ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that by bringing together new and old technologies of the self—screen and blog on the one hand, photography and fashion on the other—personal fashion blogs assert themselves as a privileged space of identity construction. It develops this argument in the light of gender. The chapter explores the idea of computer screens as mirrors, and the presence of mirrors in the self-portraits posted on personal fashion blogs. It discusses such blogs as a space for the articulation of a panoptic gaze that reproduces women’s position as specular objects, but also as a space of empowerment through the control it grants bloggers on their own image, as well as through the alternative visions of femininity it allows them to circulate. The self personal fashion blogs narrate is articulated through writing but also through the images the bloggers post of and by themselves.
