The Personal is Political:
Feminist Blogging and Virtual Consciousness-Raising

The Woman Question: Feminists and the Blogosphere

Feminist blog research is attempting to address problems of the blogosphere. For example, the paper “Women & Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs” by Herring et al. examines the obvious absence of women from public discourses about blogs.¹ The authors argue that “filter-blogs” (blogs that link to world events, online happenings, etc.) have been constructed as privileged blogs. Primarily authored by men, these blogs not only tend to marginalize the content of women’s blogs (which are often diary-journal style), but also legitimize a certain type of (male) blog as valuable and worthy of readership. It is this type of blog (and blogger) that receives the most attention in the blogosphere and outside media, such as newspaper and television, where the focus is rarely on women’s blogs or their content.

Given this construction of “worthy” or “legitimate” blogs, there have been numerous debates around the absence of women. The central question remains, “Where are the women in the blogosphere?” Indeed, there are many women blogging, but whether these blogs are legitimized is another story. Trammel and Keshelashvili’s research supports Herring’s findings that men outnumber women in producing the Web’s most popular blogs.² These “where-are-the-women” debates stem from several issues: First, there are few women listed in many of the top blog lists, or what is often referred to as the “A-list” of bloggers. A-list bloggers (bloggers with thousands of hits a day) often seem to dominate the blogosphere, and their viewpoints are often the ones that are most read, commented on, and linked to online. A-list blogs are typically “filter-blogs” or “knowledge blogs” (blogs about technological information and observations). There have many blog posts dedicated to the problems inherent to “A-listers” and the hierarchies of blogs themselves.³ Many of these posts discuss how many A-listers belong to a certain demographic—white, right-wing, heterosexual men—and how this works to exclude others.

Second, given the hierarchies of blogs and bloggers, there has been much discussion about the experiences of women within the blogosphere, which is itself a gendered and raced environment. Kennedy and Robinson’s research indicates that the comments people leave on blogs reflect gendered communication patterns similar to those evident in face-to-face communication.⁴ Their research shows that women tend to be more expressive and inclusive of others in their comments, while men’s comments are generally assertive and competitive. We need to keep in mind the implications of such gendered interaction patterns within blogs, as women’s opinions may not be heard, validated, or taken seriously by other readers.

What becomes evident in feminist discussions of blogs and blogging is the tumultuous relationship between masculine technological discourses and women’s online and offline experiences. Women’s historical relationship with technology has been rocky at best. For example, feminist literature concerning technology focuses on the importance of social roles, the hierarchy of these roles, and the relationships of power between women and men in relation to technological skills and use.⁵ There is often the expectation that the sole purpose of technology used in the home is to reduce labor and save time in order to alleviate women’s domestic responsibilities, but this has not been the case.⁶ Having said this, what are the benefits of blogging for women and how can women overcome the gendered, raced, and classed barriers that currently exist in the blogosphere? While the blogosphere can be considered challenging terrain for women, we cannot and should not ignore how blogs can be utilized by feminists as tools to raise social consciousness, build community, and promote cultural change. There are several specific ways in which blogging as a virtual consciousness-raising tool can be a vibrant platform for feminist activism, as both an intimate and communal political practice. These areas include self expression, sharing stories, and interaction and dialogue.

Self Expression

Many blogs are diary or journal style, serving to document events in everyday life. While seemingly mundane, this style of blog provides a useful way to express oneself, a place to unload and unpack feelings and situations. What is useful about blogs in particular, as opposed to a more traditional media, is that these expressions are automatically documented and archived, making it easy to refer back to one’s own narratives in one’s own words. In addition to journaling, blogs can be a place to vet and share opinions on current events, political standpoints, and social issues. While these diary-style blogs are often excluded from blogging discourses, they are particularly valuable to women. An important lesson from the Second Wave movement, which emerged out of consciousness-raising groups, is encapsulated in the slogan “The personal is the political.” Carol Hanisch’s short essay, “The Personal is Political,” notes that consciousness-raising is not simply “therapy.” She says: “One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time.”⁷ Blogging about personal experiences can be a way to situate those experiences within broader sociocultural contexts:

The “personal is political” therefore meant that our personal lives are in considerable part politically delimited and determined so that improving our personal experiences meant we must collectively address political relationships and structures.⁸

As early feminists recognized, telling stories is often only the beginning of a larger feminist process of engaging collectively to pursue social reform.

Sharing Stories

A question central to blogging is: “Is anyone reading this?” While not all women who create blogs are concerned with whether or not anyone is reading them, wider readership can open up a new public space that might lead to more meaningful interactions and recreate the notion of the personal as political. One of the key differences between Web sites and blogs is the linking structure—permalinks,⁹ trackbacks,¹⁰ and blogrolls¹¹—between blog posts and bloggers. These forms of linking allow feminist women to connect with each other and establish social networks. Kathie Sarachild’s explanation of consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s is pertinent:

The aim of going around the room in a meeting to hear each woman’s testimony, a common—and exciting—practice in consciousness-raising, is to help stay focused on a point, to bring the discussion back to the main subject after exploring a tangent, to get the experience of as many people as possible in the common pool of knowledge. The purpose of hearing from everyone was never to be nice or tolerant or to develop speaking skill or the “ability to listen.” It was to get closer to the truth. Knowledge and information would make it possible for people to be “able” to speak. The purpose of hearing people’s feelings and experience was not therapy, was not to give someone a chance to get something off her chest . . . that is something for a friendship. It was to hear what she had to say. The importance of listening to a woman’s feelings was collectively to analyze the situation of women, not to analyze her. The idea was not to change women, was not to make “internal changes” except in the sense of knowing more. It was and is the conditions women face, it’s male supremacy, we want to change.¹²

