Virtual beginnings . . .

What kind of virtual world do feminists and women inhabit, and what are the implications of their increasingly diverse online activities? This is the central question addressed in this article, which revisits some of my early research on feminist possibilities and potential in the Internet age.[1] In that relatively early (1999) reflection on what cyberspace would mean for women, on how its communicative reach could help to transform their day to day realities and the shape of feminist politics, I focused on three main areas. They all touched on the question of transcendence, whether of physical spaces and boundaries or of communicative ones in the broadest sense. They attempted to link the impact of the Internet to continuities and new possibilities in feminist analysis, politics, and activism.

The first area, and probably the most important, was the public/private as a binary that has contributed profoundly to shaping gendered realities and identities across cultures. The Internet follows and develops the traditions of mass media more generally in breaching public and private divides, operating as it does in the home and the workplace, offering, in many ways, seamless communication and connectivity, where it is accessible.

My sense was that the Internet transformation was especially significant for women, whose lives, and the complex questions of access related to them, had historically been dominated by their identification with the private sphere of social reproduction, care, and affective relations of all kinds. While women are increasingly playing roles in public as well as private spheres, patriarchy continues to frame them predominantly in relation to the private. Thus the significance of their multiple roles across public and private spheres is substantially veiled. This influences not only social perceptions of women but also their senses of self. Thus the second area I looked at was feminism's traditional emphasis on consciousness-raising. This is a means, among other things, of self-realization, affirmation, and connection among women from similar and different backgrounds and contexts. I positioned "transcending silences" as pivotal to such processes and highlighted the importance of safe spaces (away from the disciplinary patriarchal gaze) where women could openly explore the meanings of their lives and validate and critique them.

The new interactivity of the Internet offered multiple opportunities for breaking silences around women's lived experiences, including through new collective networks and political, cultural, and economic online endeavours by individual women.

The third area I discussed was the radical potential of the international reach of the Internet for women, who historically have been doubly burdened by domestic identification: with the home and social reproduction, and with the domestic national setting as opposed to the international one. Feminist international relations scholars have focused extensively on how women have historically been, and remain to a large extent, with notable exceptions, far less present and influential than men in international politics.[2]

My feminist interest is always twofold in this sense: first, in what this domestic identification means for how women perceive and relate to one another internationally (or are restricted from doing so), and, second, in the vital limitations this gendered history has placed on their capacities to shape international relations. These limitations highlight the depth to which women's lives and destinies have been mediated by masculinist (patriarchal) decision-making cultures and processes, notably where death and life are at stake in decisions to go to war or make peace.[3]

The Internet's crossing of national boundaries seemed profound for women, both actually and potentially. The international arena was no longer closed to them as it was before, and communications and activist networks could be built almost as easily across as within national boundaries, allowing for the usual limiting factors of access to the Internet, language barriers, etc.[4] It could be argued that the Internet truly did present for women a whole new world, where they would be able to find one another more easily than in the past, share knowledge and experiences, work together for political and social change, or set up businesses and other ventures.

In all such contexts, the international was more accessible to them than it had ever been. The new communications environment did not of course automatically give women access to the centers of power, whether national or international, political, economic, or cultural. It did offer possibilities for presenting and pursuing women's interests, for building alliances and lobbying at different levels, for keeping in touch more easily with different institutional processes, and for strategizing about how to intervene in them and influence them.

Where are we now, virtually?

The first straightforward answer to this question is, "We don't quite know," and it is a more complex statement than it might at first appear. The arrival of the Internet and burgeoning of its multifarious uses, expected and unexpected, is demonstrating in dramatic ways something that has always been true but now seems much more obvious and "in our faces." While we can observe, research, and analyse facets of what is actually going on in the world, we can never capture the whole in either perceptual or evidential terms.

Investigations for academic, policy, or other purposes provide us with what might be best regarded as fragments of what is really happening; and of course, they often tell us very little about the diverse motivations and the intended and unintended consequences that are in play at any one time. As I say, this has always been the case, but the Internet provides us with a new and powerful illustration of just how deeply true it is.

