Authorship and professional digital presence in feminist blogs

This research traces the shift from stand-alone, personal blogging toward professionalized use of social media. To exemplify this process, we draw attention to the transition from pseudonymous to identifiable authorship in feminist blogging. This transition toward professional digital presence is important for two major reasons: first, it reveals how oppositional politics is part of the commercial circuits and neoliberal market logics of identity management; second, it underscores the ways in which online harassment of feminist bloggers can harm their public identities and negatively impact their larger professional self-making. Further, we suggest that feminist bloggers perform a dual role of social media influencers and web-based public intellectuals as they affectively participate in the political sphere through systematic production of oppositional knowledge and counter-discourses. The paper concludes with a reflection on the significance of professionalized feminist blogging as a site of creative, intellectual, and relational labor.