Beautiful script, cute spelling and glamorous words: Doing girlhood through language playfulness on Israeli blogs

Research on language and gender in CMC has evolved through two trajectories: differences between men and women, and the performance of gender through linguistic resources; both are still underrepresented in languages other than English. While previous studies of language playfulness in CMC have focused mainly on typography and orthography, this study demonstrates a playful principle evoked for performing a specific gender identity across four linguistic levels: digital typography, deviant orthography and morphology, and lexical borrowing. The paper emerges from a larger ethnography of the Hebrew-language blogosphere. I argue gender is performed online through linguistic style choices associated with stereotypical differences and offer CMC constraints and globalization as layers of sensibility that interplay with feminist discourse on language and gender.