Mothers with attitude — How the Mumsnet parenting forum offers space for new forms of femininity to emerge online

By Sarah Pedersen, Janet Smithson. 2013

117 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper investigates the motivations and online behaviour of the users of Mumsnet, a UK online parenting community. The Mumsnet discussion forum is characterised by its difference to other mothering websites in its language use, its celebration of confrontational, opinionated and well-informed debate, its tolerance of aggression and swearing and its focus on entertainment rather than support. Many of these attributes have previously been seen as male online behaviour, but it is argued that new forms of femininities are emerging and a clear-cut binary divide between male and female online behaviour can no longer be applied.

Subfields: Communication, Gender Studies, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4db457c061b7e5b689dd284c5d215184681a9262

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Communication

1. Deborah Lupton
2. Sarah Pedersen

In Gender Studies

1. Deborah Lupton
2. Sarah Pedersen
3. G. Thomas

In Human-Computer Interaction

1. Deborah Lupton
2. Sarah Pedersen
3. Minna Ruckenstein
4. C. Till
5. Natasha D. Schüll

Citations in the corpus

• ‘What are you feeling right now?’ communities of maternal feeling on Mumsnet (2016, methodology): “We used this facility to produce a dataset focusing on the term ‘I feel’, following the methodologies of other researchers analysing the content of Mumsnet thread posts (Gambles, 2010; Hine, 2014; Jensen, 2013) and also Pedersen’s previous work on Mumsnet (Pedersen, 2014, 2015; Pedersen and Smithson”