. Australian feminist bloggers November 2009.

There are also a number of new bloggers on the network, shown below in blue. Not all of these are new bloggers, but they are newly part of the network, showing the increased linkages in the blogging community being studied.

Fig. 1.8. Showing new blogs in network, difference from December 2008 to November 2009.

Blogs from the November 2009 network whose contributors were interviewed during the course of my research are shown below in pink:

Fig. 1.9. Showing bloggers interviewed from November 2009 network map.

Lazega (1997, 120) argues that network analysis, used on its own, ‘is a purely formal exercise’. Thus, while network analysis may provide useful insights into the community, its main role is a peripheral one; to assist in the identification and delimitation of the network, as well as helping to identify the main actors in the community. In this way network analysis has supplemented my own observation of the community through reading and exploring the network. It also helped me decide upon blogs for sampling and discourse analysis. This process of navigating the community involved using the Down Under Feminists’ Carnival, following links both in blogs and in the feminist community on Twitter, and reading and clicking back through comments. These navigations have been the primary means by which I have come to understand the relationships within the network beyond the initial phase of network analysis. Also, in network analysis, I had to make decisions regarding the exclusion of Australian non-feminist sites and international feminist sites. Therefore there is a degree of artificiality in both the boundedness of the community and its cohesion – nonetheless in talking of the network or the community I am talking about something quite specific and bounded, though mutable, changeable, sometimes conflicted, and with significant overlaps with other blogging genres and networks.

Process: start to finish

The process of my research began with the collection of seed links for network analysis. Out of that I developed a list of between 36 and 45 blogs that I followed closely at any one time during the three year period. This list changed responsively as a result of new blogs entering the network, either in terms of the network maps and crawls, or as a result of consistent inclusion in the Down Under Feminists’ Carnival or observed participation in the conversations and debates going on at that time. The list was then iteratively adjusted to reflect the current network structures, and the seed links for network analysis were also adjusted to include new blogs that were receiving links and attention from other blogs. The list also changed as occasionally blogs were deleted or became inactive.

Through reading these blogs on a feed reader16 I maintained a sense of what was happening in feminist blogs over the three year data collection phase. I was able to flag major debates and discursive interventions as they appeared and I wrote memos - in line with grounded theory methods - about my sense of the significance of particular posts and conversations. When I conducted semi-structured interviews with each blogger, I carried with me a list of the posts that they had written that had prompted a strong response from other bloggers, or that prompted a question for me about motivations and process for that blogger. From the interview transcripts I then drew out the themes of what they told me about blogging, its meaning for them, and its processes. I continued to follow the blogs after the interviews, and found that the themes explored in the interviews were repeated in the blogs, often with a commentary on how their relationship to blogging and its processes had changed.

I contacted potential interviewees via email, after locating the contact details of the interviewees through the ‘About’ pages on their blog, or other publically available information related to their online identity. If I couldn’t find their email address on their website I generally left a comment saying that I was involved in a research project on feminist blogs and asking them to email me if they were interested in participating or in

16 Feed reader: Aggregator of RSS feed subscriptions.

finding out more. When they responded, I then emailed them with a short description of the research project and my contact details as well as the ethics consent form and information17. I asked 26 bloggers if they would like to be interviewed, and 21 interviews took place, 20 in a face-to-face setting and one in online chat. Bloggers who did not agree to be interviewed generally did not respond to my emails at all. Two more bloggers agreed to be interviewed however we were unable to arrange a mutually convenient time and place to meet.

The interviews ranged from about forty minutes to two and a half hours long. The interviews were open-ended, recorded on tape, and later transcribed and treated as a text (Scheurich 1997, 61). I asked them at that point to choose their preferred pseudonym for the purposes of this thesis and other papers, with their blogging pseudonym as the default. In most cases, bloggers are referred to by their blogging name rather than their full personal name. This will be the convention throughout the thesis.

Transcripts were then sent back to the interviewees for correction and for permission to use the wording as it was transcribed. I gave them the opportunity to exclude any material they wanted from use in this or other publications. In response to reading the transcripts some interviewees wrote a short explanation of how they felt their blogging process had changed since the time of the interview, or gave some modifying information addressed towards the text of the interview. Overall, this was a very useful exercise, which also gave some additional ownership of their interview transcript to the research participants.

After receiving the adjusted transcript I then coded it thematically, and looked particularly for unexpected themes. I also wrote memos alongside the coding process, and was guided by grounded theory techniques. However, as I will discuss further, this was not an orthodox grounded theory. I analysed the interviews thematically and applied each of the themes to case studies identified throughout my data collection for further analysis. My coding categories provide the structure for Chapters Three, Four, and Five which follow. These were iteratively developed from memos, and mainly drawn from the interview transcripts. Coding categories at saturation ran as follows:

17 See Appendix A for a copy of the information sheet and consent form

Identification with feminist blogs - Education Outreach New participants Self-education - Self-improvement Writing Political self-improvement - Community-building Moderation Respect for difference Linking and ‘signal boost’ - Articulation Arguments and conflict Prepared responses Claims-making (from personal and shared experience) Affect/Community - Affect Blogging as outlet x Response to everyday life/relationships x Response to media - Community Moderation/trolls Conflict Support network / creating safety Backchannels / offline Comments Belonging / not belonging Politics/Activism - Blogging as commitment/commitment to blogging As opposed to formal politics/protest

- Ethics of alterity/intersectional politics - Blogging as social movement - Discursive interventions/discursive activism

Many of these codes and categories break rank and cross into different categories, and in my analysis I allow these themes to address one another.

Methodology

Qualitative Research and the Internet

Towards the late 1990s a tradition of internet ethnography began to develop among internet researchers. Markham’s (1998) work on internet ethnography, Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space, voiced some of the contradictions of ethnographical research in online communities, while emphasising the reality of online experience as lived experience (Markham 1998, 115). This was a groundbreaking framing within a discipline that privileges face-to-face interaction, community, and research. Hine’s (2000) Virtual Ethnography advocates a similar approach, and challenges the face-to-face emphasis of ethnographic research historically. Internet ethnography necessarily takes place largely in online and networked spaces. It is often partial because of its spatial and temporal dislocation (Flick 2009, 273). Markham (1998, 2004) also emphasises a reflexive approach to online ethnography. More recently, Boler's (2008) work on the challenges of qualitative web-based work has been instructive.

In this project the online community is understood in its social, political, and personal context rather than as a cyberspace entity that enables feminists to play out certain political discourses (Kendall 1999, 58). Few of the bloggers make a clear distinction between online and offline worlds. The discourses developed online have an impact in the real world and relate to offline communities of feminism such as student feminism, institutional feminism, and academic feminism. It is the responsibility of internet researchers to ‘explore how participants blend their on-line and off-line lives and social contexts’ (Kendall 1999, 59). To quote Nancy Baym:

[R]eally good internet research, be it qualitative or not, does not really believe in cyberspace in the sense of a distinct place that stands in contrast to the earth-bound world. How online spaces are constructed and the activities that people do online are intimately interwoven with the construction of the offline world and the activities and structures in which we participate, whether we are using the internet or not. Offline contexts always permeate and influence online situations, and online situations and experiences always feed back into offline experience. The best work recognises that the internet is woven into the fabric of the rest of life and seeks to better understand the weaving. (Baym 2006, 86).

In internet research, Baym (2006, 82-85) advocates a methodological approach that combines participant observation with other research methods, interviews in particular. Similarly, Kendall (1999, 62) argues that ‘[r]eaching understandings of participants’ sense of self and of the meanings they give to their on-line participation requires spending time with participants to observe what they do on-line as well as what they say about what they do’. These ethnographic research practices inform my methods, particularly in terms of online participant observation and analysis of messages, but also the combination of message analysis and accounts of online experience gained through interviews. This is a common triangulation of methods in online spaces (Baym 2000; Baym 2006; Hine 2000; Jones 1999; Kendall 1999; Markham 1998; Nakamura 2008; Senft 2008; Sundén 2003; Turkle 1995). Face-to-face interviews contextualise the research and provide further opportunities to gain the perspectives of network participants about their role in, and experience of, this network (Baym 2006, 85; Orgad 2009, 39).

The most important methods for my research are semi-structured interviews with community participants, and discourse analysis of community texts. Discourse analysis in online communities seeks ‘to understand cultural meanings and the complexity of daily social experience through dense deep readings of cybertext discourse’ (Mann & Stewart 2000, 87). The latter analysis involved the selection and analysis of conversations, posts, and debates within the Australian feminist blogging community (Paltridge 2006). I have analysed two types of discussion: those that occur between blogs around a particular issue, and those that develop around a single post.

This research is an example of ethnographic research within a culture or setting that is self- documenting, which is necessarily different from ethnographic fieldwork in which the culture being studied is not self-documenting. Atkinson and Coffey (2004, 56) call this the study of documentary realities. Texts, indeed, are central to the work of this political community, and to rely solely on verbal description of a social world through interviews would be to ignore the social world itself as it is played out through texts and textual interplay. As Markham (2004, 95) argues, the internet provides ‘new means for understanding the way social realities get constructed and reproduced through discursive behaviours’. While the internet can be understood pragmatically as a medium for communication and physically as a network of computers, it is also a ‘context for social construction’. Thus it is a site of study for understanding how ‘language builds and sustains social reality’ (Markham 2004, 97).

Interviews as a method of triangulation have a history of use in internet research. Semi- structured interviewing approaches correspond to what Hine (2000, 154) calls ‘adaptive ethnography’, where the ethnographic method is adapted to the particular aims of a study rather than attempting to simply describe a community or space. These projects:

[R]equire methodological innovation, if they are both to locate themselves in offline contexts and to take online contexts into account. The insights which they produce will be limited if they confine themselves to a single idea of the field. Shedding a reliance on holism, face-to- face interaction and dwelling in a bounded location opens up new horizons for ethnography and promises new ways of understanding the Internet (Hine 2000, 155).

Some early texts in the field of internet studies, such as Markham’s (1998) Life Online and Turkle’s (1995) Life On the Screen, have much to recommend them in terms of their methodological approach. Markham (2004) in particular has made significant updates to her methodological approach. While for me the research experience carries much less of the flavour of an intrepid journey into life in cyberspace than those early texts, because the internet has become ordinary and present in everyday life, the emphasis on the situatedness

of the researcher and the lived experience of the community participant still resonates with my research experience.

Methodological challenges

My project has a number of methodological challenges, as a result of the large size, rapid change, and shifting connections of the networks being studied. Boler (2008, 11-33) describes a similar methodological project in her discussion of her research on 'digital dissent' in the wake of the Iraq war, during the most recent Bush administration in the United States of America. Hers a study that looks at political blogging networks, and triangulates survey material, interview material and discourse analysis. In my case, I have chosen not to use surveys as part of my study, but the project is otherwise methodologically similar. Her project is also focused on the development of social movements in online spaces, its relationship to online cultural production, and the motivations of people who are engaging in what she calls 'digital dissent' (Boler 2008, 17).

Boler’s focus is on the problem of how to find meaningful results and emerging themes in such a large space as (in her case) North American political blogs (Boler 2008, 24). Certainly, although the community of bloggers that I look at is considerably smaller, this was my challenge as well. Bloggers deal with such a diversity of subject matter, mobilise as a result of such a diversity of motivations, and direct their writings at such a diversity of audiences that it is difficult to narrow down the field of study. Boler (2008, 28) discusses the process of moving through and between blogs, and acknowledging the impact the choices made will have on the study. The researcher has to define the boundaries of the network being researched, in the identification of a group of people for study.

The problems of researcher navigation – where the researcher is influenced by her own inclinations and interests – were somewhat tempered by the use of the Down Under Feminists’ Carnival as a selection tool. Because the Carnival is curated by self-identifying participants in Australian feminist networks, it removes some of the problems with researcher selection. Nonetheless, my research can only ever be a partial view of Australian

feminist blogging networks. Similarly, because I identify as feminist, the community is viewed, and theorised, through that lens.

Insider research

The challenges of insider research have been explored by many feminist researchers (e.g. Fine 1994; Foster 1994). The problems include a tendency to universalise one’s own experience of the community, rather than understanding that one’s own view of the community is partial (Fine 1994, 14). The researcher engages in a form of ventriloquy, in which he or she assumes to speak for other participants (Fine 1994, 17). Another pitfall of insider research is the assumption of insiderness – a researcher only shares some experiences with some other participants some of the time. A researcher is only partially an insider. A researcher cannot assume that their experience of and perspectives on a community are the same as those of other participants in a community (Foster 1994, 144).

I have avoided some of these pitfalls by being in some sense both an insider and an outsider. I did not start my research as a participant of Australian feminist blogging networks, although I considered myself both a feminist and a blogger. So while engaged in participant observation, I did so both as a partial insider and a partial outsider. Like some other bloggers, I came in contact with a wide range of feminist discourses and claims that I had not encountered previously. Like some other bloggers, I experienced both a sense of interpersonal risk and interpersonal safety as a participant in the community.

I also triangulated my research results in order to ensure the reflexivity and critical distance of my analysis. Network analysis afforded some surprises – blogs I had never come across in my own exploration appeared on the network. Likewise, when asking questions from my own perspective on the blogging network, interviewees frequently contradicted my own experiences. I privileged contradictory perspectives, and allowed for disagreement in my research. I analysed community texts like blog posts and comments to ensure that bloggers’ descriptions of their participation agreed with their actual behaviour in blogging networks.

In addition, insider research has a number of advantages. Being an insider sensitises the researcher to the experiences of the research participants (Taylor 1998, 368). As an insider- outsider researcher, I was sensitised both to the discourses of the blogging community, and the dominant worldview (Taylor 1998, 368). The researcher can construct questions from her own experience and, without assuming that the interviewee shares that experience, explore the question further. Certainly the process of writing memos while reading blogs and constructing an interview guide out of those memos provided such a ‘sensitising’ purpose. My position as insider allowed for sensitising approaches to research, and my position as outsider allowed for reflexivity. Another advantage of insider research is that it is in line with feminist standpoint approaches to research. While remaining rigorous and reflexive in my research design, my aim has been to provide an explicitly feminist analysis of the blogging network. This necessitates – while maintaining a critical distance – the recognition of work that women are doing to maintain feminist networks, and the affirmation of feminist values and claims. Nevertheless, the outcomes of this research are interpreted from my own standpoint, rather than the standpoint of feminism per se (Fine 1994, 22).

Feminist standpoint methodology

Feminist standpoint methodology enables the researcher to recognise and include such positionality in their research work. It challenges and rejects ‘positivism's pretense of creating a view from nowhere’ (Sprague 2005, 41). However, this leads to a responsibility and accountability on the part of the researcher to practice strong reflexivity in the course of research (Gannon & Davies 2007, 72). My understanding of the community is necessarily partial and situated, even as I have sought out voices different from my own (Hesse-Biber 2007, 9).

Feminist standpoint methodology advocates the principle of starting from marginalised lives (Tanesini 1999, 151). Feminist research methodology, more broadly, seeks to highlight ‘complexities of differences of experiences that have previously not been considered’ (Letherby 2011, 71). The significance of standpoint is one of recognising the role of power and perspective in research. Feminist methodological practice has emphasised ‘the place

and significance of politics, power and emotion with research’ (Letherby 2011, 75). Collins (1991) in Tanesini (1999, 153) shows that oppression is ‘a matrix with no pure victims and no pure oppressors’. Tanesini argues that:

Acknowledgement of the partiality of one’s own angle on reality encourages a politics of solidarity in the awareness that one does not have a complete knowledge of social reality: one may thus be disposed to learn what other marginal standpoints have to offer. This approach does not only have political advantages, it also facilitates more accurate knowledge of social relations. (Tanesini 1999, 153).

Collins (2000) and hooks (1990) explain marginal positions as sites of resistance, as places where counter-hegemonic discourses are able to develop, the ‘space where oppressed people organize their resistance’ (Tanesini 1999, 154). Intersectionality is emphasised as part of the activist repertoire in the feminist blogging communities that I studied, and so too it informs the methodological approach of the thesis. Originally explored by Crenshaw (1991, 1242), intersectionality engages with the ways that identity categories result in the elision of difference within identity categories, and fails to notice the ways that the intersection of identities results in particular experiences of oppression. Intersectionality is emphasised as a way to build alliances across difference, recognising the commonalities in difference, and the difference within commonality. Intersectionality attempts to ‘identify the effects of interlocking oppressions’ (Haslanger 2000, 36). This concept (and this problem in questions of discursive justice) is the link between the ethics of listening, dissensus, and feminist standpoint methodology.

Feminist methodologies, while they may vary in other ways, often begin from the tenet that the personal is political. In the introduction to her Handbook of Feminist Research, Sharlene Hesse-Biber argues that feminist research of all different kinds ‘recognize the importance of women’s lived experiences with the goal of unearthing subjugated knowledge’ (Hesse-Biber 2007, 3). Women’s experiences of blogging – what they get out of it personally – are crucial to the argument I construct in later chapters about affective investment, discursive political activism, dissensus as opposed to consensus, and networks of attention and investment.

These features of feminist blogging are a contrast to debates that focus on the expansion of ‘the public sphere’ and deliberative democracy.

Semi-structured interviews

I conducted 21 interviews with members of the feminist blogging network to understand its impacts on them personally and politically. Generally I selected these interviewees by observing who was most active in the community, and confirming this using network analysis. There were a couple of exceptions to that process. One woman had developed connections to the community through a Twitter campaign, described in Chapter Five as the ‘Hottest 100 Women’ case study. A few more had more peripheral connections to the community, or had a strong connection to the community at an earlier time, but were now less active.

I chose a method of interviewing that is semi-structured and conversational to avoid standardised expectations and responses. I often began with general questions which the bloggers could bring back to the specifics of their life if they wished. Later in the interview I gave examples of entries that stood out to me in the recent history of their blog, and asked them about those posts or topics in particular. Although my interviews did not have a list of set questions, I did include a number of questions about particular themes or problems such as: the blogging practices of feminist bloggers including reading and linking practices; the ways that blogging impacts on the identity and personal life of bloggers, the community and how being part of that community affects them; blogging as political action and its relationship to other forms of activism; and finally a discussion of a selection of the bloggers’ recent or watershed posts18.

My interview design aimed to understand the experience of being part of this community for each of the interview participants, in order to get closer to understanding the community’s impact on political subjectivity, identity and the personal/political impacts of online activism. Where did their motivations come from? What enabled them to speak? What made them

18 See Appendix B for a sample interview guide

feel heard or included? What did they get from such inclusion? How did that change their life and their personal/political practices? What role did identity and subject position play in this process? What implications does this have for the relationship between social movements and online community spaces?

Most bloggers with whom I spoke made little distinction between face-to-face and online interaction with other bloggers, even if some of them chose to keep the spheres separate for social, personal or geographic reasons. It was important for me to consider ‘the possible effects of these off-line contexts [or lack thereof] on participants’ understanding of their online experiences’ (Kendall 1999, 62). Here are some examples of how bloggers' boundaries varied:

I think the internet is lovely because it’s a real community that you can just tap into and there’s probably then a temptation to want to meet offline and make it a real friendship outside of the internet, but for me I kind of like the boundary, I guess. (‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010)

Meeting up in real life? Oh... that’s probably happening, well at least every couple of months, yeah. [...] But you know how, this is the thing, that whole division between real life and net life, they’re not necessarily separate. The boundaries blur. (‘Mimbles’, in interview, 2010)

Some of the friends I’ve made online are now friends offline. So I’ve got a whole new friendship group and people I’ll see and interact with and share our lives with. (Chally Kacelnik, in interview, 2009)

Semi-structured interviews also allow for reflexivity (Baym 2006, 86) and the ability to scrutinise the meaning of statements made by social movement participants (Blee & Taylor 2002, 94-95). In her work on internet-based qualitative research, Baym (2006, 85) writes:

I cannot say this too strongly: if researchers do not interview participants or have other access to their points of view, they have no grounds for claims about how online phenomena are understood or how they influence those who engage in and encounter those phenomena.

The semi-structured interview approach serves to minimise ‘the voice of the researcher, aiming to bring the everyday worlds of activists to the fore’ (Blee & Taylor 2002, 95). In the interviews and in my use of them, the aim is the centre the voices of the women that I interviewed, and to bring them to the forefront in my analysis.

Interviewing is a reflexive and iterative method, whereby researchers can discover new research questions and approaches in conversation with participants. The interview technique involves the construction of a loose interview guide which reflects the aims of the research project. However, the guide is adaptable to the situation of the people/person being interviewed (Blee & Taylor 2002, 99). According to the principles of constructivist grounded theory the guide is also adaptable over the period of time that interviews are taking place (Charmaz 2003; 2006; Clarke 2005).

Grounded theory techniques

For the initial analysis of interview transcripts, I used grounded theory techniques to draw out themes and categories the research participants used when describing the community. While I have used grounded theory techniques, my research is not an orthodox grounded theory, because I analyse my data in conversation with social movement theory and new discourse theory, rather than building a theory from the data. However, the findings of a grounded theory analysis are used to structure the themes of the thesis.

A constructivist grounded theory approach makes the assumption that the worlds or communities being discussed in the interview are mutual constructions on the part of both researcher and participants, and that the researcher is necessarily affected by the world of the participant and vice versa (Charmaz 2003, 314). There is no assumption of objectivity in constructivist grounded theory techniques, although there are some strands of grounded theory that do assume an objective position. Scheurich (1997, 63) argues:

The decontextualized interview text which is transformed through the coding process becomes that from which the conventional researcher constructs her/his story. The bricks of

the construction are the reductive monads of meaning, coded in categories in the transcript. These bricks are formed, however, from a mold that is then shaped from the researcher’s conscious and unconscious assumptions and orientations.

The use of interviews in a grounded theory-based approach to data collection and analysis requires that the research project does not simply rely on these interviews. The goal is not simply to create a theory but to create a theory and apply it to later data found in order to come to conclusions. As Charmaz (2003, 318) explains:

The logic of the grounded theory method calls for the emerging analysis to direct data gathering, in a self-correcting, analytic, expanding process. Early leads shape later data collection.

This requires that grounded theory does not rely on a ‘one-shot interview’ approach (Charmaz 2003, 318). Some ways to practice such a method are a) to change questions as themes emerge in interview data for later interviews; b) go back to earlier interviewees to ask them about new themes that have emerged; c) apply the findings from interviews to other forms of data collection through ethnographic case studies and content analysis (Charmaz 2003, 318). My research makes all three of these recommendations. For example, after a few interviewees began to talk at length about their emotional responses to their participation in feminist blogging communities, I altered later interview guides to follow up on these emerging themes.

Grounded theory also requires that researchers are reflexive about the particular kinds of data their interview questions may elicit. In particular it is possible to force data into preconceived categories. In order to avoid this the interviewer has to ‘create a balance between asking significant questions and forcing responses’ (Charmaz 2006, 32). I have been reflexive in my analysis of interview data, adjusting my analysis to fit the nature of the question or conversational style at that point, from exploratory to irrelevant or forced. Not all data has the same value. The transcribed, recorded interviews enabled me to develop this self-reflexivity because they ‘[made] it easy to see when [...] questions don’t work or force the data’ (Charmaz 2006, 32).

The sources of data for discourse analysis include both interview texts and data collection samples from blogs. Grounded theory analysis techniques were used for the interview transcripts, as it is from these interview texts that I derived my understanding of the community and its political significance (Charmaz 2001). After picking up particular themes from the interviews, these were applied to other texts for a grounded discourse analysis (Charmaz 2003, 312). Particular texts from the websites of bloggers supplement their interview transcript, thus triangulating their responses and enabling me to stay up to date with their thought processes about the significance of blogs in their life long term. Bloggers’ experiences and practices change over time and they often reflect on these changes in their own blogs. Some bloggers use a specific name for this – ‘metablogging’ – which refers to the practice of blogging about blogging. The discursive analysis in the chapters that follow draw on a range of data sources, which include:

x General sampling. In December 2008, November 2009, and November 2010 I collected one month of blog posts from a defined sample of blogs drawn from ongoing network analysis and the Down Under Feminists’ Carnival (DUFC). I limited the sample to blogs that identify or have been identified (e.g. by inclusion in DUFC) by others as feminist blogs and that have predominantly Australian authors. This sampling provided material for representative discourse analysis and allowed for the tracking of participation levels and community concerns over a three year period. x Interview texts. x Personal or ‘meta-blogging’ posts - entries about the experience of blogging and Australian feminist networks. x Watershed discussions or debates – events or online happenings that bring bloggers together around a single issue, whether on a single blog post or across several blogs. This selection allows me to identify seminal texts in the community, that are used repeatedly to support the claims of Australian feminists (Johnston 2002, 67). x Sub-community case studies and intermedia case studies. These show how intersectionality can function within the community to bring particular issues to the attention of the broader feminist community. The following areas have been

particularly successful, but there have been other areas of awareness raising and discursive activism within the community: o Fat acceptance o Disability o Feminist parenting

Analysis of these very different varieties of discussion and interaction (varying from everyday conversations to those moments of crisis that crystallise the community) is important. The inclusion of debates that take place on a single post provide insight because they include both the arguments of the original poster, who sets the agenda for the debate, and also the critical or approving reactions of other participants. Analysis of comments on posts also allows for the responses of non-blogger participants, casual participants in the network, and responses from those outside the network, whether interested outsiders or ‘trolls’ (aggressive and disruptive participants who either provoke irrelevant debate to derail discussion, or harass the original poster or other participants, see Brail 1996; Herring et al. 2002). This approach to discourse analysis recognises that often the meaning given to an utterance can become the meaning of the utterance (Wood and Kroger 2000, 109-110). Comment responses can change the eventual meaning of the original text.

Sub-community case studies provide illustrations of the ways in which new discourses are generated and maintained within the community, and the ways in which affective investment is involved in this process. For example, I explore the development of disability and anti-ableist discourses in the community, a theme that emerged in the majority of interviews with bloggers. I argue that these sub-community, intersectional debates are where the impetus for activism and the identification of areas for action are occurring within the community.

My discourse analytic approach uses elements of grounded theory on a practical level to assist me in coding and understanding large quantities of data. Apart from being expedient, grounded theory is compatible with a feminist approach to research because coding is responsive to the data (Clarke 2005, 346). This allows for an iterative and reflexive approach to research that is responsive to women’s lived experience. This is shown in the way that my

interview questions changed as themes emerged in our discussions. It emerged in how my data collection was guided by the research participants, particularly from their identification of entries and texts that were important to them. Grounded theory allows for complexity and difference because it allows data to be fractured and to permit multiple analyses (Clarke 2005, 355). Her situational analytic approach draws on the work of Donna Haraway (1991) on situated knowledges, ‘assuming and acknowledging the embodiment and situatedness of all knowledge producers’ (Clarke 2005, 19). A situational analysis involves ‘the specification, re-representation, and subsequent examination of the most salient elements in that situation and their relations’ (Clarke 2005, 29).

Clarke (2005, 145-179) sets out the ways that situational grounded theory can be used for discourse analysis. Such analyses can be done ‘that pursue [...] three areas of substantive focus: (1) negotiating discourses in social relationships/interaction; (2) producing identities and subjectivities through discourse; and (3) producing power/knowledge, ideologies, and control through discourse’ (Clarke 2005, 155). Each of these aspects of discourse analysis are important to my research project. Situational analyses are not concerned with the form of discourse or on narrative or speech forms. Political and ideological discourse is central – the generation of gendered claims and the intention to act on these claims is what makes the community an online social movement. But often the social relationships and interaction through which these claims are generated is also important to the participants, and the negotiation of identities and subjectivities through these relationships and debates is a large part of the political significance of the community. In Clarke’s (2005, 158) explanation, the interest is in ‘how discourses are taken into account in situations where identities and subjectivities are on the line – at issue’. This relates to my claim that feminist bloggers are driven to discursive action at times when their own identity and beliefs are at odds with those of the mainstream – when there is a conflict of worldviews, a rupture or dislocation (Laclau 1996; Rancière 1999).

The theoretical context of my research methods

The concepts of affect and dissensus take a prominent place in my theoretical standpoint, and also impact upon my methodological approach. Lather’s (2007) ‘methodology of getting

lost’ refers to the research practice of allowing oneself to be confused by the results of research, and being open to what research subjects have to say. Lather (2007) argues that researchers can take a stumbling approach to research that enables them to accept contradiction as part of their findings and to trouble research praxis even as research is done. This approach responds to problems with representation and fixed identity in the social sciences (Lather 2007, x). It is about being open to what is being said. Lather (2007, 12) critiques and questions the performance of confidence in research, and pushes researchers to ‘think again’.

One example of this can be found in these interview responses to prepared questions, where notes from my prior participant observation and prior interviews were used as ‘sensitising’ guides for the interview. In the first few interviews, my respondents discussed how they wrote blog posts due to emotional responses to the press. I included a question in later interviews that asked if emotional response was an impetus for writing. Most interviewees agreed with the question, describing the way that they were prompted to write because of an emotional response or impulse. However, three more interviewees disagreed with this characterisation, or qualified it by explaining that it was often an ‘analytical’ response rather than an ‘emotional’ one, although it was still ‘responsive’ to discordant mainstream discourses and experienced as an ‘impulse’ for the blogger. Although I continued to place emphasis on affective response (as interviewees did, on the whole) I used this concept of analytical response or ‘analytical outlet’ in my analysis, even though it did not fit with the overall trend of interview responses. I found it to be a productive disagreement that in fact brought up new questions about the link between affect and the creation of new political claims and counter-hegemonic discourses. This disagreement aided in my analysis, and allowed for analytical nuance and theory-building.

The aim of a triangulated approach to qualitative research is to find difference and to use this difference productively. Flick (2009, 450) calls this ‘difference requiring explanation’ and explains that triangulation has three possible outcomes: converging results, complementary results, and contradictions. All three outcomes are understood as positive, particularly when layered with Lather’s (2007) ‘methodology of getting lost’. A contradictory result leads to questions and productive doubt.

As Gannon and Davies (2007) argue in their chapter on postmodern and poststructural approaches to feminist research:

An account […] is always situated. It is an account from somewhere, and some time, and some one […], written for some purpose and with a particular audience in mind. It is always therefore a partial and particular account, an account that has its own power to produce new ways of seeing and that should always be open to contestation. (Gannon & Davies 2007, 72)

The account is situated within the researchers’ own viewpoint, and from their place of study (Geertz 1994 [1973], 23). Meaning-making as a process in research interviews is a complex process. As Scheurich (1997, 67) says:

Sometimes the participants are jointly constructing meaning, but at other times one of them may be resisting joint constructions. Sometimes the interviewee cannot find the right words to express herself/himself and, therefore, will compromise her/his meaning for the sake of expediency. There may be incidences of dominance and resistance over large or small issues. There may be monologues. There may be times when one participant is talking about one thing but thinking about something else. A participant may be saying what she thinks she ought to say; in fact, much of the interaction may be infused with a shift between performed or censured statements and unperformed and uncensured statements.

These features of interviews mean that transcripts should not be treated simply as decontextualised texts for analysis. Scheurich (1997, 71) argues that interviews should be allowed to carve out a space of their own that overlaps with but is separate to the research project. Allowing for alterity is crucial here, the researcher has to be open to ‘seeing’ or ‘hearing’ resistance (Scheurich 1997, 71). ‘Many times I have asked a question which the respondent has turned into a different question that she or he wants to answer’, explains Scheurich (1997, 71). Thus while there are relations of inequality and power inherent in a research relationship, research participants should not be understood as passive, or indeed as always necessarily actively resisting or submitting to dominance. Scheurich (1997, 72) points out that ‘much of living [...] occurs outside the confines of the dominance/resistance

binary’ and he terms this remainder ‘chaos/freedom’. This is true both of the interview process and the online feminist community itself, where people’s actions may not always be predicated on the negotiation of power, but on play, work, affective investment, and care.

Methods in conclusion

The methods for my research into the discursive aspects of the contemporary Australian women’s movement involve network analysis and iterative navigation of Australian feminist blogging networks, participant observation and discourse analysis of conversations within that community, and semi-structured interviews of community participants chosen for their particular role in the community. It has been an iterative, reflexive research process where I examine my own location in the research. It also reflects a theoretical perspective that draws upon feminist standpoint epistemology and grounded theory approaches, an agonistic understanding of politics, and developments in cultural and political theory around the role of affect in social movements. The combination of network analysis and iterative navigation, discourse analysis and interviews used in my research will help me assess both the locations of subjects in social networks and physical space, and critically examine the discourses through which the movement participants construct and deconstruct their knowledge of the world.

Chapter Two: Conceptualising social media and social movements

‘[I] didn’t know that my blog would change me. That I would come to rely on it so heavily for catharsis and exploration and expression. I didn’t know it would open me up to ridicule from trolls or conflict with others but perhaps I should have been less naive. Happier things have come of it: I have met some fabulous people and will hopefully be meeting some more soon.

This space is mine, still. But it’s yours too. If it means something to you, a little thing, fleetingly, I am so incredibly humbled by that. So honoured.

I hope you don’t mind me changing in front of you.’

- ‘Spilt Milk’ 2010, in ‘What is a blog?’

Introduction

‘Spilt Milk’ draws out the complicated, sometimes difficult relationship she has with her blogging practice, evoking the affective ties that she has to her blog. She has come to rely on it for ‘catharsis and exploration and expression’. But her relationship to her blog is also a relationship with other bloggers. The space is ‘mine’ but it’s also ‘yours’. ‘Spilt Milk’ has changed as a result of her blogging practice, and she is still changing, and ‘changing in front of you’. Through her blog she has come in contact with difficult affects; ‘ridicule from trolls’ and ‘conflict with others’ but also meeting ‘fabulous people’ and being ‘humbled’ and ‘honoured’ from the value that her blog has for others. She hopes others ‘don’t mind’ her changing in front of them.

In this post, ‘Spilt Milk’ explains the way she began writing her blog – on a whim – and the way that blogging has affected her life since she began. This quote expresses the place that blogging can take in people’s lives, and the personal and political significance of that place. It also shows that involvement in blogs has a more difficult, complicated side, signalled in the mention of ‘ridicule’ and ‘conflict’. In this chapter I explore the literature on social media and

social movements that can help us understand the interplay of affect and identification in creating such a sense of importance and of political empowerment for this blogger, and others. I also provide an overview of other literatures that have contributed to my analysis in this thesis.

Social movement theory and the history of social movement studies has informed my research in the study of this social movement, and here I review its uses in internet studies, both past and potential. I also provide an overview of approaches to social movement studies that take into account discursive activism and emotion, such as Melucci’s (1989, 1996) theory of submerged networks and collective identity, and make suggestions about their applicability to online contexts. Social movement theoretical approaches that do not address discursive activism are not relevant to this study. I connect this literature to other fields such as internet research, finding ways that the insights of new social movement theory coincide with findings in the field of media studies. I conclude with a discussion of feminist political theory and theories of agonistic democracy, foregrounding my argument in the empirical chapters to follow.

There are a number of tensions between the fields of internet and new media studies and the research being done by social movement theorists in terms of internet movements. My aim is to analyse these tensions, and discuss ways in which they might be made more productive, in this case by using new social movement theory to look at an Australian feminist blogging network, and arguing for the contributions and contradictions that internet studies can make to this field. How well does social movement theory fit new forms of activism? What is missing from new social movement theory in terms of its capacity to explain contemporary online politics and activism? How can new media research contribute to our understanding of how internet technologies are being used by activists? How well can we understand contemporary feminism using existing social movement theories, and what needs to change to improve this understanding?

Discursive politics

In social movement theory, aspects of social movement activity that are not directed towards traditional political action aimed at states remain undervalued. As a result, despite some theorisation of discursive activism (in particular by feminist social movement scholars), there has been little analysis of online communities and their role in discursive politics. Also, in spite of the growing recognition of culture as a force in social movements, the cultural side of social movements is left out of social movement studies analyses of internet activism. Social movement researchers have focused on online movement mobilisation and organisation rather than on political speech and discursive activism. The role the internet has to play in developing discursive communities has not been adequately explored (Palczewski 2001, 162). While social movement theorists have developed concepts to explain the contributions of discursive politics to social change in contemporary society, these concepts also need to applied to internet use within contemporary social movements.

Research into the discursive impact of social movements online requires a theoretical understanding of politics as discursively constituted, and of discursive politics as action. The concept of the political developed by Laclau and Mouffe (1985) is useful here. In their understanding, the political is the discursively constituted ground on which politics is decided. In such an understanding of politics, the state and institutional politics are only the sedimented practices derived from the negotiation of political values and norms in the past. The actual ground of the political is located in language, in the articulations and dis- articulations of discursive politics. Discursive politics is social, determined by the relations and definitions of inclusion and exclusion from political communities. Mouffe (2005, 51) advocates an understanding of what she calls the political as agonistic in nature, as opposed to dialogic. In other words, discourses are decided upon through oppositional relationships and conflict, rather than the necessity of inclusion as in deliberative democratic theory. The significance of this claim lies both in Mouffe’s understanding of the necessity of collective identity and an oppositional position in political discourse, and in the recognition of the primacy of discourse itself in ‘the political’. This recognition involves defining democracy as based on agonistic discourse rather than simply on the functioning of democratic institutions and representative bodies.

By using an agonistic understanding of democracy, we are able to recognise the part these communities play in disrupting and undermining hegemonic consensus (Marchart 2007, 11). A common criticism of tight-knit networks of bloggers is that bloggers are homophilic, creating political silos or ‘preaching to the converted’ (e.g. Lawrence et al 2010). In a counter-hegemonic network composed of feminists, whose ideas are broadly unpopular or misrepresented in the public sphere, the constitutive outside is in some senses what creates the community, and exclusion is required to enable counter-hegemonic discourses to develop. In this case, the constitutive outside is non-feminist and anti-feminist discourse and those who use it in the mainstream media and everyday conversations. Bloggers set up relations of aversion to mainstream anti-feminist discourse in order to challenge and disarticulate those discourses. One example of this, within the fat acceptance discourse, is the calling out of the common mainstream media practice of broadcasting stock footage of ‘headless fatties’ when discussing the prevalence of obesity in contemporary society. These practices of disarticulating mainstream discourse within a particular discursive space have real political effects. ‘Calling out’ the image of the ‘headless fatty’, and in doing so identifying it as part of a dehumanising discourse, sets up a (both affective and discursive) relation with mainstream discourse. 19 Feminist blogs, rather than being seen as echo chambers with no relevance to real politics, should thus be understood as intentionally created spaces for the development of counter-hegemonic discourses.

Coleman and Ross (2009, 113) argue that the internet opens up spaces for ‘political talk’, which allows for political action. This argument is made under the assumption that such political talk is only productive beyond the individual level once it is opened up to the public sphere. In contrast, I will argue that semi-public, semi-private, seemingly ephemeral spaces are where discursive change and political creativity occurs, and that this politically productive. In their critique of public sphere theory and contemplation of radical democracy,

19 In one satirical example of this discursive intervention, ‘Nicholosophy’ (2010) asks for volunteers to provide stock footage of ‘non-headless fatties’ to remove the need for this stock footage to be used. See blog post at: http://nicholosophy.com/2010/12/remove-the-headless-fatties-from-our-media.html.

Dahlberg and Siapera (2007), along with Dahlgren (2007), recognise that the freedom of participation that the internet public sphere ostensibly allows is limited both in terms of equal access and in terms of the visibility of minority cultures. They acknowledge that within the individualist, consumerist, hyper-libertarian cultures of the internet there can be no possibility of equal participation and recognition (Dahlberg & Siapera 2007, 4). Because of this, minority cultures such as feminism, anti-racism, fat acceptance and feminist motherhood, set up particular venues for the discussion of these themes.

The internet in social movement studies: gaps and omissions

In this section I explore the contributions and connections that can be made between contemporary social movement theory and internet researchers' treatments of online political activism. What are the realities of contemporary social movements and how has social movement theory interpreted these realities? How can other studies of online political networks contribute to social movement studies? How can other theoretical perspectives fill the gaps and omissions left in contemporary social movement theory by changing political communication practices?

Social media have become an increasing part of people’s use of the internet, and activist cultures have developed within these social networks. Networks of political blogs engage with and disrupt the discourses of the mainstream media, by responding to political events with alternative perspectives, by criticising the ideological stances implicit in the media, and by sharing information on systemic injustices and issues not given coverage in the mainstream press. Social networking applications have become spaces in which political protests are organised and planned, as well as the locations of political protest themselves, as will be seen in the case studies and discourse analysis in the chapters to follow.

The field of social movement theory is generally understood to be split between the structural approaches of political process theory and resource mobilisation, and the constructivist or new social movement approach. The first emphasises political opportunities, activist organisations, mobilisation networks, protest events, actions, and resources, and the second emphasises culture, emotions, and collective identity

(Klandermans and Staggenborg 2002, xii; Kurzman 2004, 111-112; Mische 2003; Staggenborg 2008, 84; Tilly 2002, 78). Unfortunately, the role of the internet in social movements has been sidelined in the debates between these approaches, with most studies of internet activism originating from the political process perspective. I argue that this leads to an emphasis on conventional political action and the structural inadequacies of the internet for creating such action.

The problem with studying the internet from a structuralist perspective is that the insights of new social movement theory are lost in understandings of politics online, leaving the roles of identity, emotion, culture and discourse unexamined. This leads to a ‘denial of ‘the political’’ online (Mouffe 2005, 4). The consequence of this gap or omission in social movement studies is the loss of the insights that this body of work can provide in internet studies, and the missing of possibilities for the development of social movement theory through the study of online politics.

Attention to internet activism by researchers of social movement studies has been marginal (Downing 2008). Often, activism that takes place in non-face-to-face contexts has not been considered as significant or worthy of study as face-to-face activism. Elin (2003) discusses the perception that if activism does not involve the body it cannot really be activism. It is perceived as a visible and visceral phenomenon, a spectacle that brings to mind images of a man in front of a tank, flowers thrust in the face of police officers or soldiers, unarmed civilians blinded by pepper spray, or swept off their feet by water cannons. Internet activism seems to have no place amongst these images. ‘Can you really put your body on the line online?’, ask McCaughey and Ayers (2003), and if not, ‘when can a purely textual presence actually cause political change?’ This implies that it is the risk of activism that actually causes the political change, which results in an undervaluing of discursive activism as an aspect of activism that results in concrete individual and societal changes in ways of thinking, living, speaking, consuming, and practising politics.

