Pretty in pink vs pretty in black: blogs as gendered avatars

Abstract

Blogs are usually treated as texts, despite the expressive potential of their visual elements through which ideology is often not expressed straightforwardly, but encoded in the imagery. This study offers an analysis of blog design themes and blog sidebar ‘badges’ produced by Jewish-Israeli girls aged 11 to 16 on Israblog, Israel’s largest blogging community. By looking at the blog as a ‘digital body’ or an avatar of the blogger, the author examines design elements as resources of identity performance and contextualizes the findings within the fields of girl studies and feminist theory. She argues that under the surface of the distinctive subcultural styles often presented as adversarial lies the same hegemonic Western girlhood model; however, global girlhood models may be interpreted as subversive in the Israeli cultural context.