Producing Women

The Internet, Traditional Femininity, Queerness, and Creativity

Michele White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317680239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Producing Women examines the ways femininity is produced through new media. Michele White considers how women are constructed, produce themselves as subjects, form vital production cultures on sites like Etsy, and deploy technological processes to reshape their identities and digital characteristics. She studies the means through which women market traditional female roles, are viewed, and produce and restructure their gendered, raced, eroticized, and sexual identities. Incorporating a range of examples across numerous forms of media—including trash the dress wedding photography, Internet how-to instructions about zombie walk brides, nail polish blogging, DIY crafting, and reborn doll production— Producing Women elucidates women's production cultures online, and the ways that individuals can critically study and engage with these practices.

1
Working eBay and Etsy

Selling Stay-at-Home Mothers

Mary Andrews encourages readers to “Quit Your Day Job” in a series of Etsy blog posts that provide information about sellers. For instance, she introduces readers to slippedstitchstudios who took “her career into her own hands after being laid off” during a “maternity leave.”¹ Andrews associates the transformation of slippedstitchstudios into a stay-at-home mother and Etsy seller with her independence. Andrews also links this change to the productive and physical properties of slippedstitchstudios’ hands and computer and Internet technologies. Etsy and members use narratives about hands as a means of referencing the experiences of being in control, touching, being touched, connecting, and making things by hand. Etsy members further highlight the affective, social, and tactile aspects of hands by choosing such member names as AtHome Hand Made, From My Hand To Yours, and The Hand Stamped Heart.²

These women connect through the physical and metaphorical contact of hands and Internet sites, including the ways sellers touch keyboards. Such meshing of hands and computer and Internet technologies are embodied in the term “digital.” The expression, according to Jack Bratich, references fingers as well as the delivery of information. Internet technologies and sites are “extensions.”³ They intermesh corporeal digits, bodies, cultural ideas, and numerical and computational digits. In doing this, these conjunctions of bodies and technologies disrupt ecommerce and postfeminist claims about individuation.⁴ Contemporary women are imagined to be distinct individuals and coherent bodies who are personally focused rather than engaged with communities. Of course, ecommerce sites and members constitute community and family because these conceptions get people to invest and engage and are thereby economically and socially productive.

Individuals’ descriptions of the social features of Internet settings and hyper-textual linking, which is one of the key undergirding structures of the web, present similar narratives about connecting. For instance, members indicate that Etsy and related craft events facilitate connections and community attachments. slippedstitchstudios identifies other fiber artists as a “community of mavens, connectors, and salesmen” with a “love” of “handspun” and “hand-dyed” materials.⁵ These notions of animated and potentially animating hands that interweave the human, social, creative, transformational, and technological are particularly interesting when tied to crafting sites. slippedstitchstudios also contrasts her creative delight and engagement with Etsy with her previous career experiences, which include “several dead-end, soul crushing jobs.” Thus, Etsy is depicted as enlivening individuals and positively intermeshing their interests. After her estranging job experiences, slippedstitchstudios “just wanted to stay home” with her child and handcraft things. She thanks readers for sustaining this way of life and makes them and Etsy into a community and an economic support system. Yet home and childcare are sites of intensive work and business for stay-at-home mothers who sell on eBay and Etsy.

Women as well as social relationships produce and are produced in Internet settings. slippedstitchstudios and other like-minded ecommerce sellers advertise that they are stay-at-home mothers in order to connect with compatible members, constitute a community, produce a marketable identity, and encourage individuals to identify and buy. These women reference traditional conceptions of motherhood and femininity while their site narratives produce much more complicated identities. For instance, slippedstitchstudios and many other stay-at-home mothers who are ecommerce sellers indicate that they work more hours than they did when juggling traditional careers and childcare. This can be a problem because stay-at-home mothers, according to sociologists Heather Dillaway and Elizabeth Paré, are expected to be “physically located within the home” and not engaging in “income earning activities that distract them from ‘quality’ child care.”⁶ Self-identified stay-at-home mothers who sell on the English language eBay and Etsy sites do not or cannot follow these economic and geographic expectations and thus help to reform cultural definitions.⁷

These stay-at-home mothers who sell things hybridize families and businesses. Their production of identities and selling positions illustrates some of the ways women negotiate conflicting social demands and work roles. By studying the ways stay-at-home mothers sell on eBay and Etsy, I demonstrate the wide scale deployment of this identity and the associated marketing strategies. Examining these sites and sellers’ practices also offers opportunities to understand the different ways stay-at-home mothers are correlated with childcare, crafting, and expertise. Feminists have rightly critiqued directives for American and many Western women to perform traditional mothering roles, even as they carry out increasing amounts of career work.⁸ Rather than focusing on how the role of stay-at-home mother can curtail women’s opportunities, I consider women’s deployment of these arrangements as methods of meeting cultural expectations, performing unconventional work, producing their identities, and garnering power. Stereotyped gender scripts leave women with limited options. This makes it important to study and understand how women negotiate their positions in relationship to cultural conventions and the ways they identify with the role of stay-at-home mother in order to develop authority and engage personal and cultural investments in childcare, home, and work.⁹ It is also essential to address how the Internet has been identified as an ideal setting for these hybrid and conflicted identities.