A broad range of disciplines have explored online activism, but the findings of these studies have yet to be incorporated in the study of social movements (Garrett 2006, 202). The major social movement research journals, such as Mobilization, tend not to publish many studies

that deal explicitly with internet activism. To use that journal as an illustrative example, since the beginning of 2010 only a trickle of research exploring the internet has been published. Mobilization has published work by Earl et al (2010) and Van Laer (2010) on internet social movements during that time period. Van Laer’s (2010) study explored the internet as an information channel in protest planning rather than as a site of activism. Earl et al (2010) provided a meta-analysis identifying the problem of case selection bias in social movement research on the internet. Social movement theorising of online social movements is limited to an examination of the potential for the internet to facilitate conventional protest mobilisation and organisation, as an organisational tool rather than a site of activism (Ayres 1999; Balocchi et al 2008; Diani 2000; Edelman 2001; Staggenborg 2008). The article by Earl et al (2010) provided a meta-analysis that showed this to be the case. The authors introduced a typology of internet activism, and found that some types of internet activism have been studied far more than others. It also found that views varied between scholars on the effects of internet usage on activism, but work rarely diverged from this theme (Earl et al 2010, 426).

Particular kinds of internet activism are removed from consideration in social movement research. There is a disproportionate focus on effects of online organisation on offline activism rather than on forms of online activism (Earl et al 2010). In order to show this, Earl et al’s (2010) article sampled social movement related sites and coded these according to the types of activism on offer or promoted on those sites. They divided internet activism into four different categories; brochure-ware (information distribution), online participation (petitions, letter-writing, website hauntings, and virtual sit-ins or DOS attacks20), online facilitation of offline activism, and online organising and ‘e-movements’ (Earl et al 2010, 426). The paper identifies a bias in the focus of social movement research of internet activism. They found that although ‘[t]he most frequently studied type of Internet activism is

20 DoS attack: An attempt to make a service or networked resource – usually an internet site - unavailable to its intended users through an intentional overload of the system. Usually this involves sending repeated requests to load a webpage such that the server is overloaded and the website goes down or the service is so slow that legitimate users cannot access it.

the online facilitation of offline activism’, when they sampled social movement related sites, only 18% facilitated offline activism at any point, and also found that this was complemented with online actions more than half of the time (Earl et al 2010, 431).

I would argue that the article illustrates another gap or blindness. Most of the work reviewed Earl et al’s (2010) paper comes from a structuralist perspective. While feminist bloggers engage in all of the included types of activism – brochure-ware, online participation, e-movements, and offline activism - from time to time, discursive activism is omitted from these categories in all but the most oblique way. None of the literature reviewed in Earl et al’s (2010, 430) article, comprising over 50 sampled references, covers the type of internet activism explored in this thesis. This is in spite of the fact that discursive activism is indeed a part of social movement theory, as evidenced in the work of Melucci (1989; 1996), Young (1997), Taylor (2010) and so forth.

There are a small number of social movement research texts that deal with discursive politics in online spaces in limited ways. I review them here, and follow with a review of social movement theory that could be productively applied to online discursive activism. I argue that there are significant contributions that social movement theory can make to studies of internet activism. I also argue that there are gaps and contradictions in these theories that can be productively explored to develop social movement research into discursive activism.

New social movement theory and internet activism

While studies of alternative media and contemporary studies of social movements share many of the same concerns and interests, they tend to run in parallel rather than make use of each others’ findings (Downing 2008). Cohen & Rai’s edited collection Global Social Movements (2004), Downing’s Radical Media (2001) and Van de Donk et al.’s Cyberprotest (2004) are some of the few volumes devoted to online activism from the perspective of social movement studies. Atton’s (2003) work on social movement media takes seriously the role of the internet in the future of social movements, with particular reference to Indymedia, using a new social movement approach. He argues that ‘[h]istorical accounts’ of

social movements have tended to essentialise media, ‘seeing them as immanent, structural forces rather than processes of symbolic struggle’ (Atton 2003, 5).

Meanwhile, social movement researchers are leaving culture, identity, and emotions out of research into internet social movements, despite the considerable insights of social movement studies around these very themes. Meyer & Tarrow (1998, 14) have noted that the internet has led to innovations in information sharing, and enabled activist networks to expand across geographic and social boundaries. There has also been some interesting work done on the role of the internet in the diffusion of social movement frames, repertoires, and ideology (Ayres 1999). The idea of diffusion relates to the ways in which activists in one struggle borrow elements from activists in another struggle (McAdam & Rucht 1993, 56). Ayres (1999, 137) argues that the internet ‘removes barriers to the rapid diffusion of protest ideas, tactics, and strategies’. This is apparent in the extent to which many Australian feminist bloggers draw upon American and other international ways of thinking and doing feminism. The strong cultural and interpersonal linkages that have developed between Australian and United States feminist bloggers have allowed for this diffusion of movement strategy and ideas (Ayres 1999, 134). However, this is again an instrumental view of culture in movements, that sees the diffusion of ideas as mechanisms that will allow political action to take place, rather than as being political in themselves.

Social movement researchers tend to focus on the instrumental, structural impacts of information and communication online. In Diani’s (2000, 388) comparison of 'virtual' and 'real' social movement networks, he acknowledges the potential of the internet to affect political activism by reducing the costs of communication, encouraging broader discussion, and allowing ease of access to information. Diani (2000) asks very pertinent questions about whether new types of activism will arise from internet use and whether the 'virtual' and the 'real' are in fact separate. However, Diani (2000, 389-390) privileges ‘direct’ (that is, face-to- face) communication over non face-to-face communication, draws a dichotomy between public and private modes of communication, and considers online communication as ‘disembodied’ communication, because the anonymity of participants breaks with the conventional concept of the public sphere.

This is a problematic understanding of anonymity and embodiment in the context of contemporary internet studies. In a discussion of online social networks, della Porta and Diani (2006) state that ‘[e]mpirical evidence on the type of ties established by CMC [Computer-Mediated Communication] so far is mixed’. Some show ‘some degree of solidarity and mutual trust’ while others suggest that online relationships need to be backed up by ‘real social linkages’ in order to develop the levels of trust required for a true community. Staggenborg (2008, 41) sees the internet as an extension or expansion of the possibilities of non face-to-face communication in movements, where the internet ‘provides a quick, low cost means of reaching a large number of potential supporters’. Garrett's (2006) work supports this, showing that lower communication costs can increase communication and the benefits of participation.

Social movement studies research has focused on the communication of existing social movements and the spreading of information, while leaving out online social networks, collective identity, and discursive communities. The emphasis in these studies has been on the internet’s potential for facilitating ‘the emergence of resistance’ which is understood to occur in offline contexts, rather than on online forms of activism (Eschle & Maiguashca 2007, 285). Garrett’s (2006, 205) work reflects this understanding, with its emphasis on the way that information technology reduces ‘costs associated with publishing and accessing movement information’, a technological understanding of new media that ignores its social dimensions.

The emphasis on cost effectiveness again misses the social and discursive potentials of the internet for social movements – communication online is not only free, it is also different (Palczewski 2001, 163). Staggenborg (2008) and Garrett (2006) emphasise the organisational potential of the internet as the most important topic of research for social movement theorists, rather than its discursive potential. However, Staggenborg (2008) elsewhere acknowledges the critical importance of culture and submerged networks, arguing that ‘we need to look for social movement activity in a variety of venues rather than only in publicly visible protests targeted at states’ (Staggenborg 2008, 84).

The contributions of social movement theory that see identity, culture, and emotion as political in themselves are most important for the purposes of my study. The rare works that make use of these aspects of social movement theory in the study of internet movements are outlined here. These are the texts that are most closely aligned with my own viewpoint as a researcher. Bennett and Toft’s (2008) study of identity and narratives in social movement networks explains that although ‘persistent, large-scale activist networks’ do not ‘occur effortlessly online’, these forms of social movement are only one small part of what is happening in terms of social movements on the internet. They affirm the greater attention paid to collective identity, meaning creation, and the contestation of codes (Melucci 1996, in Bennett & Toft 2008, 253). Drawing on new social movement theory and frame analysis, they explore the flow of narratives and identity in online spaces, although they conclude that other types of activity such as protests and campaigns are required ‘in order to create sustainable and effective movements’ (Bennett & Toft 2008, 247).

Palczewski’s (2001) study of cyber-movements as examples of counterpublics takes political talk seriously as a social movement activity. She talks about the ways that 'critical oppositional discourses' might be able to develop in online counterpublics (Palczewski 2001, 161). She concludes that ‘evidence of cyber-movements’ ability to generate alternative validity claims is yet to be seen’ (Palczewski 2001, 168). The implication of her argument is that communities that do develop oppositional discourses can be understood as social movements. As will be seen in subsequent chapters, bloggers in Australian feminist blogging networks fit this description, developing oppositional discourses and alternative validity claims through the challenging of societal norms.

Collective identity and submerged networks

New social movement theorists have already developed concepts to explain sociality and discursive activism in social movements, namely the concepts of collective identity and submerged networks. The significance of these concepts for the study of online social movements lies in the recognition in these concepts of the role of discourse in social movements, rather than focusing on social movement organisation and traditional political

action targeted at states. In this section I explore these concepts, but also critique the instrumentality of the ways that they are described.

Collective identity is understood as a precondition for movement success for social movement theorists, particularly from the new social movement theory tradition, although the concept of identity work also has appeal outside of NSM approaches. Della Porta and Diani (2006) define collective identity as negotiated over time through shared experiences. They affirm its role in explaining the maintenance of social movement groups over time, and allowing for the role of emotions in social movement activity. Klandermans (1994) sees collective identity as transient and dependent on context. Hunt et al (1994) emphasise the way that identity is socially constructed through framing processes that participants identify with and contribute to.

The concept of collective identity has been forced to do too much in social movement theory, which obscures aspects of political action that take place at this level, including discursive action but also the building of affective relationships for their own sake rather than for social movement expediency. Polletta and Jasper (2001, 284-285) argue that collective identity has been treated as a residual category to explain what cannot be explained otherwise, and thus has been used as a catch-all term for anything non-structural – the role of emotions in social movements, expressive aspects of action, the social categories of actors, and the collective definition of a problem.

The most useful and insightful uses of collective identity are Verta Taylor’s (1996; see also Taylor & Whittier 1992) concept and aspects of Melucci’s (1989; 1996) understanding of collective identity. This is because their explanation of collective identity as a process contributes to an idea of personal political involvement that is an end in itself. Kaminski and Taylor (2008, 49) argue that collective identity involves the negotiation of oppositional culture, as well as the negotiation of boundaries. This resonates with ideas of the ‘constitutive outside’ from radical democratic theory in which actors are able to develop and maintain spaces for counter-hegemonic discourse through the setting up of discursive boundaries (Natter & Jones III 1997, 146). These identity markers are contingent and dependent on hegemonic discourses to define against.

The concept of submerged networks seeks to understand what happens within social movements at the non-visible level, and in the course of everyday life. Submerged networks are made up of the relationships between participants in social movements that are hidden from public view, through which people communicate and exchange information with each other, while also negotiating a collective identity and developing a sense of belonging (Melucci 1996, 67). Melucci’s (1996, 115) concept of submerged networks expands the definition of social movement networks to include informal, discursive communities.

In this model, submerged networks are as critical to social movements as the contentious politics that make up their visible part, and help explain the maintenance and development of the social movements themselves (Staggenborg 2008, 84). Melucci (1995, 41; 1996, 30) sees social movement communities as having a unique capacity to ‘break the rules of the game’ by expanding the limits of possible social behaviour and discourse. The contribution of Melucci’s (1996) work is his theorisation of cultural codes as part of political activism, even if, as Papacharizzi (2010, 40) argues, he ‘implied that such language shifts are ineffectual’. Melucci distinguishes between ‘political actors’ engaged in ‘action for reform, inclusion, new rights, the opening of the boundaries of the political systems, redefinition of the political rules, and so on’ and those who are ‘addressing the issues in a pure cultural form, or in pure cultural terms’ (Melucci 1996, 36). While Melucci (1996) gives primacy to the latter cultural work, discussing how activists engage in ‘challenging codes’, he also sets up a false dichotomy. I argue that discursive activism is itself ‘action for reform, inclusion, new rights, [...] redefinition of [political] rules, and so on’ (Melucci 1996, 36). Institutionalised aspects of the political are as discursively and culturally determined as the limits of social behaviour. Beyond coercive and violent regimes, political institutions rely on discursive politics for their legitimacy.

When social movement action is split into the political and the cultural, emotion and identity are conceived as the cognitive preconditions for organisation and political action, rather than as political in themselves (Young, 1997). This tendency in social movement theory to ‘view (political) structures as noncultural’ has hampered theorisation of the role of culture in social movements (Polletta 2004, 97). Young also (1997, 156-165) criticises Melucci’s (1996)

conception of submerged networks in her work on the discursive politics of the feminist movement. While new social movement theorists have come to acknowledge the importance of cultural change as an outcome of social movement activity, this remains located at the level of identity. Social movement actors are thought to participate in social movements for psychological rather than political reasons, in order to affirm their own identity, and this is ‘a formulation that depoliticises these movements’ (Young 1997, 158).

In order to map the relationship between culture, politics, and social change, social movement theory needs to address its own epistemological contradictions, and develop a toolkit that can adequately address discursive politics in online social movements. Polletta (2006, 5) urges social movement theorists to ‘flesh out the discursive and organizational mechanisms by which culture defines the bounds of strategic choice, rather than locating those mechanisms in people's heads’. This recognises that the field of social movement research is an especially useful field in which to discover the relationship between culture, structure, and political efficacy. Downing (2001, 24) notes that ‘[i]t is on the edge of being weird that there is so little systematic analysis of communication or media in the social movement literature’. Although studies of alternative media and political communication grew throughout the period of the 2000s, he points out that the two main journals for social movement scholars, Mobilization and Social Movement Studies, rarely cover the media dimensions of social movements, particularly new media and social media (Downing 2008, 41). As we have seen earlier in this chapter, this is still the case.

The internet and other forms of media are often relegated to being simply ‘technological message channels’ rather than as ‘the complex sociotechnical institutions they are’ [emphasis his] (Downing 2008, 41). Palczewski (2001) argues that studies of the political impact of online activism have focused on political participation and information access, while not taking into account developments in understandings of discursive politics, including counterpublics and new social movement theory. As a result, she explains, studies of social movements online have replicated ‘both traditional social movement studies’ focus on the state and modernists’ limited understandings of political participation’ (Palczewski 2001, 162). The internet is part of a broader cultural change that impacts on the ways people

use and consume the media (Meikle 2004, 76). This has significance for social movements, the processes of which will continue to change as society changes.

Feminist social movement theory and discursive activism

Contemporary social movements (though perhaps not only contemporary social movements) are often more ‘embodied and sensual than deliberative and representational’ (McDonald 2006, 4). As Jasper (1997, 5) has pointed out, protest extends beyond the organised activities traditionally understood as protests, to practices such as ignoring social rules, whistle-blowing, and public complaints and criticisms, including those that take place in conversations around the water cooler. This is very much in line with an approach which moves away from cognitive and psychologised understandings of identity and political subjectivity, and approaches that separate the political from the cultural.

Within social movement theory, feminist researchers have done much to legitimise discursive activism as a part of protest. Recently, Laube (2010) researched women feminist PhD sociologists and acts of discursive protest in academia. She argues that social movement theory ‘must move beyond restrictive notions of potential movement targets, activists, locations, and strategies; and past narrow conceptualizations of collective action and movement goals’ (Laube 2010, 3). However, this research, like Katzenstein’s (1995) work on discursive activism within the Catholic church, focuses on activism that takes place in an institutional context. Interestingly, Laube’s focus is on ‘geographically dispersed’ activism, which recognises that social movement action can take place on an individual level outside formal activist organisations simply as a result of shared values. This resonates with feminist bloggers’ description of how they engage in personal acts of resistance which, though not collective, ‘have collective consequences’ (Laube 2010, 7). This resistance grounded in identity and shaped by the institutions in which actors live, work, and play allows a movement to continue its work even when its adherents are geographically separate and occupy myriad social locations (Laube 2010, 7).

Feminist social movement theorists have often helped to find the gaps in the broader social movement theory. For example, the work of Susan Gal (2003) on the circulation of discourses about women, finds that social movements’ diffusion theory – the theory of the way that ideas spread between movement groups – does not pay enough attention to the ways in which ideas change as they travel (Gal 2003, 96). She advocates being deliberately agnostic about the origin of ideas ‘and writing, instead, a self-conscious genealogy of feminisms in motion – understanding such a history to be itself a discursive act with political consequences’ (Gal 2003, 98). This theoretical step gets to the heart of my argument about discursive activism in this thesis:

Rather than looking for the origins of political ideas, one assumes that origins are multiple and the version activated in any instance is constructed within already existing political debates. Accordingly, one important effect of movement relies on intertextuality to create or support a sense of sociocultural continuity vs. rupture. Another is to introduce categories of politicized subjectivity – in excess of local/foreign – that can then become the focus of further debate and activism. (Gal 2003, 117)

Such an understanding of discursive negotiation and political subjectivity is helpful for a study that originates in questions about the ‘legacy’ of Australian feminism. It recognises that the past is relevant and is implicated in the present moment, when old discourses are activated or re-activated. Some of the discussions (described later in this thesis) can be seen as repetitive of old debates within feminism. Certainly intersectional negotiations and conflicts originate in and bring up past conflicts within feminism. Continuity of feminist thought, including what Norval (2007) calls ‘inheritance’, is interwoven with the ruptures and conflicts of the moment. The past and the future are part of the conversation. Likewise, ‘Australian feminism’ is inextricably tied up with international (primarily United States) social justice and feminist discourses.

Feminist social movement theory, through its insights into discursive activism and subjectivity as a central part of political action, opens up a space for a different kind of research into online social movements. Beyond the organisational, structural, and even processual approaches to the study of social movements shown in Earl’s (et al, 2010) meta-

analysis of online social movement research, the work of feminist social movement scholars provide the opportunity for an exploration of how the internet is being used for discursive activism. Taylor’s (2010, 121) ideas of collective identity are particularly instructive in this sense. In her work with Nancy Whittier, she sees collective identity as:

[A] socially constructed, politically strategic, and continually contested process that involves the formation of boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ the creation of group consciousness that brings about an emotional investment in the identity, and the deployment of identity for strategic and political purposes. (Taylor 2010, 121)

This description anticipates many of my own findings regarding the elements of the community under analysis: the discursive boundaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the development of identity, the co-creation of claims, affective investment, and finally discursive activism. Taylor (2010, 116) explains that she has increasingly seen collective identity and oppositional culture as important in social movements, an insight that was crucial to her development of the concept of abeyance structures. As time went on, she continued to make changes in her thinking as a result of her research:

While the structural concepts of resource mobilization theory had considerable pay-off in my early work, studying women’s movements ultimately forced me to struggle with issues such as collective identity, emotions, and culture as they relate to collective action. (Taylor 2010, 116)

Taylor’s work with Nancy Whittier (Taylor & Whittier 1992) was considered path-breaking on the subject of collective identity. In a retrospective article looking back on this piece, she explains that:

The notion of identity – that is, how contentious actors define themselves both to themselves and to others, how this influences their worldviews, and how it shapes their tactics and strategies – lurks behind the talk, discourse, collective displays, and practices of activist groups. (Taylor 2010, 121)

Despite some clear similarities, however, I am at odds with the epistemological assumptions behind this framework. The framework leaves out crucial aspects of the process, about how these aspects of collective identity link and what part of this is understood as political (all of it, or only that part of it that is strategically deployed?).

Social movement theorists have begun to recognise the role of emotion in political action through new social movement theory and other strands of social movement theory that explore culture and identity. They have attempted to ‘depathologise’ the ‘emotions of protest’ (Gould 2010, 19). In doing so, however, they have tended to ‘conceptually tam[e]’ emotion in their attempts to ‘offer a corrective’ to the assumption of rationality (Gould 2010, 20-23). As Gould (2010, 24) explains, in this conception of affect ‘cognition precedes political feelings and the latter become almost rational in the sense that they flow directly, expectedly, and coherently from cognitive processing’. There is little space in this for political emotions that are seen as unreasonable or excessive.

Social construction of identity has become paradigmatic in most social and political theories, including social movement theory (Kurzman 2004; McDonald 2006, 27). As Nash (2000, 116) argues, the inclusion of culture and emotion in social movement theory while maintaining previous assumptions (such as rationalism) leads to inconsistencies in the theory of social movements and conflicting definitions of politics. Polletta and Jasper (2001, 284) argue that ideas of culture and collective identity have been used in social movement theory in a way that tries to fill the gaps of ‘structuralist, rational-actor, and state-centered models’, to explain what those models miss, thereby using culture and identity as a ‘residual category’.

In social movement theory, the treatments of emotion, collective identity, and framing have emerged from a need to explain things that could not be explained from within the structuralist tradition without abandoning a structuralist approach. Jasper (2007, 60) considers these aspects were ‘sprinkled atop’ structuralist approaches. For one example of the way this works, Van Dyke and McCammon (2010, xvii) argue for the importance of social ties and culture to social movement coalitions. However they do so with an understanding of social ties and culture that is highly structural, and that pays little attention to affective motivations (Van Dyke & McCammon 2010). Social ties facilitate involvement in social

movements structurally rather than because of affective relations between actors. Additionally, ‘ideological alignment’ is seen as important, but treated as coincidental rather than co-constructed (Van Dyke & McCammon 2010), such as through the creation of negotiated oppositional discursive definitions.

I argue that ideological alignment is as much negotiated discursively within networks of activists as it is a reason to join networks of activists. The meaning-making elements of protest are often lost in purposive understandings of protest, in which protest is seen as being in pursuit of clear rights and forms of inclusion (Jasper 1997, 12), or as based solely in a movement towards distributive justice (Young 1990, 70). This approach leads to an emphasis on protest efficiency or effectiveness over concerns with experience and the affective role of political involvement. Action is seen as ‘shaped by intentionality or goals’, in a progressive movement towards freedom (McDonald 2006, 17). The significance of discourse is limited to a strategic role of convincing ‘a wide and diverse audience of the necessity for and utility of collective attempts to redress them’ (McCarthy et al 2006, 291). The concept of ‘framing’ fulfils this role, in particular, for political process theorists – framing processes constrain and determine collective action repertoires (McCarthy 1996). This grammar delegitimizes certain kinds of social action and privileges others, such as political organisations and parties.

The view of social movements I choose to pursue sees political subjectivity as central to the political, identity as central rather than psychological, and the spread of ideas as much more than strategic or as simply another resource for social movements. Discourse is used intertextually (Gal 2003, 117) within the Australian feminist blogging community – ideas and claims are taken from other feminist discourses and mainstream discourses, but they are then challenged, pushed, and reapplied in new ways. The idea of rupture (Gal 2003, 117) is one that relates to the intersubjective challenge of intersectional feminism. It is a politics that asks; ‘Does this apply to me? Does this exclude me? Why or why not?’, and allows for development and change in feminist discourse in a specific context.

Political dissonance, subjectivity, and affect

The concepts of dissonance, dissensus and dislocation have considerable force for understanding discursive politics. In order to develop an understanding of discursive activism that allows for the inclusion of political subjectivity, I draw on the work of Laclau and Mouffe (1985), and individual works by Laclau (1996), and Mouffe (2000; 2005) around dislocation. Dislocation is the ‘process by which the contingency of discursive structures comes to be seen’ (Howarth 2000, 109). I also make use of Rancière (1999) and Ziarek’s (2001) work on ‘dissensus’.

The word dissonance is an aural metaphor for an affective dislocation. There is a conflict between a person’s understanding of the world and the discourses and events of mainstream society. The notion of dislocation articulated by Laclau (1996, 67) enables the agency of individuals to be retained, by preventing the possibility of structural determinism. Dislocation refers to events that disrupt the discursive structure; events that resist symbolisation and domestication (Torfing 1999, 149).

The advantage of these concepts as they are outlined by Rancière (1999; 2010), Laclau (1996) and others, is that they make explicit the link between discursive formations and sedimented discourses, political subjectivity and agency, and the role of affect in social movement activity. Within social movement theory, similar concepts have also been used. What Jasper (1997, 129) calls a ‘moral shock’ is an event or piece of information that upsets a protestor to the point that they ‘become open to the possibility of protest’. This concept is very useful to understand the role that emotions play in social movements, contributing to understandings of changes in political subjectivity and agency as part of social movements. It resonates with the notions of ‘rupture’ and ‘dislocation’ from the work of Rancière (1999; 2010) And Laclau (1996).

Politics or the political takes place at the level of constitutive discourse – an oppositional struggle of competing hegemonies. My understanding of ‘the political’ is aligned with that of Chantal Mouffe (2005) which also relates to Rancière’s (1999) concept of ‘politics’. Both of these terms are defined in opposition to the institutional and electoral politics that is

generally understood as the political in a mainstream sense (Mouffe 2005; Rancière 1999). Laclau and Mouffe (1985) see political (and economic) structures as discursively constructed. Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985, 36) concept of democratic politics is one in which the object of struggle is not necessarily individual or group material gains, but ‘forms of articulating forces that will allow these gains to be consolidated’. This is an agonistic understanding rather than a deliberative understanding of democracy (Mouffe 2005). In this way, competing discourses are central to the power struggles of which politics is composed.

Discursive politics is linked to political subjectivity and identity. As Norval (2007, 1) asks, ‘How do we account for the articulation of political demands and its relation to the constitution of political identity and community?’. Norval (2007, 5-6) places an emphasis on the emergence of claims that arise from ordinary activities. She talks about a sense of restiveness or dissatisfaction with the system that gives rise to the articulation of new political grammars that:

[Delimit] a horizon of what is sayable and doable at any given point in time, as well as what we may expect from others and what others may expect from us in the articulation of claims upon one another. (Norval 2007, 8)

This notion of political grammar resonates with the active negotiation that develops over time in the Australian feminist blogging community. As we will see, participants speak not only as women or feminists, but also as people with particular experiences of the world that intersect with other privileges and oppressions: racism and ableism, for instance, but also identity markers such as being a mother or being fat, in the case of the Feminist Parenting and Fat Acceptance sub-communities. The differences among the community participants lead to the need to negotiate ‘what we may expect from others’ (Norval 2007, 8) within the network. The discourse that takes place within feminist communities does not only serve to stake claims upon or against mainstream discourse, but also negotiates feminist discourse itself.

Feminist political theory and new discourse theory provide an understanding of subjectivity that allows for (feminist political) agency while denying essentialism. As Hekman (1995, 86)

argues, ‘action and agency are themselves discursive products, not the exclusive attributes of the modernist subject’. As I have shown, feminism refuses ‘to assume away personal experience (or subject position)’ (Griffiths 1995, 56). Just as Foucauldian poststructuralists see the subject as grounded in discourse, poststructuralist feminists see political subjectivity as ‘simultaneously discursive and political’ (Hekman 1995, 97). Combined, these perspectives produce a nuanced account of political action.

In this thesis, I am interested in ‘the way social agents 'live out' their identities and act’ (Howarth & Stavrakakis 2000, 12). Subjectivity is a product of discourse, and not simply a mouthpiece for discourse. The concepts of subjectivity and identity form the basis of the political as understood by theorists such as Laclau and Mouffe (1985). And as Rancière shows, nothing is political in itself, but becomes so when it clashes with the police order (that is, institutionalised politics) (Norval 2007, 77). Democracy is an ‘interruptive moment in which new subjects come into existence’ (Norval 2007, 79). Identity is not fixed, but constantly changes in the process of articulation (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 70). Howarth (2000, 9) explains that:

[D]iscourses are concrete systems of social relations and practices that are intrinsically political, as their formation is an act of radical institution which involves the construction of antagonisms and the drawing of political frontiers between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’.

This is a non-essentialist view of identity and subjectivity, which is compatible with Melucci’s (1996, 67) understanding of identity as ‘constructed through interactions and negotiations’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 98). Melucci understands identity as a process rather than as something that is contained within the individual; his use of the verb ‘identize’ signifies this process (Melucci 1995; Mueller 2003, 276). However, Laclau and Mouffe’s way of understanding identity differs from Melucci’s (1996) understanding of identity. This is because the construction of identity is understood as a political - as opposed to a cognitive or ideological - process and one that is constrained by the political. Although identity is constructed, it is never fully determined - there is no social identity that is protected from ‘a discursive exterior that deforms it’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 111).

Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) concepts of identity, subjectivity, hegemony and the political are compatible with the insights of new social movement theories. They allow for the importance of identity and emotions but also recognise that the construction of identity and affect do not simply lay the groundwork for political action. They are themselves political practices. Laclau and Mouffe (1985, 96) emphasise that a ‘discursive structure’ is not a cognitive entity, but rather an ‘articulatory practice which constitutes and organises social relations’. Laclau and Mouffe (1985, 108) understand discourse as material rather than mental in character. Discursive politics embraces all social practices and relations, not just the purely cultural or conceptual (Howarth 2000, 101).

An understanding of politics that extends to discursive interpretation and constitution is compatible with both feminism and new discourse theory. Feminists have the capacity to effect discursive change and this can be an intentional political act. Images, metaphors, and language itself are ‘sites of cultural and political contestation’ (Balsamo 1999, 154). Discourses are ‘relational entities’ that depend on ‘their differentiation from other discourses’, which is articulated by discursive actors (Howarth 2000, 103). ‘In A Strange Land’ illustrates this when she notes:

When I read [entries] by feminist bloggers, what I read is women reflecting on their own experience, reflecting on other women’s experience, and from there, working towards an understanding of patterns of power, patterns of domination, patterns of oppression. Patterns that reflect the reality of women’s lives. But somehow, because this is not grand politics, because it is centred in women’s lived experience, it is not regarded as real, and valid, and worthy of discussion. (‘In A Strange Land’ 2010, ‘But the Personal Is Political’)

Such statements demonstrate Norval’s (2007, 14) point that ‘one needs an account of language that takes ordinary language seriously’. Despite the inclusion of subjectification and identification in the work of Laclau (1996) and Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Norval (2007, 11) argues that the ‘role of practices, passions and the visceral dimensions of identification’ have been undertheorised in all of these theorists’ work. Norval (2007, 71) argues that the really groundbreaking part of the work that Laclau and Mouffe have done in political theory is that they have provided the tools to conceptualise affective devices such as sarcasm,

satire, hyperbole and other affective devices and language use in the political process. Tomlinson’s (2010) work on ‘textual vehemence’ contributes to an understanding of the political uses of ordinary language. ‘Textual vehemence’ here refers to rhetorical devices that draw on affective uses of language (Tomlinson 2010). Tomlinson argues that ‘rhetorics of ‘textual vehemence’ – moments of textual ridicule, irony, indignation, or intensification – work to create claims about the proper nature of our social life’ (Tomlinson, 2010, 23). This has particular significance for blogging cultures that regularly use sarcasm, irony, and hyperbole to challenge hegemonic discourses.

Conclusion

While social movement theory addresses the role of emotion and culture, its understanding of these aspects is incomplete. The discussion of culture and emotion within social movement studies treats them as a residual category intended to cover aspects of protest that are not explained by structural, process-based understandings of social movements. The characterisation of discursive politics as only a precondition for activism rather than a form of activism, and as a residual category in social movement theory, originates from underlying epistemological assumptions about political subjectivity and identity. There is a lack of social movement research – particularly in the area of internet social movements – that understands discourse as the central ground of politics and social change. However, the work that has been done within the social movement tradition on identity, culture and emotions is insightful and is ripe for being combined with the work that is being done in different academic traditions on political subjectivity and affect. The following chapters provide evidence to show that discourse and affect are not residual categories but central explanatory categories for politics.

The internet, in the context of social movement studies, should not be understood only as a tool for communication and organisation but also as a space for sociality and discursive activism. This is the gap in social movement studies literature on internet activism that feminist traditions and new discourse theories fill. Rather than simply being technological add-ons for social movement organisation and dissemination, internet communities extend the sphere of the social, the ground on which social movements exist.

Chapter Three: Identity and political subjectivity

It’s a curious fact that many women find motherhood is one experience which galvanises their feminist spirit. Whilst completing what might seem to be decidedly non-feminist actions in their daily lives, a lot of mothers are thinking. A lot.

‘Spilt Milk’ (2009)

I’ve always considered myself a feminist but I didn’t have to put it into practice until I became a mother. Experiencing and seeing the prejudices that still exist has served only to fuel the fire in my belly and double my determination to fight against it.

‘Noble Savage’, in a comment on ‘Spilt Milk’ (2009)

Introduction

‘Spilt Milk’ was a young mother when she started to blog in November 2008. A friend of hers had told her that she should start a blog because a mutual friend had one and she felt that ‘Spilt Milk’ had a lot to say. As a stay at home mum, ‘Spilt Milk’ often felt that she needed more stimulation and interaction with other people than her life looking after her small child allowed her, so she began to write about her expectations and frustrations. In the first month, she wrote about how she feels guilty about shirking housework, and the pressures of being expected to be perfect as a mother, to keep another human being alive and not only alive but entertained, well-fed, and clean. Gradually she found and was found by other feminist bloggers, and over time her focus evolved. She began to engage with other feminist bloggers and write in response to their posts, as well as in response to her own life and experiences. Later she got involved in some other political issues, including Fat Acceptance

politics. She wrote for other blogs, including guest blogging spots at the Australian fat acceptance blog Fat Lot of Good21 and the international group feminist blog Feministe22.

Bloggers changed their feminist identity through their participation in writing and interacting through blogging. Writing and thinking, in concert with the experiences of their own lives, ‘fueled the fire’ of their feminism - particularly in terms of motherhood and disability issues. For many, motherhood forced them to put feminism ‘into practice’ because of their experience of prejudice. Blogging also gave them the opportunity to share these same experiences. Feminist bloggers make links between identity change and the political. Indeed, identity and identity change were important themes in our interviews. Bloggers felt that even if the nominal parts of their identity had not changed, in the sense that they had always identified as a feminist, the substance of that identity – its meaning – had changed a lot.

Alongside personal and collective identity, women are also building a sense of momentum, necessity and investment in feminist politics through their participation in feminist discourse. They individually and collectively build narratives, themes and discourses around what feminism means to them. Sometimes these negotiations involved conflict and disagreement, sometimes not. I found that women’s involvement in blogging enables them to construct their identity and personal experiences using feminist and intersecting discourses, and also to participate in the negotiation of these discourses based on their own experiences.

This chapter begins the process of linking findings with my theoretical approach, to explore the relationship between collective identity and political subjectivity. For example, bloggers described blogging as a practice designed to inform others. In interviews this practice was sometimes framed as ‘educational’. Ideas of self-education and self-improvement formed a second and related finding around a similar theme. Through identity negotiation and

21 Available at: http://www.fatlotofgood.org.au/

22 Available at: http://www.feministe.us/blog/

change, women can articulate their experiences in ways that draw upon feminist discourses and build new discourses and feminist claims. Through a case study of the feminist parenting movement, I develop a theoretical position on these findings, based on the ideas of identity and dislocation, dissensus, and aversive democracy discussed in the previous chapter.

Narratives of participation

‘Spilt Milk’s’ blogging journey, as described at the start of this chapter, coincided with the timeline of my research study. There are dozens of other stories, gleaned in interviews, about the process of starting and maintaining their blogs. Bloggers become involved in the community in a variety of ways. Feminist identity is claimed (and disclaimed) in different ways by different people. Here I draw out the processes and mechanisms in a blogger’s changing sense of self, including how that sense of self is publicised. Of the 21 participants with whom I conducted interviews, many became interested in blogging as a result of friends blogging. Some began writing in order to keep in touch with existing acquaintances, others did so in order to develop their writing skills, as an outlet for political discussion and ‘venting’, and sometimes in order to participate in the community of feminists that they had found by reading blogs online. The owner-administrator of Hoyden About Town, ‘TigTog’, came to feminist blogging networks through her involvement in Usenet newsgroups:

[B]ecause I started from, coming from a newsgroup background and most of the people I interacted with in on the newsgroups were American, and a few Europeans but mostly American. So when I started reading blogs I was following the links that my existing internet friends recommended which tended to be mostly North American, so all my initial blogging experience was with North American blogs. And then I started looking around for Australian blogs and linking with the Australian blogosphere and I’m not sure how common that particular trajectory was. (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2009)

Helen, from Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony, also began blogging quite early, and had a similar experience:

I suppose [in the beginning] I mainly focused on the American blogs simply because there were so many American blogs compared to the Australian blogosphere which was really quite tiny [then]. (‘Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony’, in interview, 2010)

Later Helen explained that in describing how she came to blogging, she ‘should have started with Usenet and forums because of course they were the matrix that the blogs came out of’. These examples demonstrate that particularly among the older participants, familiarity with and participation in internet discussion traditions dating back as least as far as Usenet provided them with a legacy of experience of feminist political discussions. This might be contrasted with how younger feminist bloggers came across feminist ideas online, such as Chally in the below example, by searching for feminist websites on Google. This was not only a matter of age, since some older bloggers had only recently developed these participatory practices, but of experience and familiarity with technology.

Some bloggers came across other feminist blogs after they began blogging, and only began to frame their blogs in those terms after a period of time. On the other end of the spectrum, Chally Kacelnik (in interview, 2009), writer of the blog Zero at the Bone, and contributor to several others, explained that she ‘started developing feminist consciousness in 2007’. She ‘began to realise that maybe this movement would be a helpful way to frame my experiences and try to do some of the social justice work I’d been wanting to do’. She was looking for feminist voices online, and aimed to develop contacts within that community:

I started searching [on Google] for feminist websites, and I came across all sorts of different feminist blogs and it was such a vibrant community and there were so many different voices putting forward feminist thought in terms of their own experiences and in terms of theory and in terms of stories they’d found in the news and all sorts of things, and I thought what a beautiful world that I’d love to be a part of. This was throughout the middle of 2008, but that year I was doing the [Higher School Certificate]23 and I figured that it’d probably be a good idea to focus on my studies rather than getting into this whole little world. So I said I won’t start my blog until November 2008, and that will be my reward. And that’s how I got into

23 Higher School Certificate: New South Wales High School completion exams

feminist blogging and ever since then it was just a matter of networking and just digging in deeper and finding new voices. (Chally Kacelnik, in interview, 2009)

Chally was motivated to participate in the community through her existing feminist identity, in order to seek out likeminded others. Once she had found her way in to the community, the building of links of attention and feeling began. She came to the community on the basis of feminist identity, and then built affective attachments within it. Other bloggers were motivated to participate in blogging networks by lifestyle factors such as raising children at home, chronic illness or disability, or as an outlet for political feeling or analysis, and different combinations of these. They were motivated by the desire to develop their writing skills and thinking, as well as to form relationships with likeminded people. Existing relationships in other online networks, such as by meeting other feminist women in broader, often male-dominated Australian political blogging networks and through Usenet and other online forums, contributed to some women’s practice. Through the rest of this chapter I draw out some of the themes that bloggers used to describe their involvement and commitment in feminist blogging networks, beginning with education.

Education and outreach

A recurring theme in interviews was the idea of being an educator, of assisting others to find out about feminism and to think about social issues in new ways. What part does pedagogy play in the practice of feminist bloggers? It was described by bloggers as a process through which participants come across ideas and seek information that helps them to make sense of their lives and experiences. It is about making feminist claims audible to new people in new ways. My interview participants expressed this idea frequently, and also expressed the necessity of being sensitive about how to do this, along with their anxieties about how best to perform outreach in a community that is occasionally quite insular and self-contained. Bloggers wrote about their hopes that what they write about and link to will have an impact on others’ ways of understanding the world. In particular they hope that people who do not often think about particular discourses, like parenting, from a feminist perspective will read their blog and start to think about the politics of those discourses, and begin to challenge them in their own lives. ‘Spilt Milk’ explained:

I hope that some people read it and concur or some of the people I know in real life might read it and go ‘oh I never really thought about that’. My background is teaching and I think all the time all I want to do is educate people. [...] A lot of my real life friends [...] don’t necessarily think about these things so I sort of like the idea that they might think about them now. (‘Spilt Milk’, in interview, 2010)

One example of a blog that was implemented as an educational resource is the Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog site started by ‘Tigtog’ from Hoyden About Town. The site aims not simply to educate but to deflect attempts to derail and disrupt productive discussions on feminist blogs. It also addresses demands (both sincere and insincere) by non-feminists that they be educated about feminism and that feminists spend their time and energy on this rather than maintaining momentum and developing their own political aims. ‘Tigtog’ (in interview, 2009) described the site in this way:

I got that up which has proved useful at its basic purpose which is just to derail derails, to say... ‘We’re talking about this, you can go and talk about that over there’. And sometimes they’re a bit persistent and don’t get the hint but that is the basic idea, because it was a regular train wreck on all sorts of the more popular feminist blogs particularly, and things were getting derailed so easily. I guess that was something I’d learnt on newsgroups. [...] [W]e were very strong on what’s known as netiquette and keeping things on track and on topic.

I asked ‘Tigtog’ if she saw herself as a facilitator of discussion. She agreed, explaining that ‘originally when I started, I just wanted to have my voice heard. ‘Listen to me! Listen to me!’, but now I’m actually a lot more interested in getting something that generates a good discussion.’ (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2009). She spoke about building strategies so that different voices are heard in feminist blogging networks, as well as strategies to discourage trolls and people who want to derail discussions, in order to create a space for productive feminist discussions.

Although it is not the primary reason that she writes her blog, ‘Ariane’ also sees blogging as having its uses in the building of awareness for other women:

[Y]ou’ve really got to start to notice the sexism that’s built in, it’s not so overt as it used to be, it’s a lot easier to deal with stuff, and a lot of stuff you don’t even think about until somebody points it out (‘Ariane’, in interview, 2009).

