Skanky ah lians and edgy grrls : how young female blogshoppers read blogshop photographs.

• Main Author: Chan, Aaron Yongzhi.
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/51645
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Since 2004, the blogshop has emerged as a popular and extremely profitable model of e-commerce in Singapore. This research in particular focuses on Singapore-based blogshops that sell women’s apparel and how blogshoppers read depictions of femininity within blogshop photographs. Employing Dorothy E Smith’s notion of femininity as a textually mediated discourse and based on interviews with 18 young adult female blogshoppers, I argue that blogshoppers draw upon a textually mediated discourse on the relationship between masculinity and femininity when reading images. This discourse prescribes stereotypical qualities of being feminine and which should be embodied by women. Blogshop images are read for the ways in which their models are perceived to embody or not the prescribed qualities of being feminine and thus accordingly labelled and acted towards. As such, a hierarchy of cyber-feminities central to sustaining the gender order is (re)constructed by the blogshopper when reading blogshop photos.