Gizli hikâyelerin örtüsünü kaldırmak: Türkiye'de muhafazakâr kadın blogları

This study examines the conservative fashion blogosphere in Turkey from a gendered perspective, focusing on how blogging reshapes conservative women's cultural environment and how these women negotiate disclosure, privacy and modesty in an age of extreme self-display. This thesis presents and discusses the findings from the content analysis of 27 fashion blogs in Turkey about the practice of blogging with respect to the questions of "self-realization", "publicity", "emancipation", concerns about privacy and self-branding. It also examines how female bloggers negotiate their activities and conservative identity with the tenets of Islam. The findings reveal that home remains to be the "proper place" for conservative women but at the same time, online interaction extends their private sphere to the public realm. Creating their own fashion styles as well as their own definitions of Islam, conservative female bloggers of Turkey also collaborate with the veiling fashion industry. Thus, as an advice-giving tool and a brand-making platform, the blogosphere provides employment opportunities for these bloggers. Given its integration into the neoliberal economic system through a conservative framework, Turkey and its female blogosphere constitutes a good starting point to investigate the complicated articulation of Islamization with the global market system. This study, reconsidering the arguments of the digital media literature from a gendered perspective, is the first to adopt a content analysis method in this specific topic. Thus, besides being methodologically unique, it also contributes to the domain of communication studies through the lens of feminist theory embedded within a non-Western context. Keywords: fashion blogging, privacy, veiling, publicity, Islam, content analysis