Women blogging in Québec, Canada: surfing between ideals and constraints

This thesis explores online practices of women in Québec, a culturally and historically distinct province in Canada that is undergoing rapid social and technological transformations, and analyses the discourses that emerge. It zeroes in on blogging, as a facilitator for exploring, constructing and challenging gendered identities. It draws on and contributes to a growing body of literature that investigates and legitimises women’s online writings, an area that remains under analysed. This online ethnography was accomplished through face-to-face interviews with 23 Frenchspeaking women bloggers, home visits and an analysis of their blogs. Using feminist critical discourse analysis, the thesis analyses how informants locate themselves inside and outside traditional and mainstream discourses of femininities. It first explores how participants discuss their blogs using domestic metaphors, thereby linking their online expressions to ideas and ideals of the home. Second, it reveals how bloggers share a common concern with putting forward a favourable self, emphasising personal qualities such as education, respect, affability, and impressive online networks. Third, it analyses self-improvement narratives in participants’ interviews and blog entries, examining recurring discussions of personality, values and views; body size and image; emotional and mental health; and professional and homemaking skills. The last chapter underlines how blogging provides women with opportunities for networking, a place to discuss challenges and with a means to claim time for themselves. The thesis draws out the complex engagements in an activity they find pleasurable despite working within mainstream gender role constraints and still facing a digital divide. In both discourse and practice, participants seem at ease with blogging but remain highly influenced by traditional discourses. This gives rise to a sense of contradiction where they feel like they exist, have a public life and make a contribution but also exhibit a sense of compulsion and regulation. They break out of the limits of normative femininities perhaps – at the same time creating new 'women's worlds' – even as the use of blogging reinstates and produces conservative forms of self-management

Être jeune mère et survivante de violences conjugales en contexte rural et francophone minoritaire : une étude de besoins à Prescott-Russell

Cet article s’appuie sur une étude de besoins réalisée pour Maison Interlude House, dans les comtés unis de Prescott-Russell (Ontario) auprès de six participantes francophones aux prises avec la violence conjugale. Malgré la présence d’organismes dont le mandat est de leur venir en aide, ces jeunes mères monoparentales vivant en milieu semi-rural dans une province à majorité anglophone se trouvent généralement dans une situation de non-choix qui revêt son lot de conséquences. Grâce à leurs récits de vie, aux informations recueillies auprès d’organismes travaillant à l’autonomisation de cette population et à un groupe de discussion visant à identifier des pistes de solutions, nous dressons un portrait des défis rencontrés et des solutions évoquées.Drawing on results from a needs analysis conducted for Maison Interlude House, located in the United Counties of Prescott-Russell (Ontario), this article sheds light onto the challenges faced by six female Francophone participants, survivors of domestic violence. Despite the work of organisations whose mandate is to support them towards autonomy, these young single mothers, living in a semi-rural area within a mostly Anglophone province, often find themselves in a situation where they have little to no choice. Using data from their life stories, information gathered via various organisations working towards the empowerment of this population and a focus group, we underline the difficulties these women face when trying to escape domestic violence, as well as some of the solutions that were identified

Violence sexuelles en milieu universitaire: Synthèse des résultats de l’enquête ESSIMU au Québec

This study, “Enquête Sexualité, Sécurité et Interactions en Milieu Universitaire,” conducted in 2016 with 9,284 respondents from six francophone Quebec universities, provided a portrait of sexual violence taking place in a university context. This article presents a summary of the results extracted from the research report (Bergeron et al., 2016)