The personal is political: women and blogging
By Dr Ruzy Suliza Hashim and Dr Noraini Md Yusof, Centre for Gender Research, UKM
BANGI, 2 Aug 2010 - A woman blogger known by her blog “Mamasita mamamia (http://mamasita-mamamia.blogspot.com/) recently wrote this appeal to her readers: “Do you think that by blogging about it I hope to get my 'job' back? I have forfeited that hope totally and sealed my fate.
I knew the consequences towards me and I know you'd say how wrong I am to forgo our privacy. But do you know how therapeutic it is to talk about the sad and terribly painful matter?
And its not enough just talking and piling my sorrowful stories to you all..I need a huge following of moral support..strangers can give that strength too.” (retrieved 27 July 2010)
This woman blogger’s voice is a drop in the ever expanding blog ocean. What she describes is her honest, raw emotion of a personal conflict of a marriage gone wrong. In the Malaysian context, 64 percent of Malaysian bloggers are women aged below 25 (http://www.microsoft.com/malaysia/press/archive2006, retrieved 16 September 2007).
But there is also a growing corpus in Malaysia – the “Makcik Bloggers” – older women in their mid forties and older whose blogs enjoy a handsome traffic. In another global survey, women bloggers created 56 percent of surveyed blogs (Karen Trimbath, 2004). It would seem as though the blogosphere has a female face.
Nearly eight decades after Virginia Woolf’s observation that for a woman to write, she must be financially sound and has a room of her own, the scenario has changed. What a woman now needs is an internet-linked computer of her own.
With the birth of the World Wide Web, and especially the creation of weblogs, Malaysian women, as do other women globally, have embraced this new tool as a means to be heard and to share their thoughts, lives, experiences in an engaging way. This is seen most obviously in the sprouting of weblogs authored by Malaysian women.
In a research headed by Associate Professor Dr Ruzy Suliza Hashim and her fellow researchers – Dr Noraini Md Yusof, Associate Professor Dr Imran Ho and Associate Professor Datin Dr Norizan Abdul Razak, many interesting findings emerged. The content of each blog is not standardized, allowing for various idiosyncracies and styles to actualize themselves.
Four basic types of weblogs: the content is external to the blogger (links to world events, online happenings, etc.), while the content of personal journals is internal (the blogger’s thoughts and internal workings), (knowledge)-logs are repositories of information and observations with a typically technological focus, and entrepreneurial blogs.
For many women bloggers, the personal is political. This notion is drawn out from the idea that women and men inhabit two different spaces – women the domestic, hence private/ personal domain, and men the public, therefore the political domain. By writing out their stories in virtual space, these bloggers recognise common problems and experiences, and they use these insights to challenge existing ways of understanding the world which did not fit into their experience of it.
Therefore, problems which women thought were confined to individuals, privately experienced and agonised over, or too trivial to be shared, developed into collective lived reality of women. By exposing and sharing their experiences, women are able to validate their contentment and discontentment.
Serious socio-political bloggers, such as Marina Mahathir, provide an excellent example of the blurring of the personal and political. Marina’s blog entitled RantingsbyMM (http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com) shows her profile: her public one as is “a newspaper columnist, blogger, occasional TV and film producer, and activist” and her private life: “Meanwhile she tries to be nice to husband Tara and patient with her children Ineza, Haga and Shaista”.
Does she want to be taken seriously because she is so candid, as one might say? Can she be taken seriously, given the way in which she profiles herself? The content and emphasis of her profile direct attention to who she is in private and in public. But the content of her blog shows the seriousness of her agenda: sexual harassment, HIV, Malaysian politics.
Even those blogs which are characteristically personal because they narrate the day-to-day realities of their individual lives can also be seen as political. One such blogger, who speaks of her battle with breast cancer, can easily be seen as someone who blogs for therapy. And yet, Dalilah Tamrin, whose virtual name was Raden Galoh, a historical figure taken from Sejarah Melayu, made it her responsibility to inform others of breast cancer in her blog, Onebreastbouncing (http://onebreastbouncing.blogspot.com/).
Raden Galoh spoke from her heart; her narratives were very personal and intense. She even provided her mobile number for her readers to contact her regarding the disease. It is not incidental that when she passed away recently, the Malaysian blogosphere mourned her demise.
In the final analysis, blogging is liberating. It is a good way to network and diminish isolation. The bloggers represent versions of truths of their private experiences. Their stories provide significant ways their private lives can be shared and understood by the public. For women out there, it shows that women’s experiences can be so similar despite cultural, social, and religious differences. 
Assoc. Prof. Dr Ruzy Suliza Hashim can be contacted at email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or Tel: 0389216481