Hawisher and Sullivan’s essay from Eloquent Images “Feminist Cyborgs Live on the World Wide Web: International and Not so International Contexts” addresses Russian women’s self-representation online, and specifically how the web as a “third space” allows these women to “In cyborg fashion… mock and mimic American and Russian cultural narratives, all the while constructing oppositional identities, bringing together women and computing culture, selling their wares, and building electronic social networks” (233).
Though the context I am begining to examine–that of the phenomenon of “mommy-blogging” in Northern America–is significantly different, much of the argumentation here is applicable. While for now I will to defer the question over whether these blog spaces represent subjects of a different “cyborgian” ontology, as a metaphor, like Bhaba’s notion of hybridity, the cyborg is a useful tool for thinking about the “in-betweenness” of online identities and writing spaces.
We can say that in this context, mommy-blogs are “in-between spaces [that] provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood–singular or communal–that initiate new signs of identity and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself” (Location 1-2). Mommy-bloggers articulate and construct the (contested) meanings of “motherhood” through the process of writing and interaction.
In all their ideological messiness, contradictoriness, Mommy-blogs–even the discussions over ”definitions” of “mommy-blogging”–can be perceived as spaces of resistance (explicit and implicit) where women discuss, argue, and playfully subvert dominant images and ideologies concerning motherhood, and so begin to articulate new truths about the identity of ”mom.” These writers are woven into the fabric of what Hawisher and Sullivan refer to as an “international feminist cyberquilt that can be a transformative global force in the global settings in which we work and live.
AM THE FIRST.
Here’s my well-considered thought: WOO HOO!
WIll come back when headache isn’t pressing to consider and remark further…
(And will post link to my academiblog when it goes live! Again, after headache!)
All interesting points, although I remain skeptical about why mommy-blogging would automatically be trustworthy; I don’t want to suggest that the idea itself is absurd or that those who participate in the said activity are inherently dishonest, but the identities of those who participate in blogs remain a priori ontologically unstable (as all identities are, but even more so because of the medium). Now maybe I am taking too much of an essentialist perspective here, believing that when there is a body standing in front of me it necessarily means more truth, more honesty. That said, the pose of anyone writing out there in the blogosphere is always already problematically discursive: we have to trust largely because of the semblence of trustworthiness, which means little more than a person identifying him/herself as a mommy who wishes to share experiences and thoughts. Just as significantly is the possibility of someone choosing to put on the veil of a persona to participate in the discussions — maybe to eavesdrop or maybe to disrupt. It seems unlikely in most cases; however, it is still there. The pose of so many Internet predators is specifically to pretend to be a teenager and thereby to ensnare a victim who takes the performance as truth and reality. In Margaret Atwood’s novel, _Alias Grace_ the young psychologist begins to believe Grace’s version of the story of two gruesome murders because her persona matches what he has read. His colleague warns him by saying that there is a distinct possibility that Grace, herself, has read the newspaper accounts and what others have said she is — in other words, she is believable because her persona matches the descriptions of her person and her behavior. The same can be said here: we trust certain representations because they affirm what we believe should be there; the medium, however, keeps us even farther away from any kind of verifiability. It is (and I think this word may just about run its course) truthiness, a la Stephen Colbert: we believe mommyblogging to be a discussion with real people talking about real issues because it seems to be real people and real issues.
Again, I am not trying to downplay its value nor suggest any malicious about those who participate in it. I have known it to be a very good thing in several instances (even when there are ads!).
Oops: my previous comment was meant to go to the first posting, not this one on cyborgs. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed this second one much better, and not just because I know who Bhabha is and have read his books. The idea of interstitiality and hybridity as necessarily a form of resistance is fascinating, and also works amazingly well with non-blog writers like Borges, who wrote to resist, who hid his messages because of a particular fascist dictatorship. Peter Childs in his book _Modernism_ has pointed out that Woolf and Mansfield, writing was a feminist act: an aesthetic movement that began as a rejection of Victorian mores and quickly became a statement to re-masculinize literature, simultaneously became a means whereby women writers could break the rules too and negotiate a space whereby they could identify themselves (even if it was a forged identity) and empower other voices. I see mommyblogging as you state it above as akin to such an endeavor, largely because motherhood is a problematic site in so many instances. Writing is always political, and the act of writing about mothering (and writing about writing about mothering) necessarily problematizes the overly simplistic designations of subject and object, not to mention creator and construction, and self and other. The ideal image of The Mother too often suggests one who remains passive, except when the care and nurturing of the child is concerned. The space created, regardless of its truth value, systematically disrupts normal understandings of the value of motherhood itself, as repeatedly touted by western thought. One only think of the backlash and continued dislike of someone like Hillary Clinton whose only real problem (early on at least) was that she was unapologetic that she was not a home-maker. Immediately when she made the comment about not having time to stay at home to bake cookies, it opened up a can of worms that polarized ideas about motherhood (or at least made the ideas manifest). By the backlash, the suggestion seemed to be that if one if a mother, one cannot have a successful career outside the home; and just as problematically, if one is a successful career woman, one is either not a mother or not maternal.