Some interviewees expressed concerns that while many blogs held a pedagogical style and aim, the kind of women who could learn from these blogs were not finding them. While ‘Ariane’ (in interview, 2009) believes feminist blogging has the potential to be extremely useful for building awareness, she perceives the community as not engaging in enough ‘reachout’ beyond its own borders. ‘Lucy Tartan’ told me that:

There is a question about what is described as activist blogging that aims to talk past feminist readers and educate this hypothetical reader who has come and knows nothing and needs to be taught. Because there’s no evidence as far as I can see that those people are reading feminist blogs. (‘Lucy Tartan’, in interview, 2010)

Other bloggers also expressed concern about whether, when new and curious people do find feminist blogs, they are welcomed or allowed to learn about and discover feminist identity at their own pace. Because of this, they expressed a commitment towards being gentle when it comes to newcomers:

One thing I’m a little reticent about doing on my blog is when people are sort of finding their way to feminism and they say things that are still riddled with quite a lot of sexist assumptions, I don’t really go hard on them. [...] I just let them find their way. (‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010)

This understanding tempers strong moderation policies in order to not ‘scare off’ people who mean well, but do not know the rules and conventions of communities, which may change from blog to blog in the network. In some cases the community may put off people who were otherwise open to exploring different ideas about feminism. Many interviewees explained that they felt that they were relatively ignorant or ‘clueless’ when they began writing or participating in the blogosphere, but over time developed a confidence and understanding of community discourses that enabled them to feel more comfortable in

feminist spaces. Bloggers, readers, and commenters, even those acting in good faith, need to spend some time lurking24 in comments threads before they become familiar with the environment enough to comment without risking offence. Early mistakes can lead to ‘pile- ons’, where those familiar with the negotiated political position of the community respond vehemently against the new commenter. One example of a ‘pile-on’ conflict will be described in Chapter Four.

Conversely, such conflicts can open up the discursive space for renegotiation or strengthening of that political position. Because of their experience of this process, bloggers in the community aim to give newcomers and participants on the periphery of the community the benefit of the doubt when responding:

It’s kind of [about] respecting that people are at different places in their thinking. And it’s not [necessarily that] they’ve never heard of things that I believe in, it’s just that maybe they’ve heard of them and investigated that and then rejected it themselves. It’s like a personal philosophy or idea. And so instead of treating people like they’re stupider than me, paying people respect for the ideas that they have even if I disagree with them. And if I think something is really uninformed, or offensive in some way, then I would call it out, but if it’s just that I disagree with it, then does my voice saying ‘you’re wrong, this is what I think’ really need to be heard that much? No. (‘Caitlinate’, in interview, 2010)

‘Tigtog’ from Hoyden About Town suggested that feminist blogs are reaching a broad audience, one much broader than shown in the active contributors to the community. For every active participant, there are many lurkers coming in contact with the feminist ideas that are expressed in the community. She believes that a great deal more women are being exposed to feminist ideas, and identifying as such, as a result of the development of feminist blogging networks:

I get the feeling that there’s actually a lot less reluctance with women to identify as some sort of feminist now than there was three years ago, simply because there’s so much feminist

24 Lurking: The act of reading without active participation or declaration of presence.

discussion online. And I think there’s a huge number of women lurking and reading that discussion and absorbing it and considering it. (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2009)

The testimony of the women I interviewed showed that in spite of concerns about whether the ideas were finding ways into broader discourse, many were learning from and self- educating through their contact with the community. The majority of interviewees identified as feminist long before coming into contact with the feminist blogosphere. However, they explained to me how much their feminism changed and developed as they became more involved and read a variety of different blogs. This process assisted them in articulating their ideas and the form that feminism would take in their lives.

Self-education

Related to the idea of education and outreach was the idea of self-education and learning through contact with other feminists. Bloggers discussed the uses of their blogging networks for the purposes of learning. They explained that they used blogging to teach themselves how best to articulate their thoughts, feelings, and political opinions. Some women came to blogging in order to learn how to write, or to learn how to write differently. They came away thinking differently, as well as writing differently. Alongside the idea of self-education, implicitly or explicitly in the words of many women that I spoke to was the idea of self- improvement, of using blogs as a way to be a better thinker, a better feminist, a better parent, among other things. Bloggers described an ethical commitment to learning and improvement of their own political standpoint. Community members’ discussion of self- education relate to making a commitment to an ethics of alterity, to learning about others’ experience, and the practice of listening for new ways of understanding feminism. This process of educating others and of educating oneself is itself a political process and a political labour and has instrumental as well as affective purposes. While I focus on the concept of self-education, there is also a strong thread of self-improvement statements in the following analysis.

A recurring theme in the interviews was the idea of thinking through writing alongside the development of skills in writing. ‘Godard’s Letterboxes’ (in interview, 2010) explained that

she is ‘the kind of person who, by writing or talking, it helps me gel my thoughts’ (emphasis mine). Chally tries ‘to keep up a fairly consistent writing regimen because I’m trying to develop my voice as a writer’, and writes in order to put her experiences ‘into words and think them through’ (Chally Kacelnik, in interview, 2009, emphasis mine). ‘Ariane’ (in interview, 2009) sees other bloggers as educators, but explains that she is blogging ‘for my own education, and for my own purpose’. She began writing her blog because a friend had a blog, and found it useful as a way of thinking through things that she was learning in her studies:

I was doing philosophy and sociology and that kind of stuff that was sort of creating thoughts that had nowhere to go, so I started writing, and it was extremely erratic when I started blogging. And then I started to also blog about the kids, and then by mixing up the family stuff and the more general esoteric stuff, it found a bit more pace, and so then I started reading other stuff and following the links and doing what everybody else does and reading more of the other aspects of it. (‘Ariane’, in interview, 2009)

For ‘Ariane’ the process of becoming part of feminist blogging networks was a gradual one that grew out of her own writing practice and the things that she wanted to write about. However, the blogs that she began reading as she became more involved also had an impact on her approach to blogging. She used others’ blog entries as a point to bounce off in the development of her own ideas and arguments. Others also started writing blogs in order to develop their writing and thinking skills. More than one blogger referred to their blogging practice as comparable to (but more convenient than) a writing course or workshop. Helen from Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony explained:

[I thought] I’d love to do a writing course of some kind but I thought that [blogging] would actually be better than a physical in the real world type writing course because I can write things and have readers who comment, but I don’t have to front up at seven pm at such and such a room and go across town. I can do it on my own terms, so that seems like a really good way to learn to write. (‘Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony’, in interview, 2010)

‘Rayedish’ (in interview, 2010) was writing her PhD thesis at the time she started blogging, and told me that her blog was both a procrastination tool and a tool to improve her writing.

‘Blue Milk’ (in interview, 2010) also explained that while she writes a lot for her work, that she ‘wanted to develop a different style of writing’ and used blogging as a way to do that. ‘Spilt Milk’ began blogging in order to practice writing, and brings in the idea of blogging as a flexible, less labour-intensive way of learning:

I had people hassle me to do it. I was doing a writing course for a while and so I suppose I’d thought about blogging as a way to do writing without it being particularly labour-intensive, if that makes sense. And then a friend had a friend who has a blog and she said ‘oh you should start a blog [as well]’. (‘Spilt Milk’, in interview, 2010)

A sense of experimental or non-committal writing was a common one, but blogging often became gradually more committed and personally important where it had previously been experimental and playful. For others, though, the practice of blogging was seen as a commitment and a challenge from the very beginning. Chally (in interview, 2009) told me that she read feminist blogs for a long time before she started writing one herself, and that it was a deliberate undertaking with a sense of commitment to feminist politics.

In addition to the development of a particular voice and style of writing, bloggers and blog readers use the blogosphere in order to self-educate about feminist ideas and scholarship. Some of the feminist bloggers I interviewed studied Women’s Studies or feminist courses at university, but many did not. ‘Mimbles’ was never formally trained in feminist theory, but sees the blogosphere as providing her with that education:

I wasn’t widely read, and [...] I’ve had very little contact with feminist theory. [Although] I find that interesting, and although I was aware of there being a range of ideas and understandings within feminism as a whole, I had no detailed knowledge of any of that. So now I understand more about the history and more about the theories and ideas and so on than I did before. (‘Mimbles’, in interview, 2010)

Those who did study feminist issues at university and elsewhere also found that their engagement with blogging practices had enhanced and expanded their knowledge of feminist ideas and theories. It kept them up to date with new developments and kept

feminism relevant to their lives as they moved through different life stages after university. For ‘Blue Milk’, who did study feminist theory, and who has worked for women’s organisations in the public sector, the feminist blogosphere still provides a valuable way to develop her knowledge:

I think if you read enough good feminist blogs it’s almost like taking a degree in Women’s Studies. You can really learn about so many issues. Especially when you follow a really good debate. I’ve just learnt an enormous amount in the last while. I mean I’ve been a feminist for years, I would’ve first started sprouting feminist ideas and getting taken up in feminist debates when I was about twelve at least. And I worked in the women’s sector. But still I’ve made huge leaps and bounds in what I’ve learnt about from the blogosphere. (‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010)

Through this process of collective education and self-education, women are able to find ways to share feminist ideas and maintain feminist discourse. This is closely linked to the development of a feminist identity, and the practice of discursive politics. The next section elaborates on the ways that online feminists articulate political claims and develop awareness of specific political issues within the community, particularly in relation to Norval’s (2007) concept of political creativity.

Articulation

Closely linked to the idea of learning from feminist blogs is the way that women are using the ideas that they come across in blogs and articulating them in debates and arguments on their own blogs and offline. We can see in many of the above quotes that women said they use blogs to help them put their experiences into words and generate feminist ideas and arguments. I explore the generation of new claims and political programs through discussion within and between blogs, and connect these ideas with analyses of political creativity, negotiation, and the productive aspects of conflict.

Blogging becomes a strategy for developing rhetoric and arguments that work in order to feel able to deploy these arguments in everyday life. Knowing that other women feel the

same way, and creating analytical concepts around particular themes, helps feminist bloggers and readers build a rhetorical repertoire. By solidifying their responses to mainstream discourses, they not only respond to things that are upsetting or distressing to them personally, they are also analysing what is wrong with those discourses, and developing ways to combat those ideas in everyday conversation. In sharing experiences, articulating problems, and proliferating feminist ideas, they are generating new feminist claims.

The idea of using writing as a way to improve thinking processes and the articulation of ideas came up in my interview with ‘Mimbles’:

To actually go through that exercise of articulating things [is helpful], because it’s like staircase wit, by the time you’ve worked out how to respond to something, it’s too late. Whereas now, when someone says something I’m like: ‘Arrgh, no! And this is why!’ (‘Mimbles’, in interview, 2009)

Blog community participants are applying feminist ideas and principles to their own lives and experiences, and by sharing experiences find common ground with others. This process enables them to articulate particular claims and keep them going in online feminist discourse, and also to use feminist discourse as a way to counter mainstream discourses about gender in their day to day lives. ‘Shiny’ explains how she puts what she has learned online into practice in her own life:

As someone who has not specifically trained or studied in this field, it’s so good to have a resource in a way that’s literally just people putting their thoughts online. I find it really valuable when your head’s circling a topic or something you’ve heard or seen, and you’re not quite sure why it’s irritating you, it’s kind of good just to put it out there and cement it. Even just the process of writing it is helpful but if people come back and say ‘I’ve experienced that too’ or ‘That’s really irritating as well for me’, then I guess it’s reinforcing that you’re not the only one, that you’re not alone, but also you can learn, you know? That’s why I’m involved, I suppose. (‘A Shiny New Coin’, in interview, 2010)

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As ‘Shiny’ explains, this process helps her to develop ways to counter anti-feminist discourses in her own life, what she calls ‘the joy of immediately having a smackdown’ (‘Shiny’, in interview, 2010). ‘Blue Milk’ (in interview, 2010) also discusses this use of the debates and discourses online as a way for young women to ‘cut their teeth on the debates and the fights and the nastiness that will happen when you go out and identify as a feminist somewhere: [...] you get to learn the responses and the strategies’. ‘PharaohKatt’ (in interview, 2010) explained that ‘now when someone says something I actually have the means to counter it’. ‘Mimbles’ agrees:

Finding the feminist blogosphere was like finding all these people who were saying all the things so much more articulately than I ever could, and also broadening my understanding of things and so on. And it made me tend to be more forthright in real life. (‘Mimbles’, in interview, 2010)

The theme of articulation shows the ways that Australian feminist bloggers are engaged in discursive activism. Community participants respond to hegemonic discourses by drawing on counter-hegemonic concepts (for example existing feminist claims) and also building new concepts to respond to and challenge these mainstream discourses. Their engagements with mainstream media often take this form, and so do their written responses to everyday encounters and everyday behaviours that they analyse in their blogs. This is activism in the sense that it changes the kinds of conversations that are possible within blogs and also outside of blogs, and builds claims that can be introduced into everyday conversation and in engagements with the media, the workplace, and institutional politics. Incrementally, piece by piece, discursive politics works to change political cultures.

Generating claims and the ethos of alterity

One of the most important outcomes of this process of articulating ideas is the process of collectively generating and negotiating feminist claims within and between networks. For the many who already identified as feminist before they began blogging, this engagement meant finding a different kind of feminist identity, based in the development of a negotiated understanding of feminist claims and discourse. Through this shared thinking and collective

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process of listening and finding voice, women generate new feminist claims and negotiate priorities around a set of feminist issues.

Interview participants discussed their commitment to examining their own ideas and assumptions about feminism and intersecting political projects through their engagement with blogging communities. They made a link between this commitment and the possibility of broader change in social discourse:

If you can challenge people to think about the way that they perceive things and the way that they see things, you can make a difference in their life maybe, or maybe to one or two people. And then these things spread, we can be optimistic! But I think [...] you can’t expect change [in others] unless you’re willing to take small baby steps yourself. (‘Godard’s Letterboxes’, in interview, 2010)

Bloggers’ commitment to self-examination links to the political commitment to blogging that many community participants expressed both explicitly and implicitly in interviews and in the texts of their blogs. For many, there is an ethical commitment to hearing the discursive claims of other women in order to modify their own ways of understanding feminism. Another theme that bloggers referred to was the idea of gaining a language to speak about things in their experience, in a way that relied on the intersectional politics in the community.

When I started off in the blogosphere I found [Renee from Womanist Musing's] writings on racism and racism in the feminist movement and just being a non-white woman in general were so incredibly helpful for putting words to my experiences that I never had the language or the frameworks [for] and that was quite a revelation. (Chally Kacelnik, in interview, 2009).

‘Fuck Politeness’ discussed the visibility of feminist claims expressed in blogging networks. She explained that it has had an impact on her discursive awareness of sexist and anti- feminist discourses in her everyday life:

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[I think it] was on the most recent Down Under Feminist Carnival, and this time [Mynxii25 has] written a bit of an introduction talking about invisible politics, and that it’s the elephant in the room; nobody is going to mention it, and sometimes it feels like what you’re doing has no point, but it helps her to think of it as pointing out the elephant in the room and maybe some people won’t see it but once they do, they won’t unsee it. (‘Fuck Politeness’, in interview, 2009)

One example of discursive activism in process is a post by the blogger ‘Spilt Milk’, entitled ‘Who hears you, when you speak about rape?’. One act of concept-building and claims- making that has been very effectively employed in the feminism blogosphere is the discursive act of ‘rape apology’. Bloggers identify popular discourses about rape that are mainstream and commonly held views, often non-controversially reproduced in the mainstream press and everyday conversations about rape. In this particular post, ‘Spilt Milk’ (2010b) makes links between examples of such conversations, and the consequences of these discourses in people’s real lives:

Say you’re at a family barbecue and someone mentions that one of Assange’s accusers was a feminist who wrote about taking revenge on men, and you say yeah, rape is terrible but so is being wrongly accused. So many women just cry rape to get the attention, it’s disgusting and your mother-in-law leaves the room because she was raped many years ago by a trusted family friend and nobody believed her, but you don’t know that story, because you never asked. How does your mother-in-law feel, how does she feel about you being the parent of her grandchildren?

This post is an example of discursive activism, because it identifies mainstream discourses that are damaging to victims of sexual assault, builds a conceptual understanding of the problems that underpin these discourses (such as the assumption that no one present is a victim of sexual assault) and then finally advocates discursive activism in practice. The blogger builds a discursive strategy combined with a rhetorical appeal:

25 The host of the carnival, which is available at: http://mynxii.livejournal.com/762030.html

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You have a choice, when you speak about rape, any rape. You can make victims and survivors hurt more. You can take justice further out of reach. You can encourage the disrespect and objectification of women. You can further silence marginalised victims, like children (and sex-workers and prisoners and trans* people for that matter) and make it ever harder for those who can face the greatest resistance to telling their stories, like male victims, or those raped by celebrities and ‘heroes’. Or, you can not. (‘Spilt Milk’ 2010b)

The act of making visible particular feminist claims and of examining one’s own understanding of feminism and privilege are seen as the main political work of the community. For example, as one blogger explained:

I think by blogging about it, what I’d really like to be doing is making voices and experiences that are invisible more visible. So I don’t think it’s going to smash the patriarchy. I don’t think it’s going to radicalise or revolutionise anything. And I don’t think that many people are going to read The Dawn Chorus and go out and start fires or anything, but they might start to recognise the links between the different types of gender oppression [...] which is part of the bigger picture of oppression and inequality. (‘Caitlinate’, in interview, 2010)

Norval (2007, 113) links the negotiation of our way of seeing things to identity. She uses Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘aspect dawning’ or ‘aspect change’ to show this. A person realises that ‘a new kind of characterization of an object or situation may be given, and [begins to] see it in those terms’ (Norval 2007, 113). She argues that this moment, and the sense of renewal that it carries with it, as well as the affective charge of a changing perception ‘allows us to capture the reactivation of an already present identification’ necessary to sustain an ethos (Norval 2007, 137). As one blogger explains:

When I first started blogging about feminism specifically I was telling my boyfriend that it’s like The Matrix, you’re living in it all the time but until someone points it out to you, you can’t see it. And once you point it out, you can just see it, and it’s everywhere, and you’re surrounded by it. (‘A Shiny New Coin’, in interview, 2010)

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The above quote is an evocative description of this moment (short or long) of aspect change and re-identification. And there is an affective aspect to it:

[S]ometimes when you reveal something you get a really lovely charge because people go ‘Oh, yeah, exactly, that’s exactly what I feel’. And I guess those things that have to be revealed are some of the most significant aspects of your feminist identity. (‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010 [emphasis mine])

But these moments are not always simple or easy, and are tied up with the difficult affects of identification with an oppositional political project. In her discussion of feminist teaching, Fisher (1987) links the practice of feminist education with affective response. She describes the process of learning about feminism, and the process of making connections with ones’ own experience which were previously less visible, as a sometimes painful experience, both for teacher and student of feminism. She relates the anecdote of the teacher who stood up in a National Women’s Studies Association meeting and:

[R]ose to make an anguished declaration. ‘I don’t think I can go on with this,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear taking in all their pain, all the anger they feel when they learn about their own oppression’. (Fisher 1987, 47)

Certainly women in feminist blogging networks described the frustration that they feel when others fail to understand and change their patterns of behaviour and language use. In describing the significance of aspect change in democratic identification, Norval (2007, 182) links the moment of aspect change to the moment of ‘dislocation’. In this view of politics, there is a relationship between shifts in political grammar (through dislocation) and aspect change (Norval 2007, 137-138). This dislocation need not be catastrophic (Norval 2007, 139), like an earthquake that then requires the discourses to be rebuilt on new foundations. A dislocation might be simply, as in a dance, like someone shifting their weight in movement, and then there is a corresponding shift in the partner. The following quote shows how this works in practice:

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Sometimes people will say something along the lines of ‘I’ve sort of been feeling this but I haven’t quite known how to say it or why’ which is always a nice feeling that you’ve said something that has made sense to someone else to starters, but that they were kind of trying to find a way to express that themselves. That’s a really good feeling. It doesn’t happen often but you know, you just think oh good, we’re not all weird in our own way, we’re weird in the same way. (‘A Shiny New Coin’, in interview, 2010)

The internet, in these descriptions, is being used for cooperative work in processes of creating opinions and discussions in order to make other people aware of particular feminist discourses (Carstensen 2009, 118). Groups of people work together on particular texts or conversations. The work that is done is a political project involving the development of oppositional discourses in cooperation with others (Carstensen 2009, 121). This is a practice that is linked to the description of experience in everyday life, as will be shown in the case study on feminist parenting that closes this chapter.

Feminists collectively develop awareness of issues that they face and of different political priorities. In this study, women are shown to use feminist blog networks to make feminist claims audible. They do this by collectively developing a shared language with which to frame their own issues and encourage awareness of these issues in the community. I will explore the idea of a shared language further in the case study at the end of this chapter, as well as the continued theoretical exploration of the concepts of identity, dislocation, and aspect change later in the chapter. These processes relate to the development of a feminist identity, and other identities that are seen in the community, such as disabled identity, non- white identity, and identifying as fat. These identifications are frequently understood as political practices by those who claim them.

Collective identity and discursive activism

Along with the reinforcing of existing gendered claims and the generation of new feminist claims comes the development and strengthening of identity that occurs in social movement networks. I argue that the processes of identification and the development of feminist

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subjectivity are inseparable from the way that political claims and discursive activism takes shape.

The bloggers I interviewed, with three exceptions, identified as feminist long before they became involved in blogging. However they frequently argued that the way they identified as feminist had changed. ‘Naomi Eve’ (in interview, 2010) told me that ‘it’s like I’ve had this mini rebirth as a feminist’ since becoming involved. ‘Fuck Politeness’ (in interview, 2009) also told me that through her involvement in online discussions, her feminism has changed and developed, also adding that ‘there’s a sense in which you can feel like you don’t have to apologise for things as much’. ‘In A Strange Land’ (in interview, 2010) echoed this by explaining that because of her involvement in blogs, she has ‘become more confident about claiming feminism, or claiming it publicly’. ‘News With Nipples’ (in interview, 2010) felt that being part of the community helps her to stand behind her feminist identity, and to feel validated in doing so:

It’s probably crystallised [my identity] in terms of knowing that feminism is still needed. Because I’ve been a feminist pretty much my whole life [and] there was a point in my twenties where I was thinking ‘Am I just being angry?’ [Laughs] ‘Am I seeing stuff that’s not there? Am I getting offended by things that aren’t happening?’ So being part of this online community has helped in that way. (‘News with Nipples’, in interview, 2010)

Reading feminist blogs enabled ‘News with Nipples’ to compare her own experiences of daily life and her reactions to media with those of other feminists. In these quotes we already see the strong link between a non-apologetic identification as feminist, the development of feminist claims, and the willingness to intervene or act against anti-feminist discourses that one comes up against ‘in real life’. ‘Shiny’ (in interview, 2010) told me that she ‘take[s] a lot less crap now. [...] It has [changed me] but I think probably for the better in that I feel a lot stronger’. ‘PharaohKatt’ (in interview, 2010) did not identify as a feminist before she began reading feminist blogs. She told me that she ‘discovered the blogs and sort of went from a feminist denier to a feminist’. When she first encountered feminist blogs, she questioned them and trolled them, but after a while changed her views:

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[The feminist blogging community] has given me a reason to keep fighting. I’m not a pushover anymore. I was a huge pushover, in my life. But I’m not going to do that anymore. When somebody says something to me or about me or about the things that I care about I’m not just going to take it. Because I have that permission to be angry at them and I can say, ‘No! Stop! That’s not right!’ and I never had the strength to do that before. (‘PharaohKatt’, in interview, 2010)

Many women writing feminist blogs hope that the writing they do causes others to understand the world differently, but also hope that their words encourage others to claim a feminist identity. They encourage other women to recognise their own ideas and feelings as feminist feelings, or to identify their grievances as caused by mainstream social structures and discourse. They encourage women to identify patterns in mainstream discourses that are anti-feminist, and to develop strategies in everyday conversation to combat these.

Collective identity is a useful lens to understand these processes. Melucci (1996, 66) explains that collective identity is a form of negotiated meaning that provides ‘actors with the capacity of making sense of their being together’. Melucci’s (1996, 67) definition of collective identity in one in which identity is not a given, but is instead negotiated and constructed. It is a process rather than a thing, and it is a process that we can see in the above description of the interplay of education, identification, and articulation. This model of collective identity affirms a constructivist view of collective action, as Melucci (1996, 70) claims. However, as Melucci (1996, 72) also acknowledges:

[C]ollective identity is as much an analytical tool as an object to be studied, it represents by definition a temporary solution to a conceptual problem, and should be replaced if and when other concepts prove themselves more adequate. Melucci’s (1996) collective identity model came about as a strategy to make sense of the importance of identity and discourse within social movements. However the separation of means and ends that Melucci (1996) demonstrates in his work show the problematic nature of the term. His assumption, firstly, that processes of collective identity ‘[lead] to a unified empirical actor’ and that collective identity provides the means for social movements to act politically are useful but problematic. The separation of the process of collective

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identification from political action and the view of collective identity as necessary for political action both imply that processes of identification are not in themselves discursive activism. However, these are processes that women in the blogging network often overtly politicise.

The bingo card

Bloggers link their identity work with their work to change the way others see the world, and their work to change political discussions. These cannot be separated. One discursive strategy that is often used in the feminist blogosphere is the ‘bingo card’. This has become a popular tool broadly used in online discussion, but some of its most enthusiastic applications have been within feminist debates. The idea of the bingo card is to pre-empt particular discursive tropes or strategies. The anti-feminist bingo card, one early adoption of the strategy, has been shared and linked to widely around the internet, and was originally

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developed by ‘Lauredhel’, one of the bloggers at Hoyden About Town.

Figure 3.1. Anti-feminist Bingo.26

Due to the popularity of the link, ‘Lauredhel’ edited the original entry to note the purpose of the bingo card, in order to explain that it is not only about trolling behaviour, but about beliefs that people actually hold about feminism:

Many of these statements are made not by people just stirring crap in the hope of provoking a reaction; they’re made by people who earnestly believe what they’re saying, or by people who are parroting what they’ve been socialised to believe, or by people who are knee-jerk defensive when they come across ideas of cismale privilege. Some of them may never be

26 Anti-feminist-Bingo! Available at: http://hoydenabouttown.com/20070414.431/anti- feminist-bingo-a-master-class-in-sexual-entitlement/

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said in good faith, but some may; part of the point of this card, though not the whole point, is to highlight a few patterns of behaviour. These patterns occur in all sorts of contexts, not purely in trolling contexts. (‘Lauredhel’ 2009 in an edit to ‘Lauredhel’ 2007)

The ‘bingo card’ is one example of how feminist bloggers aim to intervene in patterns of discourse using rhetorical strategies. This is a deliberate strategy, one designed to make visible hidden tropes in discourse, the way that feminist arguments ‘[come] already discredited’ (Tomlinson 2010, 1) due to these stereotypical reactions. The strategy humorously turns the tables on anti-feminist discourse, by taking the sting out of common anti-feminist responses. The spread of the feminist bingo card – which now takes on the status of a meme27 – in addition to the links that the original post receives, demonstrate that it has reached a broad audience.

The rhetorical strategy of sharing particular examples of problematic discourses in aggregation is an instance of what Tomlinson (2010) describes as the rhetorical strategy of ‘intensification’. Feminist bloggers share their experiences and link them to feminist concepts, linking academic feminism with everyday experience. Through ‘intensification’, the layering of repeated discursive tropes to show the problematic nature of a pattern (Tomlinson 2010), bloggers make the subtle invisible discourses of the mainstream visible to the readers of feminist blogs.

Case study: identity and articulation in Australian feminist parenting blogs

A significant subset of the Australian feminist blogging community are also parents, and dealing with the challenges of raising children in feminist ways in a world that places so much emphasis on gender and gender roles, particularly of children. I could have chosen any number of other sub-communities, issues, or debates to explore the same process, such as the Fat Acceptance sub-community. I chose the feminist parenting sub-group because parenting frequently involves a steep learning curve and a change in both practices and

27 Meme: a self-replicating idea. Used in the context of the internet to mean a recognisable, user-generated, repeated image, concept, or catchphrase.

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identity, and I wanted to explore how these were collectively and collaboratively negotiated by community participants, politicised, and developed into a political program grounded in dissensus. Further, parenting and motherhood can be a site of conflict and negotiation for feminist bloggers internationally, and I explore the outcomes of this conflictual process in the creation of sub-communities and safe or unsafe spaces for discussions about feminist parenting.

This case study shows the engagement of the feminist blogosphere in active interventions in mainstream media and discourses, the generation of feminist claims and counter-hegemonic discourses, and processes of identification and subjectivity change for feminist parents. Whether they started off blogging about these issues or not, many women discussed with me the value they find in the community to help them find new ways to parent, or share and construct feminist ideas of parenting. This can be seen as a safe space away from mainstream discourses around parenting, motherhood, and children that are often oppressive, judgmental and limited.

In the context of my thesis I will not be exploring the broader community of motherhood blogging, but instead focusing on one sub-community, in which the bloggers identify as a) parents or mothers, b) Australian, and c) feminist. On occasion, non-parents also participate in feminist discussions of parenthood in the comments, and they are not excluded from my analysis. The sub-community is drawn from my broader community sample, so these discussions form a daily part of the Australian feminist blogging community that I have researched for this thesis.

Helen from Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony explains that while her primary interest in terms of reading blogs are political blogs, she prefers to read blogs of other people who are also dealing with the same problems and issues that she is as a feminist and a parent:

I do definitely enjoy blogs by people who are juggling work and family. If you look on my blogroll, it’s a lot of people who are mothers. Not mummy bloggers, not that sort of phenomenon but political bloggers who are also parenting. I find it interesting the way people post about their family because of being a feminist blogger that’s part of where the

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family and the politics intersect, talking about things like the domestic load and things that happen to your kids and stuff like that. So that illustrates or provokes thought on various things that are of interest. (‘Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony’, in interview, 2010)

While these are not necessarily ‘mommy blogs’, a distinction made by some bloggers in the case study, some of the scholarly work being done in the area of ‘mommy blogs’ has resonated with the findings of my own research. Powell’s (2010) study of three ‘mommy blogs’ explores these blogs as rhetorical constructions of identity, and as sites for rhetorical resistance and fluid subjectivities. She finds that mommy bloggers challenge ideas of good and bad motherhood on their sites, and emphasise other areas of identity other than motherhood, in order to challenge expectations that ‘Good mothers change their whole beings for their children’ (Powell 2010, 45). The blogs challenge the fixed positions of good and bad mothers, demonstrating that ‘there are no straight narratives, no fixed positions, just messy lives’ (Powell 2010, 47). Powell (2010, 49) describes mommy blogs as helping to create new possibilities for motherhood. The focus of the feminist parenting blogging community is – likewise - to expand the possibilities for parenting in feminist ways. Some bloggers do identify with the ‘mommy bloggers’ genre, and others do not. For example, ‘Blue Milk’ explained that there is a tension between these identities, but she chooses to affirm both:

One of the challenges about writing about motherhood is that, as a feminist, I very much identify as a feminist and I’m part of the feminist community. But I’m quite happy for people to identify me as a mother blogger, and I know that’s seen as an insult and I don’t care. (‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010)

Ariane explains that although she did not set out to change her parenting through reading blogs, being part of the feminist blogosphere ‘probably has changed [her] parenting fairly substantially’:

[M]y eldest is just about to turn seven, and we already have conversations about the stupidity about what things are regarded as girl things and what things are regarded as boy things […] and I think that having that in my face more than it would have been otherwise

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has reminded me that it really does matter and it makes a big difference. If we’re going to change these things, we’re not going to change it in the men that are thirty now, we’re going to change it in the kids that are five now. And so I’m aware of this not in terms of attempting to change the adults around me at all, but in terms of trying to change my children as they grow up and change the way that they see the world. (‘Ariane’, in interview, 2009)

‘Tigtog’ feels similarly about the relationship between feminist blogging and lifestyle, but feels that she has always seen her parenting style as overtly feminist, and reading blogs and engaging with other parents online plays a role in discussing options for ways to put this into practice:

[It’s good for] reading what other people are doing in terms of integrating feminism with the other aspects of their lifestyle and thinking ‘ooh yeah that’s a good idea, I can do something like that’. (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2009).

Those in the community who do not have children but still participate in conversations about parenting read feminist parenting blogs because they express a different life from their own as feminists without children, to broaden their understanding of women’s lives and the possibilities of their own lives if they have children in the future.

[I read] Blue Milk, which is I think really good for me to read because I’m not a mother and not a lot of my friends are mothers, and seeing a girl from high school with a baby freaks me out. And so reading about the experiences of people who are mothers and have children and that life thing is really important for me to do. (‘Caitlinate’, in interview, 2010)

Another way that feminist bloggers share the parenting experience is through support and the sharing of intimate aspects of their lives, something which they value particularly in an area of life that is so heavily politicised in mainstream discourse. Through this practice of sharing, they build a shared language about motherhood that is grounded in feminist thought. ‘Spilt Milk’ explains how she shared her birth story with ‘Blue Milk’ as well as others in order to share the ways that childbirth can be a positive experience in a culture that so often either idealises childbirth as miraculous or makes it seem like a terrifying and risky event:

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I love telling my birth story. […] Blue Milk was about to have her second child and she had said that she wanted positive birth stories. So that’s why I wrote it then. Because I think I’d had it in the back of my mind that I would write it for her birthday and I really enjoyed writing that because it’s a really happy thing for me to talk about and write about. And I sort of think in a way that’s... talking about it positively like that is a form of activism too, because so many people think of it as such a horrible thing. (‘Spilt Milk’, in interview, 2010)

‘Blue Milk’ in turn responded positively to the culture of sharing between feminist parents:

I love the birth stories. That’s one that’s cooking in my brain that I can’t bring myself to write is my birth story for this [child]. And that’s one of the most rewarding parts about being part of a community is people being able to tell you things like that. (‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010)

Feminists also use the practice of blogging about parenting to discuss the ways that embedded gender assumptions and discourses can play out even in families where both partners consider themselves feminist and try to parent along those lines. In this way they are able to show the ways that feminism is still needed in all households because of the ways that gender is socialised and parenting is politicised differently for men and women. ‘Naomi Eve’, who was a non-parent at the time of our interview but planned to become a parent in the near future, explained how she felt that reading about feminist motherhood prepared her for the challenges of feminist parenting:

And things around general parenting like... another one is specifically the loss of freedom and loss of independence and what that means for a woman and what that means for men. Because even on the blogs where people are like yes, we share everything equally there’s always a post now and then that goes ‘I’m not sure why I’m the only one thinking about this in my family. I’m debating this big thing that I think is important but apparently it’s only me’, or things like ‘I need to get him more involved and he’s not being more involved and that’s important so that kind of, it shouldn’t just be me shouldering this, it should be him as well’. (‘Naomi Eve’, in interview, 2010)

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Bloggers often see the feminist blogosphere as a safe place for discussions around parenting, away from a lot of toxic discourses around parenting in mainstream media and other parenting forums and communities online. ‘Mimbles’ explained that she felt that mothers in contemporary society are bombarded with so many judgemental and extreme messages around the right way to parent and the right things to buy and the right way to bring up children, that she feels contemporary motherhood must be fraught with so much guilt and anxiety as to be unbearable. Feminist blogs, she told me, provide a space that is mostly free from judgemental discourses:

I think certainly as someone who’s immersed in the feminist blogosphere, you’re probably going to be fine, because that’s where you’re going to get the most grounded and focused on you as a person, sort of support. Whereas I occasionally find myself wandering into [other spaces], like I’ll click on a link in the Sydney Morning Herald and end up reading the Essential Baby28 forums, and just go ‘oh dear god these poor people’, because it’s just this... It’s that whole judgement of everything you do thing that... and that women are supposed to become... supposed to self-efface themselves to the point of almost non-existence because it’s all about the baby, which I find disturbing. And that you can’t ever do anything right. It seems to be quite pervasive in these online forums. (‘Mimbles’, in interview, 2010)

However because parenting is so heavily politicised, even in feminist blogs the sharing of different ideas about parenting can be understood as judgement. ‘Blue Milk’ finds it a difficult balance to strike:

In general I think I write about fairly inclusive topics and I write in a fairly inclusive way. But I mean whenever you take a stand on parenting things, it’s very personal to people. Parents are so easily offended by anybody else’s different way of parenting, and there’s an inherent judgementalism in it and so right now I just wrote something about the way we teach our

28 A parenting website linked to the Sydney Morning Herald website, available at: http://www.essentialbaby.com.au/

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children about eating and I know I will have offended some parents out there about it. (‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010)

Feminist motherhood blogs tend to be spaces in which identity as a mother and as a feminist is negotiated. This is particularly necessary because of debates within the international feminist blogosphere in broader terms about motherhood and children. While such conflicts are not particularly common within Australian feminist networks, they do arise in broader interactions in the international context, particularly on the larger United States-based group feminist blogs, such as Feministing and Feministe. ‘Blue Milk’ explained how she deals with the negotiation of these identities, and coming up against other points of view in these forums:

One of the few things I’m not at all defensive about, which you’d think I would be as a feminist mother, is that hostility towards mothers from feminists. It doesn’t really make me particularly defensive at all. I find it really interesting and fascinating and I really think it’s an area with lots of potential. It’s a core area of feminism that anybody who wants to identify as a feminist mother has to get into and understand and see their point of view. If you want to be a feminist mother, you really have to understand where this incredible cause of feminism […] finds itself in conflict with you and your lifestyle, and there’s much to be gained from understanding their point of view and from being able to therefore challenge your own ideas about what you’re doing and then also to be able to respond to their... what’s the word?... to the degree to which they’re not able to... their misunderstandings. (‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010)

Comments like this suggest the complex ways in which conflict is part of the experience of bloggers in these networks. Political speech often has an adversarial quality – feminist bloggers do not negotiate claims only through aggregation of experiences, these claims must be negotiations in which counter-claims are addressed. Conflict is often productive, and coercive and dominating speech, though often experienced as negative, has the potential to re-ignite debate at points of tension (Norval 2007, 60). Certainly in a space that values intersectional politics, such points of tension are inevitable. Norval (2007, 167) argues that

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conflict or dislocatory moments are ‘necessary to foster the need for opening oneself to another’s argument’, which is in turn necessary for a productive intersectional politics.

It is also a space where feminist mothers can share their frustration about contemporary gender expectations, and challenge those expectations:

I was in the lolly aisle and there they were. Boys Adventure and Girls Enchanted. I posted that because I thought that feminist bloggers that I have connections with would be similarly amused and outraged. That was just a ‘Look at this! There’s another one!’ It’s interesting that I occasionally see someone who’s googled for Allens Adventure Mix and they found me! I like to think that maybe they’ll think twice about buying them. (‘Mimbles’, in interview, 2010)

Following on from the anti-feminist ‘bingo card’ earlier in this chapter, another bingo card addresses the discourses deployed against mothers, particularly breastfeeding mothers. This redeployment of the discursive strategy shows the strength of the meme and the political work achieved by it.

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Figure 3.2. Anti-breastfeeding bingo.29

Bingo cards like this identify damaging discourses and judgements made against women and mothers. Their power is to enable participants to feel safer knowing that these common rhetorical statements, which they may come up against in their own lives, are not acceptable or legitimate. They also signal to others that these arguments and opinions are neither original nor acceptable.

29 Available at: http://hoydenabouttown.com/20090220.3832/antibreastfeeding-bingo/

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In an interview series called 10 feminist motherhood questions, ‘Blue Milk’ used her blog to which explore the feminist motherhood choices and identifications of dozens of community members. The series is continuing and has been part of her blog since very early in its history. Aggregrating the responses to these online interviews for the Mothers at the Margins conference, April 2011, ‘Blue Milk’ (2011b) shared these results on the blog as well.

Many of the questions explore the strategies that women use for resolving tensions between their feminism and their motherhood. Sharing these question and answer sessions on the Blue Milk blog allows these tensions to be discussed in a community context through an explanation of individual processes of identification. One blogger from the Blue Mountains near Sydney said that parenthood provoked her identification with feminism:

I have only recently started to identify as a ‘feminist’, but my ideals have always been the same. I think motherhood has made me take this step because I realised that, possibly for the first time ever, I am expected to do much more than my share. The thanklessness and invisibility of motherhood really strikes me. I don’t know how many times I’ve encountered the ‘What do you know, you’re just a mother,’ look, and I feel it is exaggerated by the fact that I’m a (relatively) young mother with three children under the age of four. It’s so frustrating – sometimes I feel like wearing my degree stapled to my forehead! (‘3under3’ 2011)

Another Australian respondent, who was in the majority of feminist parenting bloggers who identified as feminist before becoming a parent, explained her feminism as ‘part of my poiesis - the poetics of who I am always becoming, and of how I am transforming the world’ (‘Eglantine’s Cake’ 2008). For this blogger parenthood became part of the way that she practiced feminism, and part of her becoming and transforming of the world. In the same response, she discussed the way that motherhood up-ended her sense of feminist identity, and that she had to renegotiate the terms in which she identified as both a mother and a feminist:

I always thought when I had kids I'd be Penni + kids. I thought feminism would protect me from any kind of identity loss. In reality there's an enormous chasm between who I was before motherhood and who I am now. Motherhood is an extreme, physical and emotional

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and psychic metamorphosis, and it keeps threatening your identity, even as your kids grow up – actually in some ways more so now that the kids are older. I yearned for a baby, and always knew I'd love being a mother (and I do), but I didn't know I'd hate it too. Having said that, I didn’t know that I would be such a creative mother, nor that it would so completely and perfectly connect up my imaginative, intuitive self with my analytical, pensive side.

