%0 Thesis %A Campbell, Perri %D 2017 %T Fractured lives, digital selves: Iraqi women’s warblogs and the wilderness of cyberspace %U https://bridges.monash.edu/articles/thesis/Fractured_lives_digital_selves_Iraqi_women_s_warblogs_and_the_wilderness_of_cyberspace/4774921 %R 10.4225/03/58d1d32f8a792 %K Restricted access and full embargo %K Post-invasion Iraq %K Weblogs %K Digital-selves %K Foucault %K ethesis-20110329-010037 %K thesis(doctorate) %K monash:63629 %K 2011 %K 1959.1/479320 %K Women %X The Iraq war blogosphere is a place of loose ends, fragments and moments in time. It is a space shaped by conversations, contradiction, opinions and life stories. Time is compressed by archive functions and selves are fractured by dates and posts. As I pull various threads together figures appear on the horizon, shaping the wilderness of this digital landscape. Here I encounter young sisters HNK and Aunt Najma, Neurotic Iraqi Wife, Riverbend and Faiza. In this space I am not analysing a text. It is not just a story. I am delving into a history of thoughts, reflections, and memories where the troublesome past meets the possible future. A ‘sense’ or part of who these women are lies in these fragments, in my practice of reading their blogs, and of lurking in the Iraq war blogosphere. This thesis provides a critique of what it means to be a woman – to be a mother, a worker, a sister, a University student – in post-invasion Iraq, and a critique of what it means for me – a white, Australian woman – to speak about Iraqi women’s experiences. I draw upon Foucault’s late ‘ethical’ work to argue that weblogs provide a real-time, unfolding, reflexive, and often inter-active window into particular life-worlds and into selves that shift and move and exist in tension between a variety of digital and non digital spaces. I engage with five particular Iraqi women who shape a digital-self in the wilderness of cyberspace. I explore the tensions between the various ways women practice a self in/between different fields of possibility in Iraq, such as the workplace, marketplace, school, or home (Foucault, 1997a: 291). I encounter these practices of the self as stories of choice, of decisions made amidst a sea of possibilities, encouragements, and right decisions (Foucault, 1982: 212). The ways in which HNK, Neurotic Iraqi Wife, Aunt Najma, Riverbend and Faiza, practice freedom and negotiate power across digital and non-digital fields, shapes the very fields the bloggers engage with. In a time of war, chaos and often deadly uncertainties digital-selves speak to the malleable limits and possibilities of discursive fields. These women enable us to see the local, embodied repercussions of a global struggle, the sites where encouragement and coercion meet, and where choice and practice converge. %I Monash University