This paper aims to investigate female blogging practices and the female blogosphere in Turkey, focusing on the role of blogging as a medium in women’s self-formation processes. It explores how female bloggers construct their identities via online media representations and negotiate disclosure, fame and labor in an age of extreme self-display. Based on an ethnographic approach, the study explores the spaces within which women seek “self-realization”, “publicity” and “employment opportunities” in the digital world, particularly, through the practice of blogging in the male-dominant culture of Turkey. Taking female blogosphere as a field, the study examines how blog production is manifested in Turkey, through the female bloggers’ struggle for hope. The aim is to see how these women use blogging as a media practice to explain themselves in social media platforms. Through the framework of hope (Hage 2004), relatability (Kanai 2019), fame and visibility notions, material formation of identities in this process, the nature of labor production in blogs as well as the construction of female subjectivities within celebrity culture is discussed.
This study adopts an interdisciplinary approach combining the literature on digital labor with feminist theory, to understand the factors that shape Turkish female blogger practices and the material formation of identities in this process. The aim of this study is to approach the already acknowledged impact of blogging on self-formation practices from the perspective of women in a patriarchal country like Turkey. This research will shed light on how women experience the transformation by adopting a blogger identity, their self-presentation in Turkish blogosphere and the digital labor produced as a result of their blogging activities.
Thus, the study will provide a better understanding of the cultural and social meaning of such a media practice, including the motivations behind female blogging, the opportunities they gain through the blogosphere and how it improves women’s lives in terms of adjusting to the social structure. Following the lines of Nick Couldry, who offers a new paradigm for media research that “sees media not as text or production economy, but first and foremost as practice” (2004:115), blogging is regarded as a media practice since blogs are entities not only consumed by the reader but also blog-writing itself is an important practice worth to be explored. Adopting a practice perspective, the study aims to focus on routine activities of female bloggers shedding light into their media production processes to prove the media effects through these subjects.
The study will also situate and contextualize Turkish female blogging practices in digital labor and feminist media studies, contributing to the growing literature about the representation of women online while adding to research on representation of self and self-branding techniques in cyberspace (Marwick 2013, Eltantawy 2013, Banet-Weiser 2011) as well as digital media and communication studies. Specifically, the study will add a whole new way of looking to the study of blogging practices of women through a combination of notions including hope, fame and labor, demonstrating how digital media, namely blogging, offers new ways of representing the self.