Gendered Power and Mobile Technology

Intersections in the Global South

Caroline Wamala Larsson, Laura Stark, Caroline Wamala Larsson, Laura Stark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351708135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Mobile phones are widely viewed as the information and communication technology that holds the most promise for bridging global digital divides.

Gendered Power and Mobile Technology uses empirical research to focus on changing intersections between technology, gender and other categories of social and cultural power difference (such as age, race, class, and ethnicity) in the use of mobile communication technologies. Asking how these intersections can inform development discourse, practice, and research, this volume seeks to rectify the lack of attention to the Global South, calling for more sensitivity to the contexts and consequences of mobile phone use. Indeed, drawing on case studies from Ecuador, Ghana, Kenya, Mexico, Peru, Tanzania, and Uganda, this book engages with the intersectionality paradigm to tease out the complexities of using mobile technologies for development purposes.

Gendered Power and Mobile Technology will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as media studies, development studies, gender and technology, feminist technoscience, anthropology, and sociology.

1 Rethinking gender and technology within intersections in the Global South

Laura Stark and Caroline Wamala Larsson

Background and rationale

For over a decade, the dominant development narratives surrounding mobile communication technologies have emphasized that they can be used to narrow socio-economic disparities across genders, countries, and regions. The basic premise of this media and policy rhetoric is that the economically less privileged populations of the Global South have leapfrogged into modernity via information and communication technologies (ICTs), with especially mobile phones having become ‘the latest champions of poverty reduction’ (Sey 2011, 376). If the focus is purely on technological connectivity in its most basic sense, it can be argued that the digital divide between societies has narrowed considerably over the past two decades. Mobile phones have been widely adopted among even the poorest of the poor in low-income countries, and they enable communication and information exchange in the remotest parts of the globe. In the Global South, mobile phones have rapidly become the communication technology with the broadest and most intensive social impact on the everyday lives of individuals. Many in the developing world are just as much members of the new digital generation as those living in the Global North (Gajjala 2014). Given the increasing availability of smartphones, the effects of mobile-transmitted data and communication are only poised to increase in the developing world.

At the same time, this techno-optimism has come under criticism. Enthusiasm over mobiles for development (M4D) relies on assumptions that mobile phones can function as ‘smart catalysts to development’ because they are frequently the most complex technological device in rural villages and the only modern technology owned personally by those in poverty. Yet, the benefits of mobile technology can only reach marginalized persons in developing countries if users are not disadvantaged by access to these technologies or gaps in usage ability (Dodson et al. 2013, 79; Murphy & Priebe 2011). Digital and communicative divides are gendered, as well as structured by age, socio-economic status, education, language, and geography. Thus, M4D and feminist technology research need to map out the place of mobile phones within a broader ecosystem of social power dynamics.

Although feminist technology studies have been instrumental in developing the theoretical and methodological tools to analyse technology and gender simultaneously, there has been relatively little attention to the experiences from non-Western societies. This has meant that theoretical and methodological standards have been largely informed by Western accounts (Bray 2007, 47; Mellström 2009). Having organized and participated in M4D conferences and events, the editors of this volume acknowledge that gendered experiences in the developing world and its attributes are not always made visible in academic events and discourse. The impetus for producing this anthology arose from this lack, contributing to existing debates how gender and mobile telephony mutually constitute each other in processes of design, use, and access.

Redressing the relative lack of non-Western experiences with technology, especially those related to gender, race, and class, is necessary to help gender and technology research realize its transformative potential and embrace the diversity of human-technology relations from a gendered and feminist perspective. As Mellström (2009, 888) notes, in order to develop the ‘gender’ in gender and technology studies, the ‘huge spectrum of variations in gender subjectivities in relation to artefacts and technology’ should be explored.

The focus of this volume is the role of mobile phones and their epistemologies in shaping the production of gender in non-Western realities. It has three aims: to extend discussions within feminist technology studies to include scholars from the Global South, to present a critique of the techno-optimism still proclaimed in policy and media discourses, and to encourage more intersectional debates on uses of mobile technology. Because the majority of empirically based, theoretically informed investigations regarding the impact of mobile telephony on identity and power focus on societies in the Global North, in our volume, we bring the ‘margins to the centre’ in that we adopt a non-Euro/American-centric perspective, expanding our knowledge of mobile technology use to communities in Ecuador, Ghana, Kenya, Mexico, Peru, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Using empirical case studies, this book calls for more sensitivity to the gendered, sociocultural, and political contexts of behaviours linked to mobile use, as well as the consequences of that use (Horst & Miller 2006; Masika & Bailur 2015; Tacchi et al. 2012; Tenhunen 2008). In addition to research focusing on mobile telephony itself, research that asks empirical questions about mobile phone can, for instance, be used as a methodological tool for perceiving and identifying social hierarchies that are not readily visible (Ling & Horst 2011; Wamala-Larsson this volume; Stark this volume). Practices linked to mobile telephony can indicate gendered power differences even at the simplest level of usage. One example is Caroline Wamala’s (2013) research on beeping in Sub-Saharan Africa. Beeping practices follow social resource hierarchies and encode performances of masculinity and femininity. By giving a girlfriend airtime and encouraging her to beep him, the boyfriend defines himself as responsible and in charge of the relationship, in opposition to a ‘cheap’ man who cannot provide for his female partner.