Why? The technological characteristics of the Internet are a fundamental part of the answer. In its design and operation, and in the creative political, economic, and cultural ways it is used, it provides evidence of the dynamic and ever-changing nature of human interaction increasingly accessible to growing numbers of people. Much that was evident only to specific groups or audiences involved in particular realms or activities is often now available to much larger, constantly changing and expanding online publics.

Virtual networks, as well as the search engines and hyperlinks that help drive them, are taking us into new experiential worlds that cross not only the boundaries of nations and cultures, and of the public and private spheres, mentioned above, but also the traditional divisions within these, such as state and market, civil and commercial society, profit and non-profit, institutional and personal.

In the complexities of this boundary crossing, the Internet has changed the world in many ways. For the first time, those who have Internet access can roam rapidly and easily across different sites of social activity, information, and service provision, and generate a range of identifications, whether as individuals or members of organizations. There are limitations, e.g., government controls against activities defined as criminal or thought to represent security threats, and political censorship in countries such as China. These limitations indicate different strands of Internet governance, some of which may be considered generally in line with democratic processes, and others, such as extensive political censorship, anti-democratic. These strands affirm that state sovereignty and the varied virtual assertions of it are an integral part of the Internet age. They remind us that the transformative potential of the Internet is subject to contrasting forms of control.

The networking principle is key to such transformation and hyperlinks on the Web—connecting different websites and documents to one another—are a core technological expression of this. At the click of a mouse we move between one virtual space and another, experiencing networks of organizations, for example, or following knowledge tracks that piece together connecting bits of information. Such online activity emphasizes interactivity and connectivity. It takes the age-old human activity of networking onto new technological levels, crossing time and space, as well as boundaries of activity, such as politics and the market.

Hyperlinks are at the infrastructural heart of transition to what is familiarly called "the information age," where societies are operating increasingly on the basis of online forms of connection and exchange. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, sums up the shift:

The fundamental principle behind the Web was that once someone somewhere made available a document, database, graphic, sound, video or screen at some stage in an interactive dialogue, it should be accessible (subject to authorisation, of course) by anyone, with any type of computer, in any country. And it should be possible to make a reference—a link—to that thing, so that others could find it. This was a philosophical change from the approach of previous computer systems. People were used to going to find information, but they rarely made references to other computers, and when they did they typically had to quote a long and complex series of instructions to get it.[5]

Berners-Lee's combination of philosophy with the practical and technical nature of this shift to information society is a useful reminder about the links between theory and practice, reflection and action, identification and engagement. Interactivity has become a pretty banal term in its everyday usage, but it does signal a new mode, or perhaps more accurately an expanded one, that binds together the workings of people, the information they produce, consume, and disseminate, and the computers and networks through which connections are made.

So the online world, and much of its political economy and culture, revolve around these aspects of connectivity and the different forms of power and inequality that shape them. The growing use of the Internet means that we increasingly live in and through "sociospatial" (virtual, technologically mediated) contexts, as well as in the more familiar and traditional "geospatial" (physical and bounded) ones, e.g., states and towns.[6]

The intimate, dynamic relationships between identity on the one hand and experiential and associative processes on the other has made it even more difficult in some ways to know exactly what is happening in intertwined sociospatial and geospatial contexts. It has also made it difficult to know exactly who we are or are becoming, in terms both of our network and of our more conventional identities of nationality, for instance. Let me unpack this a little further.

The Internet links in fluid and complicated ways to the real material world: in other words, online and offline motivations and activities relate to and interact with one another. It is difficult enough to study effectively the full complexity of online developments, certainly in terms of their deepest interpersonal and social implications; it is even more challenging to do so once the vast breadth and diverse significance of online/offline confluences has been recognized.