I was also surprised by how invisible mothers are, the whole madonna/whore thing…yada yada yada. I mean I probably shouldn’t have been surprised but I was. And I was surprised at how much I devalued the work of motherhood. (‘Eglantine’s Cake’ 2008)

Although some bloggers claimed that motherhood was the catalyst for their identification as feminist, most respondents already identified as such, and found that this identity had to be renegotiated after the birth of their children. The negotiation of tensions, as ‘Blue Milk’ explained in one summary post, is a result of the perceived conflict between the history of feminist thought and a positive approach to mothering. Many of the respondents in the 10 Questions series discussed these identity tensions in their own lives. ‘Spilt Milk’ also addressed this issue separately in a post called ‘Maternal Desire’:

Perhaps part of the problem [between motherhood and feminist identity] is a lack of articulation of what it is like to want children, and the ways in which this interacts with one’s feminism. Although my approach to motherhood is quite cerebral, my experience of maternal desire and ultimately maternity was very much in the body. The experience of childbirth was for me transformative and empowering but it is not easy to convey that convincingly without sinking into cliche. Breastfeeding my daughter taught me more about misogyny, feminism, community, consent and a million other things that I could never have imagined. It made me want to write poetry (and a blog) about milk! But how does one put the physicality of parenting up to the spotlight, without fueling terribly harmful essentialising narratives? How do you stand in awe of the experience of parenthood without teetering towards being a ‘bad feminist’? (You don’t pretend for a second that your experience is universal, is the short answer, I think.) (‘Spilt Milk’ 2011)

Negotiation of feminist motherhood occasionally involves conflict with feminist discourses that are aversive to motherhood or certain discourses of motherhood, which is touched on

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in the quote above about being a ‘bad feminist’. In feminist blogging networks this can be a point of intersectional conflict, in which feminist mothers have to fight to be heard in broader feminist discourse and mainstream discourse. In particular feminist mothers are often engaged in responding to mainstream discourses of child hate and mother hate which are seen as acceptable. Bloggers articulate the points of dislocation in these discourses. If a dislocation is defined as ‘some event or happening which ruptures the grammar ordering our political life’ then it is anti-mother and anti-child discourses expressed in feminist contexts that creates this dislocatory moment.

Articulation and discursive identification

This chapter has dealt with feminist identity and political subjectivity and understands these as linked to the use and practice of language. Blogging enables women to identify more strongly, or differently with feminist ideas, and also generate new political claims around their feminist politics. As I argued with regard to the concept of ‘aspect change’, this co- creation of new ways of seeing leads to new forms of political subjectivity. This process comes out of dislocations in the structure of our understanding of the world.

Radical democratic theory ‘opens up a whole realm of theorization of social and political relations based on their contingent articulation’ (Norval 2007, 46). This is what is at stake in my study; understanding the politics even of semi-public online spaces with a self-selected, sometimes small, and variable audience. Australian feminist blogging networks constitute a negotiated space for the articulation of feminist demands. As Norval (2007, 111) explains, by ‘putting together elements, which were not previously thought of as belonging together, a new set of relations is brought to the fore’. This is the process of articulation that feminist bloggers are often engaged in, from which feminist claims emerge. Norval’s (2007, 80) understanding of articulation draws on Laclau and Mouffe’s conceptualisation of ‘chains of equivalences’ in which ‘[processes of articulation] bring together elements that have no necessary belonging’. By sharing experiences from their own lives and drawing out feminist claims from these, bloggers are engaged in just this process.

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Through discursive activism, bloggers can make previously familiar, unexamined mainstream discourses seem strange by showing the ways that these discourses work against women in everyday experience. Discursive activists show how particular constructs impact on women’s lives, and build and reproduce feminist claims in response. Blogging is effective at making these outcomes visible because it involves the sharing of personal experiences, and also allows for the next step – the discursive linkage of these experiences to political claims.

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Chapter Four: Affective Community

Because it’s not just pressuring governments that’s important, as important as it is. Central to my activism is what I do right here, right now, in my life and my communities. When it comes down to it, progress is not only in the big sweeping changes. It’s in our souls. It’s in relating to each other with kindness. (‘Chally’ 2009)

Feminist bloggers call shit out all the time. We’re strident and unapologetic about consistently and constantly pointing out sexist advertising, the way the media promotes rape culture, the incrementalist approach of antichoicers. But suddenly, pointing out inconsistencies and abuses of privilege is a bad thing when we shine the light on ourselves? (‘Queen of Thorns’ in a comment on ‘Blue Milk’ 2012)

You always see some crapola behaviour in a big Internet fight but when it happens in feminism you also get to learn a lot from it because some of the meatier stuff about our movement and philosophy gets discussed and seriously debated. (‘Blue Milk’ 2012b)

Bloggers’ responses to media events are framed in terms of their affective responses to those media events. In the above quote, ‘Queen of Thorns’ (in ‘Blue Milk’ 2012) explains, feminist bloggers are ‘strident and unapologetic about consistently and constantly pointing out’ (for example) ‘sexist advertising [and] the way the media promotes rape culture’. In interview, bloggers explained that they began blogging and continue to blog because it is a way to push back against discourses expressed in the mainstream. This is shown in the recurring theme of the blog as ‘outlet’ when discussing their motivations to blog.

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In this chapter, bloggers are shown to develop an affective relation towards discourses and events in the media and in mainstream politics and society. Emotional investment and affective relations are part of the practice of counter-hegemonic politics. Affective motivations, far from leading us to the conclusion that feminists engage in an illegitimate form of emotional politics, as some critical comments on feminist blogs suggest, instead point towards Tomlinson’s (2010) work on emotionality in political discourse as a rhetorical device. In this view, emotionality is not only tactical, but at the core of political engagement. Emotional responses to political events are the practice of dissensus (Rancière 2010).

In her work on internet counterpublics and cyber-movements, Palczewski (2001, 172) argues that safe spaces are essential for the development of counter-hegemonic claims. She defines safe spaces as ‘a space where exploratory discourse is possible, where one is able to make mistakes knowing the opportunity to correct them exists’ (Palczewski 2001, 172). In what follows, I explore the concept of the ‘safe space’ and how it is described by feminist bloggers, as well as the ways that their narratives of participation contradict this idea of ‘safety’. For example, debates within the community about ‘pile-on’ conflicts and ‘call-out culture’ are discussed on pages 142-144. I also explore the way that feminist bloggers describe the practices and defences that they have built up to repel trolls and disruptive others. Feminist bloggers hold a relation of antagonism and aversion towards ‘trolls’ and anti-feminists in the internet-based discursive space, as well as parts of the mainstream media. Bound up in this aversive politics are the practices of moderation that feminist bloggers have developed to delimit allowable expressions, a practice of defining the offensive that disallows these discourses from entering the ‘safe spaces’ of feminist blogs, except in opposition.

This chapter demonstrates how community has become an important component of Australian feminist blogging practice, and women engage in a number of different kinds of work to ensure that the community builds in size and strength of affinity. Bloggers develop affective attachments towards one another, build friendships, and build and maintain a sense of community. This can range from making an effort to read and link to other Australian blogs, to running, submitting to, curating and hosting the Down Under Feminists’

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Carnival. It can also involve the efforts of individual bloggers to be inclusive, supportive, and welcoming to others.

Although feminist women often start blogging as a way to write about politics, as an outlet for anger, or to engage in analysis of media texts, what keeps them there are the relationships and connections they build with others. Whether through the reciprocation of support, commenting practices, or friendships built on Twitter, Tumblr, and offline, the sense of community goes well beyond the practice of writing on the same area of interest. Bloggers talked about their sense of responsibility to create a safe space for other feminists on their own blogs. These desires and aims, however, are in constant conflict and tension with the fact that blogs are not always affectively ‘safe’ spaces. Bloggers’ negotiations of feminist politics with others can be emotionally hurtful and risky, particularly in the negotiation of intersectional feminism, privilege and power. Participants with intersecting identities describe being excluded, ignored, and policed at times by mainstream feminist discourse. Further, the presence of trolls, targeted harassment, and threats of violence make public blogs an emotionally and sometimes physically dangerous place for women writers. Affect is not just an important part of bloggers’ experiences in the network, but in this chapter I will argue that it is also politically important.

Blogging as outlet

Feminist bloggers use blogs to respond negatively to mainstream discourse, as a result of the disjuncture between their own political views and the mainstream. They express these responses through blogs in a politically engaged way, and connect with others who experience similar reactions. There are emotional advantages to the practice of blogging among like-minded others, but the purpose of my argument here is to show the ways that this is also political.

In feminist blogs, there is a shared idea about the expression of anger as a good, in political terms, and as both permissible and positive. In the previous chapter, ‘Blue Milk’ explained her hopes to encourage other mothers to identify as feminist. She also discussed the

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difference between her own blog and other kinds of ‘mommy blogs’ in parenting networks. For ‘Blue Milk’, there is a relationship between feminist identity and affect:

One thing I’ve noticed in my dabbling around the more mainstream mother blogs [is that they] really have a hard time with owning anger. They can talk about how much it feels like they’re angry, but they won’t say they’re angry with their partners or with society or with their jobs or occupations. [...] People expect you to always clarify ‘But isn’t it rewarding, your job [as a mother]’. That is something I see a lot of and I think it’s one of the first steps of identifying as a feminist is being able to accept your anger. That it’s not something you have to bury. (‘Blue Milk’, in interview 2010, emphasis mine)

The invitation to embrace anger is also present in the title of the blog Fuck Politeness. The blogger ‘Fuck Politeness’ explains how she had seen in the media instances of when ‘politeness was used to shut down debate’ and would override ‘somebody’s life and what was going on’. She decided that Fuck Politeness would be a good name for a blog. This explanation links to Tomlinson’s (2010, 60) claim that conventions of civility ‘serve entrenched interests by encouraging aggrieved parties to give up part of their bargaining power – their emotional force and its consequences – prior to negotiation’ (emphasis hers). ‘Fuck Politeness’ started writing her blog because of the frustrations she felt in everyday conversations and arguments with others, because she felt that she was not listened to, and felt that writing might be a way to actually get her ideas out and heard by others. She felt blocked from contributing to political conversations in her everyday life because of the way her style of communication was discredited. In blogs she found a way to express her anger that was accepted and even encouraged. Her blogging was a response, not just to problematic discourses, but also to her exclusion from those conversations:

I remember that being something that really got me fired up about writing and about having a space where my voice could actually be listened to because I was so used to that being the end result of any disagreement with a guy where [frustrated laugh] they could just do that, they could just say ‘Oh, you’re being oversensitive’, ‘Oh, you’re being stupid’ or ‘Oh, you’re just a man-hater’. And I think it really hit me how little space there was for me to actually push back and have the last word and say, ‘You’re not listening to what I’m actually saying’. I

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don’t know, I guess I got sick of just ranting about these things to my friends and thought that I might as well have a go at writing. (‘Fuck Politeness’, in interview, 2009)

Similarly, ‘News With Nipples’ (in interview, 2009) started to write her own blog because she wanted an outlet. It was a way to get away from her work environment and the expectations of that space: ‘Because I work for a dirty tabloid, I didn’t have an outlet for having a good whinge about the stuff that was in the news’, she explains (in interview, 2009). As a journalist, she found it difficult to broach topics of sexism in the media in her workplace on a daily basis. She felt pressure to pick her battles, but came up against sexism far more often than she was able to address it directly at work. For ‘Shiny’, who writes for a living ‘about things that don’t necessarily fire me up’, her blog is where she goes ‘to expel frustration’ (‘A Shiny New Coin’, in interview, 2010). For ‘Blue Milk’, blogging is:

An avenue where you can have a political life which you don’t normally get to have in everyday conversation. So I look at it from that perspective, that instead of just thinking your angry thoughts, you can actually put them out there. (‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010)

‘Caitlinate’ (in interview, 2010) summed up these affective dimensions to blogging by saying ‘I think I write better when I’m angry’. More than one participant acknowledged that they write in blogs so as not to rant at friends and family members, to put their political feeling into something productive, positive, and shared:

I think it’s really nice to have an outlet for that rage. One of the great things about having a blog and to be able to write in your own way, is that you don’t have to bore your own partner and your close friends with the same things. (‘CrazyBrave’, in interview, 2010)

In the discussion of what prompted her to write a recent blog post, ‘Spilt Milk’ concurs:

I guess that’s an example of me seeing something in the media and just being very cross, [Laughs] and in the past I might have just said something to my husband or a friend if I was talking to them on the phone. You know, ‘did you see that? It’s terrible’, and then that would’ve been it. But now that I have a blog I can actually rant at people. I think that’s an example of one of the really positive things that come out of blogging for me I think is that

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it’s that kind of outlet so if I do feel outraged by something I can express that and I hope that some people read it and concur or some of the people I know in real life might read it and go ‘oh I never really thought about that’. (‘Spilt Milk’, in interview, 2010)

‘Tigtog’ explained that ‘blogging is very much about your own personal levels of outrage or disgust or disdain’, and thus writing politically through blogs is not necessarily a systematic process - ‘You just can’t concentrate on everything’ (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2009). Writing is bound up in enjoyment and the push to create and share ideas with people who will want to hear them, and who will appreciate and identify with the blogger’s perspective. The subject matter that each individual chooses to write about is motivated by an affective reaction to an event or experience or problem, and a desire to respond to it:

I find what’s more important, what’s more useful to me is a strong desire to speak rather than having any sort of idea of the shape or the tone or the mode of the finished product. [...] It’s more about the impulse. (‘Lucy Tartan’, in interview, 2010)

Not everyone felt that blogging provided them with an emotional outlet, but reframed the idea of ‘outlet’ in other terms: ‘I tend not to get angry at things’, one blogger explained, ‘I get analytic about them’ (‘In A Strange Land’, in interview, 2010). Alongside anger, blogs are also an outlet for creativity, enjoyment, fun and humour, analysis, sharing and distributions of attention (e.g. through link posts and ‘signal boosts’ to draw attention to other people’s writing) and anything that is not fulfilled in other areas of life. This can be because of childcare or work commitments, or in response to the limitations in the kind of conversations that are possible with one’s immediate peer group or closest family. For instance ‘Spilt Milk’ told me that blogging was ‘a real outlet for me because I get very bored, being a stay at home mother. I need more intellectual stimulation than my two year old can give me, [...] and also it’s a bit of an emotional outlet sometimes’ (in interview, 2010). For her and others it is also about wishing to engage in the political and expressing their political opinions out there in the community, about contributing to political discussion:

Definitely sometimes it’s an emotional impetus. There are some of my posts which are very much driven by being pissed off at something or thinking that something is really irritating or

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so forth. But there are also quite a few that are more reflective, like they’re more based on a sort of analytical response, so I think it’s a mixture of both. (‘Godard’s Letterboxes’, in interview, 2010)

This idea of blogging as either ‘analytical outlet’ or emotional response hints at the link between the affective and the individual as political subject. Bloggers respond to dissonance in their sense-making structures both intellectually and as a response to political feeling. These responses cannot be separated. Both occur as a result of something jarring in mainstream discourse that then leads to a discursive response. Bloggers develop oppositional discourses around particular mainstream discourses, and this leads to conflict with that outside discourse. But there are also conflicts within blogging communities; between bloggers in the negotiation of feminist politics, and between bloggers and outsiders who disrupt and harass them.

Trolls and other dissonance

Choosing not to allow someone else’s comment on one’s own space is not censoring them (they are always free to say it on their own blog), it’s simply not publishing them. A commitment to the principle of free speech does not mean forgoing one’s right (and responsibility) to shape the content on your own web publication, including the comments made by readers (different bloggers will obviously have different thresholds for ‘unacceptable’ and will explicate those thresholds as they choose).

‘tigtog’ (2007)

For women who use their blogs as an outlet for personal frustrations and political feeling, as well as emotional support from others, it can be a jarring experience when other people come to a blog in order to troll; to intentionally bait bloggers and derail discussions. It can also be a personally terrifying and traumatic experience when other people come to a blog in order to threaten, harass, and intimidate bloggers and other participants in discussions. This is especially true when people use blogs as a personal outlet, which can give the community the atmosphere of a support network. If bloggers often speak of their intent to

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create a safe space for these kinds of discussions, this is in direct tension with another subset of visitors to feminist blogs - those whose views are directly opposed to feminism.

Because of the culture of strong moderation policies in place in the network, troll attacks are now rarely visible, because they are either deterred, moderated, disemvowelled30, deleted or ignored. Trolling is often only visible as a note in the comments or the post itself. For example the moderator’s note at Hoyden About Town: ‘we've been receiving some pretty damn nasty comments that haven't made it past moderation’ (‘Lauredhel’ 2009b). However, in their strategies to deter trolls, feminist bloggers occasionally make a point of discussing the trolling event, to make visible particular behaviours and tactics that trolls use to derail discussion.

Such discussion also makes visible the aggressive attention that women – particularly feminist – bloggers receive. Recently, bloggers have tried to make the abuse and threats they experience visible through the Twitter hashtag #mencallmethings, a meme that spread to other social networks and blogs, and received mainstream media attention31. The meme drew on building concerns within the international feminist community about whether simply making trolls invisible was the right approach, because women continued to experience harassment whether that harassment was published or not.

The usual response to complaints of trolling and abuse online is ‘Don’t feed the trolls’, [i.e.] don’t respond to them or pay them any attention and they’ll go away. They don’t. They’re still there, no matter what you do. But not feeding the trolls creates a culture of silence, where women feel that they are alone in the abuse they are suffering. Only by exposing it can we beat it. (‘Fat Heffalump’, quoted in Sanders [2011])

30 Disemvowelling: The practice of removing vowels to make an offensive comment unintelligible.

31 See, for example: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/trollattack- campaign-goes-viral-20111108-1n4j4.html.

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An earlier example of this tactic of making visible of trolls is Hoyden About Town’s February 2009 ‘Troll-Off!’ (‘Lauredhel’ 2009c), a satirical poll where participants could vote for one of seven trolls. Trolling comments, though they were moderated or deleted in the original entries, were collected and reproduced in the poll article and posted together. In this way they were clearly tagged as unacceptable. Tomlinson (2010, 145) writes on the rhetorical strategy of ‘intensification’, wherein scholars ‘quote, echo, aggregrate, exaggerate, and in other ways appropriate the language of other people’s pedagogical texts’. The satirical aggregation of examples of trolling has the same effect, ‘heaping’ and ‘conglomerating’ language to demonstrate its superfluity (Tomlinson 2010, 145).

Despite their importance, such light-hearted responses to trolls belie the very real emotional consequences of threats and harassment in online spaces. In internet culture in general, and blogs in particular, guidelines for behaviour make attempts to address problematic practices such as trolling and harassment. However, such a doctrine of ‘civility’ is problematic for feminist bloggers. In an illustrative response to one such code of conduct, Australian feminist blogger ‘Lauredhel’ adapted it for a feminist readership:

So, my draft Blog Reader’s Code: * If a blogger has a ‘feminine’ pseudonym – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her. * If a blogger says something you don’t like – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her. * If a blogger disagrees with you publicly – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her. * If a blogger has a photograph of herself on her blog – Don’t threaten to rape and kill her. (‘Lauredhel’ 2007b)

The Blog Reader’s Code continues in the same pattern, satirically taking the code of ‘civility’ to task. This Code sends up other bloggers’ concern with maintaining civility in online spaces, and trusting others to maintain such civility, exposing the specific threats and dangers that women writers are exposed to in public space.

In all interviews in this study, women either described harassment and threats that they experienced, or told a story of other women bloggers who had experienced harassment and threats. One research participant had her real name exposed in a comment by someone who

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was insulting and harassing her. This was experienced as directly threatening. Some women who had not experienced direct threats themselves said ‘I’ve been lucky’ (e.g. Chally Kacelnik, in interview, 2009). There is an implicit sense of threat in the view that women have that they have ‘escaped’ harassment or the feeling of having ‘been lucky’. For example:

I know some of the other girls, whose blogs I go to, they do get quite nasty trolls on there, who will just say horrible horrible things, but I haven’t had any of that happening. (‘News with Nipples’, in interview, 2009)

Civility is also a problematic concept in feminist blogs for reasons explored by Tomlinson (2010, 48-60). As mentioned previously, Tomlinson discusses the way the trope of civility is used to re-position people on the basis of gender and race. This is a strategy that depoliticises political speech by framing it as ‘disagreeable’ or ‘demanding’ (Tomlinson 2010, 46). Women and women of colour are marked by their gender and race and as a result considered subject to ‘specific forms of surveillance’ (Tomlinson 2010, 46) and policing by others. Readers and audience are free to ‘chastise and instruct the author’ (Tomlinson 2010, 47). Women writers, and women of colour in feminist communities (in particular) ‘must allow audiences to demand civility from them, while the audiences excuse incivility in themselves and others’ (Tomlinson 2010, 48).

Some trolls couch their comments in civility while simultaneously de-railing discussion. These comments generally make it through moderation, but feminists have developed taxonomies of trolls, including ‘concern trolls’ and ‘mansplainers’. A concern troll couches his or her attempts to derail discussion in terms of concern:

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Figure 4.1. A LOLcat meme image satirising ‘concern trolls’ and their tactics. (‘tigtog’ 2011).

The meme of the ‘concern troll’ has also been taken up in the Fat Acceptance community, to describe someone who reproduces fat-phobic discourse out of ‘concern’ for others’ health. ‘Mansplaining’ addresses the topic of the post, particularly posts about offensive or discriminatory discourse, by explaining slowly and carefully why it is not offensive or should be excused. ‘Mansplainers’ treat feminist writers as though they are incapable of comprehending the world on their own terms, which is a silencing practice. They often portray themselves as experts in gender politics. Some trolling incidents veer into the realms of cyber-harassment and manipulation32.

There are also participants who are not trolls, but whose views are opposed to members of the community. As the previous chapter’s discussion of bingo cards illustrates, feminist bloggers have come up with strategies to deal with not only trolls, but also with ignorant bystanders, and others who engage in online political discourse in apparently good faith. These are readers who hold opposing beliefs about gender and feminism but are not intentionally commenting in order to disrupt or derail discussion. Bloggers in the network try not to make this distinction too sharp, because trolls often do hold strong beliefs about

32 As documented at: http://hoydenabouttown.com/20110813.10389/repostcrosspost- because-this-psa-is-still-needed-can-i-talk-to-you-troll/ (‘Guest Hoyden’ 2011)

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feminism, and engage in trolling and harassment in feminist blogs precisely because they are anti-feminist.

Anti-feminist discourses are also present in the comments on mainstream online news. Many of the women interviewed discussed the aversive reactions that they had to seeing the opinions of the ‘vocal minority’ on public news websites and in the comments on their own blogs. For many, the visibility of these opinions is disturbing. ‘CrazyBrave’ told me:

I remember being really surprised just to see the kinds of things people thought it was reasonable to say on media sites. [It's] not even the responses to feminism, the responses to feminist women. Just the kind of... any woman saying anything is attacked for her femaleness, is what it is. And I think that’s awful, and that makes me identify much more strongly as a feminist. And makes me go harder too, on the people who are being [like that]. (‘CrazyBrave’, in interview, 2010)

The existence and expression of these opinions therefore make anti-feminist viewpoints more visible, and radicalise feminists who had previously assumed that these opinions were not widely held. The idea that feminism is no longer needed or ‘has won’ is quickly debunked through even the shortest exposure to online discussion of mainstream media. The response that feminist bloggers have towards these opinions was frequently expressed as an emotional one. It is shocking, horrifying, or depressing to read:

One of the things about the internet that’s really depressing is that the vocal minority are so vile, you know? At the end of all the news stories, they’re so horrible, and it’s predictable. Every story about the battle of the sexes or race or child support payments or anything like that, they all come out of the woodwork, and I’m like ‘Where are the normal people?’ [Laughs], ‘Where are the people who are just like me or my mum or my employer who are completely ordinary, and want justice, and want the best for everybody?’. (‘A Shiny New Coin’, in interview, 2010)

For ‘TigTog’ from Hoyden About Town, these opinions have always existed, and have only become more visible as a result of the internet.

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[It used to be] easier to pretend that ‘oh no, people don’t really think things like that’. Oh, yes they do! More of them than you’d like to imagine. (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2009)

Once engaged in online discourse, the feminist blogging community can serve as a space away from such discourses and opinions, as well as a space to talk about and counter those views. As ‘Ariane’ (in interview, 2010) explains, being part of the feminist blogging community enables her to engage with political ideas without having to interact with ‘people whose opinions I really can’t handle’:

One of the things I like about it is that I can see all these different perspectives and opinions that are still reasonably well aligned with my own, so that it’s not just depressing, and I get a sort of filtered view of the outside world by people reacting to it. (‘Ariane’, in interview, 2009)

‘Ariane’ feels that there are people in the mainstream with horrendous ideas and opinions, and in feminist blogs she finds protective space away from these ideas, where she can engage with like-minded people. ‘Rayedish’ expressed a similar resistance to mainstream discourses, an aversion that has increased as a result of her involvement in feminist networks:

I’ve found that I’ve definitely become more feminist in who I want to read and why because I found it’s sharpened my sensitivity to misogyny in comments and stuff, and I just don’t want to read it if I don’t have to. A feminist blog [is a] safe space. (‘Rayedish’, in interview, 2010)

However, sometimes people with anti-feminist views come to feminist blogs. ‘CrazyBrave’ (in interview, 2010) believes that this happens because of ‘pushback’. Women are pushing forward, for change, and antagonistic visitors resist that push for change:

One thing that really amazes me about feminist blogs, is how hard you actually fight to have to have a space for a feminist discussion. Even online where there’s no limit to how many conversations can go on there, [blogs] have to be policed. (‘CrazyBrave’, in interview, 2010)

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Feminist bloggers have developed collective strategies to counter trolling and harassment when it occurs. They have developed these strategies in response to the aggression, harassment, and kneejerk responses that they face in comments. These strategies are not only practical, but help to build relationships within the community. Building up a shared awareness of how to deter and discourage trolling helps to build camaraderie among bloggers and a sense of strength and capacity to together resist offensive discourses. ‘Godard's Letterboxes’ told me how it helps her to know that she's part of a group dealing with the same issues and problems:

Particularly if you write something on rape and get trolling comments back at you, you don’t feel alone in that you’re the only one who is facing those kinds of things. And that you can have the courage to just say, ‘Your opinion doesn’t really count’ or ‘I’m not interested in you’ and looking at how other people deal with comments and things is quite interesting and quite empowering. (‘Godard’s Letterboxes’, in interview, 2010)

The way that feminist bloggers have developed strong moderation policies in cooperation with each other is linked to the development of feminist community itself. In particular bloggers make use of backchannels such as Twitter, email lists, and personal emails and chats to share solidarity when they come up against particular forms of opposition, such as trolls, or extremely problematic political statements, or personal attacks. An example of this is the previously mentioned #mencallmethings Twitter hashtag, but bloggers also use backchannels in particular instances of abuse and trolling.

Feminist bloggers see the shared moderation culture as a way to be supportive of one another, and to prevent others from having to deal with offensive attacks or ‘triggering’ (i.e. of a past trauma) ideas. ‘Blue Milk’ (in interview, 2010) explained that one of the reasons she avoids reading big mainstream political blogs is that they are not as well-moderated as the big feminist blogs who ‘look out for that sort of trolling behaviour’. She values sites like Hoyden About Town because ‘you know you're not going to get mercilessly attacked by a bunch of trolls’ (‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010). Moderation is a responsibility and a labour that feminist bloggers commit to when deciding which comments to publish and which to not publish. Moderation has negotiated conventions, individually enforced, and bloggers

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make personal decisions about where to draw the line. The women I spoke to had varying ideas of when it was appropriate to disallow or ‘disemvowel’ a comment:

I do have a comments policy. Assuming people are in accordance with it I do publish their comments. Sometimes I publish comments that go against the comments policy. If someone is outrightly offensive to myself or one of the commenters in terms of making sexist comments towards them or wishing them not-nice things, I won’t publish those. (Chally Kacelnik, in interview, 2009)

Bloggers express a commitment to ensuring that the blog remains a safe space for others, at least as far as practicable. This means that often the hosts and moderators of blogs have more awareness of levels of trolling and offensive comments than other participants do, because abusive comments are not allowed to pass moderation. This is particularly true for expressions of hate speech, which are not tolerated on feminist blogs. However, some bloggers explained that they will occasionally publish offensive comments in order to make these views visible and expose the commenter. ‘Fuck Politeness’ explained why:

I will publish anything that’s just idiocy and a bit of a rant but I’ve only a couple of times devowelled people, but if [...] they’re coming on to say something like ‘trans people should die!’ then I’m not gonna publish that without taking the vowels out and ripping them a new one because it’s not okay to say stuff like that. (‘Fuck Politeness’, in interview, 2009)

Many feminist bloggers talked about the culture of moderation in the feminist online community and their own comments policies and comment moderation approaches. ‘Tigtog’ explains that:

[T]hree or four years ago, there were a lot of feminist bloggers who were reluctant to moderate their blogs. They weren’t confident in the idea that they didn’t have to publish anything, everything. Or [felt] that it was unfair to just not approve a comment just simply because you found the person annoying. I mean, it’s your blog, you don’t have to publish people you find annoying. And I admire some of the people who do publish anything and let

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it fall where it may, but I think that’s a very different sort of space from a space where, that you can necessarily have continued productive discussions on. (Tigtog, in interview, 2010)

New people coming into communities develop an awareness of their right to disallow harassment and offensive comments in their own blogs by observing moderation practices on other blogs. Sometimes moderators have clearly outlined policies, but other times moderation tactics and guidelines will be negotiated over time. When asked what her comments policy was when faced with abusive or derailing comments, the host of a relatively new blog ‘News With Nipples’ told me that her policy was simply ‘This is my blog, I do what I want!’ and that she would most likely:

Just delete it, you know? Or publish it and ridicule it. I don’t think I actually say that in my comments policy, but if you’re just going to be a troll, don’t waste your time, because I won’t publish it. And then you’re just wasting your time. [Laughs] (‘News With Nipples’, in interview, 2009)

‘Helen’ from Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony wondered whether a tight moderation policy has its own problems and leads to the exclusion of awareness of particular views held by people who may be reading and commenting on feminist blogs:

I think the issue of commenting is very interesting to me as a femmoblogger because there’s a definite opinion out there in the US and to some extent [in Australia] that you are responsible for what your commenters are saying. Obviously you’re not responsible for the whole spectrum of opinions but what it means is that if you were to come into my blog and indulge in a bit of hate speech or very disparaging talk about say transsexuals or people with disabilities or whatever it might be, then if I was to leave it there, then that’s an implicit endorsement. Now I don’t believe that and I think there’s actually a little bit of an advantage in leaving some of those commenters up so that people can identify that commenter and see where they’re coming from. […] I think it’s probably a good idea if somebody indulges in out- and-out hate speech to either moderate it or you can put something, you can edit a post so that you can put a comment in brackets sort of saying this isn’t acceptable here, anything further will be moderated. But I think it’s good that [we know that] these people are out

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there and shown up for what they are. (‘Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony’, in interview, 2010)

On the Hoyden About Town blog moderators maintain a culture of careful moderation in order to discourage attacks. Long-time bloggers such as ‘Tigtog’ and ‘Helen’ derive their tactics towards trolls and offensive comments from their experience of internet sociality going back to Usenet newsgroups and forums. ‘Tigtog’ argued that her experience in such communities helped her to have a realistic understanding of internet debate, derailment and trolling practices, enabling her to develop a strong moderation culture in the Hoyden About Town blog particularly. Such moderation practices promote a sense of safety and community that aims to allow feminist discourse to flourish, and that fosters an ethics of attention to intersectional issues.

However harassment and threats, as well as intra-community conflict, remain a significant problem for individual feminist bloggers, even when they are not made visible. For example, the Australian blogger Chally Kacelnik, after a long stint on the staff of the international, US- based blog Feministe, wrote her final post on that site:

As much as we have amazing conversations so much of the time, dealing with commenters here has taken over a lot of my life and commanded too much of my effort and spirit. [...] [N]o one should have to put up with the kind of thing I was getting from readers simply because of who I was. I have received violent threats, I have received remarks about my family and my racial background. I have received the more mundane forces of attempts to hijack almost every single conversation and make it about something closer to feminist and social norms, which seem curiously aligned at times. I have taken every kind of pressure you can imagine. (‘Chally’ 2011b)

This post makes clear that although feminist bloggers aim to make a safe space for feminist discussions – as was repeatedly mentioned in interviews – internal conflict brings up difficult affects for feminist bloggers. My interviewees were more tentative in discussing these aspects of their experience, but conflict and disagreement has an undeniable part to play in the affective landscapes of feminist communities. In part this is because in Australian

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networks conflict is less ubiquitous than in international feminist networks – by which I mean that the majority of specific instances of conflict discussed by my interviewees, the majority were in US-based group blogs such as Feministe, as in the above example. Nonetheless internal conflict was part of blogging participation for many.

The politics of feminist spaces

Bloggers describe the development of designated spaces for feminist thinking and writing as a political act. Among other things, the blogging network functions as a support network for feminist and politically active women. ‘A lot of people have been pretty badly damaged by other people being horrific to them’, Ariane explains, and because of this it sometimes ‘feels more like a support network than a movement for change’ (‘Ariane’, in interview, 2009). But building an affective community was also often understood as part of the political work of blogs. The case study of the Fat Acceptance sub-community later in the chapter is used as an illustration of this process. These women and men are engaged in discursive activism, and part of that is building a support network and a discursive space for people identifying as fat.

Bloggers see engagement and interaction within the feminist community as part of their feminist practice. ‘Shiny’ (in interview, 2010) felt that the practice of building community was a kind of ‘applied’ feminism. The community enabled people to both share feminist knowledge and feminist discourses, but also to apply that to their own lives. ‘Lucy Tartan’ explained:

I think it informs every part of my life. Feminism does, anyway, being part of the community... Community interactions have been at least as important as all the book learning, all of the reading. It ceases to be theory when you’re discussing your ideas with other people, and with all of their real lives. It exposes the weaknesses in theory. (‘Lucy Tartan’, in interview, 2010)

These networked negotiations can take on both positive and negative affective charge. While on the whole bloggers had good emotional relationship with other bloggers, many also experienced conflict and other difficulties. Maddison’s (2003) work on the potentially

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productive purposes of conflict between feminists shows that this is not always negative, and certainly conflict can be and is productive in this network. However, there are also unproductive aspects to feminist politics online that relate to ingrained patterns of internet sociality and also particular aspects of online social justice communities. One tendency that has been described in these networks is the ‘pile-on’ conflict, in which a number of participants ‘call out’ a particular participant when they say something offensive. This becomes a pile-on when many people reply at once criticising the poster of the consciously or unconsciously offensive comment or post. Participants may also draw attention to the comment or post on their own blogs or on social media, thus drawing still more responses. The main problem with pile-on conflicts is that they can be very unpleasant for the person involved, particularly if they said something as a result of unconscious beliefs or unexamined privilege (‘tigtog’ 2009).

One example of such a ‘pile-on’ conflict occurred at the blog Hoyden About Town as part of the ‘Where are the women bloggers?’ debate, which is also described in Chapter Five (‘Lauredhel’ 2009b). One participant used the phrase ‘going native’ (‘Possum Comitatus’ in the comments of ‘Lauredhel’ 2009b). In a follow-up post (‘tigtog’ 2009) blog participants and commenters discussed the conflict and whether people could have or should have responded differently. ‘Tigtog’ (2009) pointed out that most people are ‘swimming in the toxic soup of assumptions and common turns of phrase’ and that the unconscious repetition of such phrases is altogether possible for most. However at the same time she affirms the value of ‘[c]hecking one’s own privilege as a result’ and understanding that as ‘an opportunity for self-awareness’ (‘tigtog’ 2009). The difficulty, as she acknowledged, is to make criticisms without blaming, and in taking criticism without defensiveness. In the discussion to this post, commenters also obliquely referred to one or two other ‘pile-on’ events in the same blogging community, to discuss whether or not ‘pile-ons’ are always productive or unproductive of good political (and interpersonal) outcomes. ‘Deborah’ (in comments on ‘tigtog’ 2009) explained that ‘it’s actually much easier to say, “oh no – I stuffed up and I’m sorry” and work on trying not to do it again, than getting myself wound up in trying to justify myself to myself’. However, others also expressed frustration towards those who seem unable or unwilling to check their privilege in these kinds of circumstances. ‘Wildly Parenthetical’ (in comments on ‘tigtog’ 2009), said that:

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I had thought that there was a shared, if implicit, commitment to taking people who experienced marginalisation seriously, and to make it the responsibility of those privileged to interrogate how their privilege is earned off the back of the marginalisation of others.

She and others linked conflict to participants’ frustrations when their claims were dismissed by those with privilege, forcing these participants to prove or defend their own marginalisation. However, others such as ‘Fine’ (in comments on ‘tigtog’ 2009) felt that sometimes ‘calling out’ others became ‘demeaning, jeering and mocking people’.

On the whole bloggers linked the productive aspects of conflict to their commitment to an ethos of alterity and the ways that conflict has helped them change their minds. They linked the unproductive aspects of conflict to others’, or their own, inability to engage with this ethic. Two examples of how this was described in interviews are below:

Like people don’t get online, find somebody who disagrees with them and says ‘so, try and convince me, because I’m really interested to change my opinion’. I’m not going to be convinced by them, they’re not going to be convinced by me. And it will get me so angry, so frustrated so quickly to see how horrible people [are]. (‘Naomi Eve’, in interview, 2009)

You have the occasional blog war. Although I really don’t bother on that especially much these days. I’ve had the occasional spat with someone in comments at Hoyden [About Town]. I don’t follow them back to their blog and continue it there. (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2009)

However some also felt that the prevalence of ‘pile-ons’ in feminist blog comment threads, as well as ‘call-out culture’ were problematic aspects of the feminist blogging network. Through the negotiation of claims in the community, conflict has productive uses, but sometimes conflict is profound and leads to the dismissal of another’s point of view. However, bloggers do not necessarily aim to make blogs a safe space for all kinds of participation. Safety for some kinds of speech can preclude safety for others. As ‘Lauredhel’ (in comments on ‘tigtog’ 2009) explained, ‘my bottom line is, and I am only talking for myself here, my threads will not be a safe space for racist/sexist/ableist/homophobic/etc language’

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(emphasis in original). It was debated whether this safety versus non-safety dichotomy was productive when ‘allordinary2’ critiqued this sensibility (in comments on ‘tigtog’ 2009) by saying ‘[i]t’s the technique of refusing the attempt to make you swallow shit by forcing the other person to swallow shit themselves that I find both ethically deplorable and politically unproductive’. Although relatively rare, these types of conflict show that there is an ongoing interplay between safety, risk, privilege, and place, as well as different affective relationships and styles of communication within these networks, that cause people to make choices about participation and non-participation in conversations.

Because these networks of feminist thinkers and writers break up and re-form in different configurations as a result of shifting patterns of attention, they ‘differ profoundly from the image of the politically organized actor’ that is portrayed in social movement studies. However, Melucci’s (1996, 115) submerged networks fit these dispersed patterns of relating. He sees movements as ‘hidden networks of groups, meeting points, and circuits of solidarity’. These hidden networks allow for ‘cohesion which even persists through troughs in the cycle of collective mobilization’, in other words at times when social receptivity to particular discourses is low (Melucci 1996, 114). For ‘Blue Milk’, writing in the feminist parenting context, writing a blog has had the explicit goal of:

[B]uilding a community for myself. That was definitely one of the reasons why I did it. [A goal of my blogging was] finding other parents like me and particularly other women, and other parents that I could learn from or other parents that I could feel some sense of bond with. Parenting blogs are blogs where people are writing about their lives and so there’s a kind of lovely intimacy there and so that’s been incredible. (‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010)

Internet communities also, ideally, provide a greater degree of accessibility and inclusion. Feminist bloggers strive to make this a reality, and some of the women that I interviewed explained that blogging allowed them to engage politically in ways that they otherwise would not be able to. Blogs allow people to find likeminded others in geographically dispersed locations. The community also allows for international engagement with bloggers overseas. The international feminist community was not within the scope of my study. However, over the three years of this research, Australian feminist bloggers forged strong

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links and maintained relationships with a range of bloggers in other locations - the United States and New Zealand, in particular. As ‘Caitlinate’ (in interview, 2010) explains, the internet-based feminist community can provide replacements ‘for real life communities for people who are alienated or physically unable to access a wider physical community whether through their own abilities or through being in the middle of nowhere’. For women who are raising children, or whose access to space outside the homes is otherwise limited due to disability, and/or who live in places where their contact with other feminists is limited, the blogging network is invaluable:

[The] online community is quite important to me, because I don’t have a huge number of people in my real life connections with similar outlooks on life. (‘Mimbles’, in interview, 2010)

Backchannels such as Twitter and Tumblr have also developed an importance in reinforcing and encouraging a sense of community among feminist bloggers:

Before, even when I was reading blogs every day, I still felt sort of apart from it because I wasn’t commenting on it. Now I’m talking to those same people on Twitter, and even when I’m not commenting on their blogs, I’m still talking to them about stuff, so it’s actually a really powerful social tool. (‘PharaohKatt’, in interview, 2010)

As well as providing a space for solidarity and community, for some women backchannels like Twitter have helped them find likeminded people in the first place. ‘Naomi Eve’ came to the feminist blogosphere indirectly through her organisation of the ‘Hottest 100 Women’ poll in 200933. Through word of mouth on Twitter she was able to form a new online social circle (discussed further in Chapter Five):

Through The Hottest 100 I met all these cool feminist people. Wow! I forgot we could do this online! […] Then I realised I’d added half of the biggest online feminist bloggers in Australia [on Twitter]. And I’m like well that’s nice, we’re friends now. Go me! How did that happen?

