on homing blogging, postfeminism, conservatism, and stereotypes of motherhood

me channelling all the Courtney Love vibes back in 2010

So hey! Hi! And wow! I have been blogging on this here site for over a decade, can you believe it? A lot has gone on during that over-a-decade, some of which I've probably forgotten, and some of which this blog helps me remember. What a fascinating record of our times! But also, and above all, a love song to my family and our home. And yet! Yet! Also a subject of at least one scientific study. Who knew? I didn't, but I discovered it very recently, and now I'm here, and I'm like Wait, whaaaat? My little essay / confession about suffering from post-partum depression has been discussed in a paper on feminist discourse? 

Which is why I'm here today. It's gonna be a long one, so grab yourself a cuppa of your preferred beverage and read on. Rest assured, this is not gonna be making much more sense than it has by now, that I solemnly swear.

So here's the background story: Some time ago, could be like two years, give or take a few, I got an email into my rarely-used Gmail account, from a professor (or what have you, university type anyway) who asked for permission to use the above apple image in their scientific study on Finnish mommy blogs. Now it was very decent of her to ask (my brother, a PhD student, tells me they actually didn't really have to), but I'm sorry to say I forgot about it for a while, then accidentally deleted that email, and never got back to her. (I truly apologize for this one!) I wasn't even blogging at that time anymore; my return here came much later.

But the other night I just kinda remembered it out of nowhere, and got intrigued, and decided to do a little Googling, and lo and behold! I found this paper called 'Homing blogs as ambivalent spaces for feminine agency', written by a group of female scientists, and published in at least one journal (Feminist Media Studies). (Why did she want that apple picture though? I much prefer the apple picture below, from the same post back in 2014. This was before my Insta presence got going.)

So anyway. At first I was all Cool! Our blogging community has been selected as a kind of a focus group or a case in a study, without us knowing about or being asked about it, but who cares, it's all out here and it's all legal to make whatever you like of it if it's for science. But then I began to read what it actually said about 'us' and 'our' ethos. (I'm using quotation marks here, because I honestly don't know most of the 18 people behind the 18 blogs studied, and some of them probably don't know me. I think it's just a group of what we like to call 'like-minded folks' these days.) Here is how they studied us:

November 2011

MATERIAL: 18 Finnish blogs that they call 'homing blogs', one of which is mine. This blog used to be called Koivukuja back then, which they've translated as Birch Alley, though I would've have preferred Birch Lane had I been consulted because it's just sounds more poetic, you know? Incidentally, one of the blogs is actually based in Belgium but I guess the fact that it is in Finnish makes it Finnish?

METHOD: Close readings of these blogs, and other blogs of the same genre. Focus of paper is on the first post of November 2011 of each blog, though mine gets quoted the most. (It's this ole gem.) They also demonstrate having read more than that one post from at least some of the blogs, case in point being my short story of depression. 

THE CULTURAL BACKGROUND THEY GIVE: 

- the Finnish job market is gender-segregated

- the financial crisis & recession starting 2008-2009 lead to Finnish women working part-time more often than they wanted to, and was in fact 'a feminized recession'

- this made many Finnish women 'more dependent on their spouses and hence more vulnerable' (hey, this isn't a scientific study, it's just an essay by a blogger, so I don't need to give page references right? all quotations from study linked above)

- this has lead to a feminist and conservative backlash in our society, and these postfeminist & neoconservative & neoliberal discourses 'applaud the woman's place in the private sphere of the home'

- which in the context of the homing blogs studied are curiously entwined with 'ecological values and downshifting', and I quote:

From within this complex ensemble of discourses and ideologies, the withdrawal from the labour market of individual, modern women can be rationalized and justified as a "natural" and legitimate choice that women themselves make, rather than the outcome of a range of structural, economic, and ideological factors. [...] For them, homing blogs may offer a collective means to justify their "choice".

And it was at this point I was like Whaaaaaat? It went on to identify our homing blogs as postfeminist in themselves, as they were clearly promoting women's return to the private sphere of the home, and indeed celebrating all things homely, like crafts and knitting and making dinner in our 'descriptions of busyness and activities such as diligent sewing, painting, and making pickles.' I'll get to the sewing, painting and pickles soon enough, because, well, PICKLES! 'Tis the season again. But first more about the study, which found that our blogs reinforced traditional, conservative gender ideologies, didn't challenge dominant discourses of maternity, and basically disguised the oppression of women as liberation from the job market.

Umm, excuse me, I'd like to comment please. I can't speak for the others, so I'll just tell you a little bit about myself, my family, and my postfeminist homing blog, if you'd like to read on. 

the birch lane back in 2010

When I started this blog back in May 2009, I was a stay-at-home mom one month into motherhood, and on paid maternal leave. I was also an inactive grad student working on my MA thesis, but that had kind of been put on hold because I had been working full-time in my field of expertise (teaching) for the past four years, and also volunteering a lot, and hence had suffered a lack of both time and energy to finish my thesis.

My husband was also a grad student, but he also worked part-time for his father's company. 

