The purpose of this essay is to study how feminists portray themselves and their opinions about gender issues and other political matters in popular feminist blogs. The blogs that are studied are Lady Dahmer, Fanny Åström, Hanapee and Genusfolket. The overall essay questions are: How does the feminist bloggers present themselves? Which subjects are discussed in the feminist blogs? Which rhetorical devices does the feminist bloggers use? The theories that are used to answer the essay questions are the four spheres where there are inequality between the sexes, theories about third wave feminism, the rhetorical concepts ethos, logos and pathos and the SPADER-model for writing good argumentation. A descriptive method is used to study how the bloggers present themselves, a quantitative content analysis is used to count which subjects the bloggers write about and a qualitative rhetorical text analysis is used to study the rhetorical devices the bloggers use. The result shows that the two bloggers Lady Dahmer and Fanny Åström describe themselves with provocative words while the other blogs have more neutral descriptions. The provocative language was interpreted as a sign of the harsh debate climate that surrounds feminists. The results also shows that the bloggers write about different feminist and political subjects; Lady Dahmer writes mostly about family and relationships, Fanny Åström writes mostly about politics, Hanapee writes mostly about politics and objectifications of women and Genusfolket writes mostly about violence and sexual abuse of women. All bloggers write about racism and this can be related to the third wave feminist notion of intersectionality and antiracist activism. They also debate feminism as an ideology and meet the harsh criticism they get. This can be related to earlier studies that show that feminists get a lot of harsh criticism in the media and on the Internet and that feminists meet this critique. The rhetorical analysis shows that the bloggers all use some rhetorical devices from the SPADER-model but none of them use statistics or expert quotes in their argumentation. Instead they use personal experience and examples to make their points. The bloggers use mostly pathos-arguments in their texts. They show ethos to different extent and it is most abundant in the analyzed text from Genusfolket.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-85398 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Gärdemalm, Elin |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Institutionen för kultur- och medievetenskaper |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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