Desigirls@blogspot.com: Gender, Diaspora and Cybertexts

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This paper examines feminist South Asian weblogs with a focus on representative platforms and personas. Specifically, it notices how conventional narratives of sexuality, maternity, and everyday politics are reappropriated in mommy blogs and ‘chick lit’ confessionals in popular cyberlogs from London, Bombay, Delhi, and Illinois: Em - The Compulsive Confessor, The Accidental Momma, and??! - This is a Title. Such electronic diaries will be studied in relation to the gender politics of journal writing as a feminist strategy, as well as forums that introduce the question of ‘embodiment’ in virtual space—and illustrate how negotiations with the gendered body in discourses of sexuality, reproduction, or illness play out in insubstantial episodes of cyber talk. In addition, we will consider postmodern stylistic issues of performance, authenticity, anonymity, within network dispersals and virtual simulations of subject and form. In this context, the paper examines the possible emergence of a differentiated ‘postfeminist’ politics in a specific diasporic forum. Do such cyber practices, in fact, facilitate pluralistic feminisms? Do they address the needs of marginalized agendas? In short, does the cyborg diaspora initiate a civil exchange or a postfeminist debate?