Sex And Money: Feminism and Political Economy in the Media

4. An Unsuitable Technology for a Woman? Communication as Circulation

“Women’s use of men’s technology would come to no good end,” said telephone developers and so-called experts in the early expansion of telephony (Marvin 1988, 23). For them, the telephone was too serious a technology to be used as women would for what men called frivolous matters. Many feminist studies on new information technologies adopt a position close to that of early telephone developers and claim that technologies such as the Internet embody male culture and hence are hostile to women. Are communication technologies gendered? My previous research shows that who can have access to and who can determine the uses of systems of communication depends on a complex relationship among the social, political, and economic conditions under which such systems developed. From my position, a central element in the development of systems of communication is their role in the process of circulation and accumulation of capital. It is this role that I wish particularly to examine in this chapter. The importance of capitalist accumulation in the development of modern systems of communication is largely absent from the feminist studies that I have reviewed. Given the rapidly changing conditions of the field, I limited the corpus of my analysis to feminist studies on women and new technologies of communication published from 1993 to 1999 in feminist or other types of journals or in books. Though my analysis is not exhaustive, I believe it to be representative of the kind of feminist research done on such issues. The stress put by feminists on empirical studies, though important and useful, raises questions as to the shortcomings of conceptual approaches: Can we sustain, theoretically, that communication technologies are gendered? Could there be other ways of conceptualizing what seems to be an a priori gender-bound conceptualization? I do not pretend to give a satisfactory answer to these questions, but I think they deserve to be raised. The aim of my discussion is to suggest some paths of research that might be useful to consider in feminist analysis of modern systems of communication. To do so, I begin by reviewing some of the most recent works on women, the globalization process, and communication technologies, thereby uncovering some 49 4. An Unsuitable Technology for a Woman? Communication as Circulation Michèle Martin leading recurrent themes and questions. Then, using Marx’s approach to communication technologies, I discuss the link between communication and the circulation and accumulation of capital. Finally, I examine how modern systems of communication are mutually related to different spheres of society: the economy, the state, social relations, and how and why this relationship may affect women’s relation to modern systems of communication. Some Themes in Feminist Research Various themes are explored in the works reviewed for this discussion. The theme of women’s labor related to diverse situations in the global economic structures seems to be of particular concern for some scholars : women’s exploitation by big conglomerates, especially in lessdeveloped countries (e.g., Marchand 1996; Giri 1995; Spivak 1996, 1999); the impact of information technology on household female workers in subaltern occupations (e.g., Menzies 1996); the appropriate training given to women to integrate successfully in the globalization of capital (e.g., Peterson 1996; Hurgenberg et al. 1994); and the impact of the development of information technology on women scholars (e.g., Morritt 1996, 1997; Taylor et al. 1993). The role of the state in relation to issues raised in this area of study has emerged frequently, particularly the state’s weak or lacking intervention in regulating gender discrimination on the net or in media production (e.g., Knupfer 1996a, 1996b; Shade 1996, 1998); in developing policies eliminating the unequal accessibility of new technology for women (e.g., Taylor et al. 1993) or in erasing hate speech, pornography, sexual harassment on the net (e.g., Shade 1996); in supporting the construction of gendered identity within the process of globalization of communication (e.g., Peterson 1996). The use of the Internet has particularly attracted the attention of feminist research on new technologies. As stated earlier, there seems to be some consensus among feminists that technology is embedding a strong male culture that may prevent women from using it. Many studies are concerned with the ways such a culture could be overcome, or circumvented—through legal interventions (e.g., Kramarae and Kramer 1995); teaching women a critical approach to systems of communication (e.g., Luthra 1996); increasing the number of women using the net (e.g., Senjen and Guthrey...