1st Edition

Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age

By Jessalynn Keller Copyright 2016
    212 Pages
    by Routledge

    212 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age explores the practices of U.S.-based teenage girls who actively maintain feminist blogs and participate in the feminist blogosphere as readers, writers, and commenters on platforms including Blogspot, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Drawing on interviews with bloggers between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, as well as discursive textual analyses of feminist blogs and social networking postings authored by teenage girls, Keller addresses how these girls use blogging as a practice to articulate contemporary feminisms and craft their own identities as feminists and activists. In this sense, feminist girl bloggers defy hegemonic postfeminist and neoliberal girlhood subjectivities, a finding that Keller uses to complicate both academic and popular assertions that suggest teenage girls are uninterested in feminism. Instead, Keller maintains that these young bloggers employ digital media production to educate their peers about feminism, connect with like-minded activists, write feminist history, and make feminism visible within popular culture, practices that build upon and continue a lengthy tradition of American feminism into the twenty-first century. Girls’ Feminist Bloggers in a Postfeminist Age challenges readers to not only reconsider teenage girls’ online practices as politically and culturally significant, but to better understand their crucial role in a thriving contemporary feminism.

    Introduction: Transforming Feminist Conversations? Girls, Blogging and Feminist Politics in the Twenty-first Century  1. Click Moments and Coming Out: Girl Bloggers and the Performance of Feminist Identities Online  2. "Spread the Good Word of Feminism!" Defining a Girl-Centered Feminist Activism  3. "Loud, Proud, and Sarcastic:" Young Feminist Internet Communities as Networked Counterpublics  4. "I’ve really got a thing for Betty Friedan:" Feminist Girl Bloggers and the Production of Feminist History Online  5. Performing a Public Politics: Feminist Girl Bloggers and New Citizenship Practices  6. Conclusions: Articulating a Girl-Friendly Feminist Future

    Biography

    Jessalynn Keller is a Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. Her research on girls’ digital media cultures has been published in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies; Feminist Media Studies; Information, Communication & Society; and Celebrity Studies, as well as in several edited anthologies.

    "Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age draws attention to the sustenance of feminist activism by storytelling that simultaneously conveys personal experience and represents broader themes."

    -Akane Kanai, University of Hawai'i Press