Making the Virtual Real:
Feminist Challenges in the Twenty-First Century

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.¹ 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.² 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.³ 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.⁴ 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,⁵ rather than the separation and hierarchy of the former over the latter, and also the need to think about “embodied political economy.”⁶ 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.⁷ Gendered relations to technology are intimately bound to gendered divisions of labor and the education, training, and skills associated with them.⁸

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.⁹ 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.

1. See Harcourt, ed., Women@Internet, and Hawthorne and Klein, CyberFeminism. [↩]
2. Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998). [↩]
3. See the range of perspectives on this in Gillian Youngs, Political Economy, Power and the Body: Global Perspectives (London: Macmillan, 2000). [↩]
4. Youngs, Global Political Economy; Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002). [↩]
5. See, for example, Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books, 1993). [↩]
6. 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. [↩]
7. 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). [↩]
8. 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). [↩]
9. 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. [↩]