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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.
"With smart readings of websites, blogs, and spaces of e-commerce in which women produce a wide range of feminine identities, Michele White delivers an intriguing analysis of gendered creativity online. A crucial read for students and scholars of gender, sexuality, and internet culture." —Elana Levine, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee
"From the ambivalence of residue glitter makeup to the visceral tactility of crafted reborn dolls, White examines gender, normativity, and vernacular production on online platforms with skill and critical insight. Producing Women is recommended reading for all interested in how the norms of femininity are lived, negotiated, appropriated, and made, and how women’s production cultures matter online." —Susanna Paasonen, University of Turku, Finland
"White’s study is significant in its depth of treatment of women’s production cultures on the Internet. This study should attract a new generation of critics and scholars who will find White’s interpretation of the websites, production of material on said websites, and the complicated relationship that women share with the Internet as fresh, provocative, and nuanced." -Kelly J. Hunnings, Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 16 No. 2
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