Blogging Solo: Women Refiguring Singleness

In this final chapter I turn my attention to the blogosphere as a potentially oppositional field where the dominant meanings around singledom can be contested, negotiated, and rewritten. The single women blogosphere can be seen to challenge the texts and forms previously addressed in two key ways. Firstly, by providing counter-narratives to those that position singleness as a problem to be rectified; secondly, many of these blogs do not appear marred by the postfeminist (and indeed neoliberal) logics that characterize the media forms considered in previous chapters. That said, as in these earlier examples, there are actually a number of competing discourses about women’s singleness in the blogosphere — including blogs that presume women’s desperation (especially those in their 30s and 40s) to be otherwise — that must temper any simplistic celebration about how it is used. There is a clear distinction between what can be called dating singles’ blogs, which centre on how to find (and secure) a mate, and those considered here. That is, the blogosphere is not a priori oppositional or progressive as far as single women are concerned. As Graeme Turner argues, ‘there is nothing inherent in these technologies which privileges the liberal, the tolerant or the progressive in terms of the opinions they carry’ (2010, p. 140).