33 Details at http://hottest100women.blogspot.com/

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So I started reading a lot more feminist blogs, and participating in the debate more. […] I’m part of a community. It’s a community of online feminists and that’s got to be the coolest community I’ve been in for a while, you know? It’s happy days. (‘Naomi Eve’, in interview, 2010)

The labour of linking

Women engage in a number of different kinds of labour to build Australian feminist blogging communities. This can range from making an effort to read and link to other Australian blogs, to running, submitting to, curating and hosting the Down Under Feminist Carnival (see introduction). ‘Caitlinate’ explains why she thinks the development of community is so important politically. Her response highlights the emotional dimensions of her political involvement:

Feeling that community power, and that spoken power and that written power, is really really really amazing and much more powerful than just being someone explaining really clearly why [something is] not okay, I think. Even if it’s not said explicitly, the emotion of it and the fact that these people are gathering together to say that that’s not okay and here are all these things that happened and we see them and we know that they’re there and as a community we fight them or speak out against them. That’s incredible. (‘Caitlinate’, in interview, 2010)

The blogging community thrives on networks of attention. ‘Tigtog’ explains how she uses link posts to build a sense of community and help Australian feminists to find one another. This shows how the building of networks of attention can be an intentional and political activity rather than simply being informed by personal interests. As internet users, people find what is visible to them and what others in their own attention networks make visible to them (boyd 2009b). Many feminist bloggers use the term ‘signal boost’ in their everyday blogging practice. Rather than speaking for other people, this concept signifies a commitment to helping other people find new voices, and boosting the signals of people who are saying important things. This allows bloggers to direct attention to marginalised voices. ‘Tigtog’ explains the value of this kind of activism:

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I think one of the best things of the blogosphere generally is the way that you can lead your own readers to find other voices. You find other voices yourself through what you read on people’s blogs, that they find somebody and linking to them, you can sort of help other people find them and build them up and whatever. (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2010)

Chally Kacelnik talks about her own blog reading and linking practices, noting that:

I tend to include a lot of white feminists and this bothers me, specifically because there’s been such a centreing of white experience in the feminist movement, and I as a non-white woman find that I want to find experiences of people, not just like myself but people who’ve been marginalised within this movement. So I try to keep a mixture and keep everything percolating and find different kinds of experiences. (Chally Kacelnik, in interview 2009)

I would argue that while many of the early blogging participants came to the Australian blogs through contacts in North American blogging networks, the current strength of Australian feminist blogging networks was constructed through the links and attention that Australian feminist bloggers gave to their own community. This is something that takes a great deal of effort and is a political labour. The Down Under Feminist Carnival, which has been running for a little over two years, was begun by ‘Lauredhel’ at Hoyden About Town and is now being administrated by Chally Kacelnik. This labour is appreciated and understood by other bloggers as important to the health of the community, and as having solidified and extended the networks of attention that existed at its inception.

Comment culture and lurking

This is how I think about it: when comments and links are flying, there’s a cost to receiving a comment: seeing that notification sitting there in your inbox, and wondering if it’s yet another flame or criticism or even a thoughtful comment that might take an hour of one’s time to properly digest and consider (and while doing so 50 comments come in…) It’s immensely stressful knowing that one is the [subject of] intense feelings and scrutiny. (‘Mary’ in a comment on ‘Mindy’ [2011])

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Comment discussions have a particular importance in blogs, allowing for clarifications and argument that is associated with spoken conversation (Barlow 2008, 16). Because comments, unlike the original blog posts themselves, cannot generally be edited after posting, they are more like direct speech which ‘can only be amended through an overlay of other words’ (Barlow 2008, 15).

Comment cultures and architectures differ from blog to blog. Within the Australian feminist community, some bloggers are more likely to write comments on other people’s blogs than others, and some blogs are less likely to have a culture of commenting and forum-like debate on their posts. This does not suggest that they are less a part of the community, as many of their posts are widely read, linked to, and commented on by others, and they may read widely themselves. Often it is a matter of differing writing styles, differing social styles, or a differing history of internet use. An internet user who started out engaging heavily in Usenet discussion groups, for example, or threaded discussions on Livejournal.com, may have a more debate-focused style of internet interaction than those who came to the internet more recently and more tentatively. ‘Tigtog’, one of the main bloggers at Hoyden About Town, which has a strong debate culture, explains:

I guess it all came about because of just being part of online discussion groups from the mid- nineties on, really. I used to be part of several Usenet discussion groups. (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2010)

Bloggers expressed the fact that developing a culture of debate on their blogs requires a certain level of commitment and work on their own part, in order to develop a sense of a community for dialogue and challenge:

[M]y blog doesn’t have a culture of the commentariat talking to each other in the threads. I’m actually actively trying to encourage it at the moment by replying more often to people in the threads, but they don’t tend to talk to each other. (‘Mimbles’, in interview, 2010)

They give this debate a positive value and work to encourage a culture of debate:

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I make an effort to respond to every comment, you know, so it does become a discussion rather than me saying ‘this is my opinion!’ (‘News With Nipples’, in interview, 2010)

While debate is viewed as a positive, however, it can also be a stressful challenge, particularly if debate is accompanied by abusive or trolling comments, or community conflict. In discussing the things that have affected her emotionally as part of the community, Chally Kacelnik spoke about how stressful moderating comments can be when ‘the blog wars’ are on:

[T]here’s been blog drama after blog drama, and I’ve mostly not been in those but the ones I’ve had, it’s been quite distressing. But I try to remember that it’s going to happen again and again and I need to just stay focused on doing the valuable work that we need to do and be in community with these people, because we can’t all get along but most of the time we can, so that’s what I’m trying to do. (Chally Kacelnik, in interview, 2009)

Desires and expectations for an individual blog can sometimes clash with the reality of blogging. ‘TigTog’ explains:

Sometimes […] the blogger will have an idea in their head about what they hope their readers will do with something that they’re doing, and the readers don’t play along. Readers have ideas of their own. [Laughs] (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2010)

Some bloggers have difficulties negotiating the different readerships they have on their blog. As feminist bloggers, the topics they are writing about may be controversial to family and friends who might not share those views. This is a challenge or tension in terms of the sense of intimacy that bloggers develop in their communities combined with the publicity of blogging practice. ‘Spilt Milk’ spoke about the difficulty of this negotiation, after a friend of hers responded angrily to a post she had written:

I suppose that’s one of the experiences from doing it that’s been interesting, is sort of dealing with that type of thing. I think if it had been a stranger who made that comment, I

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would have just thought, ‘Ugh! Whatever’. [Laughs] So it does definitely have an impact on relationships sometimes. (‘Spilt Milk’, in interview, 2010)

Several women brought up a sense of non-belonging, an outsider status, or ‘newbie’ status. ‘Ariane’ said she sometimes feels like she does not belong in the community, and thus does not have the right to comment on particular blogs or on particular topics. ‘Spilt Milk’ also talked about this feeling, as a relative newcomer to the community at the time of our interview:

I can feel a bit intimidated sometimes, especially on some of the bigger blogs because I feel like I’m the new kid, I have that sort of feeling. And also because I feel I haven’t done the reading, I sort of get that feeling like it’s a long time since I’ve actually read any feminist theory or anything like that and there’s a lot of stuff out there that I’m not familiar with at all so I don’t want to put a foot wrong or come off looking ignorant or anything. (‘Spilt Milk’, in interview, 2010)

This intimidation or sense of being an outsider is part of the affective relation that many participants have to the community, though they do not always view this in a negative way. Few resented this feeling - it was just part of becoming used to the discourse in the community, or of choosing to maintain some distance. Others were more immersed in the community, and invested a great deal to the community not just on blogs but also in backchannels and offline. As well as commenting on each others’ blogs and creating networks of attention, bloggers used backchannels such as Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook to reinforce a sense of community and to strengthen and indeed extend the network and influence of the online feminist community. Although I have focused on a blogging network in this study, such backchannels have increasing significance for the reach and spread of the ideas that are generated and reinforced within this community.

As ‘Mimbles’ explains, regarding Twitter; ‘I like that you can have ten, fifteen minute conversations with three or four people while just sitting here at home’. Tumblr is another space in which feminist discursive networks are being built alongside feminist blogging networks. While Tumblr is a blogging platform, many bloggers use it in addition to their

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regular blog to post links and images, more ephemeral, frivolous, or shorter posts, and it can be conducive to building friendships and community off of the main sites where traffic is heaviest. ‘Tigtog’ discusses the value of backchannel communication:

There’s a great deal of solidarity in particular behind the scenes. I’m on several different mailing lists that are made up of different cross-sections of feminist bloggers who’ve for one reason or another have put the mailing list together and keep in touch with each other about things, and it’s nice sometimes to be able to pose a question to those people and get an answer back. (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2010)

Conversations held through Twitter and on Tumblr serve to help bloggers share aspects of their personal lives with one another. They make small talk, and chat to amuse each other, developing in-jokes and directing each other to items of interest. While it may be more casual and ephemeral than the conversation that takes place in comments and in the dialogue of blog posts, it performs a very important function in the community, cementing personal ties and making linkages visible. It helps people find new connections, and new things that they have in common in addition to feminist politics. It also helps to rally people at times of crisis, by providing links to posts or issues that come up in the news and on other blogs.

Bloggers consolidate their relationships with one another in other ways apart from reading and commenting on each others’ blog posts, and interaction in online backchannels. Many bloggers, though by no means all of them, develop offline relationships with people in the community. They see no difference between this kind of socialisation and ‘hanging out’ in backchannels such as Twitter. Bloggers’ offline meetups can lead to the formation of regional social groups. Geographic location also influences how likely bloggers are to form other kinds of online social networking links. Two bloggers from two different major cities discuss their Facebook friendship groups:

[M]y friends on Facebook are generally co-bloggers as well as my family - it’s really nice that they’ve friended me on Facebook! So the kids are on Facebook and blogging mates, that’s pretty much it. And on Twitter, I follow a lot of bloggers that I [read]. […] I pretty much only

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communicate with Australian bloggers because I feel it’s a bit silly to get too friendly with American bloggers when I really have no plans to be in the States at any given time. (‘Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony’, in interview, 2009)

I think in the femmosphere generally, I think bloggers quite soon work out what other blogs, which other bloggers live locally and things and you have a bit of a blog gathering every once in a while and meet up with people, certainly there’s probably about half a dozen regular Hoyden commenters who live in Sydney that I would see every few months for something or other. (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2010)

Chally Kacelnik notes that:

[S]ome of the friends I’ve made online are now friends offline. So I’ve got a whole new friendship group and people I’ll see and interact with and share our lives with. (Chally Kacelnik, in interview, 2009)

Bloggers use comments, backchannels, and offline meet-ups to develop a sense of community. Also, emotional responses to mainstream discourses provoke participation and the discursive generation of new claims within the community. In the case study to follow, I provide a concrete example of this process. The Fat Acceptance (FA) community built a strong presence in Australian blogging networks over the time that I have been researching feminist blogs. For my purposes in this chapter, it is important because it functions as a support network for its participants, and is based in very personal and affective reactions to mainstream discourses, but also has an overtly political agenda. These aspects are inseparable in this discursive community.

Fat Acceptance: a case study in affectively charged media interventions

Feminist bloggers seek to intervene in mainstream media discourses at least partly in order to change them. However, many bloggers maintain ambivalence about how much influence the feminist blogosphere can have on mainstream politics and mainstream media. These interventions have other purposes as well – as my discussion in this chapter has revealed.

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Women use blogging as a personal reaction developing from an affective need to respond (blogging as outlet); to collectively construct alternative meanings and interpretations of mainstream discourses; to make difference and oppositional politics visible; and finally to strengthen affective alliances between members of blogging communities.

In this case study, I evaluate the role of feminist blogs in holding mainstream media and mainstream discourses accountable, and this activity’s relation to affective community- building and dissensus. This case study shows that while engagements with the media and mainstream politics did of course aim to protest and change public opinion, part of that political action was the strengthening of ties and discourse within the community itself. Also, many bloggers had mixed feelings about their interactions with media, often feeling misrepresented, and preferring always to represent themselves on their own terms, something that is best done in their own spaces. Nonetheless, bloggers respond directly to mainstream media events and discourses in ways that draw attention to the antifeminist discourses that are reproduced there:

I think... the mainstream media doesn’t notice blogs, it doesn’t want to. A lot of the time, what we’re doing is saying ‘You’ve got it wrong, I don’t like this analysis’, so that’s quite critical. [...] I suppose we operate as a criticism of what’s written in the media more than anything else. (‘In A Strange Land’, in interview, 2010)

A really fruitful way of looking at the interventions that feminist bloggers make in mainstream media is to look at the work of feminist and fat acceptance (FA) bloggers surrounding the ‘obesity epidemic’ discourses so common in the press in Australia, the US, and UK. FA networks in Australia went through a period of acceleration during my research process. Participants have generated counter-hegemonic discourses around the idea of fat. There has also been a growing though often ambivalent engagement between this discursive community and the mainstream media, with FA bloggers being interviewed or mentioned in media spots and comment pieces.

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Fat acceptance as a movement has been building force over the last several years. Kate Harding’s now closed Shapely Prose34, a fat acceptance blog founded in 2007 out of the United States, was named as a strong influence by many of those who identify as allies or members of the fat acceptance movement. Rachel, an ally of the movement, explained that:

Reading things like [Shapely Prose from] the US has opened me up to the whole BMI35 is bullshit [idea], not that I ever hugely subscribed to it but now I just really don’t care. [...] To actually decouple size and health in the way that [Kate Harding] has, that’s something that’s impacted me. (‘Rachel’, in interview, 2010)

‘Mimbles’ came to blogging through friends in the Weight Watchers community, who would post about their progress online. Her blogging practice changed considerably over the years as she came into contact with feminist, sceptical, and fat acceptance blogs:

[W]hen I stopped doing the whole Weight Watchers thing that went away, for starters. Apart from anything else I found the ‘fat-o-sphere’, started reading Shapely Prose and The Rotund36, and I thought my god this is stupid, why am I doing it? [Laughs] And stopped. (‘Mimbles’, in interview, 2010)

Bloggers also discussed how an engagement with these discourses led them to change the way that they identified in relation to body image. For many, this was an ongoing negotiation that they were having with and through Fat Acceptance texts, and through their own writing and thinking on the subject. These two bloggers described how coming into contact with these discourses has changed their thinking:

34 Archive available at: http://kateharding.net/

35 BMI: Body Mass Index, a standardised measure of underweight, normal weight, overweight, and obesity.

36 The Rotund available at: http://www.therotund.com/

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I'm fat, which is not something I would have said a year ago. I still have some big thinking to do around fat, and how to interpret some feminist writing about fat. (‘CrazyBrave’, via email, 2010)

I didn’t know anything about Fat Acceptance before I looked at blogs, so that’s something I’ve really learnt a lot about and I guess that has changed things in my life like I got into [the Health at Every Size movement37] and things like that and so now I think that’s changed something about my identity. Because when I first started blogging I wasn’t really comfortable saying ‘I am fat’ [because] it’s not something that you talk about. Whereas now I’m very open about [it and] the way that I write about this has really changed. (‘Spilt Milk’, in interview, 2010)

This case study looks at two particular fat acceptance community push-backs; one against a blog post written by the mainstream media journalist Mia Freedman (2010), also the chair of the body image advisory group at the time, as well as a more recent article written by John Birmingham (2011) in The Brisbane Times. The first article was called ‘Fat, fatter, fattest: meet the people who think bigger is better’ (Freedman 2010), although the title was later changed. The post dealt with the rare phenomenon of ‘feederism’38 but many fat acceptance bloggers argued that the published reader comments on the post and the original post itself (particularly before it was substantially edited) served to stigmatise fat bodies and added to the hysteria surrounding the obesity epidemic.

The blogger ‘Spilt Milk’ (2010c) framed her choice to intervene when this post was published in the following way:

37 The Health At Every Size (HAES) movement builds awareness of the fact that health and size are independent variables, rather than causally inseparable as they are often understood. The title and acronym comes from a book by Linda Bacon of the same name.

38 Feederism: the practice of intentionally overeating (or being fed) to gain weight, usually for the sexual arousal of others.

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When I see something that I don’t like — a bigoted Facebook group, a misguided article on a forum, an offensive comment on this or another blog that I enjoy — there is always a choice to just ignore, walk away, go look at pictures of kittehs. And there are times when the most appropriate action is inaction. But I wouldn’t be much of an advocate if I wasn’t prepared to speak up. That’s what feminist bloggers, fat acceptance bloggers, lactivist bloggers, social justice bloggers in general, do. At least, when we have the energy.

That’s why saying to someone ‘if you don’t like it, you don’t have to read it’ is both insulting and disingenuous. When, for example, I see a post on the public website of someone who is the Chair of the Body Image Advisory Group which allows – perhaps even incites – fat-hating commentary, I want to speak up. (‘Spilt Milk’ 2010c)

The debate on and around the MamaMia post (Freedman 2010) became a rallying point for feminist and fat acceptance activists, who used backchannels such as Twitter to call for support in the debate around the way this post reinforced fat stigma, and the problematic nature of that for someone who was the Chair of the Body Image Advisory Group. This belief, that language use matters and that those in positions of public influence should be held accountable when their language allows or even encourages hatred of others on the basis of body size, is at the core of this protest. FA activists argued that the post encouraged fat-phobic responses. Some examples are shown below:

Are you kidding me? Is this just a prolonged form of suicide? As morbid and terrible as they are, at least pro-anorexia makes sense. They are dying to be thin like all the pretty little models in the world. Who the eff is their ‘fat-spiration’ ?? (comment on Freedman 2010)

I know this is one viewpoint, but working in healthcare I really hate when we get a very obese patient (as these people will no doubt become) because it just means very hard physical work and the probability of a potentially career ending injury. (comment on Freedman 2010)

I have a family member who is obese. This person eats McDonalds, doesn’t work (has spent the last 20 years on the dole) and complains that they can’t get the gastric-banding surgery

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that may save their life because they actually need to lose some weight before they will do the operation. Mind you, this is at the tax payers’ expense. Newsflash, stop eating shit, get up, exercise and get healthy. It’s disgusting there are people out there who refuse to take responsibility for their lives, then complain they’re obese when it is too late. Some people have eating disorders, others are just irresponsible. (comment on Freedman 2010)

This is just so sad. Regardless of the motivation for gaining weight, these people are seriously endangering their own lives by overeating. Obesity one of the main causes of preventable disease and this behaviour inadvertently affects everyone through the impact it has on health care and social resources. (comment on Freedman 2010)

Bloggers spoke out against the article, leading to several mainstream media engagements with the problematic post, including features on TV current affairs shows Today Tonight, A Current Affair, and in the daily tabloid The Herald Sun. While it is questionable whether these features contributed to a healthy discourse around weight and fat acceptance, FA bloggers were able to directly influence the coverage of the issue, in particular because Bri King from Fat Lot of Good was featured on the Today Tonight current affairs segment. In addition, Nick Perkins from The Axis of Fat was interviewed on talkback radio in Melbourne. The discursive intervention that FA bloggers made was framing the discourses around obesity and fat people as a contemporary ‘folk devil’, that is, real people were being used as examples of what not to be. The bloggers’ interventions and discursive claims were clearly articulated in the blog Big Liberty: musings of a fat anarchist, who wrote:

[I]t shows either a great deal of ignorance or intellectual dishonesty on the part of a so-called body image advocate to claim that highlighting feederism in the midst of a moral panic where fat people are the folkdevils isn’t harmful to fat people in general.

Here are a few facts to chew on, in case you’re still not convinced:

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Feederism wouldn’t seem as horrifying if society wasn’t already panicked and disgusted by fat people in general. The natural bigoted question being, ‘Can you believe there exist people who not only like being fat but want to get fatter?’ Feederism wouldn’t seem as horrifying if the common wisdom wasn’t erroneously that people with few exceptions have the ability to control their body weight. The natural bigoted question being, ‘Can you believe these people want to be fat when they could be thin if only they got their priorities straight or were sufficiently shamed, and further, that they want to be so very fat indeed?’ Feederism wouldn’t seem as horrifying if the nanny-state wasn’t continually making its version of ‘health’ a public responsibility (thus placing people’s bodies into the black box of common ownership and hence critique). The natural bigoted question being, ‘Can you believe these people are irresponsibly choosing fatness when it’s my wallet on the line?’ (‘BigLiberty’ 2010)

FA bloggers also spoke out against the news blog article by John Birmingham, ‘Why is fat such a fractious issue?’. This is an example of a conflictual event in Australian feminist blogging networks. In the article, Birmingham (2011) explained why he allows his children to watch the reality TV show The Biggest Loser. He sees the television show as ‘constructive cruelty’, a deterrent against obesity, and a way to encourage his children to eat well and be healthy:

Because as a parent fresh fruit, oatmeal for breakfast, drinking lots of water, and playing sport rather than Nintendo DS, is a hell of a hard sell. The grotesque obesity on display in Biggest Loser makes explaining the benefits of good nutrition and exercise that much easier. Harsh and ugly, but true.

I write these words knowing that a hate wave is inevitably a heading my way for having done so. (Birmingham 2011)

In this article Birmingham demonstrated an awareness of the existence of the online Fat Acceptance and Health At Every Size movements, a rare direct acknowledgement of online feminist discourses by the mainstream media, which is what makes this engagement so

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interesting. John Birmingham also maintains a strong social media presence, and so it was possible for fat acceptance activists to engage with him directly in return.

Fat Acceptance activists and commentators drew attention to the article through blog posts and Twitter commentary and links. Participants also used backchannels and the comment threads in their blogs as the means to support each other through a discourse that is at odds with their own, and that is actively harmful and stigmatising to them. Here, the instrumental use of blogs and Twitter is twofold. Blog posts are affective and personal, and they are also political. They build and reference counter-discourses and feminist and Fat Acceptance claims that have been generated and disseminated over time in this community of women and men. It is my contention that these two instrumental uses – the development of community and the development of discourses – are intimately linked.

Spilt Milk’s response to Birmingham’s (2011) article was an affective and personalised one, in which she defiantly responded to the way that he was effectively using other people’s bodies (understood as abject) to scare his children into being healthy. In a post entitled ‘I am not your cautionary tale’39, she argues that fat bodies are used by others in ways that ignore the subjectivity of those bodies:

[F]at bodies are our current culture’s dumping ground for fear and loathing: we are the go-to places for thrashing out anxiety about consumption and excess, death and disease, work ethic and individual responsibility, boundaries and restraint, ugliness and beauty. [...]

All of this is, perhaps, largely academic. I’m a fat activist, of sorts, but most days I’m not overtly doing activism. Most days I’m buying bread and milk and taking my daughter to play dates and watching Dexter and, you know, living.

Except my life is lived in this body, which is fat, and when I am buying my bread and milk etc. I am visibly fat and when I am existing I am inhabiting a politicised body. (‘Spilt Milk’ 2011b)

39 Available at: http://mymilkspilt.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/i-am-not-your- cautionary-tale/

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This practice of returning the ‘politics of fat’, as Birmingham calls it, to the lived experience of a fat person, is affective and rhetorically effective. Attitudes like Birmingham’s, she explains, transform her from a person into ‘a walking cautionary tale’ (‘Spilt Milk’, 2011b). On Twitter, the post was broadly shared and retweeted. ‘@fatheffalump’ introduced the link by adding: ‘Fat loathing and stigmatisation is about all of us who live in bodies that the media/culture deems unacceptable.’ Others shared stories of how this kind of discourse impacts their lives, such as when one woman tweeted that Birmingham’s article ‘reminds me of time a stranger told his 5-6 [year old that] she didn’t want Maccas or she’d look like me’ (quoted in ‘Spilt Milk’, 2011b).

On the blog Fat Heffalump, ‘sleepydumpling’ (2011) explains her response to John Birmingham’s article, but more importantly her response to the fat-haters and trolls that targeted the fat acceptance community following on from his article:

Last night I really struggled to go to sleep. I felt so angry and bullied by the afternoon/evening’s events online. I won’t link to John Birmingham’s blog post, simply because while he does give a hat tip to Fat Acceptance, he just continues the ‘but you’re not healthy!’ rhetoric that frankly, I’m sick of hearing and sick of responding to.

I’m laying in bed, thinking about all of the hurt and anger I saw from fellow fats yesterday, and thinking how sometimes it would be just so much easier to give up on Fat Acceptance and go back on a fucking diet, or at least shut up and pretend that I buy into the bullshit than it would be to put myself out there time and time again and get slapped with hatred time and time again.

But then I had an epiphany.

Fat haters hate fat people no matter what they do. (‘sleepydumpling’, 2011, emphasis hers)

In this example, there is a clear link between ‘the hurt and anger I saw from fellow fats’ and the impetus to fight these discourses in movement with others. The use of the community as a support network is part of the political work of that community. Analysis that draws upon

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and constructs feminist claims helps activists ‘’make sense’ of inchoate affective states’ (Gould 2010, 33) and give them political force.

As the event wound up, Natalie from the blog ‘Definatalie.com’ introduced a new character into the equation: the superhero Dastardly Donut, to make light of the issue when she felt that she ‘[had] no words to explain the sheer amounts of bullcrap that happened yesterday’ (‘Definatalie’ 2011). She superimposed the image of Dastardly Donut over a screenshot of the Brisbane Times opinion page:

Figure 4.2. Dastardly donut

Birmingham’s article, as shown above in the comic, fits the stereotype of the concern troll – a person who cloaks their desire to stir up debate or derail productive argument in concern

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for the wellbeing of the people they are intentionally provoking. In this case, feminist bloggers used a variety of different rhetorical styles, including humour and ‘textual vehemence’ (Tomlinson 2010), and used familiar concepts from online feminist discourse - such as ‘concern troll’ - to intervene in the fat-phobic discourses that John Birmingham reproduced in his opinion piece. In doing so they made it clear that their concerns were not simply personal, but indeed that their personal concerns were deeply intertwined with their political concerns.

In the aftermath of the controversy, Samantha Thomas wrote a nuanced post on her blog ‘DISCOURSE’. ‘Weight: An Emotional Issue’ explored how and why the debate surrounding Birmingham’s article and The Biggest Loser was so emotionally framed:

Over the last few days we have seen an almighty twitter explosion of debate about fatness. The debate was stimulated by the return of Channel 10′s Biggest Loser, but I think it is a debate that has been a long time coming.

The debate, for the most part, has been deeply personal. That is because, for the vast majority of people, weight is a deeply personal issue. It has an emotive charge unlike many other health issues we have ever seen. There are many different reasons for that. Part of it is being part of a culture which values and respects thinness as an ideal – both medically and aesthetically. (Thomas 2011)

While broadly supportive of Thomas’s analysis, ‘Spilt Milk’ questioned whether ‘emotional debate’ was an accurate way of understanding the fallout from the article and the experiences of bloggers who encountered an influx of trolls.

This is an emotional issue because it concerns our bodies and [...] it concerns human beings. But I hesitate to characterise it as an ‘emotional debate’, particularly the events of the last week or so. I am sure there are people who are very invested in their own weight loss efforts who feel that fat acceptance is dismissive of them, or who have their personal reasons for feeling that it is harmful. And I think that fat acceptance and individuals who promote it can not be considered above reproach.

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[...] [But] I wouldn’t call trolling (in the traditional sense or in the sanctioned ‘I’m going to write a column for the Brisbane Times and shit-stir about fat acceptance’ sense) ‘emotional’ in the same way that I would call someone defending their right to live happily in their body ‘emotional’. Tomorrow when I wake up I will still have a fat body and I may still face situations where I basically have to defend my right to exist. I think sometimes being angry or emotional is the only logical response to that situation. Marginalised people [...] shouldn’t have to be the reasonable and balanced ones. And yet it always seems to fall on us (I would love a dollar for every time I’ve been told to calm down about fat acceptance and I’m not even an ‘angry fatty’ by most measures!) (‘Spilt Milk’ in a comment on Thomas [2011])

These responses to being labelled an ‘angry fatty’ or to the labelling of debates as ‘emotional’ intervene in the idea that these debates can or should take place without reference to affect. These comments acknowledge that a discourse which shames or marginalises a group of people inevitably leads to anger and sadness, and indeed that these affective responses create the impetus for the building of counter-hegemonic claims.

Feminist movements and interventions in mainstream media

The generation of claims and counter-discourses around fat acceptance - and feminism more generally - relies on the affective relationships that the blogging community and backchannels such as Twitter have helped to develop. Many of the women interviewed in the course of my research made reference to the importance of building communities as part of the development of critical feminist discourses. When discussing their participation in feminist blogging networks, women explicitly or by proximity linked this community to the development of feminist ideas. They talked about how being able to call on a group of others with the same political viewpoint helped them to deal with political conversations in their own lives:

But now when someone says something [offensive] I actually have the means to counter it and when I don’t, I can go on to Twitter and I can say ‘such and such used this argument, what do I say? How do I respond?’. (‘PharaohKatt’, in interview, 2010)

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I think there’s a sense in which you can feel like you don’t have to apologise for things as much and […] I came from a really working class background and so there was a real instinct that you had to be able to laugh things off [...] [but] I do feel like in reading so much and in this exchange of ideas you kind of feel like ‘no, I will throw down on that one and I’m not going to feel bad’. (‘Fuck Politeness’, in interview, 2009)

[Blogging is] a good way to educate people that I know about different ways of thinking about ‘the obesity epidemic’. [...] I mean I’ve always been keen to reject a lot of ideas about what the beauty industry tells us and everything, but now I feel like I’ve got backup. (‘Spilt Milk’, in interview, 2010)

The case study of the Fat Acceptance movement shows how this process plays out in practice. Bloggers found the courage of their convictions in conversation with one another, and perhaps more importantly in support of one another on a personal level. This allowed them to act in practical ways to intervene collectively in discourses in the mainstream media. While they drew on a range of rhetorical devices, one of the most prominent among these was the use of affective narrative to explain the practical impacts that mainstream discourses can have on the lives of the marginalised. Affective relations and affective rhetoric – including just not anger and sadness, but also care and humour - are the tools used to help activists develop counter-hegemonic claims.

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Chapter Five: Discursive interventions

I’ve accidentally come to consider myself a bit of an online activist. By that I don’t mean devoting a life to poverty, good causes and the kindness of near strangers. With Tibetan prayer flags hung over the verandah. I meant my activism to be just thinking before I speak. Stopping the gut instinct, the knee jerk and considering what it is I’m really reacting to. Is it words? Or is it an idea that I hadn’t considered before? I tried to implement a form of activism that was learning, then speaking. ‘A Shiny New Coin’ (2011)

Bloggers understand what they do as political, and they see their engagement with debate through blogs as a political engagement. They do not idealise this activism or understand it as an uncomplicated force for change. In the above quote, the blogger ‘Shiny’ questions whether she succeeds in what she tries to do through blogging, an expression and a questioning of the commitment she has made. Despite this ambivalence, bloggers politicise the development of affective community that they make through their blogging practices, and they see their changing identity as part of this process. In this chapter I bring together the contributions of Chapters Three and Four to a conceptualisation of discursive activism in which both identity change and emotional involvement make up political practice. I use three case studies to illustrate my argument around discursive activism. The first case study on disability supports my argument about intersectional negotiation of political claims. The second, on the ‘where are all the women bloggers?’ debate, supports my argument that feminist bloggers are engaged in discursive activism, intervening in ideas of the political. The third case study on the Triple J Hottest 100 of All Time debate, outlines the network’s practices of discursive intervention. In making this argument, I acknowledge that the description of activism above is not an uncontroversial one, and that many scholars in social movement studies would not recognise these activities as activism. The conceptual

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framework that I have built around discursive activism argues for a change in viewpoint, particularly for an understanding of discursive politics in online settings.

The internet has become an important place for social discourse, for the negotiation of political values and claims. Inclusion in this conversation is dependent on networks of attention (boyd 2009b). Regardless of whether feminist bloggers are heard in the mainstream, what is being developed in the feminist blogging community is a space for the negotiation of feminist politics, and measures for discursive intervention in mainstream discourses. In understanding feminist blogging networks as activist communities, what are the ways that blogging is seen by the participants as a political act? What is the impetus and what are the intentions behind the work that bloggers do in a political context?

Blogging as a political commitment

Bloggers express a sense of responsibility toward maintaining their blog, and doing so in ways that are responsive to the needs of the community. In the quote above, ‘A Shiny New Coin’ (2011) explained that she ‘tried to implement a form of activism that was learning, then speaking’. The fact that she was questioning her success and the limits of that approach shows that this form of commitment is not uncomplicated, and can reach its limits, but this is also a sign of its affective hold on the participants of this kind of community. As earlier chapters have demonstrated, bloggers make an emotional and political commitment to blogging that brings with it certain risks. Bloggers become aware, in their everyday blogging practices, of particular responsibilities and political commitments that they have toward others in their networks. ‘TigTog’ explained that she now blogs in ways unlike the unfocussed, intermittent kind of blogging that she engaged in when she first began Hoyden About Town:

I’m very aware of the fact that I do have a platform now. And that if I highlight something in a concise and compelling way that other people are probably going to also mention it, and the discussion is going to end up continuing round a lot of other places, so I’m definitely aware of that and I sort of certainly use it to highlight certain issues that people mightn’t otherwise be so aware of. (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2009)

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This theme recurred throughout the interviews - the idea of blogging as a political labour, with personal costs and demands on time and energy, that was nonetheless an important and valued part of everyday life. The act of blogging is not unremittingly pleasurable or enjoyable, according to many of the bloggers, who frame their practice in terms of a ‘commitment’. ‘Blue Milk’ explains that although she has so many competing priorities in her life, she makes the decision again and again to ‘stick with [blogging]’. It is still a decision, however, and one that has to be made on the basis of other life demands. Exit from these networks is not ‘an option with nearly no costs’ as described by Dean (2010, 7). Bloggers continue their commitment due to an affective attachment to the community (as discussed in the previous chapter), but also due to a sense of political commitment. These two aspects of the commitment - the sense of political necessity and the affective attachment to the community - are closely linked.

Although bloggers discuss the commitment and sense of responsibility they have towards blogging, they also say that blogging does not take precedence over other aspects of their lives such as family and work. ‘I blog in my spare time, such as I have, which is almost nil’, explained Helen from Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony, ‘but it is a bit of a commitment that I have now, and I think it's necessary’. ‘Lucy Tartan’ also discussed the energy she expends on blogs:

On a daily level it’s meant that I spend time every day reading blogs. And that means I spend less time on other things, like I don’t watch television anymore, ever. And I’m sure that that’s from falling in love with blogs. (‘Lucy Tartan’, in interview, 2010)

‘Caitlinate’ (in interview, 2010) told me that ‘blogging properly is more than a full time job, and following blogs properly is like a part time job’:

[It's not] just the time work and the active work of it, it’s also the brain work of clarifying thoughts that you have and clarifying reactions that you have to stuff that occurs. [It’s] being able to clear enough away to be able to produce something that coherent and well written

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and ideologically consistent. And actually be able to have that come out straightforward and to do it multiple times a day in this really good and clear way. That’s really, really impressive. (‘Caitlinate’, in interview, 2010)

Many felt there is a necessity for their continued commitment to blogging. This labour involves the work of listening and an attention to an ethics of alterity. This also involves the work of building a strong community of feminists in Australia. Within that community, there is a sense of being accountable and responsible for what is being said and whether it is marginalising to others. ‘You're held accountable’, explains ‘Blue Milk’ (in interview, 2010), ‘there's at least two posts where people have called me to account for them. […] But I've kept them, I need to own the bad spot I came from on that issue’. As Chally (in interview, 2009) puts it, ‘I think the feminist blogosphere has a pretty strict structure concerning how you relate to people with different privileges and oppressions to you’. Occasionally that means that people in the community can feel inhibited from writing freely, but this is rarely begrudged. ‘Rayedish’ explained to me why this inhibition and care is useful for her political subjectivity:

[Y]ou feel like you’re part of something. But it’s also kind of sometimes hard to write because I know who the audience is. I don’t want to offend somebody who I know is very passionate. So you have to be careful... now. It's fine, it’s good, it’s just... it’s made me aware that it’s easy to inadvertently cut someone out of the conversation, which I don’t want to do, and I’m glad that I’ve had that awareness, even though it might be a little inhibiting, I think it’s ultimately shaping my feminism for the better. (‘Rayedish’, in interview, 2010)

Bloggers write to express themselves, but in ways that are mindful of the experiences and histories of others in the community. Ziarek (2007, 6) writes that ‘accountability is a motivating force of political contestation and action’. Bloggers do not simply write out of consideration for their own experiences, but also, ideally, out of consideration for the experiences of others. This relates to hooks’ (2006 [1994], 289-298) work on love in the context of political community. In the next section I discuss the form this ethos of alterity

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takes, with a discussion of intersectionality as an important shared responsibility, developing within the feminist blogosphere.

Blog politics, formal politics, and formal protest

Feminist blogging should not be understood as a withdrawal from the world of politics. While there is a sense in some of the interviews that bloggers are disengaged from mainstream electoral politics and the formal political process because of a sense of disillusionment, and such disenchantment is common to many activists, this idea of disengagement should not be overstated. As Papacharissi (2010, 24) explains, a ‘retreat’ to a private sphere of political engagement ‘is an act of dissent, and as such is a political act’. For many, blogging is a way to engage more strongly and actively than before.

Many bloggers held an ambivalent attitude toward mainstream electoral politics and formal or organised activism. Some bloggers had been active in street protest in the past, but felt that those efforts had had no effect on policy or the decisions of political leaders. Rachel explains how she had once taken active part in student politics and protests, but:

It’s kind of disappointing when you have all of these ideas and campus life is a fairly small forum in which to enact them, and they just don’t happen even when you go through all the necessary channels. That’s a bit depressing. I think also [the protests against] the war on Iraq. Like when you go to all those protests and you’re really enthusiastic and then nothing happens, I found that deeply depressing. That’s when I stopped going to protests. (‘Rachel’, in interview, 2010)

Rachel found that investing time and energy in street activism, only to have it ignored and dismissed, so disheartening that she now sees writing and opening people up to new ideas as a more effective way for her to act politically. Others, such as ‘Blue Milk’ (in interview, 2010) were less disillusioned, but held a ‘realist’ view of governmental capacity for change. She sees discourse rather than policy as the location of new political possibilities and changing social norms. Others see mainstream electoral politics as entertaining or theatrical, but only consequential as far as it maintains relevance or connection to their own lives:

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[I'm interested in mainly] federal politics, I'd say. Things to do with education, higher education. Mainly things that relate to my life, personally. I’m really not interested in the latest newspoll or anything like that. Federal politics, I [sometimes think] of it as a kind of comic opera, which is not even really a healthy attitude in the last analysis, I don’t think, but it’s one that’s really prevalent. (‘Lucy Tartan’, in interview, 2010)

‘Tigtog’ shares others' ambivalence about political (both activist and party) organisations, explaining that she’s ‘not much of an organisation person’. In terms of politics:

I’m an interested observer. I’ve never particularly been active in anything, was never involved in student politics. When I’ve been an employee of other people I’ve been in a union but that’s about as far as it’s ever gone, I’ve never held a union office or anything. (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2009)

The women I interviewed did not engage in what they classified as political activism, but it became clear during interviews that those same women were (for example) involved in community work, and had been to a number of protests in the last year. ‘I do what I can, which is not much’, said ‘PharaohKatt’ (in interview, 2010) after listing her many commitments and intentions. For another example, ‘Blue Milk’ told me that:

A friend of mine runs ANTaR40, another friend of mine runs political campaigns, for both [The Australian Greens] and [The Australian Labor Party], and then a friend of mine coordinates a lot of homebirth rallies so just things like that. I’m certainly doing a bit for those things but I’m not doing my own agitating much on the ground. I just don’t have time at the moment, but I see a time, definitely, when the kids get older, when I’d like to get more into that kind of grassroots campaigning. I mean, also my friend and I who facilitate the discussion groups, we’ve gone and done things in women’s festivals before, like we’ve been invited along and run workshops and things like that, and so that’s the kind of stuff I’ve done in the last couple of years. (‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010)

40 Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation

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For many more bloggers, the ability to participate in visible, organised protest is inhibited by aspects of their lives such as parenthood and disability. For political bloggers with a disability, the emphasis on street-based activism and the derision directed towards many forms of online activism in conceptions of politics is particularly problematic. It excludes as political subjects those without the privilege or capacity to participate. Chally explained her issues with such a perception of activism:

I’ve been going around the comments sections of feminist blogs for quite a while, and seeing people make complaints about these blogs saying, ‘Oh this isn’t real activism, it’s just typing. You’re not getting out into the world and doing something’, and I started to think about how you’ve gotta be in such a privileged position, a singularly privileged position to say something like that. The way I’ve experienced activism in my life is my mother sitting me down and saying you don’t have to put up with being treated in such and such a way. […] You can’t always drop everything you’re doing to go to a rally when you have to work, and single mothers are not going to be able to leave their kids at home to go do activism, and we haven’t all got the spoons to stand up and work in a soup kitchen or whatever, and while that work is immensely valuable I think there are lots of kinds of work we can do, and I don’t think it’s good to marginalise the way in which anyone improves the world. (Chally Kacelnik, in interview, 2009)

As a result of this, feminist bloggers often hold an understanding of activism where offline and street-based forms are not privileged over other forms, and use that understanding as a starting point for developing a different kind of politics. This is present in the concept of micro-activism, which was named by a number of interviewees as what they hope to do through blogs, and also (as discussed in Chapter Three) what blogging enables them to do by intervening in day to day conversation and mainstream media. ‘Caitlinate’ defined her understanding of activism in the following way:

I think if it takes any energy then it’s activism. If it’s just sitting on your couch and that doesn’t require any effort, then that’s not activism. If it’s doing something that requires effort or brainpower or energy then it’s activism. And I think it’s really difficult for people to

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recognise that particularly if they’re fairly able-bodied and stuff like that. And for me, understanding that came from being ‘Oh, wait, people with disabilities, maybe mental health stuff that makes it really difficult for them to do these things, what they’re doing is still really important and valid’. And then I thought, ‘I do that too so maybe me doing that is important and valid’, and whoa, I have to validate myself. (‘Caitlinate’, in interview, 2010)

Bloggers intervene in mainstream discourses and engage in micro-activism by questioning others who are repeating problematic and hegemonic discourses, and by supporting each other to act discursively in this way. These two forms of activism produce an intervention in mainstream discourses, and the generation and negotiation of feminist claims in a political community. Rather than being an ‘instrumental community formed to promote the pursuit of private interests’, such a community shares an ‘ethico-political bond’ based on symbolic identification which ‘cannot be separated from embodiment, passions, and sensibility’ (Ziarek 2007, 76-77).

