Transgendering Mother's Day

Blogging as Citizens' Media, Reproductive Rights and Intimate Citizenship

Bibliographic Data

ID4525538
AuthorsJenny Gunnarsson Payne (0000-0001-7764-6326, Södertörn University, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume17
Issue8
Pages928-941
Publication date2013-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCitizenship Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1362-1025 • E-ISSN: 1469-3593
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13621025.2013.851143
OpenAlexW2057439296
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited19

Citizenship is fast emerging as a central concern for transgender politics. This article approaches the topic of transgender citizenship by investigating empirically how the practice of blogging has served as a way of claiming, or practicing, intimate citizenship for transgendered people. Theorization of intimate citizenship helps us to further our understanding of the ways in which our most private decisions and practices are inextricably linked with public institutions, law and state policies. Significantly, this development is also tied up with other characteristically late modern technological advancements, ranging from new reproductive technologies to new Information and Communication Technologies. In the case of transgender politics, such interlacings become particularly perspicacious, not only due to modern discourses concerning diagnosis and treatment, but also because the presence of social media resources affords new possibilities for the sharing of personal and political narratives about 'being transgendered'. In this article, I investigate an event in the Swedish blogosphere, namely the way in which the national celebration of Swedish Mother's Day became a site for the contestation of the current limitations of the reproductive legal rights for transgendered people, providing an opening for a more general debate on transgender reproductive rights.Keywords:: transgenderintimate citizenshipreproductive citizenshipbloggingcitizens' media AcknowledgementsThe work on this article was conducted mainly as part of my postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Ethnology, Religion and Gender Studies at Stockholm University (2009–2010). I would also like to acknowledge the importance of my time within the collaborative research project Feminist Media Production in Europe (funded by the Austrian Science Fund, project no. P21187-G20), within which some initial ideas for this chapter were developed. In addition, I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on this text. I would also like to thank David Payne for thorough proofreading and valuable intellectual comments. Last, but certainly not least, my sincerest thanks goes to Amanda Brihed, Immanuel Brändemo and Signe Bremer for their generous and initiated feedback on previous drafts of this article. Needless to say, all remaining mistakes and shortcomings are my own

Citizenship · Political science · Politics · Population · Reproductive health · Reproductive rights · Sociology · Transgender · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Social Media and Politics

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