Gillian Youngs, "Making the Virtual Real:
Feminist Challenges in the Twenty-First Century" (Page 3 of 5)
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.
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