Intersectionality

Intersectional feminism originates in the work of Crenshaw (1989) and has been further developed by Crenshaw (1991) and Davis (2008) and Yuval-Davis (2006; 2009). Intersectional feminism requires activists to understand the ways that privilege overlays and modifies their experience of gendered oppression. In the context of feminist blogs, intersectionality refers to the ways that oppressions intersect, and implies the responsibility of feminists to know that gender is not the only variable of power, privilege, and oppression. ‘Tigtog’ (in interview, 2010) discusses the work that feminist bloggers are doing to deconstruct particular privileges, and the responsibility to act on these discoveries:

I think [it’s] so important, [...] the intersectionality work that’s become very important in the feminist blogosphere in the last couple of years. The idea of making sure that we all realise that we have our own prejudices and that being human, we will act on them, and that acting on something doesn’t necessarily make us a bad person. Defending it when somebody else calls us out on it, and denying that it was what it was, that’s the problem. You have to acknowledge ‘oh, shit, yes I did do that, and I wish I hadn’t, and I’m sorry I did’. [Laughs] And

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then look into making sure you don’t do it anymore, and that’s the bit that most people don’t do. (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2009)

Among interviewees, there was a sense that participants in feminist blogging networks work to generate claims around intersecting spheres of oppression, and that those who are reading have a responsibility to carry that forward. ‘Lucy Tartan’ explained how contact with intersectional politics has changed her relationship to feminism:

It’s pushed me. So it’s speeded it up, perhaps. I wouldn’t have perhaps felt that it was an obligation on me to... come to terms with my own privilege. Not that I have, you know, but to try to. Because I was educated in liberal feminism, and I still think that that project isn’t finished, and I kind of feel like the classical goals of liberal feminism are still really important. But at the same time, I now understand that you can’t just do that work and then do work around intersectionality and things like that. You can’t do that, you’ve got to try and do it all at once. You can’t separate it. (‘Lucy Tartan’, in interview, 2010)

Many people told me that even if they had previously identified as feminist and followed progressive politics generally, their contact with feminist blogs changed their awareness of intersecting issues, particularly race, transphobia, disability and fat phobia. In particular, they came in greater contact with the concept of privilege and its relevance in their own lives:

I was, you know, fairly well aware of the generalised sexism and patriarchal underpinnings of big systems, but it’s made me a lot more keenly aware of the other intersecting -isms like [ablism] or the hatred for trans people or things that I wouldn’t have really necessarily come across just in everyday, and then being made aware of them on the blogosphere means that I can see them in things that students say or in prevailing attitudes that I hadn’t even noticed before because it’s not something that touched my life personally. (‘Rayedish’, in interview, 2010)

The research for this thesis suggests that feminist blogging networks are allowing claims to be generated in new ways, drawing attention to patterns of oppression that were previously not as visible in progressive and feminist politics. Rachel (in interview, 2010) expressed the

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opinion that this attention to intersectionality in the feminist blogosphere was due to the fact that ‘online I think is one of the key places where thinking about feminism is happening at the moment’. Feminists have had these debates in the past – intersectional debates of course have a history in the feminist movement, but these intersecting ideas, claims, discourses, and politics are now being built and fought for through blogging networks. This can seem frustrating to those who have been engaged in feminist debate for a long time, but there is recognition that these conversations are ultimately necessary and make for better politics. As Ziarek (2007, 79) explains, ‘it is a dangerous politics that deteriorates into the order of the same’. Feminist bloggers negotiate positions and create discursive responses to mainstream discourses. Bloggers understand their blogging and blog-reading practice as a practice of drawing attention toward intersecting issues, and affirm the necessity of listening before speaking:

I use the term equalist as well as feminist because of multiple spheres of oppression and so it’s not just women’s rights, it’s disability rights, and people who are non-white. But basically I thought that there’s more things that need to be fought for than feminism, and it’s not going to work unless we’re fighting all of them, and so I use equalist as a catch-all because... because I’m not always an activist, sometimes I’m just an ally, because I can’t be an activist for whatever reason. Either it’s not my oppression or I just don’t have the energy to do so. […] Because otherwise I’m going to do more harm than good. I have a couple of posts on my personal journal about privilege and things written before I understood, and they’re really bad, and they’re full of privilege, believe it or not. [Chuckles] And I would consider them a mistake, so I’m trying to learn from my mistakes. (‘PharaohKatt’, in interview, 2010)

Bloggers also support and encourage readers of their blogs to do the same, and to take ownership of discriminatory behaviour, while understanding that these behaviours take place in a context of unexamined privilege:

I think that’s one of the really beneficial things that I’ve learnt through the blogosphere, and something that I’d like to take through my writing, and I guess what I see my blog as doing, hopefully, and my writing, is teaching people to be aware of the oppressive things that they do without blame. (‘Rachel’, in interview, 2009)

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Chally gave an example of coming into contact with intersecting privileges in her own experience, and how feminist blogs exposed her to new ways of thinking about these privileges:

I think transphobia in particular is something I hadn’t paid attention to until I got into the feminist movement. Like, I knew trans people existed and I knew that they were marginalised but I didn’t really pay attention or think I should do something about it, until I started confronting transphobia through people’s blog posts and activism and also [from finding out] how it has been so ingrained in the feminist movement. (Chally Kacelnik, in interview, 2009)

Part of the work that bloggers do is draw attention to intersecting oppressions and discourses alongside gender-based discourses. Ziarek (2007) explores these concepts by linking an ‘ethos of alterity’ with an ‘ethos of becoming’ for progressive political projects. Bloggers engage in practices that change both their own political subjectivity and the attention of the political project that they are part of. The ‘ethos of becoming’ is ‘the transformation of the negative thought of resistance into a creation of new modes of being’ (Ziarek 2007, 15). I explore this later in the chapter through a case study of the feminists with disability blogging sub-community.

Case Study: Disability

The following case study has a different focus – on the generation of an intersectional politics around disability in Australian feminist blog networks, and the outcomes both for feminist politics and for disabled women in these networks. During the time that I have been researching Australian feminist blogs one of the most prominent instances of the generation of feminist claims and intersectionality has been in the area of disability awareness and disability rights. Within this community subsection, and through raising awareness in the broader feminist blogging community, Australian feminists with disability (alongside people from all over the world) have built discourses about ableism and society, have engaged with and argued against mainstream discourses, and created counter-discourses on disability as an issue. Feminist bloggers and readers of feminist blogs have also engaged in direct activism

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and advocacy. This section discusses two instances of claims generation and activism, one that directly engaged with government legislation, and one that intervened in mainstream discourses around disability.

One of the most prominent instances of online activism around issues of disability in the Australian context was the campaign against the proposed legislation for the harmonisation of disabled parking schemes, which would have put the onus on people with disabilities to prove their dependence on particular equipment or on another person in order to walk short distances. The consequences of this would have been that:

People who can walk without physical assistance from another person, with or without a cane, no matter how restricted their walking distance, will no longer have access to accessible parking. (‘Lauredhel’ 2009e)

The timeline below shows the sequence of posts that followed on from this proposed scheme. Most of the posts were hosted at Hoyden About Town, with five posts across a four day period covering the topic and calling for activism, but many other blogs also linked to these posts and discussed the scheme.

Figure 5.1. Timeline of posts – ‘disabled parking schemes’

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As can be seen on this chart, the call to activism originated at Hoyden About Town. Following on from this, a number of other bloggers came out in support of this action and linked to the original post. A number of writers at Hoyden About Town developed resources for the action, including a review of current legislation. The resources explained what the new legislation would mean in terms of worsening conditions for people with disabilities. Resources also included a form letter for government, and to disability organisations advocating for them to also protest the change. Bloggers also reflected on why these issues were important, and developed discursive claims around the issue, in particular around diversity of disability and the invisibility of particular forms of disability – including fatigue and pain – leading to the exclusion of people with disabilities from all kinds of public participation, and the relevance of these issues to feminism. In my interviews, a number of bloggers saw this action as important in their understanding of the political impact of feminist blogs:

Occasionally there’s calls to activism and calls to arms and I think that when there’s a specific one, I think it gets a real response. I think when you get something that they were expecting three people across the country to respond to and they get even thirty or forty it makes a difference. I think the changes to the disability parking scheme is one [example of that]. It was quite obvious that they got way more responses to that than they expected to get, and I think that happened entirely through that particular [feminist] network. A whole heap of people wrote stuff about that, and [that’s an example of when] there’s a real positive effort to change things. (‘Ariane’, interview 2009)

The conversations and reading other people’s perspectives has made me aware of a lot of the injustices that before I didn’t notice, like for example Lauredhel writes a lot about disability and that’s something that I’ve never really kind of thought about so being part of those conversations has made me more aware of that generalised ableism that goes on most places, so it’s definitely opened my eyes to the other injustices that need work and need addressing. So [when] the government was doing an enquiry on disabled parking, the permit scheme change, nationalising the permit scheme, so I wrote to the MP about that, which is something I wouldn’t have done, except being made aware by her work at Hoyden About Town and FWD: feminists with disabilities... [...] [Because they were] able to make so many people aware of that issue, they probably got a lot more submissions than they otherwise

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would have. And to me that’s a good thing, making people aware of the issues, and you make it easy to be active. (‘Rayedish’, in interview, 2010)

The second part of this case study explores the development of a specific sub-community for the generation of claims around disability as an issue within feminist networks. In 2009 a group of women started a feminists with disability group blog as a result of a felt need for a specific disability focused space within the feminist blogosphere. The blog, FWD/Forward: Feminists with Disabilities for a Way Forward, is an international blog which had 13 contributors listed on the site as of November 2010, and also hosts occasional guest posts. Three of those contributors are based in Australia, and two of them are also the main bloggers at Hoyden About Town, Australia’s largest feminist group blog.

Chally, who blogs at FWD/Forward as well as several others, including her personal blog Zero at the Bone, explains the blogging that she does there in these terms: ‘I talk about disability and that’s what I do exclusively, sometimes with intersections of gender or race or what have you’. She explains that her involvement in the feminist blogosphere has changed the way she identifies in terms of her experiences with disability:

I only started to identify explicitly as disabled a couple of years ago, and finding these fellow voices, […] all the other disabled feminist bloggers have really helped me to not be ashamed and to learn about disability as a political identity rather than something that is just thrust on you and a social stigma, and I’ve learned how to... how to relate to myself better, I don’t feel shame anymore. I can talk about it with pride, and I can go forth and stand up for myself. (Chally Kacelnik, in interview, 2009)

She reiterates this idea later:

I think the most stark contrast to how I was feeling a couple of years ago is… disability as a political identity. Where I thought it was a problem located in my body, I now see it as the combination of my impairment and how society relates to me, so I’m less likely to be ashamed of that. (Chally Kacelnik, in interview, 2009)

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Many bloggers explained that they saw disability as a major theme in the feminist blogosphere, a rallying point for political action and discourse. ‘Naomi Eve’ (in interview, 2010) explained how ‘the rights of disabled people have become a lot more prominent’ since she was last involved in feminist politics. In this way feminist bloggers engage in claims- making and other discursive practices that influence the trajectory of the feminist movement itself. ‘It’s like feminism goes 'ooh, there’s some inequality [here], let’s have a chat about that!’, explains ‘Naomi Eve’ (in interview, 2010). ‘Fuck Politeness’ describes the way that being part of the feminist blogging community has exposed her to new ideas around disability rights and language use.

I don’t know that I would’ve had much of an idea about disability politics… that’s probably the biggest one. I think I had exposure to trans issues through uni and through friendships. But […] entering into dialogues about these things and sometimes they can get a bit sharp, and you will get picked up for saying something, [for example] I have been for using the word lame and not thinking about it, you know? (‘Fuck Politeness’, in interview, 2009)

‘Spilt Milk’ had a very similar experience:

I think it’s changed my language use [...] like I said before about using ableist language. The other day my husband said something like ‘that’s so lame’ or whatever and I said to him, ‘you really shouldn’t say that’ and we talked about that. (‘Spilt Milk’, in interview, 2010)

The women that I spoke to in the community perceived the awareness-raising and intersectionality around ideas of disability as the most prominent trend in recent blogging history. The issue achieved greatest prominent over the course of 2009 and 2010, as expressed broadly by my interviewees:

The biggest shift in the last six to twelve months or so would be... some of the disability blogging that’s come in with the feminist blogging as well. So that’s been quite interesting. So there’s a little bit more intersectionality coming in. (‘In a Strange Land’, in interview, 2010)

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I think right now feminists with disability is the issue I come across in every single blog. It seems to be like, in terms of big blogs, it seems to be... and not always willingly taking part in it, but every single one of them seems to be getting into that debate and conflict. And I think that’s fascinating because a lot of people who read my blog aren’t really taking part in the feminist, even though they do kind of identify themselves as feminists, they’re not taking part in those things or reading those things, and so sometimes I just think they’re fascinating things to point to and go well, you wanna learn about this? There! That’s happening right there! (‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010)

But [the issue of disability] does seem new to me, and I think it is becoming a lot more mainstream, if you can call the feminist blogosphere mainstream at all, but it’s becoming more visible and there are a lot more conversations, and the feminists with disabilities website has started up. Which I guess makes people who are people with disability really visible because you’ve just got a critical mass of so many bloggers all directing people there. (‘A Shiny New Coin’, in interview, 2010)

These quotes show both the way that feminist blogging networks were used to generate intersectional claims about a particular issue, as well as to raise awareness about these issues among feminist bloggers themselves. It also provides another example of how ‘signal boost’ works in practice. The engagement with disability politics in feminist blogs encouraged feminists with disabilities to be critical of mainstream feminism and feminist blogs on those terms, and to proudly claim both feminist and disabled identity simultaneously, allowing them to act on those terms through interventions in mainstream discourses and ableist language use. When the FWD/Forward blog put up its final post on January 1, 2011, it summed up its achievements in the following way:

In the last year, we’ve noticed an explosion of new disability blogs, and an increased interest in disability issues at sites labeling themselves explicitly as feminist. This has been tremendously exciting to watch, as one of our goals was to join the ongoing conversation about feminism and disability, to amplify voices that weren’t being heard, to, yes, be part of the way forward towards a more intersectional discussion on feminism and disability. (‘Staff’ 2011)

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Two posts by blogger Chally Kacelnik illustrate and discuss the Australian concepts of ‘the Aussie battler’ and ‘taking a sickie’ respectively, in order to articulate the problems with these mainstream discourses, and intervene in them. These posts were hosted both at FWD and at her own blog Zero at the Bone. In the first, she argues that:

The Aussie battler ideal is about a person working hard to get enough money for the family to live on. Every feminist knows how problematic it is to set up paid work as the only sort of real work. After all, women’s work in the home, raising children, running the household – the second shift – has been devalued in Western society as a matter of course. It also is very ableist. [...] And if you must be disabled, there’s a battler’s way to do that, too. Complaining is not the Australian way, you must be stoic and soldier on. Never admit that you need assistance, because not being able to do everything on your own is weak. Having to rely on anyone else is a matter of shame. (‘Chally’ 2009b)

In the second, she notes:

Where even taking legitimate time off is for disabled people fraught with guilt and potential accusations of slackness and faking, there isn’t a lot of room for participating in the cultural tradition of taking a sickie. (‘Chally’ 2010b)

These posts draw on Chally’s experience both of mainstream Australian society and discourses around disabled people, to illustrate the ways that people with disabilities are excluded from two of the biggest Australian national myths. These critiques are intersectional in character, demonstrating through the stories they tell that not only people with disabilities, but also women, and non-white people are excluded from these myths. The analysis effectively intervenes in these discourses by problematising them and extrapolating from that problematisation the way that mainstream Australian culture, with its focus on the able-bodied white male, can serve to exclude and stigmatise people through its national discourse.

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Blogging as social movement

When I asked women what they felt was the political significance of the feminist blogosphere, and how it related to the trajectory and tradition of the wider women's movement, their responses were often guarded or ambivalent, if in most cases hopeful and affectively charged. In expressing doubt about the capacity for the feminist blogosphere to affect mainstream politics, many women also expressed their sense of how it has and will continue to change their own political sense of themselves and their engagement with the political.

While many bloggers expressed the view that blogging is activism, they also (though not universally) expressed ambivalence about the effects of this activism. They invoked ideas of the blogosphere as an echo chamber, and of preaching to the converted. The following quotes show two bloggers sharing their doubts and hopes about the political effectiveness of blogging:

Because we’re all kind of shouting together, maybe it makes a big sound, but yeah I don’t know, sometimes I [think] that just sitting around writing on the internet is probably not the most effective way of changing anything. (‘News with Nipples’, in interview, 2009)

But it’s strange because online you’re not marching on the street, you don’t know how heard you are. We could all just be standing in a echo room talking to each other and the world goes on around us. But I do think, I mean from my own personal perspective, I do feel part of a movement and part of affecting change in a way but it might just be so tiny that it’s... Will it change the world? I don’t know, but I think that little amount of changing yourself or the people around you is enough, in a way, because it’s all you can do. (‘A Shiny New Coin’, in interview, 2010)

On the other side, ‘PharaohKatt’ (in interview, 2010) told me that as she sees it, ‘Blogs are the primary movement right now! Hey, it’s how I came to feminism so they must be doing something right!’. ‘Naomi Eve’ (in interview, 2010) said she thinks that ‘Hoyden About Town will one day be recognised as one of the biggest political blogs in Australia’. ‘In A Strange

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Land’ (in interview, 2010) told me that ‘it's real feminism. Just because it's online doesn't mean it's not real’. Helen from Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony sees the community of bloggers as socially and politically significant, and believes that in future people will understand it for what it is; a social movement:

I feel that twenty or thirty years later if I’m still alive I’ll look back on it and go well that wasn’t just technology, it was a whole social movement and I’m glad I was part of it. […] That’s the feeling I get with blogging, that there’s an exciting moment in history where people are doing something a little bit different. It does get panned and ridiculed by a lot of people but I think a lot of people miss the point of what’s actually happening. (‘Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony’, in interview, 2010)

But feminist blogs are still made invisible in much online political discourse (Bell 2007; Gregg 2006; Harp and Tremayne 2006; Herring et al 2004; Ratliff 2006), as I will explore below in the ‘Where are all the women bloggers?’ case study. Bloggers expressed their frustration with the way that the work of feminist bloggers is glossed over, even in online political communities, let alone the mainstream press:

It’s not like you have to burrow around to try and find any of it, you know? A cursory search of feminist young women would reveal that but people just want to ignore it. (‘Audrey & the Bad Apples’, in interview, 2010)

If feminist blogging is not directly affecting policy outcomes - though there are times when bloggers do aim to do so - that is not necessarily its purpose or aim. For many of the people I spoke to, it is not so much blogging that is the focus of their activism but the community that has built up within and between the blogs. These networks form a political movement of people who share a cause and will act on particular issues as they emerge:

I think a lot of politicians aren’t paying any attention to it, and... I don’t think they pay any attention to the blogosphere. I think if there is a way that the blogosphere is helping politics, it’s in rallying support for a cause, and getting a lot of people sending a lot of emails or letters or whatever to a specific person, or even just talking about it on their own blogs

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which other people can read. And so it’s not really the blogs themselves that are causing it, it’s the sense of community. So getting a lot of people angry about a specific issue can get those people targeting a specific person about that issue, and that person can go ‘Hmm, actually, I’ll pay attention to this’. So while I don’t think writing blogs in itself is affecting politics in Australia, I think that the community in the blogosphere is in a sort of roundabout way. Not directly but indirectly. (‘PharaohKatt’, in interview, 2010)

The application of political ideas and identifications to everyday life is experienced as a political practice that increases participants’ awareness about the continued relevance of feminism. The linking of feminism to the everyday has a strong tradition in the history of feminist politics. Consciousness-raising groups of feminist activists in Second Wave feminism had the aim of linking personal experience to the political (Taylor & Whittier 1992). Women’s framing of blogging as political often acknowledges that tradition:

I don’t have any sort of pretensions about its national importance but yes, I think that... I think it is political for a woman to choose not to be nice. And the thing is that I will continue to be nice in my day to day stuff but I think even carving out a space in which to talk back and giving other people a space in which they can say things or they can laugh about things that they, it wasn’t really okay to say before... And I think it comes up a fair bit in blogging but the fact that the personal is political. (‘Fuck Politeness’, in interview, 2009)

Many bloggers expressed the view that the application of feminist scholarship to the context of their own lives was important to them in their own experience of blogging networks:

I often wonder how many people read [feminist blogs]. But in a sense it doesn’t really matter how many people are reading it. It’s there. I know how many people come by my blog, and they’re from all over the world. It astonishes me. [...] Forming that worldwide community. And of course a lot of what’s written on blogs is much more accessible for people than academic stuff. It’s much more readable, and it connects much more immediately. Not necessarily on [my blog], which is quite academic in its focus, but some of what it does in general is it says ‘Hey these are real people’s lives!’. (‘In A Strange Land’, in interview, 2010)

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Feminist blogging can be understood as part of a social movement in the sense of Taylor and Whittier’s (1992) work that draws on the concepts of abeyance structures and collective identity, as well as Melucci’s (1989; 1996) concepts of collective identity and ‘submerged networks’. However, these texts would understand feminist blogging networks as a structure that keeps feminist activist networks strong for a hoped-for future ‘wave’ of political activity. In contrast, I would characterise the work that is being done in the community as discursive activism, with real-world effects. Through the work of Norval (2007) and Rancière (1999; 2010) we can see that the changing of political subjectivities and the acting out of discursive interventions in the media is the practice of discursive activism. What is at stake in this theorisation is an understanding of blogging activity that recognises the interventions that bloggers make in mainstream media and particular discourses, and understands these interventions as politically significant.

Case Study: Where are all the Women (Political) Bloggers?

I’m of the opinion that politics covers the exercise of power in society, and not just electoral number crunching. (‘Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony’, in interview, 2010)

This case study focuses on several comment threads that developed in the Australian blogosphere in mid August 2009. The threads demonstrate the ways in which Australian feminist bloggers engage in discursive activism and see themselves to be engaging in discursive activism. The threads that I analyse are taken from: ‘Where are Australia’s female political bloggers?’ posted by ‘Possum Commitatus’ (2009) on the blog Pollytics which is hosted by the Australian independent journalism site Crikey; and ‘Quickhit: Invisible Women, Invisible Politics’ by ‘Lauredhel’ (2009d) on the blog Hoyden About Town. This case study is an example of the most common form of conflict within Australian feminist blogs, which generally occur between mainstream media or general (non-feminist) Australian political blogs. Another example of such a conflict is the argument between John Birmingham and the Fat Acceptance community in Chapter Four. The blog post by ‘Possum Commitatus’ (2009) was the post that triggered the discussion, and was itself triggered by a Twitter post (tweet) by a Crikey.com editor asking why there were so few female subscribers or regular

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commenters on Crikey.com. Speculating on this fact led ‘Possum Commitatus’ to identify ‘the lack of big female political bloggers’ in Australia.

The question ‘Where are the women bloggers?’ has been a popular refrain since the beginning of blogs, and has been problematised by several writers (Bell 2007; Gregg 2006; Harp and Tremayne 2006; Herring et al 2004; Ratliff 2006). According to Gregg (2006, 151), ‘men's blogs are often seen to be more engaged in political debate, especially when the notion of what counts as political remains undefined’. Ratliff’s (2006) work on gender in weblogs provides a background study of the way that women’s blogs have been received in online political blogging circles. On her weblog Culture Cat, she maintains a portal to discussions dating back to 2002 that relate to ‘Where are the women?’ conversations:

In my analysis of the posts thus far, I have found that the ‘gender gap’ in blogging is being attributed to a number of factors, including but not limited to the following: 1.) women don’t do enough self-promotion of their weblogs in the form of leaving comments and trackbacks on high-traffic weblogs; 2.) women can’t handle the agnostic nature of political discourse on weblogs (common metaphors for political discourse men use include ‘sporting events’ and ‘food fights.’ Some women have chosen a different metaphor: ‘pissing contest.’); 3.) the use of pseudonyms is more common among women; 4.) women are ‘not interested in politics’; 5.) constraints such as childrearing prevent women from having the time to blog. I have also encountered appeals to evolutionary psychology. (Ratliff 2005, 11)

In the 2009 case, the Australian feminist group blog Hoyden About Town first responded to the question with the post ‘Quickhit: Invisible Women, Invisible Politics’ by ‘Lauredhel’ (2009d). The title of the post referred to two things; the fact that there are a large number of women political bloggers in Australia, and secondly ‘Possum’’s (2009) claim that Hoyden About Town and other feminist blogs ‘touch on politics occasionally’, and thus that both political blogs by women and the political content of blogs by women were rendered invisible in the post.

The discussion in the comments on ‘Lauredhel’’s (2009d) post developed in several directions. Of most interest for this thesis was a discussion around definitions of ‘a political

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blog’, and the discourses used to describe one. Several themes emerged. Firstly, ‘Possum Commitatus’ constructed the justification of his question about the ‘lack’ of female political bloggers around concerns of ‘inclusion’ or ‘representation’. He asks what it is about the Australian internet ‘that causes a hole in female representation in the blogosphere’ (‘Possum Commitatus’ August 20, 2009 at 9:26 am in ‘Lauredhel’ 2009d). In addition, ‘Possum Commitatus’ (August 20, 2009 at 4:48 pm in ‘Lauredhel’ 2009d) defined this sphere as ‘those same issues that affect the largest possible majority of the population’, ‘what the mainstream media defines as daily politics’, and ‘the same issue space as the political reporting of the mainstream media’. He argues that ‘independent female voices *competing* daily with the [mainstream media]’ on these issues ‘would be a GOOD THING by any yardstick’ and would constitute these women ‘speaking to power’ (‘Possum Comitatus’ August 20, 2009 at 7:05 pm in ‘Lauredhel’ 2009d).

Putting aside the fact that many Australian political blogs written by women do engage directly and daily with issues in the mainstream media, ‘Possum Comitatus’ expresses concern about the exclusion of women from the (internet) public sphere while simultaneously defining the terms of inclusion. Many commenters on the Hoyden About Town post pointed out that if it wasn’t obvious to male political bloggers that feminist blogs like Hoyden About Town were political, the definition of ‘political’ must be constructed to exclude women’s political concerns. ‘Oh, wait. ‘Big-p Political.’ That means ‘about dudes.’ I forgot’, said ‘softestbullet’ (August 19, 2009 at 3:43 pm in ‘Lauredhel’ 2009d). ‘Lauredhel’ (August 19, 2009 at 4:11 pm in ‘Lauredhel’ 2009d) speculated that Hoyden About Town wasn’t understood as a political blog because ‘we also post about gardening, and food, and parenting, and life’, which is ‘pretty thoroughly deprecated in some masculine-coded online spaces’. ‘WildlyParenthetical’ (August 20, 2009 at 8:39 am in ‘Lauredhel’ 2009d) points out that feminist blogs are being constructed as ‘apparently not ‘real politics’ according to those who consider themselves in a position to define it’ and that ‘this inside/outside distinction, whereby women are considered to be ‘not doing politics’ is key in producing this sense, for women, that they are not welcome on ‘big-p political’ blogs’ (WildlyParenthetical August 20, 2009 at 12:21 pm in ‘Lauredhel’ 2009d).

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In interview, ‘Lucy Tartan’ explained the surprise with which she encountered attitudes about what constitutes politics in the political blogosphere:

I do feel like that personal blogging still has to fight to be recognised in the same way as legitimate in the same way as capital-P Political blogging, whether it’s mainstream governmental politics or feminist politics. There’s still a hierarchy and personal blogging is on the bottom as being less serious. And to me that’s the sort of basic error that literary critics and literary historians stopped making at least thirty years ago, that women’s writing... novels about the domestic scene are no less innately political than novels about wars are. So it’s always been fascinating to me, that that issue has survived as long as it has, in metablogging debates that come up in the blogosphere. (‘Lucy Tartan’, in interview, 2010)

Several commenters argued that blogging in modes that do not simply reproduce the concerns of mainstream media is itself a political strategy. ‘WildlyParenthetical’ (August 20, 2009 at 8:39 am in ‘Lauredhel’ 2009d) noted that ‘the blogs I read that are written by Australian women […] tend to focus on the marginal, attempting to destabilise the centre’ while the ‘’political blogs’ […] tend to reiterate the centre’. As ‘News with Nipples’ explained:

A lot of women bloggers tend to look at politics as being a bit broader than [electoral politics], so you talk about disability issues and issues about rape and sentencing of rape as policy, and maternity leave as a political issue, so it’s more about the issues that are around it, rather than directly: ‘this is what so and so said and this is what so and so said’. Because that’s just news reporting. [In feminist blogs], it’s more about how those things affect your life. (‘News with Nipples’, in interview, 2009)

For Lauredhel (August 19, 2009 at 4:11 pm; August 20, 2009 at 6:00 pm in ‘Lauredhel’ 2009d), posting about the context of her life in the midst of posting about politics is partly ‘a deliberate political strategy’ and she argued that the narrow concept of the political that is being described is ‘politically sterile’. ‘WildlyParenthetical’ (August 20, 2009 at 10:24 am in ‘Lauredhel’ 2009d) is even more emphatic:

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[P]art of why women bloggers tend not to participate in political blogging as you have delineated it (and that’s part of the problem) is for political reasons: because they don’t like how mainstream political blogging functions, and are working to intervene in that.

‘Possum Comitatus’ (August 20, 2009 at 5:52 pm in ‘Lauredhel’ 2009d), shortly before disengaging, concludes that the differing definitions of the political in the debate have directly led to mutual unintelligibility; ‘Speaking to two separate audiences with two very different understandings of politics is pretty difficult. I’ll live and learn for next time’. Because of differing norms, the spheres for debate must be in some sense separate. Because of this separation of spheres, as ‘pharaoh-katt’ (August 20, 2009 at 2:06 pm in ‘Lauredhel’ 2009d) said: ‘These female bloggers aren’t failing to be heard. They’re failing to be heard by you’. As ‘CrazyBrave’ explained it, this separation of spheres is unfortunate for women bloggers, because the consequence is often exclusion from political debate:

Well, you can see explicitly all the time how the fact that women have talked about things like their cats on their blogs is used by men to undermine or disrespect what they say. It happens really quite frequently, and I think it’s really important that if we’re going to push out the edges of what’s political then the more integrated we are, the better. (‘CrazyBrave’, in interview, 2010)

The denaturalisation of mainstream definitions of politics, as practiced by those in the Australian feminist blogging community in these threads, is necessary for meaningful inclusion, as well as an understanding of feminist blogs as engaging directly with political discourses. The claims made by feminist bloggers in response to the question ‘Where are the women political bloggers?’ draw attention to the problematic assumptions behind that question, and build an understanding (and practice) of feminist bloggers engaging in the political.

Interventions

To some extent, ruptures, surfaces, contextuality, and a host of other happenings create gaps that make space for oppositional practices which no longer require

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intellectuals to be confined by narrow separate spheres with no meaningful connection to the everyday. – bell hooks (1990, 31)

The Australian feminist online community is a space in which women are developing feminism-to-come (Norval 2007) through the filter of their own lives. Political communities, as Ziarek (2007, 78) explains, ‘have an irreducible performative dimension’ in which they act out an ethos of becoming. That is, they act in the world as though the world has already changed. Bloggers intervene in mainstream discourses both in the media and in the context of academic feminism by behaving as though such discourses are not commonplace because they should not be. An example of such a performative act would be the expression of shock over a commonplace reproduction of sexist discourse. This brings the discursive claims of academic feminism into contact with real-world discourses.

When I discussed academic feminism with bloggers, the most common response was to say that online feminism fulfilled a different purpose, or generated feminist claims in different ways to academic feminism. ‘Lucy Tartan’ (in interview, 2010) explained that feminism ‘ceases to be theory when you’re discussing your ideas with other people, and with all of their real lives’. Another blogger explained:

I haven’t done academic feminism, but [blogging is] much more... based on individual experience and conversations. And in many ways it’s probably a lot easier to grab hold of and it’s a lot easier to wield because it’s down to earth and you’ve got a context for it. It’s not, well I guess sometimes it is an intellectual challenge, but if people are saying ‘this is an experience, that’s an example of this’, it’s very easy to understand even if it’s foreign to you. Which I find really useful. (‘A Shiny New Coin’, in interview, 2010)

Online feminist writing shows the continued relevance of feminist ideas in ways that feminist theory may sometimes lack the rhetorical freedom to demonstrate. However the online community is not understood as a replacement for academic feminism:

In terms of the feminist community, I guess there’s one other point I’d say about it which is that I think this is... I don’t think you can take away from the academic sphere of feminism. I

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don’t think you can replace it with online feminism, but I think online feminism has definitely filled in all the holes that were there in academic feminism, especially in terms of participation and it’s really sort of shone a light on that, because it’s just been taken up so hungrily by people. [...]Because I mean [feminism] is a movement that should be reaching pretty much the majority of women. I mean it’s their lives and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t believe in feminist principles, so the fact that it hasn’t been able to, yeah, I do think there’s a bit of a gap there [that is being filled]. (‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010)

Feminist blogs are used to create a language to frame academic feminist issues, and diffuse feminist ideas through everyday experience. They are also frequently devoted to the analysis of other people’s language, and will challenge particular forms of language use that are sexist, racist, or otherwise discriminatory. ‘Tigtog’ provided this example:

[T]here’s the unfortunate thing of progressive men thinking that making fun of someone is more important than making sure that the mockery is not sexist! [Chuckles] He goes ‘Ooh, I’m making fun of the bad guy’ – ‘Yeah, but you’re using sexism to do it, stop that!’ [Laughs] (‘Tigtog’, in interview, 2009)

‘News With Nipples’, whose blog tends to have a focus on sexism in the media, explains why she feels it necessary to intervene in these uses of language, and to break the cycle:

Because my focus is on language, there’s just so much standard journalistic language that is really sexist. [Journalists] seem to go ‘oh, wow, I can write a bit differently and you know, unleash my hidden writer’ and it’s always sexist. You know, because it’s about… this is just the language that everybody, I guess everyone above us uses and as we come up in the ranks we learn that. (‘News with Nipples’, in interview, 2010)

Mainstream discourses jar against the world that is imagined in the feminism-to-come of the feminist blogosphere. As explored in the previous chapter, sometimes the mainstream discourses that prompt feminists to intervene are those that make visible the gap between the sensible and its representation (Rancière 2010). In other words the non-feminist discourses of the mainstream are experienced in contrast to a feminist understanding of the

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world, leading to a dissonance or affective dislocation for the person experiencing it. This affective dislocation prompts women to push back against these discourses. This is demonstrated when bloggers talk about having an ‘outlet’ or an impulse to write:

When I see things that I think, I find are just so blatantly reinforcing the status quo which I don’t think is an acceptable status quo, that’s when I tend to be prompted to write. (‘Godard’s Letterboxes’, in interview, 2010)

For ‘CrazyBrave’ this impulse responds to the gap in sense that is left in mainstream discourses:

Like seeing, rather than seeing feminism as something kind of delivered, like through mass media or through famous feminists and all that kind of stuff, to see the work process that it is, and to see how we struggle with ideas and formulate ideas, change our minds, argue with different people about different things and agree with them about other things. Like, I think that really is an advance for all of us because it means that we’re trying to shift out of these dichotomous media constructions of what things are like. And I think as the mainstream media in general gets worse and worse, some of the slack is really being picked up by people writing online for their own pleasure and that of their circle. (‘CrazyBrave’, in interview, 2010, emphasis mine)

‘CrazyBrave’ sees blogging as a making sense of current events alongside feminist principles. In this way it is instrumental in the discursive process of aspect change. The idea of ‘trying to shift out of these dichotomous media constructions of what things are like’ is part of the rhetorical purpose of feminist blog writing, and one that relates to the construction of new political subjectivities and new ways of seeing. ‘CrazyBrave’ also links these discursive engagements with both pleasure and community. These aspects of blogging should not be separated. As Ziarek (2007, 80) puts it, ‘rather than choosing between the symbolic community of justice and the more intimate community of love, between performative politics and ethical obligation, the feminist ethics of dissensus has to contest these dual oppositions’. Recognising discursive activism in blogs involves a definition of the political in line with feminist definitions, wherein the public/private split is challenged and particular

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patterns of relating are not disqualified from the reasonable. These negotiations are played out in the following case study.

Case Study: Triple J Hottest 100

The following case study, like the previous, shows patterns of exclusion of women from participation in mainstream cultures. More importantly, it demonstrates the rhetorical strategies that feminist bloggers use to denaturalise mainstream discourses around women and popular culture. Feminists’ political agency is exercised with the explicit intention of changing the way people understand and interpret discursive acts, and to put new ways of seeing in their place.

On the 30th of June 2009 a guest blogger on Hoyden About Town wrote a post called ‘Alternative Youth Music Station Thinks There’s No Alternative to Being a Bloke’ (‘orlando’ 2009). The blogger criticised Triple J Radio’s41 ‘potted history’ of contemporary music that was posted on their website in the run-up to the vote for the Triple J Hottest 100 of All Time. ‘Of the 59 album covers shown to illustrate, NONE were put out by female artists’ ‘orlando’ (2009) pointed out. The entry is ‘tagged’ with the word ‘erasure’ and the post describes how women were erased in the lead-up to the poll. She argues that the music industry has worked hard to exclude women, and even when they broke through (as many have), ‘now Triple J erases them all over again’ and this ‘erasure of female artists distorts the history of popular music’ (‘orlando’ 2009). ‘Orlando’ argued for the importance of ‘drawing Triple J’s attention to what it means when they do things like this’ and she and other Hoyden readers and contributors wrote letters to Triple J website manager to complain (‘orlando’ 2009). Eventually, Triple J modified its ‘potted history’ to add some women artists, however by that time voting had long since closed for the Triple J Hottest 100 of All Time.

41 Triple J is a national public radio broadcaster in Australia that caters mainly to younger, alternative music listeners. The Triple J Hottest 100 is a nationwide music poll that occurs annually. Most years it focuses on music released in the preceding year, but they have run several ‘All Time’ polls during the life of the franchise.

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The initial conversation that developed around this post had several trends. First of all, many of the commenters pointed out that they couldn’t think of specific time periods in the history of music without thinking of many influential female artists, and were amazed that Triple J could have ‘forgotten’, ‘erased’, or ‘excluded’ them from their potted history (various commenters in ‘orlando’ 2009). Many listed their favourite or most obviously influential female artists. There are ‘so very many women whose music has had a huge influence on alternative music that to leave them all out is just so conspicuously and gratuitously wrongheaded’ (‘fuckpoliteness’ June 30, 2009 at 4:42 pm in ‘orlando’ 2009) wrote one blogger; another claimed ‘It’s so typical of the erasure of women’s contribution to history: nothing counts until a man does it’ (‘orlando’ July 2, 2009 at 9:40 am in ‘orlando’ 2009). Some expressed dismay that a music station that had been an important part of their youth ‘regards me as non-existent or hard-on-fodder’, and argued that ‘JJJ are just another component of the malestream media now’ (commenters in ‘orlando’ 2009).

The discussion continued once the results of the listener poll for the Hottest 100 were being released and listeners started to realise how few women were actually making the chart. In the end result, no solo women artists were featured, and a woman’s voice was present on only a handful of the 100 tracks that were voted as the Triple J Hottest 100 of All Time. In the meantime, several strands of discourse had developed on the comments on this blog entry, and on the many other blog entries that dealt with the issue of the lack of women in the Hottest 100 list, which identified ways that the history of rock music excludes or erases women.

The first discourse was that taste cultures become male-dominated by excluding women from the discourse of greatness, such that people are ‘unlikely to include them when asked to name the ten songs that are the greatest ever’ (‘orlando’ July 10, 2009 at 7:04 pm in ‘orlando’ 2009). ‘Fuck Politeness’, linking to ‘orlando’’s post, argued that ‘jjj erased women in their selection of top ten from each decade’ and ‘then of course the listeners do that thing where male=great so they don’t bother nominating any chicks’ (‘fuckpoliteness’ 2009). This was also extended to include the way people are socialised to think of ‘history’ in general. For example, one blogger claimed that ‘[o]ur history has been made invisible to us’ (‘Linda Radfem’ in ‘fuckpoliteness’ 2009); and another asked ‘why do we only think of the male

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voice as authoritative?’ (‘godardsletterboxes’ July 13, 2009 at 3:09 pm in ‘fuckpoliteness’ 2009).

‘Orlando’’s post set in train a process at the end of which Australian feminists could readily identify a systemic problem in Australian media publics; the exclusion and erasure of women from the history of alternative rock music. Certainly the lack of women in the Triple J Hottest 100 of All Time poll would have been a glaring fact regardless, and was raised in various other media venues. However, through this online conversation, women in the community developed alternative discourses to explain women’s omission, which they could then use to counter claims that (for example) it was a statistical anomaly, that you cannot blame the radio station for the way listeners voted, that music is simply a matter of personal taste, that women simply haven’t produced ‘great’, ‘alternative’ music. All of these arguments were raised by commenters in a parallel debate on the popular blog Larvatus Prodeo (‘Kim’ 2009). They were countered in the same comment thread with arguments drawn from those raised in the Hoyden About Town and other posts from the feminist blogosphere (various comments in ‘Kim’ 2009). ‘Godard’s Letterboxes’ explained why she was fired up to respond to the poll:

When women are obviously sidelined in stuff – and I think that’s what happened with the Triple J Hottest 100 stuff as well – is when it suddenly occurs to you that hey, somehow the way women are being treated here is completely marginalising and yet there’s no real recognition of that. And one of my concerns about some of this stuff is that it’s not made visible, unless you make it visible, you can’t expect it to ever change. We can all sit there and go yeah, that sucks, and patriarchy is bad, but unless you can actually try to articulate some of those problems, it isn’t [helpful]. (‘Godard’s Letterboxes’, in interview, 2010)

The second important thing to note is that the conversation had a political intent. This is signalled in ‘I wonder if [this] would encourage Triple J to reconsider its music programming?’ (‘shinynewcoin’ July 14, 2009 at 11:38 am in ‘shinynewcoin’ 2009). Many readers and bloggers sent letters to Triple J Radio to have the website changed. Several participants in the debate set up alternative lists such as the @Hottest100Women poll on Twitter (‘@Hottest100Women’ 2009), and the Women’s Music Appreciation Month meme

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(cross-blog), in which participants listed their favourite alternative music by female artists, in order to reverse the erasure of women artists from the alternative music taste culture. In this we see the direct engagement of the feminist blogging community with the political, understood as ‘the leveraging of power between connected entities’, through discourse (Senft 2008, 5). The results of these actions were evident in interviews:

And I thought what was really interesting about that whole reaction from not only myself but other people out there, was that it did get noticed and it did move into the mainstream media, and that’s one of those things where it also gives you that encouragement to think that’s worth doing, because you can start to make people think about these questions, even if on a relatively superficial level. Or maybe they’ll forget about it the next day, but at least you’ve drawn that attention, and I think it was something that then entered into people’s consciousness (‘Godard’s Letterboxes’, in interview, 2010)

The woman who organised the alternative ‘Hottest 100 Women’ poll, in order to show how offensive the exclusion of women from the original poll had been, explained why she chose to do it:

[T]he reason why I did it was because I was just so frustrated [...] not just that there were no women in the Hottest 100 but that the debate was that well, maybe no women did good enough music and this is what people think so it’s not bad. And well if that’s what people think that is bad, that’s a problem! […] And the whole feeling there was that it was going to flutter by like ‘Oh yes, wasn’t that an interesting thing?’, and it was just the most sexist horrific thing that all the teenage boys vote and go yeah, women don’t exist. So yeah, I was getting really angry about it, and I thought ‘Fuck this, I’m going to do my own’. (‘Naomi Eve’, in interview, 2010)

Online communities function to develop new activist discourses, ideologies, and ideas, and identifying areas for activism. In this case, women developed a number of rhetorical strategies to dismantle and denaturalise mainstream discourse around women’s participation in alternative music. The campaign was successful, and in particular the Hottest

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100 Women Twitter poll received media attention, and was picked up by another group for a larger-scale popular music poll42.

