Analysing narratives of food, family and resources in mothers' blogs
Résumé
In relation to concerns that engagement with digital worlds undermine capacities to understand ‘traditional narrative forms’ (ROSE, 2012), this paper considers what is ‘new’ about digital narratives and how they relate to other narrative forms. We present narrative analysis of blogs about feeding families written by mothers in the context of constrained resources - economic, emotional and time-related. We draw out how the identities set out in About Me pages of blogs relate to contemporary cultural narratives of the maternal and how these identity positions are reinforced and contradicted in subsequent postings, underlining how multiplicities, inconsistencies and ruptures are part of, rather than outside, narrative. We consider how these blogs relate to the canon of narratives documenting the traditional maternal tasks of memorialising and archiving family life (ROSE, 2010), feeding families and building communities of like-minded mothers sharing advice and information. We conclude by considering how, as well as narrating mothers’ work, blogs themselves might represent post-industrial forms of 'women's work' more generally. Online renderings of the everyday into expertise are clearly effortful and this work builds saleable skills as well as extending social resources and bringing in some economic brands. Thus in situations where economic capital is depleted, older forms of social and symbolic capital are not paying off and established forms of cultural capital are not marketable, the blogs develop new forms of all of these.
Domaines
Sociologie
Origine :
Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
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