Connect - Cyber Feminity - A Web of complexity

Radhika Gajjala is currently an assistant professor in the School of communication studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, usa. Radhika is from Hyderabad, India, but spent childhood (schooling and vacationing) and teenage years variously in Bombay, Nigeria, Bangkok,Jakarta and Hyderabad. Spent some of my married life in Bhopal, India. During this period she was a stay-at-home mother and wrote and published the occasional short story, poem and non-fiction article. She says, "I consider my "home" in the U.S. to be Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where my husband and I did our Phd's and our son spent most of his life. Currently, we are a happily "commuting" and "computing" family."

Writer's note: The following is a version/excerpt from my published, ongoing and forthcoming work (one of Aiko Joshi's contribution SAWF refers to some of the issues I have worked on) in relation to cyberculture, race, gender and class etc. It is not in my usual conversational style of writing for SAWF. I thought it appropriate for the forum, considering some of the discussions and issues raised in the SAWF forum and the guestbook entries. This excerpt is meant not as a conclusive statement, but as a contribution to on-going dialogues.

Thanks,
Radhika Gajjala

http://www.cyberdiva.org

Is it possible for women to find electronic space as a site for re-inventing and re-representing themselves? Or have the more traditional representations and structures of femininity--both textual and visual--found in mass culture, simply found a new home in a new medium, leaving women both complicit and resistant to the more dominant, less subversive image of Woman within mass culture.

Much feminist thought about the Internet can be divided into two camps, one involving a rhetoric of empowerment, stressing increased access to communities and relationships, gender anonymity, and experimentation with multiple selves (Turkle, Stone). And the other stressing a rhetoric of victimization (e.g., Spender), chronicling instances in which women are harassed, flamed, or ignored on-line. Both theoretical and empirical treatments across various disciplines have begun to question not merely whether or not virtual communities for women exist, but what fosters or inhibits their development into genuine empowering e-spaces for women. However, most of these analyses rely on an examination of women-centered or women-friendly e-spaces. The unit of analysis in such studies is still a universal category of "woman" as constructed within hegemonic Western feminist discourses. These discourses regarding the construction of woman as subject rely too much on a "single-theme analysis" where the category "woman" can implicitly be separated from other categories of lived experience such as race, class, caste and geographical location. It is presumed that each of these categories is autonomous. Yet, as Norma Alarcon points out, such analyses ignore the fact that "one `becomes a woman' in ways that are more complex than in simple opposition to men. In cultures in which `asymmetric race and class relations are a central organizing principle of society,' one may also `become a woman' in opposition to other women."

Popular as well as academic discourses regarding the potential for information communication technologies (ICTs) in fostering democratic modes of being are most often either utopic or dystopic. Few scholars actually examine the contradictions visible in the approach we take to online existence. Questions related to virtual community and virtual interaction are often framed within mind/body, male/female, private/public binaries. Issues of accountability and responsibility to complex RL (real life) embodied existence are not adequately explored. Within such a framing, it is easy to look for and find essentialized notions of "male" and "female" styles of interaction as mutually exclusive categories manifested online, while erasing the complexities and contradictions visible in the discursive subjects that emerge online.

In general, some of my recent writing critiques the notion of "woman-centered" spaces as empowering in and of themselves. In order to examine if women from various lived contexts, mediated by unequal economic, social and cultural power-relations are indeed going to be inevitably empowered through the use of technology, we need to engage in an analysis that takes into consideration all the intersections and complexities involved in "conceptualizations of identity, opposition, consciousness and voice" (Dhaliwal, 1996). Class, caste, race, sexuality, age, geographical location and so on should not be mere "add-on" categories in such an analysis.

Till we Connect again next week...