With no intention of being simplistic, I would state that this is partly a matter of speed on many levels. New interactive technologies work at previously unimaginable speeds, and online lives are adapting to these and increasingly being expressed in and through them. Action and meaning, doing and reflection, are more condensed than ever in these circumstances, and can generate causes and effects building on one another at such rapid speeds that tracing the process leads us to whole new ways of thinking about social analysis. While cybermapping[7] is beginning to tell us about communications flows and social networks, we are, in many ways, at the beginning of new research cultures to explore the full and interactive dynamics and consequences of sociospatial and geospatial realities.

It is important to take on board the above problematics when we think about what is actually happening contemporaneously, even just online, and when we consider the implications for future feminist thought and action. Both philosophy and empirical research methodologies and strategies, I would argue, are essential to thinking about new social contexts, and feminism has contributions to make to them. But there are reasons for being concerned that such contributions may be even more overlooked than in the past. In a high-tech era, masculinist traditions of science and technology, with their gendered structures of power and influence, threaten to become even more deeply embedded. Fresh social circumstances should bring fresh opportunities for reflection and analysis. But the relationship between power and knowledge processes indicate that this will not necessarily be the case, and may become an insurmountable challenge in the face of dominant social forces.

Access to the potential of the new online/offline settings is a complicated and multi-dimensional issue, with various inclusionary and exclusionary influences in play, some of which are more immediately evident than others.

These influences include: stark inequalities in basic communications infrastructures across the most and least developed parts of the world; affordability and distribution of computing and communications equipment, including mobile varieties, across both work and home contexts; access and basic know-how to use information and communications technologies (ICTs) across generations and genders; motivations to use ICTs for self-empowerment and improvement on political, economic, or cultural grounds, or to contribute to the wider economy and its growth and prosperity; policy processes at all levels (local, national, global) impacting on priorities for digital developments and regulation; innovations in software and hardware and developments of new business models; education of all kinds related to the digital economy, including the fundamental competence of literacy—another area in which stark contrasts exist between the richest and poorest nations of the world.

While I do not have space to roam exhaustively across all these areas, I want to focus on what appear to be major priorities for feminist reflection at the current time. I draw distinctions between areas where women and feminist influence seem to be most included in virtual transformations, and others where they seem to be most excluded. This is not by any means a complete picture of what is happening, but it gives us a starting point for considering how gender differences and inequalities are both being challenged and disrupted, but also further entrenched in the combined realities of geospatial and sociospatial circumstances.

Women's voices, activities, networks, and activism

Most would agree that there has been an explosion of women's voices, activities, and different forms of networks and activism (social, economic, political, cultural) online. Whether we are thinking of women's involvement in all kinds of organizations, blogs, online publishing and business, campaigning, or community and network building, their engagement in the virtual world is clearly extensive, multifarious, and growing. Women's online presence is as diverse and significant as I could ever have imagined it in the early days of my research, and it has probably grown much more rapidly than I, and perhaps many other researchers, expected it to.

Women are at the forefront of online adventuring and discovery, and this is truly exciting. Sue Thomas is among those showing the way, helping us to relate to online realities and their roots in other forms of endeavor. "Virtual Reality has always been a part of our experience. It is where we are when we think, when we meditate, when we imagine, when we remember. It is a place where we have all been . . ." For her virtual reality (VR) is about thinking and being. "I'm talking about memory, imagination, hopes and inventions. I'm talking about the kind of VR the brain produces all on its own."[8]

Women's virtual presence expands well beyond feminist interests and agendas. Through different channels and for different reasons, women have harnessed the creative, social, communicative, political, cultural, and economic potential of the Web in many different ways.

If we see the online (sociospatial) setting as an expansion of the traditional public sphere of the offline (geospatial) setting, then women and feminists can be seen as major players in making that expansion meaningful. They are active in building online communities, long-term and goal oriented, as well as more transitory and social.[9] Women's online voices and activities, and their linkages to their offline lives and the social processes affecting them, contribute to disrupting the public and private gendered limitations of the historical geospatial world.