These changes are now beginning to transpire in cyberspace through blogging, leading to an awareness of larger social inequalities. Some bloggers are even connecting across differences of race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality to see the broader implications of their own positions, as well as those of other women. Blogging has the potential to help create and encourage a new form of feminism that better avoids some of the pitfalls of an earlier generation of feminist activism, those often exclusively middle-class and heterosexual consciousness-raising groups.¹³ We can also avoid the dangers of ethnocentrism¹⁴ and the notion of “rescuing” women from other cultures according to our own definitions of feminism and advocacy. For example, the Muslim Woman’s Blog¹⁵ shows the individual and collective struggles of Muslim women and how they work to address the social inequalities they experience. Reading a range of feminist blogs can help us get out of some of the ideological boxes that often trap us in old patterns. These blogs help us consider alternative and diverse perspectives and lead us to consider for ourselves more rigorous feminist positions.

Interaction and Dialogue

While some are content to simply read their favorite feminist blogs, one of the key features of blogs is the potential for interactivity. Online dialogue through blogs can happen in two ways: First one can respond to a blog post on one’s own blog and link back to the original post via permalinks and trackbacks, thereby connecting bloggers and establishing a feminist network. Second, if the blog has an “add comment” feature, conversations can occur within the blog itself. This is useful to feminist virtual consciousness-raising, as it allows readers to actively engage in discussion. Bortree’s research illustrates that blogs help build intimacy among women and enable dialogue about experiences that would otherwise be difficult to share.¹⁶ There are, however, some problems with enabling comments on blogs. For example, the abundance of spam comments that have infiltrated blogs has caused many people to disable the comment feature on their blogs. While passwords and word verification programs might alleviate some of the comment spamming, it is difficult to avoid altogether. Enabling comments on blogs is double-edged. While it allows feminists to openly discuss and engage in dialogue, it also opens the door to antifeminist commentary. Many of the responses to the “where-are-the-women” question clearly reflect hostility and sexism. One only has to look at the comments on any feminist blog to experience such resistance, misogyny, and antifeminism. Feminist bloggers are constantly in the position of having to validate their standpoints and dialogue with those who blatantly display antifeminist sentiments. The endless harassment and rants can become tiresome. leading some to cease to respond and some to disable the comment feature or delete comments. If we are to consider blogs as a vehicle for consciousness-raising, we have to be wary of the ramifications of opening up feminist discussions to the World Wide Web. As evident in the flaming that took place in early feminist listservs,¹⁷ the public nature of the Internet allows feminists to dialogue and network, but it also permits antifeminist groups to do the same—even in virtual feminist spaces. Despite this negativity, difficult responses are a reminder that there is much work to be done. As a feminist strategy, interactivity and intimacy as a type of virtual consciousness-raising can be seen as stemming from feminist activism of the Second Wave, and I strongly encourage feminists to lay claim to this corner of the Internet.

1. S. Herring et al., “Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs” (2004). Available at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html. [↩]
2. K. D. Trammel and A. Keshelashvili’s research (“Examining the new influencers: A self-presentation study of A-List blogs,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 82, no. 4 [2005]: 968-982) supports the findings of Herring et al. (“Women and Children Last”). [↩]
3. See Clancy Ratcliff’s list of blog posts from 2002 to present: http://culturecat.net/node/637. [↩]
4. T. Kennedy and J. Robinson “Does Gender Matter? Examining Conversations in the Blogosphere,” conference paper for Association of Internet Researchers, Chicago, Illinois, 2005. See also D. Tannen, Gender and Conversational Interaction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1993); K. Hall and M. Bucholtz, Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self (New York: Routledge, 1995). [↩]
5. R. S. Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983); “The Consumption Junction: A Proposal for Research Strategies in the Sociology of Technology,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, eds. W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes and T. J. Pinch (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 261-80; “The Industrial Revolution in the Home,” in The Social Shaping of Technology, ed. D. MacKenzie and J. Wajcman (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999), 269-300. [↩]
6. J. Wajcman, “Patriarchy, Technology and Conceptions of Skill,” Work and Occupations 18, no. 1 (1991): 29-45. [↩]
7. Carol Hanisch, “The Personal is Political,” in Feminist Revolution: Redstockings of the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. K. Sarachild (New York: Random House, 1969 [1978]), 204. [↩]
8. Z Magazine: http://zmag.org/zmag/articles/julyeditorial97.html. [↩]
9. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permalinks. [↩]
10. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackbacks. [↩]
11. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogroll. [↩]
12. See http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wlm/fem/sarachild.html. [↩]
13. b. hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984). [↩]
14. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism. [↩]
15. See http://www.themuslimwoman.org/. [↩]
16. See D. S. Bortree’s “Presentation of self on the Web: An ethnographic study of teenage girls’ weblogs,” Education, Communication and Information Journal (ECi) 5. no. 1 (2005). [↩]
17. S. Herring, “Gender Differences in Computer-Mediated Communication: Bringing Familiar Baggage to the New Frontier,” keynote talk at panel entitled “Making the Net*Work*: Is there a Z39.50 in gender communication?” American Library Association annual convention, Miami, June 27, 1994. Available at http://cpsr.org/cpsr/gender/herring.txt; D. Winter and C. Huff, “Adapting the Internet: Comments from a Women-Only Electronic Forum,” The American Sociologist 27, no. 1 (spring 1996): 30-54. [↩]