Dis/Organising Women’s Freedom: Feminist Dialectical Tensions in Women’s Business Networks Blogs

Abstract

The growing popularity of women’s business networks (WBNs) is paralleled by a critique of their postfeminist character: by promoting individualist ideals in line with neoliberalism, WBNs are considered to disorganise rather than contribute to women’s freedom. To unpack this tension between the empirical phenomena and the feminist critique, we employ an inductive approach combining topic modeling, thematic coding and dialectical analysis to examine over 1,500 blog posts from four WBNs. We show how multiple discourses are circulated in the blogs and exist in tension with each other, and interpret the interstices for change and action that these tensions open. We thus contribute to understanding the ways to women’s freedom at the intersection of neoliberalism and postfeminism and extend the comprehension of how WBNs can contribute to this agenda. Furthermore, we make ancillary methodological contributions by using topic modeling in conjunction with other qualitative analysis tools and a large corpus of blog posts.