The Internet is an international public (as well as private) space or series of spaces. The international presence of women and, equally important, their opportunities to build connections with one another within and across national boundaries, for all kinds of political, economic, cultural and social endeavours, feminist and women-oriented or otherwise, have expanded enormously thanks to the Internet. Women are more public beings than they have ever been, and it could be argued that this is a radical development. The Internet has aided women in forging public presences and identities and building on those to act in online and offline frameworks, international as well as national and local.

It could be argued that this is a whole new situation for women who have access to the Internet, that some of the barriers that women previously confronted in their attempts to access wider (public) settings have been overcome. The Internet facilitates women's public presence and action, their access to virtual politics and the digital economy. This new situation has many stimulating and liberating implications for women and girls, for they now have many more possibilities to imagine alternative public selves and ways in which these can be achieved, for example, as international political activists and campaigners, Internet entrepreneurs and online innovators, community builders and shapers.

So now there are new challenges for feminist thinking to inhabit the problematics and possibilities of the online as well as the offline, for women's individual and collective identities, for their diverse contributions to society, and for thinking about the kinds of futures that confront their communities and about how they might like to steer them differently. Women's larger public presence, thanks to online communications and activities, is in many ways a major cause for celebration and hope among those men and women who see greater gender equality as at least in part about reaching towards women's full potential across public and private spheres.

Let's stay with the possibilities of online-offline interaction before moving on to the problematics. These possibilities put new pressure on feminist theory, activism, and politics. They call for new imaginings about paths to liberation, self-realization and discovery, and community generation. I call to mind two early pioneers in this area, whose analysis follows rather different but related directions, related certainly in the sense that they are focused on women as full participants in this new cyber age. Dale Spender made clear calls for women to be as fully involved as possible in this new Internet era, to be authors as much as users in the new multimedia environment, and usefully examined how ICTs were interweaving technological processes with other socially creative ones. From her perspective, the traditional notion of the author would translate into "a new combination of artist and scientist, a new breed which has both craft and technological expertise, a new band of infotainers."[10]

Spender's analysis helped me to develop my understanding of ICTs in a social as well as a technical sense, but it did even more than that. She stressed how ICTs, as tools and means of expression and communication, were becoming integral to social creation. They were impacting not only on how we created but also on what we created. Of authors, she adds: "They will be visually literate, as well as computer and print literate (and 'sound-literate' too). They could be the shapers of future culture in the way that authors have been the value-makers of the past."[11]

Spender focused directly on the interface with ICTs and science and technology more broadly, as did Donna Haraway in her well-known work on the theme of the cyborg, which provided a basis for a lot of thinking in what we might call the cyberfeminist mode.[12] Intrinsic to this mode, for me, is the recognition of the new intimacy between machines and interpersonal and social processes that ICTs and their expansion in daily life represent.

If we take the cyborg concept seriously, it gestures towards a fusion of machine and human processes. I would certainly see ICTs as yet another and distinctive stage in the story of men's and women's interdependence with machines, which has increasingly characterized life in industrial (and now also post-industrial) capitalism. Cyberfeminism as a new turn in feminist thought and politics takes up, among other things, the possibilities and the problems confronting women in a virtual world where ICTs increasingly mediate experiences and relations.[13]

This is a significant shift in feminism, both philosophically and practically. While cyberfeminism remains concerned with established questions of freedom and oppression, liberation and equality, feminist imagining and creativity, community building, and so on, it addresses these in the context of how women are relating to ICTs and what they mean in their lives.

Cyberfeminism and the politics of ICTs

There are evident celebratory threads in cyberfeminism, some of which touch on the new public presence and connectivity ICTs facilitate for women, referred to above, and others of which focus on areas such as creativity, play, work, and online gender transcendence. One of the notable characteristics of cyberfeminism is its attention to the imaginings of women online, both individual and collective. I see cyberfeminism as a definite expansion of the consideration and assessment of how women think about each other and the world generally, of how they express, share, and put their ideas in practice, for instance, in forming new communities or businesses or launching political campaigns or organizations.

