The Day C. Jane Came Clean

Last night I had a rare and beautiful opportunity. C Jane Kendrick of the blog C JANE ENJOY IT came to my class and spoke about her experience blogging. The day before she came she tweeted something that made me nervous,

Yeep... as many of you know I use the term "mommy blogger" a lot. I love the term. I think that can be empowering. Mommy blogs are a radical action, which endows women with the ability to embrace the impossible act of motherhood and be OK with failure. I had just taught the class all about "mommy blogs". How was I going to pull this one off...

Luckily, I found that C Jane and I have a similar view, although our semantics are very different. Mommy blogs that are not an accurate representation of motherhood (either in a utopian or dystopian way) are not empowering. What is empowering, however, is C Jane. She stated her purpose as a blogger as, "to portray a Mormon woman who doesn't conform to the cultural stereotype and is OK with it. I only say that mission because it is my mission in real life." I get that. I've lived in Provo for the past few years. Mormon women often present themselves as perfect, or at least feel pressure to be perfect from the world around them. It is a classic example of "New Momism" in action. I have seen women who are feel pressure to conform to the social stereotypes in Utah County. They feel guilty because they do not fit into this picture perfect representation of how Mormon women are "supposed to be". It can consume them.

"My goal is always to represent myself as a see myself. That is always my goal." She wants to be "an authentic woman inside her own culture". She sees many women in the blogosphere as inauthentic. They present their hoped-for selves, but either they either refuse to see or refuse to admit that there is anything wrong in their life. C Jane is going against these representations. For the most part she is getting support for it, however, there are always those that will disagree. When she began blogging these antagonists bothered her and it affected the way that she wrote. However, she claimed last night that, "I'm not scared of this [anymore]". She disabled comments on her blog and only allows people to email, Facebook, or tweet responses to her. This forces at least some sense of authenticity from her readers. Even when she does receive negative feedback she realized that it is not the amount of positive or negative feedback that indicates her effectiveness as a blogger. It is the amount of feedback. The more feedback she gets the more her posts resonates with people.

For many women in the Provo area going against their culture can equate to going against their faith. However, C Jane stated, "I have a core, strong testimony about the gospel, but I don't have a testimony of our culture." The culture and the faith are not the same. There is often slippage. That is why she helped found the Rooftop Concert Series, that is why she blogs, that is her message to the world. Just because you are an LDS woman doesn't mean that you have to be perfect. It doesn't mean that you have to submit yourself to the patriarchal order of our culture. "If we were all to live our religion, then there would be a lot more women who are far more empowered." As a mother she states that woman are not to, as is taught in the primary song, "give oh give away" until you are burnt out and useless (that last part is NOT in the song...). "The best approach to motherhood is to focus on yourself. What can I do so that I'm a happy mom? What can I do, for myself, so that I can give?" Focus on finding yourself first. Once you know who you are, what you need, and what you can handle you can help your family.

Perhaps this is why C Jane believes, "that my mission as a blogger is not the same as a mommy blogger." The balance of mommy bloggers is greatly weighted towards utopian mommy bloggers who present their lives perfectly. She views the term as something that corporations coined for marketing purposes. The commercialization has changed blogging from personal narrative and prose to the misleading personal presentations of womanhood. "There is such a temptation to present yourself as perfect online, it is... prevalent in female blogging," she stated, "Especially in the female realm, blogging has been disappointing."

C Jane, obviously, is not perfect. She is often misinterpreted or misconstrued in her writing or vloging. "I'm trying to give as much of me that is truth, but I can't give everything." All we see are fragments of who she is. She said of her followers, "It turns out that nobody really knows me." All they know is the digital representation of her that she portrays for them.

Thank you C Jane. Thank you for your honesty, both last night and on your blog. You are fighting an uphill battle for the representation of women in the blogosphere. You are not alone.

All quotes were taken from a lecture C Jane gave at BYU the night of October 20th, 2011.

Mediate Gender: Performing New Momism in the Blogosphere (Part 2)

PERFORMING GENDER IN THE BLOGOSPHERE

            The role of mommy blogger itself is an example of gender performance. West and Zimmerman (1987) explain that certain roles are gendered. For instance the gender qualifier male is used to describe a nurse that is a man and female is used to describe a business executive that is a woman. This is because traditionally these roles were either male or female. This is much like the qualifier mommy being added to blogger to describe a woman blogger. While there has been some progress in distinguishing mommy bloggers into other categories it is still common to refer to a women who blog as mommy bloggers.

            This title is not universally accepted by mommy bloggers. "Despite... success, the title of ‘mommy blogger’ is not always wanted: it can be both a source of pride and a source of embarrassment; it can both compliment and demean" (Lopez, 2009:730). Many women feel that if they are known only as mommy bloggers that they cannot write about anything else. This is not the case. In fact, many so-called mommy blogs mix autobiographical information with topical information (Carstensen, 2009). By assigning female bloggers the role of mommy blogger they are limited in what they can and cannot write about. If they chose to post about politics or science or a topic other than motherhood they break their gender role and therefore will face criticism by their readers.

