Women as hoping subjects: Negotiating fame, labor and identity in the Turkish blogosphere

Work done in digital environments and media production are generally examined within certain binaries. These binaries may include exploitation or pleasure debate in digital labor studies, public vs. private, and real vs. virtual dualities in virtual world studies. The main purpose of this research is to offer a new way of looking at the digital culture production in blogs to go beyond these dualities and examine the practices and performances of women in a non-western context with a patriarchal and authoritarian regime through the concept of hope. The study considers blogging as a media practice and tool, and the blogosphere as a field that creates salient performances and conflicting emotions with its fragmented structure. Based on ethnographic research methods, through the narratives of amateur to professional women bloggers, I analyze the Turkish blogosphere, the motivations, and expectations of women, their negotiation of hope, along with the labor they produce. This research examines how hope is attached to blogging as practice and is experienced and understood in ordinary performances of women bloggers. The aim is not to suggest that the experiences of blogging discussed are uniform, but rather to draw attention to some points of connection that coalesce around ideas of hope temporality, and to examine these connections through the notions of aspiration, success, and fame. Categorizing women bloggers as aspirants, businesswomen, and celebrities, it is shown that as an "existential affective" (Alacovska, 2019, p.1118) tool, hope has a replicative reorientation dimension among bloggers which allows it to travel, circulate, transcend and expand. While doing this, hope also serves as a tool for bloggers to challenge the dominant normative conceptualizations. Keywords: hope, blogging, digital labor, women, aspiration, fame