Melike Aslı Sim

This chapter investigates the impact of ‘hope’ on the aspirant women bloggers’ practices in the Turkish blogosphere. It is part of a five-year ethnographical research carried out within the scope of a doctoral thesis, where blogging is considered as a media practice, and the blogosphere as a field creating salient performances and conflicting emotions with its fragmented structure. Through the narratives of amateur to professional bloggers, I analysed the Turkish blogosphere, along with the bloggers’ motivations, expectations, labour, and negotiation of hope. Ethnographic data in the larger study is explored in three chapters dividing the women’s blogosphere in Turkey into three and investigating blogging practices of women around the notions of fame, success, and aspiration. These chapters encompass separate data for three types of bloggers’ performances on various occasions and platforms. In this manner, celebrity bloggers have already achieved a certain status in society showing upward mobility, while aspiring bloggers’ struggle continues. In addition to this dichotomy, some women achieved successful careers through their blogging activities. Professional bloggers comprise bloggers who have a regular income from their blogs, attendant social and economic benefits, and fame. Celebrity bloggers and/or professionals who achieved their successful careers via their blogs are in this category.

Examining how hope attaches to blogging as practice and is experienced and understood in ordinary performances of women, this chapter derives from the above-mentioned research and specifically concentrates on the actions of aspirant bloggers with no or insufficient income, employment, or fame opportunities from their blogs. They are hardly seen as influencers or trend-setters and are amateur individuals trying to improve their blogger status, posting once a week or so. With reference to the bloggers in my sample, I define aspirant bloggers as amateur bloggers who have a limited number of followers, hope to achieve fame or success by turning blogging into profit and who hope to feel ‘encouragement’, ‘ambition, or ‘satisfaction’. They struggle with this sense of hope, unable to find a place for themselves in either the professional or amateur blogosphere, staying in-between as ‘aspirants’. Devoting their time and energy, these women participate in blogger events voluntarily without being paid for their efforts. In the heterogeneous women's blogosphere, bloggers’ expectations vary from achieving class-based mobility, networking or socializing opportunities, or fame to providing feelings such as happiness, appreciation, self-actualization, and usefulness.

Thus, ...

Türkiye'de Dijital Medya ve Feminizm kitabında yer alan bu bölüm, bloglarından ekonomik kazanımı olmayan/yetersiz kazanç elde eden, blogları sayesinde tasavvur ettikleri gibi iş olanakları ya da ünlü statüsüne kavuşamayan “adaylar” diye adlandırdığım amatör kadınlar konu edilmektedir. Çalışma, blogların ekonomik veya sosyal bir kazanım getirmediği durumlarda bile, “özenme”, “hırs”, “tatmin” gibi duygular eşliğinde bir gün “ünlü” veya “profesyonel” statüsüne ulaşabilmeyi ve bloglamayı bir kazanıma dönüştürebilmeyi umut eden blogcuların eylemlerine odaklanır.

This study investigates the blogosphere in Turkey from a gendered perspective, focusing on how blogging reshapes women’s cultural and social environment. Based on a quantitative approach, a snowballing survey method is conducted, to explore the spaces within which women seek “self-realization,” “self-formation” and “publicity” in the digital world, particularly, through the practice of blogging. There are two main questions that undergird this project: “Do women, performing in social media, unintentionally become subjugated to a form of exploitation and alienation, as the literature on digital labor suggests?” “Is hope labor is influential in female bloggers’ blog usage and content writing? Research findings demonstrate that these women while constructing their identities as bloggers, incorporate the neoliberal restructuring of Turkey via the articulation of blogging with the global market system. Although blogs provide employment opportunities and economic gains, the main motivation behind women’s blogging practices remains to be self-realization and self-fulfillment, leaving hope labor less influential in blog writing. Traditional views like unemployed women participating in the public sphere via blogging activities wriggling out of their inherited gender roles also remain to be an overdetermination since employed women feel more emancipated through blogging.

This paper is about the preliminary ethnographic fieldwork of a work-in progress conducted on the female blogging practices and the female blogosphere in Turkey, focusing specifically on how blogging reshapes women’s cultural and social environment. The study attempts to understand the role of blogging as a medium in women’s self-formation processes and explore 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 anthropological 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. Taking female blogosphere as a field, the study examines how blog production is manifested in Turkey, through the female bloggers’ struggle for hope. Preliminary research demonstrates that blogging acts as a medium of hope for many female bloggers. Given the heterogeneous nature of female blogosphere, experiencing this hope shows differences. At times, upper mobility opportunities are expected, but sometimes hope is realized to provide feelings like happiness, appreciation, self-realization and usefulness. Networking and socialization opportunities are also other motivations of bloggers. The aim of the study is to see how these women use blogging as a media practice to explain themselves in social media platforms. Thus, 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 will also be discussed.

This article examines the conservative fashion blogosphere in Turkey from a gendered perspective, focusing on how blogging reshapes conservative women's cultural environment and how these women negotiate disclosure, privacy and modesty in an age of extreme self-display. Presenting the findings from the content analysis of 27 fashion blogs in Turkey, the study reveals that home remains to be the " proper place " for conservative women but online interaction extends their private sphere to the public realm. Creating their own fashion styles as well as their own definitions of Islam, bloggers use their blogs as an advice-giving tool and a brand-making platform that in turn provides employment opportunities. Given its integration into the neoliberal economic system through a conservative framework, Turkey and its female blogosphere constitutes a good starting point to investigate the complicated articulation of Islamization with the global market system.