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. 42 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 4 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. 5 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. 6 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 7 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.