Feminist interventions in electronic environments

Canadian Journal of Communication, 2005

An emancipatory politics of technology requires more than hardware and software; it needs wetware-bodies, fluid, human agency.

2018

This introductory essay outlines the main theoretical and contextual frameworks of the special issue. It argues that the focus on women and technology advances the gender studies agenda of the journal while reframing and updating the current understanding of Russian, Eurasian and Central European new media within the global context of digital information flows and technological development. The ways in which gender is discussed and the degree to which gender equality is a political, social or theoretical concern offers an important window to understanding geographically and culturally localized processes. As the theoretical and methodological framework for the contributions to follow, the introduction discusses a range of feminist approaches to technology. It also discusses some significant gender biases in the history of women and computing in the Soviet Union, which have impacted the further development and cultural understanding of one of the largest national online networks, the...

Feminist Media Studies , 2010

This paper is part of a preliminary investigation toward a postfeminist analysis of “the user.” It critically examines the pervasive liberatory rhetoric of interactivity through situating it within a widespread cultural context also rife with liberatory rhetoric: postfeminism. Two media properties, heavily marketed for interactivity, are examined: the first three films of the Final Destination film series and the reality television program Big Brother (US). I situate each as postfeminist texts, and then analyze their interactivity through this lens, demonstrating the utility of applying postfeminism to technology study. Following the feminist method of analyzing popular texts as modes of understanding feminine ideals, thereby articulating contours of a feminine subject position, I argue that analyses of postfeminist culture are productive broadly applied to cultural products, such as interactive media, augmenting feminist media theory. To understand ideals of technological usership, one must understand the culture in which they are embedded. Therefore, articulating the contours of the user as a subject position benefits from understanding postfeminist cultural sensibilities. Through this analysis, I describe the user, contrary to much new media theorizing, as exhibiting an illusory rhetoric of agency, hyperembodiment suffused with temporality and mobility, and an interactivity better understood as ongoing assessment and adjustment.

Topia Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2006

made important contributions to the political economy of communications and its relations to digital technology. Despite the important insights of these scholars, most of this work does not address, incorporate or attend to gender in its conceptualization nor engage with any of the insights and/or contributions in feminist scholarship on technology. One of the few overt feminist critiques of the discipline came from Gertrude Robinson, a long time scholar in the field. In 1998, she explored how feminism has contributed to communication studies through its incorporation of "gender as one of the primary social organizers which works in conjunction with economic and political relationships," yet this work continues to be marginalized. We hope that in this short offering we can characterize the rich and evergrowing critical feminist perspective on digital technology and reveal the ways in which this work can enhance, invigorate, and perpetuate/innovate the important contributions Canadian scholars have made to the discipline in communication studies.

Past research on gender online has made important land gains but under-theorizes the Internet as a passive, fixed, and somewhat insubstantial space or context. By contrast, this special issue draws on new material thinking to put into questions the very notion of “cyberspace” as a distinct realm. In this vein, the contents of this issue critically examine how the Internet and related digital technologies actively “work” to maintain or transform systems of oppression, as displayed, for example, in the digital doing(s) of gender. They also show how digital technologies and related concepts can be used to challenge current understandings of race, class, and gender and to produce and provoke new forms of knowledge. While the contents of this issue are drawn from different fields and display great diversity, the individual contributions of each author helps to chart out three potent venues for future Internet research: namely digital gender as perspective, phenomena, and practice.

This article explores gendered practices in new media formations. We consider the ways that emergent practices in new media bring to the fore and make more explicit some previously submerged practices. In identity construction, in spatial practices, and in the productive labor of users of new media, we see examples of how the fluidity of gender can be highlighted, the cultural specificity of some often taken for granted and naturalized practices can be more readily understood as constructed, and ironically, how the overt and self-congratulatory crowing of some gamer and geek cultures draws attention to their misogyny, creating a much bigger and more easily identifiable target for counterstrategies. The intersection of emergent technologies and sociocultural practices creates new areas of gendered negotiations.

The birth of the Internet in 1989 was accompanied by warnings that women could easily be excluded from new mass communication technologies. Such fears now seem to be groundless: women are enthusiastic and proficient users and developers of Internet-based interaction systems. Nonetheless, concerns remain that patterns of computer mediated communication (CMC) might reflect gender stereotypes in embodied interaction that favour men, and hence CMC use might reinforce and perpetuate wider gender discrimination.

Television & New Media, 2014

This article explores gendered practices in new media formations. We consider the ways that emergent practices in new media bring to the fore and make more explicit some previously submerged practices. In identity construction, in spatial practices, and in the productive labor of users of new media, we see examples of how the fluidity of gender can be highlighted, the cultural specificity of some often taken for granted and naturalized practices can be more readily understood as constructed, and ironically, how the overt and self-congratulatory crowing of some gamer and geek cultures draws attention to their misogyny, creating a much bigger and more easily identifiable target for counterstrategies. The intersection of emergent technologies and sociocultural practices creates new areas of gendered negotiations.

Feminist thinkers offer new interpretations of the role of technology in social life. As society has progressed, men have become culture-centered rather than nature-centered, while women have remained nature-centered. Thus, women's devaluation resides in man's desire to control both nature and women. The values of objectivity, progress, rationality, production, and competition are masculine, while nurturance, emotionality, intuition, and cooperation are values traditionally assigned to women. Even so, women have been active creators and innovators throughout history, though most of the knowledge of women's roles as technological developers has been erased. Women will be affected most as new technologies invade the home, the office, and other workplaces. For example, as technology revolutionizes life in third world countries, it has had both positive and negative effects on women's status and situation. Also, the spheres of men and women traditionally have been public...