“Suffused by Feeling and Affect”: The Intimate Public of Personal Mommy Blogging

Personal mommy blogging forcefully enacts a productive tension linking the story of the self to broader public discourses. Mommy bloggers seem to understand their texts as at once public and private, in ways that are for the most part enabling rather than paralyzing or paradoxical. Based on an anonymous online survey I conducted of mommy bloggers, I conclude that they deliberately court and manage “intimate publics” that nurture a community of shared practice around the emotional, physical, and intellectual labor of parenting.