Feminism-as-process

The idea of feminism-as-process that I have discussed in this chapter is crucial to the analysis that I am proposing in this thesis. It takes its form and shape from the grounded theory that I have derived from interviews with Australian online feminists. This theory has three interlocking aspects: identity, affective networking, and discursive activism. In the final chapter I provide a theoretical discussion of these three aspects as they relate to ideas of political subjectivity and discursive politics. In this way I will provide a way of understanding internet politics that draws on poststructuralist and feminist political theory, alongside the findings of my own research.

42 Details formerly at www.hummingbird100.com/blog. Site has since become defunct.

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Chapter Six: Discursive activism in Australian feminist blogs - Sense- making, self-making and community- building

In the elaboration of their ideas, women have adopted a variety of places of enunciation and discursive strategies [...]. From a sarcastic, Dionysian spirit, to the serious; from the poetic vein to political philosophy, different 'styles' of thought follow one another and coexist within this vast laboratory of ideas, reflection and writing that is the women's movement. – Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance (1991, 171)

I really like the idea that my blog helps convert women to feminism. I like that idea that they can see that actually they do have the seeds of feminism in them and that their thoughts are actually feminist thoughts, that they just didn’t realise what those thoughts were. And that their anger has a valid place.[Laughs] I don’t know to what degree it actually does it, but I like the idea that possibly it does happen, that there’s some mother out there who comes across a blog and relates to lots of it and starts to think ‘actually yeah, I am a feminist’. – ‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010.

‘Blue Milk’ (in interview, 2010) hopes that her blog might ‘help convert women to feminism’. She wants to connect the project of feminism and the making of feminist claims with the experiences of her readers – that their day-to-day thoughts about parenting ‘are actually feminist thoughts’ and that their anger about these issues ‘has a valid place’. A collective identity is not one that is imposed universally and collectively on anyone in a bounded community, but rather one that is negotiated, that is tied to ‘problems of sense and sociality’ and is developed therein (Stewart 2007, 40).

I found that feminists in this network use blogs to educate themselves and others, raise awareness about political issues, and in order to seek out different ways to make sense of

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the world. In this concluding, theoretical chapter I use my qualitative study of Australian feminist blogs to explore the role of processes of identification, affect, and discursive interventions in women's political involvement. Here I will relate my empirical findings to the theoretical literature, and draw out the outcomes and implications of this research. What is at stake for research into online discursive activism is the recognition of blogging as a political act with political outcomes, and a desire to change discursive constructions by challenging political language. Blogging is seen as a political commitment as well as an enjoyable pastime. Women blog for both personal and political reasons, and these reasons are interconnected.

The findings of my research reveal the development of intimacy and community, and the use of blogs as an outlet for political and personal feeling. Bloggers’ understanding of the world and of themselves as political actors changed through their participation in blogging networks. Further, they aimed to change others’ ways of making sense of the world and identifying with particular discourses. I connect identification to the political through a discussion of affective networking. I explore the idea of gaps in discourses that are experienced as feeling by community members, and conceptualise these gaps as political dislocation or rupture (Rancière 1999). Part of this affective process is the commitment to advancing one’s own feminist politics through the active practice of listening for difference, what Ziarek (2001) describes as an ethos of alterity, rather than simply speaking for everyone in the feminist movement. The practices that women discussed in interviews showed an outward and open aspect, a willingness to hear, learn and exchange. While conflict in these networks shows that this is not always easy or possible in the context of social power differentials, it is affirmed repeatedly as a necessary – and political – practice.

I connect identification and affective investment to the generation of explicit political claims and demands. Discursive activism as I use it here is composed of identification, affective labour, and articulation or sense-making. Such an approach prevents a tendency present in new social movement theory to understand identity and emotion as pre-conditions for political action rather than political in themselves. Changing political identities, aspect change (Norval 2007), and the commitment to building a community based on affective relationships are all political acts, and form part of discursive activism. Storytelling, conflict,

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and play are also part of the work of movements (Jasper 2007; Polletta 2006). The findings of my research demonstrate the need for a theoretical approach that describes the generation of counter-hegemonic claims within particular spaces. Although feminist blogging networks are often excluded from mainstream politics (and at other times prefer to remain so) they impact on democratic politics through their discursive activism – the creation of new kinds of political subjectivities, the articulation of new claims, and the creation of affective political networks.

Part One: Identity and Articulation

A particular aspect of Australian feminist blogging networks that I focus on in this thesis is the role of identity and subject formation in the development and articulation of a social movement discourse. What my empirical chapters demonstrate is the connection between identity and subject formation, the development of feminist claims, affective networks, and discursive activism. In interviews I discussed with women their narratives of blogging – how they came to blogging and what they changed in their lives and sense of self through that practice. While not all participants agreed that their identity had changed, all spoke about a difference in the way they engaged with and participated in the political, which I discussed at length in Chapter Three. Here I connect those findings in order to build a theory around political subjectivity.

The discursive activism practiced by feminist bloggers serves the purpose of creating particular kinds of political subjectivities that are informed by feminism and backed up by feminist collectivities. Roseneil (1996, 87) also links identity and subject formation, arguing that ‘consciousness’ and ‘identity’ are two aspects of subjectivity. This is because ‘the claiming of an oppositional identity, whether individual or collective, rests, at least partially, on the development of an oppositional consciousness’ (Roseneil 1996, 87).

Women told me that by blogging, they aimed to raise awareness, and felt that their concept of ‘what was needed’ in feminist politics had changed as a result of their own changes in awareness. In connecting this concept of raising awareness, and identity change to a

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poststructural political theory, the works of Norval (2007), Warner (2002), and Mouffe (2005) are instructive. In particular I use Norval’s (2007) conceptualisation of ‘aspect change’, as well as Laclau’s (1999) concept of processes of identification. I understand lurkers as part of the community, rather than only the active members of the community, because of their implication in processes of aspect change. Through the work of articulation and negotiation among bloggers, readers and lurkers come to see things differently. People’s attention to the community makes it what it is – it enables the reach of the identity formation to spread beyond the actively articulating members of the community.

Findings and theory

My research for this thesis shows that involvement in feminist blogging networks enhanced and strengthened most interviewees’ identification with feminism, and also changed the nature of that identification. The role of the community in helping to create a feminist identity was intimately tied up with the negotiation of feminist identity, and the creation of new goals and claims in feminist discourse.

The feminist bloggers I spoke with engaged in a set of practices related to the creation of an oppositional identity. Many of them understood their blogging practice as partly pedagogical. It was a way for them to use their own experiences and knowledge of feminist ideas to share those ideas and practices with their readers. They valued the possibility that they might make others think differently about mainstream discourses. Many bloggers also shared anxieties about whether the network of blogs in which they discussed these issues was too insular or closed – they spoke about outreach and making their blogs accessible to as many people as possible. They also talked about being gentle with newcomers, and about allowing others to find their way through the sometimes unfamiliar discourses of feminist blogs. Finally, a Feminism 101 Blog is an example of outreach. It is used to deflect trolls from de-railing discussions about basic feminist ideas, but it also aims to be a good-faith information site for newcomers to feminist thought.

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Similarly, some bloggers aimed to continue learning. Many expressed a commitment to learning from others and not universalising their own experience in feminist politics. In this way, feminist identity was tied up with the negotiation and re-negotiation of claims, and the development of new ways to practice feminist politics, as well as an ethos of alterity, in which bloggers aimed to link to newcomers and marginalised voices, giving them a ‘signal boost’.

Social movement theory has had difficulty exploring the role of identity in social movements without treating it as a separate sphere from political action, treating it as a ‘cognitive precondition’ for political action. As Young (1997, 169) has argued, even new social movement theory ‘that concentrates on identity generally fails to link it to politics in the way feminism does, and to treat feminist activities in these areas as political activity’. She recommends that:

Social scientists and others who seek to understand the contests over difference and strategy that have been taking place within the women's movement will be aided in their efforts by becoming acquainted with the terms of current debates surrounding postmodern theories of power, identity, subjectivity, and resistance, and these theories' feminist appropriations (Young 1997, 170).

Through the conversations that are being held in blog networks, women are generating new claims and demands of the social, and claiming feminist identity in different ways. A particular understanding of political subjectivity can contribute to an understanding of social movements that understands identity formation as a political process. Women describe their involvement in the community in ways that resonate with Norval’s (2007) description of inheritance and creativity in the democratic tradition. Norval describes an inheritance of democratic identity which does not accept traditional democratic norms as they were but demanded ever more from democracy. This resonates with the ways that I found women to be practicing feminism online. Rather than simply inheriting a feminist tradition, women demanded more from feminism, while affirming its prior claims. They practiced feminism in creative, and evolutionary ways. Braidotti (1991, 171) calls the women's movement a ‘vast

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laboratory of ideas, reflection and writing’. Within this, most of the women that I spoke to expressed their support of intersectional politics, as I described in chapters Four and Five.

Norval (2007) draws on Derrida's idea of democracy-to-come to describe the creative ways that people inherit and recreate democratic tradition. Contemporary feminists inherit and recreate feminism and this can be understood as ‘feminism-to-come’. However, as Braidotti (1991) points out, feminists don't claim to act on behalf of humanity, as democrats may. Feminism is in some ways an ideology that is more intimately linked to the political subject and a style of thought she calls ‘creative intelligence’ (Braidotti 1991, 166):

It is not in the name of humanity and its moral, spiritual, or economic survival that women have engaged in their struggles; they act first and foremost for themselves, on the basis of their experiences, in the name of their desire for justice and life. Feminist practice is the expression of women's ontological desire. (Braidotti 1991, 166)

Feminism is not an ideological project in which women are pushing towards a doctrinaire utopian postfeminist society. Instead, feminist thinking leads to a creative style of thought that ‘open[s] new routes for reflection’ (Braidotti 1991, 279). Grosz (1994) also emphasises the way that feminists make use of their own lives to create political claims. The sharing of lives with others can be a way to find shared politics, a ‘momentary recognition, or as a sense of shock and relief at being ‘in’ something with others’, as Stewart (2007, 27) puts it. This resonates with ‘Blue Milk’s’ explanation of the importance of feminist others not only politically but personally.

The appetite for knowing more about what other feminist-y women fight about with their partners and how they resolve those arguments is really huge, isn’t it? I mean, we want to know, we really want to know, don’t we? We want any help we can get. And that’s one of the best things about feminist-y women, from my experience, they’re quite a bit more likely than non-feminist-y women to actually tell you about their relationship warts. (‘Blue Milk’ 2011)

Political identification is intimately tied up with affect, although these topics have been explored in different chapters in this thesis - Chapters Three and Four respectively. Barnett

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(2004) describes how the practice of radical democracy is made up of ‘articulation, representation, and being-with-others’. These aspects of political identification cannot be separated. Glynos and Stavrakakis (2008) argue that through taking into account emotion, affect, and passion, we are better able to understand ‘what fuels identification processes’ and what discourses become fixed. This relates to Ahmed’s (2004, 104) concept of the ‘stickiness’ of affect in discursive politics. As she describes, ‘attachment takes place through movement, through being moved by the proximity of others’ (Ahmed 2004, 100). This is also what we hear in the statements of bloggers.

Identities are negotiated and constructed. A feminist identity after talking and listening to other feminists is not the same as the feminist identity before talking and listening with others. The network of Australian feminists collectively negotiate what is meant by feminist identity, and this is where many of the debates (and often, conflicts) in the feminist blogosphere originate. As I have described, there is a debate between feminist mothers and feminists who do not value motherhood as part of their feminist identity. There is also a continuing confrontation between feminists with disability, who see issues of disability as a necessary part of feminist politics, and feminists who have not recognised a politics of disability as part of their own feminist politics.

These are things that are negotiated and subject to change. Many of the women I spoke to had come to recognise disability politics as part of their feminist identity during the period of time they had engaged with feminist blogging networks. This identity change and negotiation is closely related to the kinds of relationships, affective attachments, and discursive claims that develop within the network.

Norval's (2007) advances two particularly useful concepts for understanding the role of identity and political subjectivity in the political. The first is the concept of ‘aspect change’, and the second is that of ‘democratic subjectivity’. ‘Aspect change’ refers to a collective change of political grammars. In this sense, discursive activism changes what is politically intelligible (Norval 2007, 105). Such change can happen on a societal level, but it can also happen at the level of the counterpublic, or within a particular social movement ‘submerged network’, as in the case of feminist blogging communities. The concept of aspect change

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comes from Wittgenstein, although Norval (2007) makes some substantive adjustments to the concept. She argues that the concept of aspect change ‘counters the cognitivism’ in dominant approaches to political identity and subject formation. This is because it:

[S]hifts attention to activities other than thinking in bringing about political change. The paradox of aspect dawning, with its play on both originality and inheritance, offers a guide to rethinking changes in identification, accounting for the new without giving up on intelligibility. The experience of aspect change also foregrounds the moment of the subject, of identification. (Norval 2007, 105-106)

Aspect dawning is defined as what happens when ‘one realizes that a new kind of characterization of an object may be given, and we see it in those terms’ (Norval 2007, 113). However, aspect change is also a ‘shift in perspective that establishes different relations between objects’, and as such it should not be understood as a cognitive ‘acquisition and accumulation of facts’ about the world (Norval 2007, 114). Aspect change is relational, the result of a change in our relationship to the world and objects/situations within it. As such it is attached to the development of particular subjectivities, as well as different affective relationships and orientations toward others.

When a person’s identity changes, so too does their way of seeing and making sense of the world. Newman (2007, 88) defines the subject as the ‘the place with which individuals come to identify’ (emphasis his). This association of place with the subject is related to the idea of ‘aspect’ above. From different perspectives, subjects see things differently. Subjectivity (or subjectification) is a socially constituted process rather than inherently contained within the individual. Newman gives as one (appropriate) example the ‘feminist subject’:

[T]he woman who rejects her established role within society, who comes to see this position precisely as one of subordination and oppression, and who challenges it through social and political struggles, becomes a feminist subject. (Newman 2007, 88)

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Newman (2007) emphasises that identification is not synonymous with subjectification, because a person can identify in a particular way without politicising that identity. Subjectification has a political dimension that identification does not always have. It ‘involves a separation or a disengagement from one’s established social identity or role, a kind of rupture of [or] ‘subtraction’ from one’s normal existence’ (Newman 2007, 88). Glynos and Stavrakakis (2008) similarly describe political subjectivity occurring at the moment when ‘a social identity is disrupted and contested’. It is therefore tied up in the contesting of political norms (Glynos & Stavrakakis 2008). This involves, in particular, ‘a questioning or violent separation from one’s established, even ‘natural’, position of subordination and exclusion’ (Newman 2007, 90).

Women in Australian feminist blogging networks denaturalise place, by making strange for one another the structures and discourses of society that require them to fulfil a particular role as women, even as (already) feminist women. Subjectification is a political process that involves making familiar mainstream discourses seem strange. It is linked to the un-sticking and re-sticking of social identities. Women’s denaturalisation of gender cannot be complete or total – it is partial and contingent, and is discursively negotiated and enacted. Discursive activism is the act of making these denaturalisations visible. One of the strategies that feminist bloggers use to do this, which has been shown on two occasions in this thesis, is the ‘bingo card’. More often than not, these bingo cards are filled with examples of mainstream discourses that serve to put women (and men) in particular places, to construct particular gendered (and raced, etc) subjectivities. By making bingo cards, feminist bloggers discursively intervene through denaturalising those discourses, enabling women and others to resist being put in their place. By creating a bingo card with all of the stereotypical arguments from the opposing discourse, they can simply cross off each one as it appears in a debate. This use of satire to unpick discourses that are otherwise upsetting is politically cathartic and helps create a counter-hegemonic discourse in which these arguments are not acceptable.

In Chapter Three, I described how the blogger ‘Spilt Milk’ assembled discourses used against victims of sexual assault, using a strategy similar to what Tomlinson (2010) describes as ‘intensification’. She did this to show how these mainstream discourses, experienced in

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aggregation, could leave no escape for victims, in day to day life, from the ubiquity of such beliefs. By linking knowledge with discourses and identities, and by linking affect with the political, bloggers map ways out of ‘sticky’ hegemonic discourses and into oppositional feminist discourses. These oppositional discourses are ‘sticky’ because of their links to the real lives and relationships of the women engaged in these networks. This is significant because it allows for discursive claims to be articulated, remembered and reproduced by other bloggers in their own spaces. Their stickiness allows for their longevity and translation in discursive activism.

In this way, women’s feminist identities are articulated and negotiated in shared discursive spaces with others who share their values and can likewise help them to understand the world in new ways. Political subjectivities are caught up in and constructed through affective attachments and investments. These attachments are supportive and grow out of a shared, negotiated discursive framing of the political. There is also, as I argued in Chapter Four, a sense in which they are ‘wounded attachments’ (Brown 1995, 52-76). As Brown (1995, 55) argues, ‘identity’s desire for recognition’ breeds ‘a politics of recrimination and rancor’. Certainly this is sometimes true of the politics in feminist blogging communities, where wounds and pain associated with social injustice are returned to in moments of conflict and seem to stay stuck. But there are also more generative aspects of political subjectivity, in which participants engage with mainstream discourses to diminish and make particular mainstream discourses ridiculous. These oppositional discourses of dismissal and laughter enable feminist bloggers to devise strategies to work around the mainstream and create specifically feminist discourses of interpretation. Such discourses are enmeshed in pain but respond positively to it.

That is: the return to the painful aspects of experience that feminist bloggers draw on in their writing – some of the time – can be both productive and unproductive. Bloggers create oppositional identities, political subjectivity, and oppositional discourses out of these experiences. The least productive response to such shared experiences are the ‘recrimination and rancor’ (Brown 1995, 55) of accusations and conflict without space for change. But conflict may still be productive if it results in a changed understanding of politics and power that further results in changed behaviours and discourses within these networks.

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As I showed in Chapters Four and Five, Australian feminist bloggers expressed a commitment to understanding the ways that they are implicated in relations of privilege and power. Such conflicts and conversations are productive when these shifts in political subjectivity occur without recrimination or individual blame. In the context of mainstream social discourse conflict is assumed to place blame, this discursive reflexivity is difficult to achieve.

Several bloggers discussed, in interviews and in their blogs, the ways that they negotiate an awareness of these traps of conflict, as I described in Chapters Four and Five, on the building of affective community and discursive politics respectively. Conversations around privilege and power, in which all people are implicated in different ways, are acknowledged to be fraught. As was seen in Chapter Five, this thesis has discussed the ways that feminist bloggers negotiate power and privilege ‘without blame’ (‘Rachel’, in interview, 2009). Conflict, in the sense of negotiating different intersecting identities and experiences, is understood to be both affectively difficult for those involved, as well as productive. Bloggers affirm the necessity to learn from such conflicts, to ensure that they are productive, and that they do not happen for their own sake, because they are difficult for all involved. Having said that, bloggers express frustration when this does not happen, when others seem not to learn from conflict, or experience conflict as blame. For these bloggers, conflict is more usefully framed in ways that do not play into old patterns of power and policing, blame and (self)recrimination, but that are grounded in a reflexive understanding of privilege.

Part Two: Political Emotions, Affective Networks

Social movements and emotion

As I argued in Chapter Two, social movement theory has had difficulty accounting for the role of culture and emotion without treating these as preconditions for political action, or succumbing to the temptation to rationalise them by treating them as separate from political action, like identity. Along with Gould (2010, 19) I hope to bridge the gap that lies between the sprinkled-on-top approach to emotion that characterises most of the social

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movement studies discipline, and the work that is being done within cultural studies about the relationship between affect and politics, with explicit reference to the political.

Gould (2010, 19) argues that while social movement scholars have recently made attempts to ‘depathologise’ the ‘emotions of protest’, this does not go far enough. In these attempts to ‘offer a corrective’ to the assumption of rationality, some scholars have tended to ‘conceptually tame’ emotion (Gould 2010, 23). Political feelings are marketed as the results of cognition, and ‘become almost rational in the sense that they flow directly, expectedly, and coherently from cognitive processing’ (Gould 2010, 24). It is only logical for political actors to feel a certain way. They have thought about it and decided that the most appropriate response is to be angry. While this may be true for some, it ignores the role of community in the development of affective response, and as a place for it to go.

Like identity, culture and emotion have often been added to social movement theory but in ways that actually leave them out. For instance, as Goodwin and Jasper (2004b, 5) argue, the concept of ‘framing’ developed by political process theorists makes an effort to include culture in such a way that it simultaneously excludes it. As described in Chapter Two, emotion, collective identity, and framing are 'sprinkled atop' structuralist approaches to social movements (Jasper 2007, 60). For example Van Dyke and McCammon (2010, xvii) argue for the importance of social ties and culture to social movements, but their understanding of the facility of these aspects are as structural aspects that keep social movements moving, rather than understanding cultural activism as having value in its own right of changing social norms and political demands. They also claim that 'ideological alignment' is important for the success of movements, but do not understand this alignment as co-constructed, rather a social movement comes together because its actors already hold similar views. This is a view of social movements that leaves out discursive activism. While framing is a meaning-making element of protest, it is often understood not in its own right but in terms of its capacity to facilitate organisational cohesion and to attract participants to protest events. In this understanding, discourse is simply strategic, deployed to convince an audience to engage in collective action (McCarthy et al 2006, 291). Framing processes are understood to constrain and determine collective action repertoires (McCarthy 1996).

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Also, ‘movements that do not target the state as their main opponent’ are mostly unaccounted for in the political process approach to the study of social movements (Goodwin & Jasper 2004b, 10). Although new social movement approaches take culture more seriously and understand it as necessary to the development and maintenance of social movements, they likewise have a tendency to see it as separate from political action (Young 1997). Jasper (1998) explains that work on emotions in social movement tend to be highly cognitive in their orientation, in an attempt to avoid the stigma of irrationality. Instead, as he argues:

Not only are emotions part of our responses to events, but they also—in the form of deep affective attachments—shape the goals of our actions. There are positive emotions and negative ones, admirable and despicable ones, public and hidden ones. Without them, there might be no social action at all. To categorize them as rational or irrational (much less to dismiss them all as interferences with rationality) is deeply wrongheaded (Jasper 1998, 398)

Goodwin & Jasper (2004a; 2004b), Jasper (2007) and Polletta (2004; 2006) provide meaningful contributions to the understanding of emotion and culture in social movements. Jasper’s (1998) approach contributes the concept of the ‘moral shock’ as part of the process of social movements. Jasper’s (2007, 227) analysis of political creativity and play in protest shows how emotionality and non-tactical fun can be part of the work of movements. Jasper’s (2007) work is also notable for its discussion of the way that conflictual discussions contribute to the development of political positions and enable participates to disarticulate meaning. Polletta (2006) work shows the centrality of passion and storytelling in movements. As well, work by feminist social theorists such as Young (1997) and Taylor (1989) value culture and discursive aspects of political action. These understandings of social movements, which value culture, emotions, and discourse, have rarely been applied to studies of online activism.

. My interview subjects saw the affective attachments built through communities not only as a benefit of their involvement, but also often as something that they were committed to - a political labour with political significance. Tomlinson’s (2010) work on affect in feminist argument has provided me with a useful framework to understand this aspect of the community, the sense of commitment that members held towards others. The findings of

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my research, both through the analysis of community texts and through interviews, contribute to an understanding of the political that recognises affective attachments, discourses, and networks as crucial to its functioning.

Findings and theory

The bloggers that I spoke to used their blogs to give form and shape to the dissonance they felt in their own lives, and to share the discourses that enabled them to turn it into political claims. Blogging allowed them to focus their anger and think it through. They were able to articulate particular claims in response to mainstream discourses that made them angry or otherwise upset. These articulations provided the justifications for further confrontations with the mainstream, not only for them, but also for the others who they have armed with the discourse to do so.

Participants in discursive politics expose contradictions and feel it necessary to show the absurdity of mainstream discourses. When I say that participants ‘feel it necessary’ I am referring to the affective injunction to speak and the act of creating a space in which to do so because of that need. As described above, many of the bloggers that I interviewed in my research used the word ‘outlet’ to describe their reasons for starting to write a blog. Others said that their thoughts and feelings had ‘nowhere to go’ until they were able to carve out a space in which to do so. Many bloggers began blogging because of a desire to express things it was hard to find space to express in their everyday lives. This included a frustration with the way debate about gender was framed in day-to-day conversations.

McDonald (1999, 66) argues that in social movements, anger is a part of the struggle, but social movements are able to transform that anger into social relationship, a process he calls ‘conflictualisation’, and link that anger ‘to an expression of creativity, to a positive identity’. The movement from anger to a social movement comes through social expression, through the building of relationships in order to link affect to other horizons of possibility (McDonald 1999, 115).

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That is an incredible benefit of taking part in blogs, is feeling, is finding so many other people with views like yours, and not feeling so alone, and getting to really develop your feminism because I think otherwise it can stall. (‘Blue Milk’, in interview, 2010)

Practices of blogging can provide ways for people to hear and respond to hegemonic dislocations and ruptures, enabling new ways of thinking and living politics. This is the link between discourse and the feminist subject. In this way critique can arise out of very personal, highly affective crisis. A response is required by the gap in sense between the repeated tropes of mainstream discourses, and the discourse that has been collectively developed in feminist spaces. ‘A Shiny New Coin’ (2010) describes this feeling in her blog, asking ‘Why do we write about social justice? Is it because we have suffered great injustice all of us? Or is it because we cannot sleep until we have written it[?]’.

The mainstream discourses that prompt feminists to seek to intervene are those that make visible the gap in sense – that is, the gap between the sensible and its representation. Mainstream discourses are jarring against the sense of the world that is imagined through the feminist viewpoints discursively constructed within feminist blogging networks. This gap or dislocation prompts women to push back against these discourses. This is closely related to the idea of outlet or the affective impulse to write. The term ‘cognitive dissonance’ is often used in the feminist blogging network to signal the moments when, as a feminist, the writer encounters something or someone that threatens their subjectivity. Bloggers give voice to the sense of erasure and anger that they feel, that it is no longer possible to exist with the other there – the other that speaks words that break the back of sense.

Dissonance is also signalled in the common recommendation by bloggers made to other feminists: ‘don’t read the comments’. In the mainstream media online, many newspaper articles and opinion pieces, as well as blog posts, enable comments from the public to be posted. For feminists, reading such comment threads can be an extremely negative experience, because of dissonance between feminist counter-hegemonic discourse and mainstream discourse, and the affective response to this dissonance. A desire to withdraw and to ‘not read the comments’ can initially be understood as self-protection. And to some degree it is. As Fiumara (1990, 82) argues in The Other Side of Language, the ‘person who

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has not been sufficiently listened to’ is capable only of becoming the victim of ‘our resounding culture’. What she means by this is that for those who are excluded, mainstream media can be destructive of self. However, in many cases the injunction, ‘Don’t read the comments’ actually appears to mean ‘read the comments and weep’. The recommendation might be seen as one of withdrawal, but in fact the person remains politically engaged, while creating a relation of antagonism to the discourses of the mainstream. As I have shown, this relation is an affective relation - one of despair and frustration, and of solidarity and affinity - but it is also a political relation. The blogger defines herself in opposition to the discourses of the mainstream. The following passage explains:

I’m a bit of a sucker for trawling through the tabloids and their comment threads and the reason for that is that it seems to me that if these are the plain people of Australia then there’s an awful lot of worrying attitudes out there. (‘Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony’, in interview, 2010)

The readers of the comments may not simply be a ‘victim’ of the dissonance between their political perspective and that of the mainstream, because they have a capacity to resist it by hearing it and opposing it. Another example of the acknowledgement of the affective dimension in feminist discursive activism is the concept of the ‘trigger warning’, in which bloggers give readers a warning about content or subject matter that may recall a trauma or be emotionally upsetting. This is most common in posts about sexual assault, but extends to many other topics.

The ‘trigger warning’ and the ‘bingo card’ discussed earlier are just some of the strategies feminist bloggers have developed to deal with discursive dissonance, both affectively and politically. Here, politics and affect are bound up together. Ahmed (2004) writes on the political affects of hate, fear, pain, disgust, love and shame, as well as ‘discomfort, grief, pleasure, anger, wonder, and hope’ (Ahmed 2004, 16). She takes emotions seriously as an integral part of the process of political sensemaking. Braidotti (1991, 14) also emphasises the embodiment of discourse with her use of the word dissonance, referring to the play of discourse ‘that may collapse into cacophony and even shock some sensitive ears’.

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Feminist bloggers act discursively to expose the contradictions of events that cause dissonance, attempting to tear what is already a gap or rupture in discourse. Without a community to back up this discursive act, another possibility is frustration, or perhaps despair. The development of counter-hegemonic discourses within the feminist blogging community helps to guard against this sense of political hopelessness:

I think it’s made me know, when I read something that just made me spit, that I wouldn’t have to bore my partner with it for eight hours, [that] I could get online and get it off my chest. Sometimes you read someone put something really eloquently that you were struggling to conceptualise or whatever, and that’s a really nice thing to see that happening. It makes me feel like I have this network of friends and people that I feel warmly about who share my views. (‘CrazyBrave’, in interview, 2010)

Through the discursive construction of a different viewpoint, as explored in the previous section with reference to ‘aspect change’, women are more able to see the ways that mainstream discourse fails to live up to the expectations of a feminist politics. Laclau and Mouffe (1985, 110) use the examples of ‘synonymy, metonymy, metaphor’ to show that these are the primary terrain around which the social is constituted. Braidotti (1991, 146) has argued that dissonance emphasises the ‘falsely reassuring nature of any dream of unity or global synthesis’. Feminist activists respond to their silencing in mainstream discourses as a result of the affective dissonance they experience. For its participants, this changes the ‘distribution of the sensible’, and changes the way that the world is understood (Rancière 2010, 36). Dissonance has emerged ‘as a mode of contemporary reflection’ (Braidotti 1991, 146). These concepts have a relation both to processes of political dislocation, rupture, crisis, and contradiction.

Women in these networks were also enabled to feel particular emotions by the discourses developed therein, as we saw in Chapter Four. When particular sexist tropes became familiar as the result of sharing them within the community, women clearly felt more angry. But they also felt that it was a productive anger, because they knew why they were angry or upset, and could recognise the actors and discourses to direct that emotion towards. Importantly, they also had others to share that anger with.

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I have drawn on affect theory to make audible the ways that feeling impacts on the development of this political community. However, I do not import affect theory wholesale. When juxtaposed with the contributions of the poststructuralist political theory I have described, affect theory makes explicit the relation between feeling and the political. The concept of ‘affective networks’ is one that is explored by affect theorists and can potentially be applied to online political communities in useful ways. However, it is sometimes treated in ways which do not allow affect to be tied up in the political. It can portray subjects as disempowered, at times, by their engagement in intimate publics, affective networks, or political communities.

For example, Dean (2010) explores the idea of affective networks in her book Blog Theory: Feedback and capture in the circuits of drive. As the title suggests, she sees these networks as diverting properly political affect into the circuits of online life, creating a feedback loop, an idea relayed in the worries of blogosphere participants who see the community as just an ‘echo chamber’. Dean (2010) worries that the community is only talking to each other, and that as a result, nothing will change. Poletti (2011) summarises my reservations about ‘intimate publics’ as a diversion of the political into the 'sentimental', when she responds to the work of Lauren Berlant (Poletti 2011, 80):

Berlant articulates what could be described as the unintended consequences of second-wave feminism's insistence that the personal is the political. As she acutely observes, the expression, or merely the identification, of the personal gets mistaken for doing the work of the political. (Poletti 2011, 80)

This characterisation may indeed be accurate in cases where affect is explicitly depoliticised, such as on talk shows that frequently bring problems (particularly women’s problems) back to the individual, away from structural explanations of disadvantage (Cefai & Indelicato 2010). The majority of the online feminists that I spoke to held otherwise: rather than standing in for the political, the personal acted on the political through the negotiation of political discourse. Rather than delinking women’s problems from the political, as in talk

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show culture, the discourse of the blogosphere links women’s experiences to the political. In many ways the community's purpose was as a ‘support network’ for feminists, as some of my interviewees described it, but simultaneously it provided the material for explicitly political interventions in the mainstream. While the work of discursively linking affect with the political is performed through discursive activism, the status of the community as a support network is a strong binding force in making the community a political one.

Dean's (2010, 7) reading of blogs as places charactised by ‘a lack of binding power or performative efficacy of words’ does not describe the community being studied in my research. She describes what she calls the 'blogipelago' as a space of contingency and lack of commitment. ‘Since exit is an option with nearly no costs,’ she argues, ‘subjects lose the incentive for their word to be their bond’ (Dean 2010, 7). Australian feminist bloggers discussed with me their sense of commitment to what they saw as the tightknit and supportive space of the network. However, several participants did stop blogging during the period of my research, although they continued to maintain relationships with others in the network (e.g. through Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr). A large part of the incentive for feminist bloggers to continue blogging, and to also maintain a particular set of standards and values in their blogging practice, is their affective attachment to the community itself. But it is also the difficult affects, whether a sense of a risking of privacy, or of negative experiences and conflict, that some women discussed about their experience of the community, that affect the difficult decision to stop participating at a particular level. Nonetheless, exit cannot be said to have ‘nearly no costs’, in light of the commitment that many bloggers expressed.

The affective relation to the mainstream that is constructed within the community, and the simultaneous negotiation of ways to react, provide a means for the political that was not there before. This is related both to the creation of political subjectivities, and participation in discursive activism. A focus on political affect in isolation excludes the way that affect helps create attachments to counter-hegemonic discourses that enable these newly ‘aspect changed’ political subjects to intervene in mainstream discourse. A focus on the circulation of affect as unfocused drive carries the risks of stigmatising political emotion as zombie-like or mob-like. Dean (2010, 32) worries that ‘such a lack or absence of the political is the hole

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around which networked communications circulate. Or, more precisely, this loss of a capacity to think the political circulates as drive’. Having spoken to the participants in this political community, I have no such fears.

In contrast to Dean’s (2010) view, Tomlinson's (2010) text Feminism and affect at the scene of argument: Beyond the trope of the angry feminist provides a particularly useful way to understand the sense of affective attachment that members of the feminist blogosphere have shown to their community. Tomlinson’s (2010, 3-4) work provides a framework to deal with the specific kinds of arguments that take place in feminist blogging networks, revealing ‘how everyday and scholarly deployments of affect function as technologies of power’. For example, when critics of feminist politics ‘use strategies authorized by their unacknowledged gendered and racialized status to delegitimate arguments about structures of dominance’ (Tomlinson 2010, 20). Feminist discursive actors respond by constructing alternative rhetorics of authority (Tomlinson 2010, 20). Rather than continuing the stereotype of the emotionality of feminist discourse, she views affective forms of argument as a kind of labour that is explicitly political. While she argues that anger can be rhetorical, this does not imply that affect is intentionally deployed as such. Affect is not faked for effect, but becomes a part of political action, one that subjects hold in response to their own reactions to mainstream discourse, which is ruptured by feminist discourse. In this way the political response is tied closely to the emotional response, without invalidating it as irrational or over the top.

In my research, I found that political emotions have been part of the process of articulation, identification, and indeed activism. While not academic work, feminist bloggers similarly ‘use affect in constructing alternative rhetorics’ (Tomlinson 2010, 20). Emotion is frequently political in itself, because rather than simply creating the preconditions for political action, it occurs as a result of the creation of a political subject who would respond. This response is Rancière’s ‘dissensus’, and the result of ‘rupture’ (Rancière 2010). Affect, though frequently the result of women's relations to their particular worlds, finds its place and echo in the writings of other women. In chapter 4, I showed that women found the articulation of their political feeling to be most powerful when other women could identify with that feeling. The outlet for emotion was frequently a political analysis, but one that included affect as part of its rhetorical push.

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Part Three: Discursive Activism

The final aspect that I am emphasising in this thesis is the role of discursive activism in social movements, and the way that discursive activism interacts with the aspects of political involvement I have already discussed in parts one and two of this chapter. While drawing on a strong body of work regarding discursive activism from social movement scholars and particularly feminist social movement scholars, I am additionally linking discursive activism with processes of identification, subjectification and affective relations.

The most useful thinkers and researchers in the field of social movement studies for understanding discursive activism are often those who are critical of many of the field’s structuralist (in the case of political process and resource mobilisation approaches) and cognitivist (in the case of new social movement theory) assumptions. In particular the work of Young (1997) is useful in that it shows how discursive activism is often left out of social movement research or not considered to be activism proper. She critiques new social movement theory in these terms. She describes feminist publishing as discursive politics, aiming not to mobilise women in the traditional sense but to mobilise them discursively to resist sexism and racism (Young 1997, 32). Likewise, feminist blogs aim for social change through discursive activism.

As Purkayastha observes, the concept of discursive activism has its roots in feminist thinking and feminist approaches to the study of social movements. Discursive activism allows women activists to ‘change the meanings of concepts and offer alternatives’ (Purkayastha 2008, 400). While drawing on these conceptions of discursive activism, I additionally want to show how these forms of activism are not always seen by community members as instrumental. At times they are, and at times they are done for their own sake – out of affective investment, or in order to negotiate within feminism itself. This is not to say it is apolitical, because it is indeed political, but that it aims to change the internal politics of feminist discourses for social change rather than aiming at institutional social change.

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My work brings together conceptions of political subjectivity and processes of identification from new social movement theory and new discourse theory, and work being done around political affect, and applies these theories to an online network. My intention is to show that beyond the public sphere theory treatments of online political deliberation, activism can take place, additionally, in online spaces that are not inclusive, and do not meet the norms of deliberative democracy. Feminist bloggers use rhetorical devices such as sarcasm, hyperbole, and the expression of all kinds of political emotions that are often excluded from understandings of political deliberation.

Politics takes place not only in designated open spaces for political deliberation, but also in other spaces that have boundaries that are set through networks of attention and care, and that are frequently made invisible in broader political discourse. While I do not affirm this invisibilisation as a good (and in fact argue that this is a serious concern in the terms of inclusion in political – and internet - discourse) it is also more complicated than a case of simple political exclusion. Feminist bloggers intervene in mainstream discourses within their own spaces in ways that set feminist agendas, and change feminist thinking for the better, and do so in negotiation with the real lives and experiences of women.

The three aspects of participation that I have highlighted in this political community work together – identification and political subjectivity, affective community, and discursive activism. Each fulfils a particular purpose, and often those purposes are less to do with being overtly political than fulfilling one’s own wish to share with others who have similar views, and to enjoy the relationships that are built and maintained within the community. These aspects of feminist politics are still political, and also discursive. Having said that, at other times members of the community act discursively with the explicit aim of creating social change. Both of these forms of discursive politics are intertwined and indeed both are necessary for the negotiation of feminist politics in line with an ethics of alterity. Such a politics affirms that no one feminist blogger or group of bloggers speak for all women, and that there are intersecting political issues that need to be negotiated within the community.

Bloggers deal with their own implications in structures and discourses of power, and this can sometimes be a difficult affective terrain, as described in Chapter Four. The community

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should be understood as a political community, and the relationships within it also as political relationships. I do not say political in the sense of strategic action to achieve distributive ends, but in Rancière’s sense of the political – the challenging of contingent values, and the expression of the part of those who have no part (in politics), who are silenced and made invisible in political discourse.

One example of these politics playing out in feminist discursive spaces is the feminists with disability sub-community, in which feminists identified collectively ableist attitudes in feminist blogs. The sub-community, built through affective alliances between feminists with disability, then discursively intervened in these ableist feminist discourses. The impetus for this shift was both affective and political, drawn from the relationships that feminists had built with other women, the ethics of alterity that demands from feminist bloggers that they listen to other points of view and examine their own implication in relations of power and privilege, and finally the building of alternative discourses around disability. Certainly these actions by women with disability, though motivated by a response grounded in their affective experience, aimed to change the politics of feminist blogging communities. As described in Chapter Five, interviews with feminist bloggers revealed their changed understanding of disability politics. Feminists with disability who I interviewed acknowledged their aim to change feminist politics for a more inclusive feminism. However, they also noted the difficult affects that went along with this change – the sense of exclusion and frustration at other bloggers who refused to acknowledge their specific privilege and power as able-bodied women.

