Modebloggerskor

Feminitet och intimitet som företagande

Authors

• Magdalena Petersson McIntyre Göteborgs universitet

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37447/bk.115206

Keywords:

Fashion, blogs, fashionblogging, beauty, femininity, mode, modebloggar, skönhet, femininitet

Abstract

Fashion bloggers   In the mid 2000s, the fashion blogger appeared as a new media figure. The young women who wrote about fashion, shopping, and private lives aroused rapid criticism from the established media because of their huge impact. The emergence of fashion, beauty - and shopping blogging is a further development of a culturally defined combination between femininity and consumption that is both intensified and adapted to today's digital culture, as well as a changing view of gender. In the article, this development is interpreted as an expression of what Gill (2007, 2016) critically called a postfeminist sensitivity, and where the equivalence between femininity and feminism is determined. However, instead of a critical discussion of post feminism, the intention here is to show that this activity can also be interpreted as a negotiation with those cultural definitions of femininity that are in circulation.   The article is based on an ethnological method using deep interviews with bloggers in the wider fields of fashion, beauty and shopping. Although none of the informants described their blog as pronouncedly feminist, many considered that this was true of their blog with regard to certain aspects. These included featuring a body or a fashion that does not comply with the norms, combining something traditionally feminine with enterprise and computer technology, and not compromising on your dreams. The informants embraced traditional female values such as beauty care, consumption and motherhood, but tried to infuse them with new, to some extent feminist, meanings. By this means, they negotiate meanings in the relationship between femininity and feminism in specific ways.   Blogging challenges, in a specific way, the boundaries between the physical and the digital body, the concept of a real I and a blog I, and perceptions of femininity and feminism. However, in order to become a successful blogger, it was also necessary for the informants to negotiate their position with regard to intimacy, family information, transparency with themselves, and collaborating with companies that they did not believe in. The informants chose different ways to deal with such borders. In dealing with these borders and also in the crossing of them the norms of femininity are revealed; this lack of boundaries also solves the relationships between economy and intimacy, culture and nature, consumption and production. If the detention to a private sphere has subordinated women in history, then making visible the constructed character of this private sphere, is also a refusal to accept cultural beliefs about femininity as based on natural principles. The relationship between economy and intimacy is dissolved by exposing the private sphere as a means of work.