Cyberfeminism can in part be seen as both a set of responses to the woman-machine interface and an ongoing recognition that much more may be possible than we have even begun to imagine. Cyberfeminism has done much to focus attention on the politics of ICTs, and this work has wide relevance to the new Internet era writ large, to men's and women's experience of and reactions to it, and to the social shifts that are arising from it. Thus, I view cyberfeminism as a major contribution to wider social analysis of Internet developments, applicable far beyond the concerns of feminism and women, and with insights that are relevant to the evolving nature of politics in the hybrid geospatial and sociospatial world.

Cyberfeminism recognizes and works with that hybridity; it is thus one of the new trends in social analysis that integrate the communicative spaces of the virtual sphere with the more familiar concrete offline settings of social activity. Cyberfeminism is also best viewed as a site of debate and philosophical contestation as well as of practical application, because, in line with the history of feminist thought and action, variety and disagreement, contrasting perspectives and tensions, are fully in evidence. So there is a rich politics around and within cyberfeminism itself, featuring the familiar oppositions of utopian and fearful interpretations, hopes and aspirations as well as suspicions.

Cyberfeminism has highlighted continuity as much as discontinuity (the old as well as the new)—for example, in the area of connectivity and networking. Much feminist analysis of ICTs has emphasized that networking did not begin with the Internet but was already well established in women's and feminist (as well as other forms of) politics, and also that familiar modes of networking, such as newsletters, briefings, and face-to-face gatherings, continue alongside and interact with new online modes.[14] Use of the Internet expands networking rather than introducing it as a whole new phenomenon, and it builds on skills that have been applied for a long time.

Cyberfeminist debates recall and revisit history, and recontextualize it in new circumstances, as much as they make entirely new discoveries. And, I would argue, this is one of cyberfeminism's strengths, one of the lessons it offers to other forms of social analysis of ICTs. A key area in this regard is women's problematic relationship to science and technology, fields that have tended historically to be dominated by men and masculinist (western-centred) cultures.[15] If we take deep account of the ways in which the new cyber age is based on the long history of the dominant masculinist scientific paradigm, we realize that there will be an uphill battle for women to be fully included in this new age at every level of theory, practice, and policy.

Here we come to the dualisms that have shaped gender relations and identities. The science-over-nature pairing joins with male-over-female, rationality-over-emotion, and mind-over-body oppositions.[16] If anything, the weight of these mutually reinforcing dualisms is all the more powerful in an age where increasing amounts of social activity and connection are technologically mediated. Their definitional, institutionalized, and discursive roles in asserting and maintaining power relations between masculine and feminine influences, between men and women, in theory as well as in practice, are more important than they have ever been.

I would make two points about this situation. The first is that it reaffirms both the relevance of feminist analysis, and its focus on these dualistic notions and orientations, to questions about how the world works and who has the power (both in terms of identities and opportunities) to change and improve it. The binding of the dominant male world to the potency of science and technology and their rationalistic tendencies, and the driving forces these represent in the constant expansion of industrial and post-industrial capitalism, is fundamental to the times we live in.

Science and technology-over-nature modes of thinking are partly to blame for the inadequate attention to the negative side effects of such expansion. These include the growing problem of overconsumption alongside expanding, pollution-generating production. The expansion also features extreme inequalities between the richest and poorest countries as well as between those at different ends of the wealth scale within them.[17] What is frequently not sufficiently recognized is how much ICTs contribute to furthering consumption and production trends. Constant innovation and the replacement of old with new technology have never been higher priorities, resulting in mountains of junked and often barely used hardware. Once again we have crucial continuities with the industrial era in so-called post-industrial or virtual processes. There are disjunctures and new possibilities (including the replacement of teleprocesses for polluting jet and car travel) alongside the embedding of old tendencies.