            Many women who blog topically chose to write about their children in order to "establish their footprint in the blogosphere" (Lopez 2007:734). It, however, is clear by reading these blogs that many of these women are "simply mothers and occasionally write about their children" (p. 734). While there are many exceptions to this statement (i.e. men writing about their children) it brings to light how mommy blogging is a role that these bloggers perform. Men and women are always performing a role because "gender is not merely something that happens in the nooks and crannies of interaction, fitted in here and there and not interfering with the serious business of life" (West and Zimmerman, 1987:130). While not explicitly stated, men are male bloggers just as women are mommy bloggers because gender is omnipresent. It is always being performed.

THE GENDERED STRUCTURE IN BLOGGING

         Another way to look at blogging is through the lens of gender as a structure. Just as government or the economy is a structure that effects society, gender is can also be seen as a structure. It is inherent in ever aspect of society. Ridgeway and Correll (2004) put it this way, "Social relational contexts bring sex categorization into every activity and sphere of life in which one person casts himself or herself in relation to a real or imagined other, be it in person, on paper, or through the Internet" (pp. 521-522). They go on to describe how thinking of gender this way give scholars the opportunity to analyze gender, not as a symptom of social influence, but as a cause of this influence. 

         Blogging also illustrates gender as a structure. Carstensen  (2009) wrote that blogs, "[range] from the reproduction of gendered structures in public spaces, to enthusiastic female bloggers, to chances for creating various gender identities" (p. 116). Van Doorn, van Zoonen, and Wyatt (2007) explain how gender is represented in blogs through analyzing their performances of gender on their blogs. They conclude, "[blogs] facilitate a mode of gender presentation that remains closely related to the binary gender system that structures people’s daily lives, they also offer a ‘rich’ environment... resulting in multiple heterogeneous performances of gender" (p. 155).  Therefore, in blogging, while gender as a structure supports many representations of blogs it also provides an environment for women to explore there relationship with their gender.

Works Cited

Mediate Gender: Performing New Momism in the Blogosphere (Part 1)

Blogging has gained incredible popularity in the past few years. According to Blogpulse.com there are over 160 million blogs as of April 2011. These blogs range in topic from evangelical Christian beliefs to the economic conditions and everything in between. However, there is one blog genre that is gaining more popularity than any other genre: mommy blogging (Nowson and Oberlander, 2006). Mommy bloggers primarily write about their family, children, and life experiences. They often also include topical posts about cooking, crafting, cleaning, or other traditional women's roles; however, these topical blogs are generally listed under different genres. Many have also said how topical mommy blogs contribute to Douglas and Michael's (2004) concept of "new momism”.

Put simply new momism is the idea that motherhood is so demanding that no person can perform it perfectly. Many mommy blogs present life as perfect. These mothers have perfect children, perfect husbands, and perfect homes. However, there is also a trend to represent motherhood as a chaotic mess that cannot be performed at all without resentment on the mother's part. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how many mommy bloggers react to these opposing ideas and relate mommy blogging to West and Zimmerman's (1987) theory of doing gender and Ridgeway and Correll's (2004) theory about gender as a structure of society. While many mommy blogs either contribute to or resist new momism through extreme representations of motherhood there are blogs that perform "radical acts" by finding balance in their representations of motherhood.

HISTORY OF MEDIATING GENDER

Blogging began almost immediately after the Internet was created. These forums were generally limited to people who had mastered computer coding languages and typically discussed technology and because there were few women in the technology field at the time the infant blogosphere was mainly inhabited by men. However, in the late 1990s three companies (livejournal.com, blogger.com and opendiary.com) were founded which brought blogging to the common person. These sites allowed anyone to set up an account and blog with little or no knowledge of coding. Within a few years women began creating personal blogs, or online diaries. These blogs focused on the lives of the individuals. Soon communities began to develop and in 2005 BlogHer was founded in response to the question "Where are all the women bloggers?" (BlogHer, About BlogHer). In there first conference in 2006, women bloggers from all around the country gathered to discuss the issues women bloggers face. During one of the forms a participant proclaimed if women "stopped blogging about themselves they could change the world" (Lopez, 2007:730).

This response is typical of many individuals’ perceptions of mommy blogging. West and Zimmerman (1987) argue that gender is scripted. Men and women perform their roles much like actors on a stage. When a person breaks his or her assign role then there is backlash against that individual until either the gender role changes or the person performs the gender role again. According to Lopez (2007) much of this backlash occurred because women were attempting to place motherhood in the public sphere. "Motherhood is commonly viewed as belonging squarely within the private sphere and successful, strong men do not air their dirty laundry in public, so to speak, mommy bloggers did not fit into this equation and were thus criticized for their transgression" (p. 731).

Mommy blogger's response to this criticism started a new movement in the blogosphere. Blog author, Alice Bradley, and attendant to the 2006 BlogHer conference, responded by stating, "Mommy blogging is a radical act" (Lopez, 2007:730). In her opinion mommy blogging was changing the traditional representation of women. "We’re redefining the roles with our blogs. The messages we get about motherhood typically either comes [sic] to us in sanitized or idealized form (television shows, magazine articles) or sensationalized (newspapers)" (p. 732). Mommy blogging is not about presenting the sensational, perfect life of motherhood that is seen on television and in the media. It is about presenting motherhood as it really is. It is about the diapers and the messes and the husbands that can't quite do anything right.

Works Cited