Complaining of Work in Blogs
Momoyo Mitsuno · 2025
This chapter explores blogging as an emerging form of social labour for some women teachers to produce an autonomous narrative of work. It does so by attending to bloggers’ complex struggles to be moral in denouncing injustice at work. While critically engaging with their work experiences, the bloggers examined in this chapter grapple with the articulation of workplace injuries because of a gap between relational injustice they experience and conceptions that inform their action as a teacher. This manifests when bloggers find problems not in external work conditions, but within themselves, such as physical exhaustion and psychological difficulties. This chapter highlights self-care as a rhetorical practice for such bloggers to reengage with work as they produce messy personal writings online. Rather than presenting a clean piece of criticism, such a mess suggests the limitation of existing critical work narratives available for women teachers. Their expressions attest to a creative dimension in critical writing in which the writers bring together their body, emotions, dignity, relationships with others, and individuality into a tangible form.