Feminists have emphasized the connection between technological science and nature,[18] rather than the separation and hierarchy of the former over the latter, and also the need to think about "embodied political economy."[19] These arguments have a greater role than ever in current debates about the radical changes needed to avert extreme levels of environmental damage associated with modern and postmodern economies and lifestyles.

The second point I want to raise is that the strand of feminist critique and activism in the areas of science and technology is now expanding significantly, thanks to new focus on ICTs and their far-reaching implications. My assessment is that this will be a major feminist trajectory for the future, building on the vital early work on gender and technology of such individuals as Cynthia Cockburn, Swasti Mitter, and Sheila Rowbotham, to name a few.[20] Gendered relations to technology are intimately bound to gendered divisions of labor and the education, training, and skills associated with them.[21]

Feminist theory, activism, and policy work is addressing how ICTs are contributing to the global reshaping of our lives and work and creating new and embedded gender inequalities, as well as fresh potential, which is being harnessed by women across North and South. At issue here are technological capacities, know-how, and applications, as well as the policy structures and decision-making processes that impact on them. The historic dominance of the realms of science and technology by men and masculinist culture continues to be relevant to the ICT age. And the fact that ICTs are becoming integral to growing areas of educational, political, economic, and cultural activity means that technological gender inequalities threaten to become even more pervasive in both direct and indirect ways.

Women's and girls' disadvantages in terms of access to education and skills, income and available time, are all in play when we consider their potential for full engagement and empowerment in the ICT era, especially in poorer societies and sectors of society. It is clear that many aspects of women's and girls' social positioning and experience impact on this potential. Sophia Huyer has therefore explained that there needs to be an "enabling environment" supporting women's equal access to ICTs and their benefits, and that this needs to incorporate policy and regulatory frameworks.[22] There also needs to be "content" addressing women's social and economic concerns, efforts to increase their representation in science and technology education and training, expanded women's employment in ICTs, and support for women's SMEs (small- and medium-sized business enterprises) and earning in this area, and "e-governance" processes that are inclusive for women and their interests and rights.

Cyberfutures and gender equality

It seems to me that feminism is alive and well, evolving and changing in these cyber times. Women's online voices and activities expand day by day across the world, as does their diversity. ICTs represent an expanded public sphere where women are agents as innovators, social and economic entrepreneurs, activists and campaigners, networkers and community builders, policy lobbyists and protestors. Feminists and women are thinking creatively and critically about the potential of the Internet and the problems it poses.

Such thinking is being undertaken and expressed across myriad contexts: informally in blogs, chatrooms, and email discussion lists, as well as more formally through NGO Web sites, projects, and policy documents, online and offline journals and other publications. Many areas of women's lives have literally moved online in anticipated and unanticipated ways, and this volume and diversity is bound to grow. Sociospatial developments are contributing to transcendence of the traditional private/public divides that have historically worked to define women and their lives.

Feminist theory and women's practice is playing major roles in helping to create the new virtual world, and I anticipate that they will continue to do so. Feminist analysis of gendered and broad socio-economic exclusions impacting on relationships to and use of technology have, furthermore, become of even greater significance now that the pervasive role of ICTs is growing day by day in societies around the world. Feminist sensitivities to the socially shaped, rather than neutral, nature of technology have much to contribute to the understanding of policy makers and other practitioners wishing to build an inclusive ICT environment. These sensitivities apply not just to women but also to all others suffering from disadvantages in literacy, education, technical know-how, entrepreneurial skills, available income, and time.

NGOs are playing a vital part in networking with women across North and South towards such inclusiveness. And they are involved not only in practical training programs, especially in the South, but also in making the vital links between gender analysis and policy processes through research and information dissemination and advocacy. The Association for Progressive Communication's Women's Networking Support Program is one example of such long-standing and wide-ranging work (see also, for example, Women in Global Science and Technology and ISIS International Manila). Such work demonstrates how women and feminist politics are making theory-practice connections in direct relation to ICT transformations.

