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