Retreats Into Nomadism: Negotiating "The Good Life" in the Intimate Publics of Postfeminist Online Culture

• Author / Creator

  McRae, Sarah

• This dissertation explores how models of the “good life” promoted within the “solo female” travel blog genre are inflected by postfeminist sensibilities of retreat. Specifically, it looks at an emerging cultural current I call the “retreat into nomadism” paradigm in lifestyle blogging. I look at how models of the good life based on postfeminist narratives of retreat are negotiated, with reference to authenticity discourses, within the networked intimate publics surrounding online lifestyle content. To accomplish this aim, this work applies a method for reading personal lifestyle blogs that takes into consideration, first, that personal blogs are forms of multi-site, transmedia auto/biography, and, second, that personal blogs address multiple publics of varying size and intimacy simultaneously. Lifestyle bloggers generally, and travel bloggers specifically, use a variety of rhetorical strategies to address presumed intimate audiences. These audience are assumed to share key points of commonality and are imagined as harbouring the same postfeminist, neoliberal sensibilities about what it means to live well as a contemporary female subject. Throughout this dissertation, I trace the increasingly influential retreat into nomadism narrative through case studies of solo female travel blogs and their surrounding publics, with attention to how contemporary travel blogs engage with generic predecessors. While superficially at odds with the more familiar “retreat into domesticity” trend in postfeminist media (modelled in home-based genres of lifestyle content like mommy blogs and DIY blogs), the retreat paradigm of postfeminist travel media, like postfeminist sensibility more broadly, derives much of its logic from the larger structures of feeling associated with neoliberalism, with particular emphasis on the ideal entrepreneurial female subject, who seeks retreat from the personally unsatisfying conditions of the corporate workforce through entrepreneurial empowerment and by marketing the self as a consumable branded good.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Travel
  • Social Media
  • Blog
  • Postfeminism

• Graduation date

  Fall 2018

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3R20SC38

• License

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