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ERIC Number: EJ891821
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2010-Jul
Pages: 17
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0010-0994
EISSN: N/A
A Virtual "Veibershul": Blogging and the Blurring of Public and Private among Orthodox Jewish Women
Lieber, Andrea
College English, v72 n6 p621-637 Jul 2010
A series of articles appearing in English-language Jewish newspapers in the United States and the United Kingdom have recently announced the "blogosphere"--the world of discourse propelled by the technological innovation of online interactive diaries known as "weblogs"--as a new liberating arena for Orthodox Jewish women. In this essay, the author suggests that blogging is better understood as a technology that enables an expansion of the private sphere for the Orthodox Jewish women who write them. Rather than break through the boundaries that separate public and private realms, these blogs represent the articulation of a new kind of "public" private--one that facilitates an extraordinary opportunity for self-expression, but one that is not viewed consciously by the women who write them as compromising social or religious boundaries. At the same time, it is also clear that the veil of privacy, so essential to the genre in general, is an illusion that masks the transgressive dimension of blogging. The writers examined in this essay do not claim that their blogging is a feminist act, and do not view it as such. Nonetheless, their public writing does subvert certain aspects of traditional Jewish gender roles, and thus has consequences that, however unintended, have feminist implications. In this respect, the blogger's home page comes to serve as a site for pressing at the boundaries of domesticity, but also for inscribing a new kind of "public-private" in the virtual domain. (Contains 11 notes.)
National Council of Teachers of English. 1111 West Kenyon Road, Urbana, IL 61801-1096. Tel: 877-369-6283; Tel: 217-328-3870; Web site: http://www.ncte.org/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Opinion Papers
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United Kingdom; United States
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A