Women’s Voices Online and the Emergence of Lived Realities as Distinct Political Behaviour: A Womanist Approach to Selected Zimbabwean Blogs

ABSTRACT

Traditional approaches to electronic democracy put strong emphasis on rationality and formal reasoning, disallowing space for private interests in public reasoning—thus restricting the understanding of various discursive practices online by groups that are socially situated away from the mainstream, particularly in informal and social networks. To counter this limitation, this study analyses Zimbabwean women’s use of digital media as an activist tool for political participation. The study specifically assesses how women’s lived experiences, as expressed in the stories shared on specific blogs on five Zimbabwean websites, are a distinct type of political behaviour targeted at challenging the status quo and accentuating women’s voices on issues of political, economic and socio-cultural interests. The findings indicate that, contrary to the current view that blogs simply chronicle women’s lives, blogging is in fact a political action where women are beginning to question societal norms that continue to oppress them and advocate for a more democratic culture. Thus, this paper concludes that through everyday conversations on blogs, we are able to identify the influence of structural inequalities and cultural differences on women’s experiences, and consequently to locate how and under what circumstances everyday talk transforms from non-political to political.

Keywords:

• blogs
• democracy
• digital media
• political participation
• womanism
• women
• Zimbabwe