Because I was on paid maternal leave, we could afford to have me stay at home, and finally finish my thesis. This was the thing we had decided on the moment we found out I was pregnant: I wouldn't go back to work until I had finished my thesis because a) we knew I wasn't gonna get it done if I was both working AND a mom, and b) because I wasn't getting full pay until I got my qualifications e.g. my MA diploma.

these wristwarmers came in the mail in sept. 2010 while I was out there studying!

In addition to writing about motherhood and family and downshifting and pickles during the first few years of my homing blogging career, I wrote about studying a plenty. I wrote about my research, and about leaving my baby in the care of her father while I spent days in the city studying. I wrote about how we had a schedule where I'd have two days a week to work on my shit, while he had two days for working on his shit, and then he'd have three days of working on work shit so we'd have money to eat (which we always didn't, really).

Maybe all this mundane shit wasn't as interesting as my revelation about suffering from depression while being locked inside a prison of my own making & choosing, but it did happen, and I did write about it, so maybe the scientists just didn't read about it or didn't care, because it didn't fit their assumption of me?   

In fact, just a little over a month before my first post of November 2011, oft-quoted in the study, I graduated, got my MA diploma, and was contemplating on possibly pursuing an academic career as suggested by my thesis supervisor. But no, I didn't run to the gender-segregated job market right then and there, I chose to stay home. It wasn't a "choice" choice, as the study would have it, but a real one based on circumstances that were a tad sad.

You see, in the spring of 2011, there's a whole month during which I didn't homing blog at all, April to be exact, and why I didn't blog was that my daughter got very, very sick. I wasn't comfortable talking about it on le blog for quite a while, not explicitly, though I did allude to it.

My kid was diagnosed with juvenile arthritis just as she turned two, and the first year taking care of her, trying to cure her illness, looked like this:

- two different drugs taken at home daily

- daily use of wrist and knee and ankle wraps to keep her joints in their right places

- shots of drugs once a week at the nurse's office down our health care center

- weekly physical therapy

- visits to the hospital once a month or so, where she would be sedated and given shots of cortisone to her infected joints.

So when this happened, we decided that my husband, who already had a job, and still had to finish his Masters, would go on working to support our family financially while I would stay at home with our two-year-old until we got the situation under control, which we did, after which I wrote about the situation on the blog, and also signed up at the employment office.

So yeah, my homing about in my home, and writing about it in my homing blog, was a choice choice, not a "choice" choice. (Incidentally, my husband was a true working hero who both managed to work and study, and he only had 4 days off every month. If he doesn't deserve a love song, I don't know who does.)

a weekend off in 2013

This is also something I would like to point out to the researchers criticising homing blogs for focusing on the sphere of home rather than the sphere of work:

A year later, our situation was reversed, and I was the primary bread winner in our family while my husband wrote his thesis and did a low-paying internship. I wrote about my return to work, and I wrote about my work, but not very much because in my line of work we respect the privacy of our students.

Instead, I kept on writing (when I had the time) about our family, about the books I read, the crafting I did, the food we ate. These were kind of my hobbies, you know. Some people write about fitness, I wrote about knitting and such. These were things I enjoyed and continue to enjoy, despite them not being held in high value by many other feminists. (I don't value travelling much, because of its impact on the environment, but apparently some people do, like one of the professors who wrote the paper, according to her instagram. Do I sound stalker-ish? I don't mean to, I just like to know what people do with their time.)

These 'spare-time  activities such as [...] finishing a hand-made artefact' are clearly considered by the authors of the study as 'pottering about', just like the sewing and painting and pickling I mentioned before. The thing is, I know for a fact that at least two of the homing bloggers mentioned were, and still are, actually artists who exhibit every now and then, and continue to sell their work. Another one, whose list of accomplishments the past few weeks includes 'sewing like crazy' was in fact at that time studying to become an artisan and also starting up her own business, so this was not a spare-time activity at all, but her actual work. 

So all this leaves me wondering, did the researchers actually read the contents of the blogs they studied, or just the texts that served their purpose? It'd be interesting to know.

What gets to me sometimes about feminist discourse is this: In advocating for equality and change in our societies, many career feminists assume that to be equal, all women must undertake the same roles in our society that powerful men have traditionally held. That for women, striving to become wealthy, powerful, and independent is de facto the only way to liberation, and that enjoying the simple things like pickling, or making carrot top pesto (which I am about to do after writing this) must mean that I'm either purposely reinforcing traditional gender roles or the victim of patriarchal oppression.

That there is only one route to liberation and that is following the male route?!? Really? I assure you, I am a feminist (my thesis, which the study in which I my writing was studied, failed to mention, was actually part of what one might call feminist literary discourse, and very much intersectional in its postcolonial focus). I just don't believe we all have to strive for the same ideal. Instead, I'd like to see 'traditional women's work' valued more, and a lot of the work that women do every day to get paid for. (See e.g. feminist economics here.)

There are billions of women on this planet, many of whom are mothers. Some of them may make the choice choice of 'just' staying at home, like I did for three and a half years, and then choose to write about it in a homing blog. Isn't it kind of like stereotyping to assume they've all fallen victims of a failed society? As for them challenging discourses on motherhood, they sometimes may do that too, a little bit, gently, in the same fashion they write about their lives in general. Sometimes, while doing the challenging, they may also be challenging other women a little, the non-homing bloggers included. 

Now if only someone were to read it all.