Reinforcing, Refashioning, and Rejecting Do What You Love: How Professional Women Lifestyle Bloggers Negotiate the Paradox of Passion in Digital Labor

Abstract This study examines how women professional lifestyle bloggers in the United States negotiated the discourse “do what you love” (DWYL) as a source of meaningful work. While DWYL has many empowering aspects, this discourse can become self-exploitative and a form of hegemonic control. Specifically, we unpack how bloggers navigated DWYL in their digital labor in the overlap of paid labor and passion. Through an analysis of reflective blog posts, women bloggers were found to (a) reinforce DWYL by upholding passion as the main source of meaningful work and criteria for career choices, (b) refashion DWYL by finding a balance between passion and paid work to mitigate burnout, or (c) reject DWYL through detaching passion from paid labor. The study contributes to feminist communication research by exposing how seemingly liberating workplace discourses can perpetuate women’s marginalized position and explicating ways that women comply with and resist hegemonic workplace mantras.