ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the opportunities, as well as the obstacles, that women encounter when they participate in and make use of electronic media, and is an attempt to map current cultural shifts in how established power structures are subverted and turned upside down by women’s digital media interventions. Women-authored readers’ blogs, which can be seen as an extension of the book club phenomenon into cyberspace, have brought a much-needed balance to a literary criticism that was focused on predominantly male writers and perpetrated by a majority of male journalists and critics in traditional print media and academic circles. While blogs rely on ‘personal authenticity’, social media offer a platform for discussion and are representative of a community rather than an individual’s opinion. Bloggers like Perry are successful in the new online markets, turning private discussions between mothers into an enterprise that is well established in the political arena of traditional media outlets.