Producing the eBay and Etsy Sites and Members

The English language eBay and Etsy sites, in a manner that is related to the complicated identifications of stay-at-home mothers and ecommerce sellers, are consumer sites that render themselves as something else. Etsy defines the setting as “the marketplace we make together” and “Your place to buy and sell all things handmade, vintage, and supplies.”¹⁰ Etsy offers individuals opportunities to present and sell their goods in personal “shops” on the site and connect with other people by using the shop messaging system. In framing the site through the terms “we” and “your,” Etsy emphasizes opportunities for individualization, customization, collaboration, and ownership. It distinguishes the site from impersonal retailing and argues, “Etsy is more than a marketplace: we’re a community of artists, creators, collectors, thinkers and doers.”¹¹ Etsy thus articulates members as connected and active producers, in a manner that is related to its narratives about slippedstitchstudios, and effaces the cultural coding of Internet technologies as pacifying and isolating.

eBay emphasizes a broader array of goods and forms of production than Etsy but also asserts the agency of members. On the eBay.com domain and other country-specific sites, it offers a “Welcome” to eBay, “your community.”¹² eBay indicates that the site enables connections between individuals and is produced by members. These members, as I suggest in Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay, both take up and interrogate eBay’s promises of co-production, which asserts that the site belongs to participants.¹³ eBay and Etsy market similar kinds of agency and community to members, including active forums where members can correspond. However, Chad Dickerson, who is CEO of Etsy, argues, “Ebay and Etsy are fundamentally different companies.”¹⁴ Etsy is “about people buying and selling from other people and knowing who’s on both sides of the transaction.” Of course, eBay encourages sellers to provide personal information so that potential buyers can feel as if they know members. Each site tries to distinguish itself with narratives concerning special ties and individualization. Through these structures, they extend postfeminist claims about empowerment but do not couple this to notions of self-focused individuals. eBay and Etsy profit from people who have detailed personal interests that can be marketed to buyers and community involvements, especially commitments to work for and promote these selling platforms.

These sites promise affective connections, especially to women, and often code participants as women. For instance, Etsy offers articles on sellers that tend to feature and address white women, and to a much lesser degree white heterosexual couples.¹⁵ Etsy’s 2008 survey determined that 96 percent of members were women.¹⁶ According to reporter Brooke Dunbar, women are “responsible for Etsy’s success.”¹⁷ She supports the company’s narratives about co-production. She also identifies the interface and listed items as feminine and suggests that for women “who are trying their hand at combining full time Motherhood and homemade retail, it’s a perfect platform.” In a similar manner, stay-at-home mothers note that Etsy is “perfect” for their needs and allows them to “happily” create “swell and swanky things” and “be at home with the ones that” they “love.”¹⁸ eBay and Etsy sellers engage with these sites as shared feminine and maternal spheres. They get other women to care for their lifestyle by buying. At the same time, their marketing strategies and production modes skew normative understandings of who stay-at-home mothers are and what they do. Women’s child rearing, as Dillaway and Paré suggest, usually functions as “invisible reproductive labor that does not receive any tangible reward or acknowledgment.”¹⁹ Through eBay and Etsy, stay-at-home mothers make their mothering visible, are acknowledged by the sites and members, and garner economic rewards.

eBay and Etsy emphasize that they provide ideal careers for mothers. eBay’s newsletter chronicles how it “allows mom to focus on caretaking.”²⁰ eBay thereby indicates that the site and selling facilitate familial connections. Readers of Etsy’s Quit Your Day Job posts also learn how hobocampcrafts quit her “office job to follow her passion,” “sell full time on Etsy,” “work from home,” “and care for her new baby.”²¹ Etsy claims that it makes women and families happier. Yet working at home is associated with women shifting their schedules so that they can fit in more childcare rather than working less. Jobs that facilitate familial demands are marketed to women and tend to result in increased labor for them.²² People often imagine ecommerce sellers, especially when they are women, to be part-time workers and to have “opted-out” of careers. However, Etsy’s Success Stories encourage women to work more and address them as people who are striving for bigger businesses. Etsy writes, “You’ve seen those big sellers” who “seem to be making sales left and right. You have to wonder how they’ve made it to where they are.”²³ Members are encouraged to “Keep reading to find out how” sellers manage these accomplishments.

Etsy acknowledges women’s labor and encourages them to gen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Technologies of Producing Women: Femininity, Queerness, and the Crafted Monster
• 1 Working eBay and Etsy: Selling Stay-at-Home Mothers
• 2 Touching Feeling Women: Reborn Artists, Babies, and Mothers
• 3 It’s about “Creation, Not Destruction”: Brides, Photographers, and Post-wedding Trash the Dress Sessions
• 4 Dead White Weddings: Zombie Walk Brides, Marriages, and How-to Guides
• 5 Never Cleaning Up: Cosmetic Femininity and the Remains of Glitter
• Afterword: A Show of Hands: Franken Polishes, Mannequin Hands, and #ManicureMonday
• Selected Bibliography
• Index