Mommy Blogging & New Domesticity

“Time over money and people over things” (Matchar, 2013, p. 218) is the sentence that captures the discourse of new domesticity in its essence. It is the current sensibility to provide one’s life with meaning by focusing on quality over quantity, by enjoying the small things and by favouring authenticity and handmade craft. This thesis discusses the social phenomenon of new domesticity in relation to academic literature and within the context of a medium that could be a carrier of the discourse, the creative mommy blog. It thereby poses the research question: (How) do discourses of new domesticity feature in creative mommy blogs? In order to investigate these discourses a thematic analysis is applied to the linguistic content of twenty-five blog posts written by five creative mommy bloggers, covering four types of content: projects, tutorials, reflections and introductions. As a result of intensively questioning the material on what it conveys, the thematic analysis extracted three main themes. These themes are: identity, new domesticity and community. This thesis shows that within their writing, the five bloggers reflect upon their own identities by describing their desires, their actions, their characteristics and also by writing in a certain manner. They use elements of new domesticity, especially the desire to simplify and the engagement in handmade crafts, to construct their identity but also as a link to a broader community of creative mommy bloggers and their readers. This community acknowledges both the identity of the author and the discourse on the creative mommy blogs. Therefore, the discourse of new domesticity can feature as a link between identity and community. From a theoretical perspective this means that the bloggers’ investment in (new) domesticity should not be seen as anti-feminist, but as a way to construct a post-feminist identity within the private sphere. At the same time the bloggers communicate their domestic identities to the outside world through their blogging, suggesting that (new) domesticity is not restricted to the private sphere, as it was historically. Rather, new domesticity seems to emerge as a discourse specifically ‘conducted’ in the public sphere.