One of the most powerful trajectories offered by feminist work in relation to virtual progress is the spotlight it maintains on the challenges of making this progress inclusive in a world where technological power and expertise is not only gendered, but highly uneven, notably between North and South but also within North and South. ICTs may be enabling previously unknown levels of connectivity, but this only highlights the exclusion of those without access to them or influence over how they are developed and used. We may be living in times of utopian virtual possibilities, but they are also times that threaten even deeper social and global divisions if the kinds of warnings about exclusion that feminist voices articulate are not heeded and acted on, not just for women, as I have made clear, but for all.

Endnotes

1. Gillian Youngs, "Virtual Voices: Real Lives," in Women@Internet: Creating New Cultures in Cyberspace, ed. Wendy Harcourt (London: Zed Books, 1999). [Return to text]

2. See especially Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. London: Pandora, 1989); Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics (London: Routledge, 1996); and Gillian Youngs, "Women Breaking Boundaries in Cyberspace," in "Women's Status in the Era of High Technology," special issue, Asian Women 10 (2000): 1-18. [Return to text]

3. See Gillian Youngs, "Feminism and Peace: Towards a New World?," in America and the World: The Double Bind, ed. Majid Tehranian and Kevin P. Clements (London: Transaction, 2005). [Return to text]

4. See Harcourt, ed., Women@Internet. [Return to text]

5. Tim Berners-Lee (with Mark Fischetti), Weaving the Web: The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor (London: Orion, 1999), 40. [Return to text]

6. Gillian Youngs, Global Political Economy in the Information Age: Power and Inequality (London: Routledge, 2007). [Return to text]

7. Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchen, Atlas of Cyberspace (London: Addison Wesley, 2001). [Return to text]

8. Sue Thomas, Hello World: Travels in Virtuality (York: Raw Nerve Books, 2004), 44. [Return to text]

9. See Gillian Youngs, "Globalization, Communication and Technology: Making the Democratic Links," Politica Internazionale 1-2 (January-April, 2001): 217-26. [Return to text]

10. Dale Spender, Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace (North Melbourne: Spinifex, 1995), 92. [Return to text]

11. Ibid., 92. [Return to text]

12. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, New York: 1991) and Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouse®: Feminism and Technoscience (London: Routledge, 1997). [Return to text]

13. See, for example, Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein, eds., CyberFeminism: Connectivity, Critique and Creativity (North Melbourne: Spinifex, 1999). [Return to text]

14. See Harcourt, ed., Women@Internet, and Hawthorne and Klein, CyberFeminism. [Return to text]

15. Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998). [Return to text]

16. See the range of perspectives on this in Gillian Youngs, Political Economy, Power and the Body: Global Perspectives (London: Macmillan, 2000). [Return to text]

17. Youngs, Global Political Economy; Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002). [Return to text]

18. See, for example, Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books, 1993). [Return to text]

19. Gillian Youngs, "Embodied Political Economy or an Escape from Disembodied Knowledge," in Political Economy, Power and the Body: Global Perspectives, ed. Gillian Youngs (London: Macmillan, 2000), 11-30. [Return to text]

20. See, for example, Cynthia Cockburn, "Domestic Technologies: Cinderella and the Engineers," Women's Studies International Forum 20, no. 3 (1997): 361-71. See also Cynthia Cockburn and Susan Ormrod, Gender and Technology in the Making (London: Sage, 1993) and Cynthia Cockburn and Ruza Fürst-Dilic, eds., Bringing Technology Home: Gender and Technology in a Changing Europe (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994); Swasti Mitter and Sheila Rowbotham, Women Encounter Technology: Changing Patterns of Employment in the Third World (London: Routledge, 1995). [Return to text]

21. See, for example Sylvia Walby, Gender Transformations (London: Routledge,1997) and Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2006). [Return to text]

22. Sophia Huyer, "Understanding Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in the Knowledge Society," in Cinderella or Cyberella? Empowering Women in the Knowledge Society, eds. Nancy J. Hafkin and Sophia Huyer (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2006), 32-3. [Return to text]