Fat Acceptance (FA) activists in feminist blogging networks, while they experienced less conflict with broader feminist discourse, still had to act discursively to make other feminist bloggers aware of problematic discourses around fat and obesity. Certainly the relationships and interlinkages between Fat Acceptance activists are strong, and they act together in Australian blogging networks (not only feminist networks) to change attitudes to fat and obesity. They also respond directly to mainstream media articles, like other feminist bloggers, responding to problematic discourses in the mainstream. These bloggers have developed relationships with other Fat Acceptance activists, and share experiences with other FA bloggers, in order to develop an understanding of the discourses that they are up

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against in the mainstream. For example, FA activists explored the discourse in the mainstream around obesity and parenting. In particular there was a repeated trope that fat people are not good parents, and are letting their children down by being fat. In mainstream discourse, fat people do not have enough energy to play with their children, and may die early leaving their children orphaned. FA bloggers respond both affectively and discursively to these tropes, drawing on their experiences as parents to counter these claims. They also use humour to make fun of the idea of the medical category ‘morbid obesity’ – bloggers who fall into this BMI range refer to themselves as ‘having the DeathFatz’. They challenge this idea, arguing against the belief that falling into a BMI range directly means you are going to die regardless of other health markers and by also resisting the idea that falling into a particular BMI is morally wrong. This discourse is present in mainstream discourses of fat people being ‘a burden’ on society or family members.

In this thesis I have argued, using the work of Tomlinson (2010), that political affect is an important part of processes of articulation, identification, and activism. Women in the network act out their anger, care, and support not only due to emotional need, but also performed as part of their political practice. A feminist understanding of social movements needs to take affective rhetoric seriously, and not devalue emotional discourse in political debate. Tomlinson argues that:

[W]riting needs to be seen as labor, as a concrete praxis performed to achieve discrete and finite ends. Writing may seem private and personal, but it is always a shared social practice, an activity with both critical and creative dimensions. Writers identify problems, pose solutions, inhabit subject positions, promote new subjectivities, appeal to potential allies and attempt to disarm potential enemies. They must appeal to publics new and old. But these publics are not simply already existing discrete social entities; rather, they are conceptual parts of a social imaginary produced through the actual work of writing, reading, and arguing (Michael Warner 2002). Such publics are saturated with power – creating and created by institutions of circulation, ideologies of reading, textual genres, and the rhetoric of texts. Writing is a way of learning, a way of looking for allies who are looking for us, a way of winning recognition and resources vital to changing minds and changing social relations (Tomlinson 2010, 25).

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This important quote illustrates the way that discursive activism can be linked with community, with affective relations, and also with aspect change and the creation of new or altered subjectivities on the basis of a political co-construction of feminism. As Hardt suggests, the study of affect should properly ‘illuminate […] both our power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it, along with the relationship between these two powers’ (Hardt 2007, ix). The intimate relations that are generated within this feminist online community are part of the process of writing together a feminism or feminisms that are responsive to the changing social environment. As feminists in the blogging network have argued, anti-feminist rhetoric is more visible than ever in the words of trolls and other participants in online media. The development of a support network for feminists in the feminist blogosphere should not be understood in any way as a withdrawal from the political, except in a sense that it is an aversive politics that defines itself in opposition to particular discourses. Instead it is a space in which feminist ideas are developed, and shaped through moderation policies and a careful (though imperfect) commitment to discursive practices that are not exclusionary.

Within this network, bloggers engage in discursive activism daily. Blog posts are composed because of gaps between their sense of the political and the sense of the political expressed in mainstream discourses. As I showed in Chapter Five, feminist interventions in mainstream media are made on this basis, provoked by a felt need to respond, and with political intent. Discursive activism is an intervention in discourses on a political basis. It is the creation of new discourses to counter mainstream and/or anti-feminist views, and the building of new discursive strategies for response. Through discursive activism, members of online communities change the world, by challenging political norms and values, and through practices of political sense-making.

Rancière (2010) links dissensus with the creation of new political subjects – not new people, but new ways of being politically. Rancière's (1999, 2010) ideas are thereby indispensible for understanding discursive activism in ways that steer clear of a kind of instrumentality of culture and identity. In particular, his work on political art and literature helps to

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demonstrate the hazards of assuming that political intent leads necessarily to political outcomes (Rancière 2010, 134-168). Agreement or a co-constructed understanding of the way of the world does not necessarily lead to political action – for example awareness of the causes of global warming does not lead directly to changes in patterns of consumption. Intent to change people's way of thinking (art and writing as pedagogy) may or may not result in social or political change.

Dissensus is:

[N]ot a designation of conflict as such, but is a specific type thereof, a conflict between sense and sense. Dissensus is a conflict between a sensory presentation and a way of making sense of it, or between several sensory regimes and/or 'bodies'. (Rancière 2010, 139)

This is not at all to say that discursive activism has no capacity to effect social or political change, just that the relation between words and action (and words as action) is not so direct. It depends on sense, on dissensus - on the clash between the world that is described, seen, expected, and enacted, and the effect that this clash has on political subjects and their way of making sense of the world. This creation of horizons of possibility is a collective process of discursive sense-making, the positive corollary to the negative concepts of dislocation and rupture. Many blog posts will respond to news stories that are written in ways that reveal sexist tropes, for example. These analyses do not simply take place in a single blog post responding to a single news story. Nor do they repeat commonsense claims about gender. The job of these analyses is to denaturalise discourse that previously appeared natural in the context of mainstream discourse.

The related concepts of dislocation, crisis, dissensus, and rupture provide a model for how counter-hegemonic discourses are able to develop. The concept of ‘dislocation’ signals a political moment in which contradictions between mainstream discourse and what it says of itself become apparent, leaving it open to discursive activists to ‘disarticulate’ that discourse. Dislocations disrupt identities and discourses, and in doing so they ‘create a lack at the level of meaning that stimulates new discursive constructions, which attempt to suture the dislocated structure’ (Howarth & Stavrakakis 2000, 13). Dislocations also allow for the

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articulation of new meanings in counterhegemonic ways, so as to further work at the tear in the discourse to expose its dislocated nature.

Feminist critique can be understood as ‘counterhegemonic discourse’ which is informed by those contradictions of patriarchy that make themselves known through ‘textual incoherences in the narratives of the dominant culture’ (Hennessy 1993, 92). These incoherences (or ruptures or dislocations) ‘indicate the failure of […] hegemonic discourses to successfully seal over or manage the contradictions displaced in the texts of culture’ (Hennessy 1993, 92).

Sense-making is the process by which people are able to patch up the tear in discursive structures, but it is also the process by which people find the tears in discursive structures. Discursive activists find patterns and repeating discourses in their commentary on social events. They find breaks in social logics, contradictions and other strategies for creating ruptures in hegemonic discourse that will enable them to make counter-hegemonic claims. For feminist bloggers, posts are frequently motivated by noticing something in the mainstream media that contradicts (in often affectively disturbing ways) the discourses developed in feminist blogging networks. This is the practice that I refer to when I discuss the discursive interventions that feminist bloggers make in mainstream discourse.

What bloggers do in Australian feminist blogging networks is identify dislocations in the structure of society, seizing these opportunities to re-describe or re-articulate the symbolic order. This understanding of discursive activism allows for the role of passionate expression, hyperbole, satire, transgression and other affective and affecting devices as part of the process (Cammaerts 2007; Sowards & Renegar 2006, 63). I propose that the Australian feminist blogging community I have studied be understood as a counter-hegemonic project that politically rearticulates meaning at points of dislocation, at the same time constituting the identity and agency of the participants.

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Conclusion: The Evolution of a Discursive Movement in Blogging Networks

I began this thesis by describing how women in Australian blogging networks develop and maintain feminist community through the Down Under Feminists’ Carnival each month. This Carnival has been instrumental in providing cohesion and allowing for the entry of new voices and participants into Australian feminist blogging networks. While different blogs have different constellations of readers and linkages – as shown in the network maps in Chapter One – the Carnival helps build a sense of community and security among bloggers for the development and reproduction of feminist discourses and claims. The network maps in Chapter One showed that over the period of my study, the size and interconnectedness of a uniquely Australian feminist community has increased, even as international links have remained strong.

My research project was developed in the context of a public discourse – within Australian and other English-speaking contexts - about the women’s movement that saw it as dead, over, or in abeyance (Dux & Simic 2008; Walby 2011). In the late 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, feminism has been subject to a popular media discourse around feminism in which ‘straw feminists’ criticise ‘straw feminism’ for its failures (Dux & Simic 2008). In the meantime feminists are still engaged in feminist discussion in online social networks. This research suggests that through online discussion, feminists are engaged in discursive activism. Rather than being inactive, feminist bloggers actively intervene in mainstream discourses that are anti-feminist, and create and identify new projects for feminist discursive activism. Some examples of such projects include the feminists with disability, feminist parenting, and fat acceptance movements discussed in Chapters Three, Four, and Five of this thesis.

The affective sense of community built through the Down Under Feminists’ Carnival as well as the increasing interconnectedness of feminist bloggers through links and attention, allows

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for the development of an arena for discursive activism. Discursive activism refers to the ways that feminist bloggers respond both to anti-feminist or other problematic discourses in the mainstream media, and also the conflict and negotiation that happens within and between blog networks about what feminism can and should address. Women are engaged in feminist claims-building and negotiation in submerged networks. Building on the results of fieldwork interviews with 21 bloggers, feminist social movement theory, and new discourse theory, I have argued that discursive activism combines subjectivity change, affective community, and affective response.

This thesis was developed in productive conversation with social movement theory, however it is not a thesis bound by a particular social movement theory approach. Instead I developed an understanding of what was happening through a grounded theory analysis of the interview texts alongside new social movement and new discourse theories. I identified the gaps and omissions in social movement theory that prevent certain kinds of activism from being recognised as activism, particularly in the area of internet social movement research. Social movement theory misses such discursive internet activism even as social movement research in other contexts and traditions recognises the importance of culture and emotions in social movement activity. Research into internet social movements has left out such considerations (Earl et al 2010). While social movement theorists have tried to redress their exclusion of emotions and culture from studies of social movements in the past, these insights have so far failed to be reflected in research on internet social movements. My research combines contemporary internet research and applies social movement theory’s most useful theories around submerged networks and discursive activism, with particular attention to feminist social movement theory. My study is the first within social movement studies to address the question of the role of internet social movements in discursive activism.

Drawing on ideas from new discourse theory about ‘the constitutive outside’ of counter- hegemonic discursive communities, I have described how feminist bloggers have constructed a space for productive conversations about feminism, and for response to mainstream discourses through rhetorical forms of argument (Tomlinson 2010). I related these ideas also to the concept of the ‘submerged network’ (Maddison 2004, 230; Melucci 1996, 115) and

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‘abeyance structures’ (Taylor 1989). Bloggers are engaged in social movement work outside of the public eye and understand this work as activism, even though it does not always aim to change policy or political organisation and distribution of resources. Instead, it aims to change language.

Poststructuralist political theory places emphasis on processes of articulation and construction rather than consensus or aggregation of political demands and beliefs, and this has been the theoretical thrust and focus of my research. I provided a theoretical analysis of the disruptive and dislocatory potential of online feminist discursive activism. There has been a great deal of work looking at how politics might be deliberated or aggregated online, but less so on the generation of particular micro-discourses in political spaces online, and the way that these spaces allow for the articulation and disarticulation of these discourses. My research fills this gap by showing in detail how feminist bloggers have generated new strategies for the disarticulation of hegemonic discourses, and the political creativity with which they have developed feminist claims.

I have explored these ideas from the perspective of new social movement theory, particularly feminist social movement theory, as well as aversive, radical, or agonistic democracy, and applied them to one local online community. In particular Norval's (2007) conception of ‘aversive democracy’ draws and builds on these traditions. Norval's (2007) central argument is that democratic politics occurs not only through the agonistic articulation of counterhegemonies, but also through rhetorical and affective language practices, the creation of different subjectivities that experience gaps and ruptures in discourse, and finally political creativity. Linking up with this notion of rhetoric and affect, I additionally draw on feminist theory around rhetoric and affect in the political (Ahmed 2004; Tomlinson 2010).

Blogs, Feminist Subjectivity, and Identity

Feminists in this study are using blogs in order to negotiate the place of feminist identity, and therefore to create a particular feminist subjectivity that can act in response to particular mainstream discourses. I have shown that feminist bloggers isolate mainstream

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discourses and make them seem strange, thus allowing feminists to intervene in them from a different discursive position. In Chapter Three I have drawn on the work of Norval (2007) to conceptualise aspect change as part of the process of identification and also part of becoming a political subject. Bloggers became implicated in and responsive to particular discourses as a result of their changing identities and identifications. Therefore a feminist subjectivity, and the aspect change that goes along with that shift in political subjectivity, is part of discursive activism. Bloggers not only engage in discursive activism as a result of a shift in identity, but indeed the work of political sense-making is discursive activism in itself. In interview, women discussed with me their growing investment in and commitment to feminist politics, and in particular discussed the work of self-questioning as part of their identification with feminist discourses. Questioning privilege, and building an ethos of alterity was part of their politics (Ziarek 2007).

Rather than being understood as an individual or cognitive pursuit resulting in a political commitment, acts of discursive self-construction and identification were social and were part of the interplay between risk and safety in the context of feminist community. Bloggers negotiated their own identity in constant connection – and often tension – with the discourses and conventions of the community. Like Norval (2007, 46), I contend that ‘both interests and identities result from contingent, historical processes of enunciation and articulation’. These processes are social rather than cognitive, and are political acts in themselves. The creation of new subjectivities through aspect change forms part of discursive activism. People’s commitment to discursive activism is both affectively motivated and grounded in desire for a future reality that is different from today. For feminists, this is partly in terms of social structure and hierarchies of power, but also in terms of the (re)negotiation of feminism’s own values and hierarchies.

The delineation of what is a feminist discourse is part of what is negotiated in contemporary feminist communities. Feminists have inherited feminism/s, but feminism also changes not just from generation to generation, but also from year to year and month to month. There are different feminist communities that respond to constructions and reconstructions, negotiations and renegotiations, conflicts and changing affective relations or alliances. Far from being a waste of time (often characterised as ‘infighting’), feminism’s negotiations

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assist it to intervene in mainstream discourses in new ways as mainstream discourses also evolve.

From a social movement studies perspective, Maddison (2004, 8) has similarly argued that conflict in feminism – particularly ‘between the waves’ – is a productive process of reinvention. I also argue that these processes of reinvention allow feminists to respond differently to mainstream discourses that are similarly contingent. Thus these conflicts are not just reinventions of feminism, but a way to respond to the changing conditions that make feminism relevant and necessary in new ways, just as it remains relevant in the old ways. For online feminism, due to news media forums, and the often no-holds-barred style of attacks on feminists from ‘trolls’ and anti-feminists, communities must also learn to defend themselves in new ways to the new visibility of extremely offensive, as well as apparently reasonably mainstream, ideas and views.

Community-building and affective politics

Chapter Four, Affective Community, discusses practices of community-building and the development of affective relations to mainstream discourses. I also discuss the strategies that bloggers developed – in the context of community – to deal with trolling and harassment. In describing their activism, bloggers placed a primacy on the development of community, and on building and maintaining relationships with other women as the practice of a feminist politics. They also aimed to create a space where feminist discussion is encouraged, which was one reason for the sense that a strong moderation policy was also part of the practice of a feminist politics. Bloggers expressed a commitment to creating a space for others on their blog that was free from harassment and hostile anti-feminist attacks.

The model of discursive activism that this thesis proposes includes the building of affective community as part of activist practice. I also conceptualise blogs and their role as ‘outlet’ for affective responses to mainstream discourse as the link between the development of a feminist subjectivity and discursive activism itself. Feminist bloggers develop their affective responsiveness to mainstream discourses because of the discourses that are negotiated in

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the community, and the aspect change that those discourses allow. Emotional response to mainstream discourses, therefore, is part of the practice of a counter-hegemonic politics. Bloggers responded both strategically and passionately as a result of their community- negotiated sense of self and way of viewing the world. Alongside the felt ‘need’ to respond, their aim was to change others’ ways of seeing the world, and to create in negotiation with other feminists a way of interpreting and understanding everyday media that helps identify underlying anti-feminist tropes. It is a feminist politics that gives primacy to language and the way it is used, that understands that words have real effects on the practice of politics.

Fast-moving online spaces such as blogs and forums, as well as the comments sections of news websites, and news websites themselves, are particularly explicit spaces for the negotiation of political discourse. Within this, online feminism has identified the development of discourses within these spaces that are anathema to contemporary feminism. It has simultaneously negotiated rapidly and responsively what is anathema to feminism as these new discourses appear. Strategies like bingo cards show some of the ways that this is done, but the day to day discourse within the blogging community also serves this purpose. Further, this discourse closely links the creation of feminist subjectivities in online spaces with the affective networks that feminists develop to support and maintain their community, the affective labour of the process of discursive activism, and their interventions in the mainstream.

Australian feminist blogs as discursive activism

My thesis has shown that the Australian feminist blogging network is a medium for discursive activism. Bloggers engage in the negotiation of political discourse, collectively working through what is acceptable and unacceptable in mainstream discourse from a feminist and intersectional perspective. This negotiation involves both productive and unproductive conflict. The conflict is productive of an improved feminist politics when it reopens particular positions for re-negotiation and allows participants to question the norms of mainstream and feminist discourse. It is unproductive when it leads to revisiting an oppression over and over again, or when participants are unable to extricate their

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subjectivity from the discourse that implicates them in privilege and others’ oppression, such as through the policing of others’ behaviour, language, and ‘tone’.

This feminist blogging network in the Australian context collects and builds affective ties both between bloggers and also, through blogs, participants build investment in feminist claims that are negotiated within the network. Bloggers in the network participate in various forms of work to build and strengthen the community, for example through hosting and submitting to the Down Under Feminists’ Carnival, and engaging in signal boost – linking to and featuring other bloggers’ writings - to help other bloggers’ writings get seen and recognised. They also moderate their blogs in order to facilitate feminist discussion. I have described in Chapter Four the ways that this labour aims to make ‘safe spaces’ for feminist discussion but also explored the negative experiences that bloggers have as a result of trolling and harassment and intra-community conflict.

The feminist communities described in this thesis are held together through these practices of moderation, linking, and mutual support. New participants join the network and others leave, but those who leave (including two of my interviewees) frequently maintain ties through other forms of new media such as Twitter and background blogging on sites like Tumblr and Livejournal. These Australian feminist women maintained the overall structure of the network over the three years that I was researching the communities, while continuing to build links with new members and international bloggers. Through the commitment that participants expressed to their continued involvement in online feminist discursive politics, the network is held together.

The political efficacy of Australian feminist blogs lies in the discursive challenges that they make to mainstream discourses, the negotiation of feminist claims, and the feminist identity and subjectivity that participants develop in conversation. Interviewees saw changes in their own ways of life, modes of engagement with the political, and their response to others. Bloggers spoke of a newfound confidence to challenge and question other people in everyday conversations – which they sometimes called ‘micro-activism’. Feminist blogs also engage with and challenge mainstream media, identifying oppressive tropes and the effects

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of their deployment on real peoples’ lives. A particular example of this is the work done in the Fat Acceptance sub-community that I described in Chapter Five.

The political work of Australian feminist bloggers demonstrates that contemporary Australian feminism remains an active social movement. That bloggers engage in discursive activism more often than other forms of participation in movement activity is a result of, at least partially, the sense of alienation that women held about political institutions. Having said that, the majority of women that I spoke to did regularly engage in other forms of activism and organisation. They saw blogging as something that they did for themselves and out of their own interest. Blogging was tied up with their own identities and the affective relationships that they had built with other bloggers. These aspects of their experience cannot be separated from the discursive politics that they were engaged in.

I have argued, in this thesis, for the inclusion of discursive activism in studies of social movement activity online. I argued that while social movement theory has developed a way of talking about discursive politics and discursive activism, these analyses are left out of studies of internet social movement activity in the field. The contribution of my research, in this respect, is that it shows how social media can expand the spaces of sociality within which social movement actors engage in discursive activism. I have shown that even at times when feminism is popularly understood to be ‘dead’, ‘over’, or ‘in abeyance’, women are actively engaged in discursive activism and opening up new spaces for such activities.

As such, online feminist blogging communities have a central role to play in the development and continuity of Australian feminism. Bloggers are engaged in the active negotiation of feminist politics. As one blogger told me, blogs are the primary places where feminist thought is developing at the present time. Some bloggers are older and have identified as feminist for a long time, while others are younger and have only recently developed a feminist identity. Some bloggers have been formally educated in feminism, gender and women’s studies while others have not. Some bloggers are heavily invested in the intersectional feminism so prominent in United States feminist blogs, while others come from a background of writing about Australian politics specifically. All of these women are in conversation, allowing for the diffusion of a range of feminist claims, strategies, and

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principles of engagement. Where these differences have led to conflict, this has often been productive, allowing for the change and development of each participant’s political subjectivity, as described in their interviews.

Through the productive negotiation of feminist claims, blog networks contribute to social movement continuity, feminist identity-building, and discursive politics. The way that the priorities of the network shift and change over time as bloggers become invested and dis- invested in particular discourses is particularly indicative of its importance as a social movement medium. The case study of the ‘feminists with disability’ sub-community shows that bloggers’ investment in these discourses is so ubiquitous that it is almost inaccurate to now describe it as a sub-community. The discourse in Australian feminist blogging networks around disability and ableism has markedly changed as a result of the discursive activism of this group of women writers. In interviews, this politics of disability was mentioned by every interviewee, as an example of the way that their thinking had changed, and as a priority for them as feminist activists.

Social movement theory can help to explore these themes of discursive activism as part of online social movement practice. But first, social movement theorists need to take seriously the developments that have been made in other areas of social movement research, particularly feminist social movement research, in describing and valuing discursive politics as an important part of the work that social movement actors do. The work of changing the way people think, negotiating and developing political claims, and pushing others to question oft-repeated tropes in the mainstream media, as well as the work of valuing and promoting women’s writing, is precisely the work that needs to be recognised in social movement research into online activism. The over-emphasis on organisation of offline protests, as well as the limitation of online activism to e-petitions and so forth, has resulted in discursive politics being left out of social movement theorists’ research into online activism.

Ideally, the implications of my research into Australian feminist blogging networks could encourage social movement theorists to explore discursive activism in terms of social media, and to take such media seriously as a space for the negotiation of political claims and for the

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practice of discursive activism. The findings of my research are that the spread, maintenance, and development of social movement discourses through blogs is significant, even overwhelmingly so. Social movement researchers’ tendency to leave out such networks for social movement activity means that there are many discursive networks still to be explored. As a result, further research in this area would be fruitful. I would also, in future studies, expand the area of research to ephemeral and memetic spaces for political discourse such as those on Tumblr. In particular I am interested in the ways that curated political blogs develop discursive claims. These are blogs that are not based on one person’s or a group of people’s work, but instead collect posts around a theme. For example, there is the We Are The 99 Percent blog,43 which provides the space for discursive politics alongside the Occupy movement, or the Fuck Yeah Chubby Girls blog,44 which aggregates positive images of young fat women.

There is also the question of how we can move from blogs and discursive politics to ‘actual social transformation’ (Langman 2005, 67). This is one limitation of my research, because it may be impossible to measure while remaining agnostic about the origin of ideas and claims. Unless directly cited or responded to, mainstream adoption of claims negotiated within feminist blogging networks cannot be definitively measured. My exploration of ‘social transformation’ as an outcome has necessarily been limited to the analysis of occasions when, for example, mainstream media commentators engage directly with Australian feminist bloggers, as in the case of John Birmingham in the Biggest Loser case study in Chapter Four. Nonetheless, feminist claims developed in online discursive spaces are visible in mainstream discourse and have real-world effects – not least in the lives and lifestyles of participants and the ways that they engage politically.

Rather than seeking to measure a widespread effect, my methodological approach demands that I take the perceptions of my research participants seriously, and their descriptions of the ways that their own sense of things has changed as a result of their participation.

43 Available at: http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

44 Available at: http://fuckyeahchubbygirls.tumblr.com/

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‘TigTog’, for example, described her feeling that women are now more able to claim feminist identity, due to the depth and the breadth of the conversations going on about feminism in online spaces. Another possibility for further research would be a study of lurkers and casual participants in particular social movement social media to explore their own sense of political subjectivity and aspect change. While my research has aimed to cover a range of participation styles, lurkers, trolls, and casual commenters were excluded from my study. Considering that, as Lovink (2008, 241-242) says, lurking and casual participation is the norm, this demarcates a range of participatory experiences for future study.

The work of discursive activists in blogging networks serve to ‘re-distribute the sensible’ (Rancière 2010, 152) and ‘transform the terms of reading’ (Tomlinson 2010, 1-30). Such concepts concerning the space and shape of language and discursive change add to the concept of discursive activism as it is conceived by social movement scholars such as (Young 1997). Other conceptualisations of discourse also explicitly link discursive change to aspect change (Norval 2007) and changes in political subjectivity. Ahmed’s (2005, 104) work on affect and the ‘stickiness’ of particular discourses also add to my conceptualisation of discursive activism.

This thesis has brought together theories of new discourse theory, feminist understandings of subjectivity, and theories of political affect, to provide a model for an exploration of discursive activism in online communities. Within this, the concepts of dislocation, crisis, and rupture are demonstrated as being part of processes of discursive political action. Through strategic interventions at these points of dissensus, feminist bloggers make visible discourses that are not acceptable from a feminist perspective, and assist in the definition of a continuously negotiated feminism-to-come.

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Appendix A – Letter & Consent Form

THE UNIVERSITY OF

NEW SOUTH WALES

SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

Approval No: 09 2 131 PARTICIPANT INFORMATION STATEMENT AND CONSENT FORM

Research Project: The Australian feminist blogosphere

This statement is an introduction and a request. My name is Frances Shaw and I am conducting research into Australian feminist blogs. I would like to invite you to participate in this study. In this study, I hope to learn the role of the feminist blogosphere in Australian political and media discourse, and as a social network for political action. You were selected as a possible participant in this study because of your role in the feminist blogosphere itself, as the owner or administrator of a blog, a regular contributor in a group blog, or as a regular participant in discussions on feminist blogs.

If you decide to participate, I would like to interview you about your involvement in the Australian feminist blog network and your thoughts, feelings and experiences within this online community and the state of feminist politics in Australia. The interview will be quite informal and conversational and there will be few set questions. Any questions you do not wish to answer you will have the opportunity to refuse.

How long the interview takes will depend on how much you want to say. I would estimate that most interviews will take between one and two hours.

The interview will be digitally recorded and then transcribed. It will be completely confidential. I will keep both the digital recording and the transcript in a secure location and will not use the material without your complete consent.

Any information that is obtained in connection with this study and that can be identified with you will remain confidential and will be disclosed only with your permission, except as required by law. If you give me your permission by signing this document, I plan to publish the results of this study in papers and in my doctoral thesis. You will have a choice about whether you would like to be identified or to remain anonymous in any publications or reports that result from this research.

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Before any material is published I will send you the transcript from the interview. At this stage, you will have the opportunity to either: (a) deny use of the material, (b) claim anonymity or (c) endorse the material and its use. You can also request to make amendments and provide clarifications to the interview transcript.

Complaints may be directed to the Ethics Secretariat, The University of New South Wales, SYDNEY 2052 AUSTRALIA (phone 9385 4234, fax 9385 6648, email [email protected]). Any complaint you make will be investigated promptly and you will be informed of the outcome.

Your decision whether or not to participate will not prejudice your future relations with the University of New South Wales. If you decide to participate, you are free to withdraw your consent and to discontinue participation at any time without prejudice.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me. If you have any additional questions later, I will be happy to answer them. You can contact me on [REDACTED] or by email: [REDACTED]

You will be given a copy of this form to keep.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

PARTICIPANT INFORMATION STATEMENT AND CONSENT FORM (continued)

Research Project: The Australian feminist blogosphere

You are making a decision whether or not to participate. Your signature indicates that, having read the information provided above, you have decided to participate.

…………………………………………………… .…………………………………………………….

Signature of Research Participant Signature of Witness

…………………………………………………… .…………………………………………………….

(Please PRINT name) (Please PRINT name)

…………………………………………………… .…………………………………………………….

Date Nature of Witness

REVOCATION OF CONSENT

Research Project: The Australian feminist blogosphere

I hereby wish to WITHDRAW my consent to participate in the research proposal described above and understand that such withdrawal WILL NOT jeopardise any treatment or my relationship with The University of New South Wales or The Australian Research Council.

…………………………………………………… .…………………………………………………….

Signature Date

……………………………………………………

Please PRINT Name

The section for Revocation of Consent should be forwarded to Frances Shaw, c/o Sarah Maddison, Dean’s Unit, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW, 2052.

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Appendix B – Sample Interview Guide

Interview Guide

· Ask if okay to record

· Inform will be given the opportunity to remain anonymous

· Inform will be given the transcript of the interview in order to correct it – at that point can choose that particular details given in the interview not be used in my write-up

· If any question makes you uncomfortable or you don't wish to answer it, just say so and we'll move on to the next question

· Also if you need a break or need to stop just let me know

· Consent form

PART ONE: BLOGGING PRACTICES (10-20 mins)

Discussion around the reasons and motivations for starting a blog or for contributing to blogs.

Can you tell me a bit about the time you started writing blogs? How did you get involved?

Can you tell me about the motivations you had for starting to write this blog?

How many blogs do you write or contribute to? If more than one, why do you have more than one blog?

How often do you post entries?

Are there times that you write less than usual?

What are the motivations for continuing blogging?

Have you thought about giving up blogging at any point, if so, what were the reasons for that?

Other blogs:

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Do you link to other blogs in your posts, and if so, which blogs would you say you most frequently link to?

Why do you link to these blogs more frequently?

Which blogs do you read most regularly? How often do you read them? Why do you read these blogs regularly?

PART TWO: COMMUNITY (10-20 mins)

What would you say are the advantages and disadvantages of your involvement in the community?

Has the community had an impact on your personal life and lifestyle, if so, in what way?

Does it change your everyday behaviour? If so, in what ways?

Do you think it has changed your understanding of feminism or of particular social issues? If so, in what ways?

Does your involvement in blogging communities affect you emotionally?

How do you feel about the impact the community has had on your life?

Have you experienced any conflict or antagonism within the community? If so, how did that affect your life?

Part 3: IDENTITY (10-20 mins)

Has your involvement in the feminist blogging community changed your identity at all, if so, how?

How does your identity and others' identity impact upon relationships within the community itself?

Do you identify with some bloggers more than others?

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PART 4: POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT (10-20 mins)

Are you involved in any political or social action outside of blogging?

Volunteering, community work, activism, lobbying, member of political party?

Would you say that you're more active online or offline?

Do you keep offline political involvement separate from your online involvement?

How do you feel that your involvement in the feminist blogging community has changed your involvement in political action? e.g. Has it allowed you to participate in different kinds of action? Action about different issues than previously? Political interest in different issues?

SECTION 5: RELATIONSHIPS

Discussion about the Australian feminist blogging community as opposed to the international / US blogging community.

How closely linked, do you think, are Australian femblogs with United States and International feminist blogs?

How do you see the relationship between Australian feminist blogs and Australian progressive or mainstream political blogs?

How do you see the relationship between feminist blogs and the mainstream media? Do you perceive the feminist blogosphere as having an impact on mainstream debate? If so, how do you think this happens?

How do you see the Australian feminist blogging community itself? Would you describe it as looseknit or tightknit? In what way? Is it separate to or part of an international feminist community?

How do you feel it relates to the women's movement in general terms?

Discussion of particular blog posts – talk about what motivated you to write these, the experience of writing them, the different responses you got, or anything else you'd like to discuss :

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Appendix C – Network Maps

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'Blue Milk', 2011b. PART 1 – This is what I said a feminist mother looks like: the questionnaire, demographics, key themes and becoming feminists. Blue Milk, [blog] May 7, 2011, Available at: http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/this-is-what-i- said-a-feminist-mother-looks-like-the-questionnaire-demographics-key-themes-and- becoming-feminists/ [Accessed: March 20, 2012].

'Blue Milk', 2012. On the ethics of ignoring your power: The Feministe controversy. Hoyden About Town, [blog] January 22, 2012, Available at: http://hoydenabouttown.com/20120122.11220/on-the-ethics-of-ignoring-your- power-the-feministe-controversy/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Blue Milk', 2012b. About Hugo Schwyzer. Blue Milk, [blog] January 5, 2012, Available at: http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/about-hugo-schwyzer/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Boganette', 2011. The Thirty-Seventh Down Under Feminists Carnival. Boganette, [blog] May 31, 2011, Available at: http://boganette.com/2011/05/31/the-37th-down-under- feminist-carnival/ [Accessed: August 12, 2011].

'Chally', 2009. This is what an activist looks like. Zero at the Bone, [blog] September 15, 2009, Available at: http://zeroatthebone.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/this-is-what-an- activist-looks-like/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Chally', 2009b. Ableism and the Aussie Battler. Zero at the Bone, [blog] October 31, 2009, Available at: http://zeroatthebone.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/ableism-and-the- aussie-battler/ [Accessed: March 6, 2012].

'Chally', 2010. Down Under Feminists' Carnival. [online] Available at: http://downunderfeministscarnival.wordpress.com/ [Accessed: 2 Mar 2012].

275

'Chally', 2010b. Taking a sickie. Zero at the Bone, [blog] September 27, 2010, Available at: http://zeroatthebone.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/taking-a-sickie/ [Accessed: March 6, 2012].

'Chally', 2011. The Thirty-Seventh Down Under Feminists Carnival, Collated by Boganette . Down Under Feminists’ Carnival, [blog] September 10, 2011, Available at: http://downunderfeministscarnival.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/the-thirty-seventh- down-under-feminists-carnival-collated-by-boganette/ [Accessed: March 1, 2012].

'Chally', 2011b. The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things…. Feministe, [blog] April 26, 2011, Available at: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/04/26/the-time-has-come-the-walrus- said-to-talk-of-many-things/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Definatalie', 2011. Introducing Dastardly Donut.. Definatalie, [blog] February 2, 2011, Available at: http://www.definatalie.com/2011/02/02/introducing-dastardly-donut/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Eglantine's Cake', 2008. Bluemilk's Feminist Mother Meme. Eglantine's Cake, [blog] August 7, 2008, Available at: http://eglantinescake.blogspot.com/2008/08/bluemilks-feminist- mother-meme.html [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

Freedman, M., 2010. Gainer blogs: meet the people who think bigger is better. MamaMia, [blog] May 10, 2010, Available at: http://www.mamamia.com.au/news/meet-the- people-who-want-to-be-as-fat-as-possible/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'fuckpoliteness', 2009. Hi, we’re women, we make up OVER half the population. Fuck Politeness, [blog] July 11, 2009, Available at: http://fuckpoliteness.wordpress.com/2009/07/11/hi-were-women-we-make-up-over- halfthe-population/ [Accessed: July 14, 2009].

'Guest Hoyden', 2011. Repost/Crosspost: because this PSA is still needed: “Can I talk to you?” troll. Hoyden About Town, [blog] August 13, 2011, Available at: http://hoydenabouttown.com/20110813.10389/repostcrosspost-because-this-psa-is- still-needed-can-i-talk-to-you-troll/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

276

'Kim', 2009. JJJ Hottest 100: Women free edition. Larvatus Prodeo, [blog] July 13, 2009, Available at: http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/07/13/jjj-hottest-100-women- freeedition/ [Accessed: July 14, 2009].

'Lauredhel', 2007. Anti-feminist-Bingo! A master-class in sexual entitlement.. Hoyden About Town, [blog] April 14, 2007, Available at: http://hoydenabouttown.com/20070414.431/anti-feminist-bingo-a-master-class-in- sexual-entitlement/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Lauredhel', 2007b. Draft Blog Reader’s Code of Conduct: Don’t threaten to rape and kill her.. Hoyden About Town, [blog] April 18, 2007, Available at: http://hoydenabouttown.com/20070418.444/draft-blog-readers-code-of-conduct- dont-threaten-to-rape-and-kill-her/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Lauredhel', 2009. Antibreastfeeding Bingo. Hoyden About Town, [blog] February 20, 2009, Available at: http://hoydenabouttown.com/20090220.3832/antibreastfeeding-bingo/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Lauredhel', 2009b. T-Shirt Hell going. At last.. Hoyden About Town, [blog] February 1, 2009, Available at: http://hoydenabouttown.com//?p=3507 [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Lauredhel', 2009c. Troll-Off! Vote now for your favourite troll.. Hoyden About Town , [blog] February 17, 2009, Available at: http://hoydenabouttown.com/20090217.3779/troll- off-vote-now-for-your-favourite-troll/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Lauredhel', 2009d. Quickhit: Invisible Women, Invisible Politics. Hoyden About Town, [blog] August 19, 2009, Available at: http://hoydenabouttown.com/20090819.6278/quickhit-invisible-women-invisible- politics/ [Accessed: March 6, 2012].

'Lauredhel', 2009e. CALL TO ACTIVISM – Many people with disabilities to be excluded from accessible parking under proposed scheme. Hoyden About Town, [blog] May 30, 2009, Available at: http://hoydenabouttown.com/20090530.5122/call-to-activism- many-people-with-disabilities-to-be-excluded-from-accessible-parking-under- proposed-scheme/ [Accessed: March 6, 2012].

277

'Mindy', 2011. Is it okay just to lurk?. Hoyden About Town, [blog] June 15, 2011, Available at: http://hoydenabouttown.com/20110615.10126/is-it-okay-just-to-lurk/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Mynxii', 2009. 19th December Down Under Feminists' Carnival!. Mynxii, [blog] December 9, 2009, Available at: http://mynxii.livejournal.com/762030.html [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Nicholosophy', 2010. Remove the headless fatties from our media. Nicholosophy, [blog] December 9, 2010, Available at: http://nicholosophy.com/2010/12/remove-the- headless-fatties-from-our-media.html [Accessed: March 16, 2012].

'Orlando', 2009. Alternative Youth Music Station Thinks There’s No Alternative to Being a Bloke. Hoyden About Town, [blog] June 30, 2009, Available at: http://viv.id.au/blog/20090630.5557/alternative-youth-music-station-thinks-theres- noalternative-to-being-a-bloke/ [Accessed: July 14, 2009].

'Possum Comitatus', 2009. Where are Australia’s female political bloggers?. Pollytics, [blog] August 19, 2009, Available at: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2009/08/19/where-are-australia%E2%80%99s- female-political-bloggers/ [Accessed: March 6, 2012].

Sanders, Z., 2011. Men Call Me Things. Meanjin blog, [blog] November 17, 2011, Available at: http://meanjin.com.au/blog/post/men-call-me-things/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'sleepydumpling', 2011. An Epiphany. Fat Heffalump, [blog] February 2, 2011, Available at: http://fatheffalump.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/an-epiphany/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Spilt Milk', 2009. Feminist mothers. Spilt Milk, [blog] March 2, 2009, Available at: http://mymilkspilt.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/feminist-mothers/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

278

'Spilt Milk', 2010. What is a blog?. Spilt Milk, [blog] June 11, 2010, Available at: http://mymilkspilt.wordpress.com/2010/06/11/what-is-a-blog/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Spilt Milk', 2010b. Who hears you, when you speak about rape?. Spilt Milk, [blog] December 9, 2010, Available at: http://mymilkspilt.wordpress.com/2010/12/09/who-hears-you- when-you-speak-about-rape/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Spilt Milk', 2010c. Fat, fall-out and a big bowl o’ crazy. Spilt Milk, [blog] May 12, 2010, Available at: http://mymilkspilt.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/fat-fall-out-and-a-big- bowl-o-crazy/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Spilt Milk', 2011. Maternal desire. Spilt Milk, [blog] July 24, 2011, Available at: http://mymilkspilt.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/maternal-desire/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Spilt Milk', 2011b. I am not your cautionary tale. Spilt Milk, [blog] February 1, 2011, Available at: http://mymilkspilt.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/i-am-not-your-cautionary- tale/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'Staff', 2011. Goodbye from FWD. FORWARD/FWD (feminists with disabilities) for a way forward, [blog] January 1, 2011, Available at: http://disabledfeminists.com/2011/01/01/goodbye-from-fwd/ [Accessed: March 6, 2012].

Thomas, S., 2011. Weight. An emotional issue.. DISCOURSE, [blog] February 5, 2011, Available at: http://www.drsamanthathomas.com/blog/2011/02/weight-an- emotional-issue.html [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

'tigtog', 2007. Decline to publish unacceptable content. Hoyden About Town, [blog] April 13, 2007, Available at: http://hoydenabouttown.com/20070413.426/decline-to-publish- unacceptable-content/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

‘tigtog’, 2009. On Unexamined Privileges and Unconscious Behaviours. Hoyden About Town, [blog] August 22, 2009, Available at:

279

http://hoydenabouttown.com/20090822.6305/on-unexamined-privileges-and- unconscious-behaviours/ [Accessed: August 29, 2012]

'tigtog', 2011. Thursday Cheezburger – Obvious Troll is Obvious. Hoyden About Town, [blog] February 3, 2011, Available at: http://hoydenabouttown.com/20110203.9400/thursday-cheezburger-obvious-troll- is-obvious/comment-page-1/ [Accessed: March 2, 2012].

Interview data

‘A Shiny New Coin’, 2010, interview, February 2010.

‘Ariane’, 2009, interview, November 2009.

‘Audrey and the Bad Apples’, 2010, interview, March 2010.

‘Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony’, 2010, interview, January 2010.

‘Blue Milk’, 2010, interview, February 2010.

‘Caitlinate’, 2010, interview, March 2010.

‘Crazybrave’, 2010, interview, March 2010.

‘Fuck Politeness’, 2009, interview, December 2009.

‘Godard’s Letterboxes’, 2010, interview, March 2010.

‘In A Strange Land’, 2010, interview, March 2010.

Kacelnik, Chally, 2009, interview, November 2009.

‘Lucy Tartan’, 2010, interview, March 2010.

‘Mimbles’, 2010, interview, February 2010.

‘Naomi Eve’, 2010, interview, March 2010.

‘News With Nipples’, 2010, interview, February 2010.

‘PharaohKatt’, 2010, interview, February 2010.

280

‘Rachel’, 2010, interview, February 2010.

‘Rayedish’, 2010, interview, March 2010.

‘Spilt Milk’, 2010, interview, January 2010.

‘Tigtog’, 2009, interview, December 2009.

281