A New Kind of Body Project: Blogging and the American Teen Girl

Abstract

Through a framework of Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s 1997 work, The Body Project, this paper seeks to provide insight into how the American teenage girl’s body project has adapted and changed through the use of online blogging. Brumberg found that over the course of the 20^th century, girls changed their focus from an inner body project to an outer one. The paper uses a sample of 40 blogs, read in the month of April, 2014, and is divided up into four blog types: diary, pro-ana, style, and whole-self. By reading a girl’s online thoughts, readers will gain valuable insights into what is important to the girl and society as a whole. Here, through a phenomenological grounded theory analysis, we find that blogging is a new way to conduct a body project, and may allow girls to connect in ways they have never been able to before. Thus, the blog is an innovative way for girls to support themselves in the 21^st century and beyond. This article began its life as a senior Honors thesis at Western Kentucky University, synthesized here for publication. The full article can be found at http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/stu_hon_theses/508/.