Fighting Gender Stereotypes in the Polish Blogosphere

Milwaukee.
The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Katarzyna Chmielewska, whose focus is on Polish-language blogs, especially by Polish women. In 2006, an advertising agency created a controversial public service advertisement in Poland that was featuring a hospital delivery room with a birthing scene during which a vacuum cleaner is born, to suggest that too often consumer lifestyles are preferred to having children; this was highly controversial in Poland and was seen as emblematic of the then ruling coalition's ultra-conservative 'family values'.

However, it also points to the complex and contentious articulation of gender roles in Poland, where femininity is often still equated to motherhood: there is a stereotype of the 'Mother Pole' who bears the nation's sons and instils patriotic values in them, and this is still called upon both by supporters as well as critics - not least also by female Polish bloggers, who frequently reference this archetype as a subject of enquiry, critique, or reaffirmation of the role of these blogs.

Mother Pole is rooted in a sex-based, ideological representation, but still not recognised as such by many people; at the same time, the Polish language knows only the term 'fatherland', not 'motherland'. Polish blogs provide an alternative public sphere in the context of these issues, and provide an insight into the key points of contention in these debates. So, how do bloggers perform their identity here, how may we understand these bloggers through the discourse of motherhood and femininity and identify their cultural specificities?

Blog scholarship emphasises the participatory character of the medium and its impact on other forms of publication; they have also pointed to genre and language variation across different types of blogging. Polish blogs, in fact, are more centred on self-presentation than on social networking, as some studies have found, and an ethnographic research approach also points to the possibility that the Net played a particularly important role in articulating the cultural and political transition from communism to capitalism. This marked the Polish public sphere, and either effectively excluded women from the public sphere or framed them in ways with which they did not identify. Many women clearly distanced themselves from a discussion driven either by ultra-conservative or strongly feminist positions.

If we understand the networked public as made up of multiple overlapping public spheres, however, then the Net opens opportunities for other forms of expression, for finding other ways of positioning themselves, and it is important to examine how female Polish bloggers operate in this space.

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