The critiques of techno-optimistic views of mobile communication technologies can be reduced to three main arguments. First, development discourses surrounding the promise of poverty reduction through mobile phones have been accused of reflecting neoliberal perspectives in which only ‘the rapid flow of information via the mobile phone combined with individual initiative and entrepreneurialism’ is seen to be necessary to create an even playing field within the market (Wallis 2011, 473). These perspectives represent ‘narrow technological visions that ignore complex rural realities and long-term gendered dynamics of technology usage’ (Murphy & Priebe 2011, 15) and display insufficient regard for gender- and class-related inequalities (Wallis 2011, 473). The ideology of technology-enabled ‘entrepreneurship for all’ embedded in mainstream development policies directed towards the poor may disempower those women who, for lack of education, aptitude, access to starting capital, or necessary social networks, cannot take a market-driven path out of poverty (Cai et al. 2015). Rather than ‘becoming dazzled by the shiny new vista that the digital age appears to open up’, the authors in this book view information technologies as ‘a significant lens’ through which we can critically examine everyday life, relationships, and power dynamics (Green & Singleton 2013, 36).

A second critique centres on which transformations mobile phones can actually bring about in the Global South. Recent research on gender and mobile communication in the development context has provided evidence that mobile connectivity neither solves poverty nor shifts the hierarchical boundaries of class, but is incorporated with surprising ease by previous social structures (Doron 2012; Murphy & Priebe 2011; Tawah 2013; Wallis 2011). Kibere (2016), for instance, discusses how widespread mobile connectivity among Kenyan youth in Africa’s most infamous slum cannot overcome the stigma of their place of residence, a social marker that excludes them from social networks and makes it difficult for them to find employment. Slum youth find it easier to network with foreigners who visit the slum or have worked for international aid organizations than to digitally engage with members of more privileged classes in their own society (Kibere 2016).

Scholarship on gender, technology, and the Global South has been criticized for conceptualizing both oppression and resistance from Eurocentric perspectives (Mohanty 2003; Narayan 1997; Parameswaran 2007). In such universalizing assumptions, a woman of colour, lower class or caste, or a Third World inhabitant is ‘imagined as somehow frozen in time, living a life without leisure or fun, and oppressed by the men in her community’ (Gajjala 2014, 290). In fact, both men and women in Third World contexts of poverty and exclusion do, in fact, use digital technologies for leisure, pleasure, and consumption (Tenhunen 2014a, 44). Measuring women’s empowerment through income levels or financial independence, a common approach in gender and technology research, can be a problematic gauge since many of the benefits women report gaining from mobile phones are subjective and intangible such as freedom from danger (Murphy & Priebe 2011) and feelings of greater self-worth and competence in serving one’s community (Chib & Hsueh-Hua Chen 2011).

Since societies are the medium through which all humans understand the world around them and themselves as agents (with greater or lesser freedom of choice), ‘freeing’ people from structural disadvantage requires transforming the very fabric of society itself. This may not increase agency, but may instead remove the frameworks of intelligibility within which people know how to operate, leaving them unable to pursue any goals at all. Subordinate persons often use ‘patriarchal bargains’ – also in mobile phone usage – to gain status or agency even if, through these bargains, unequal power structures are validated (Kandiyoti 1998; Kleine 2013; Masika & Bailur 2015; Paxling this volume).

Researchers who engage with developing contexts often use Western terminology even where there are local conceptualizations. To a certain extent, feminist researchers must engage with known and established scholars in the field in order to be published, but both gender and technology, and feminist technology studies continue to be overwhelmingly monolingual. This volume engages with other ways of thinking as it opens up local vocabularies that would otherwise remain obscure to a wider audience. If every language is a world, we need to not only use colloquial terms as an occasional spice but take these worlds seriously and not only explore the analytical terminology but take the entire worlds of academic thought seriously. Being academically and intellectually monolingual hampers our ability not only to analyse but also to think different worlds. This is not simply using one term instead of another, but it is using local vocabulary that might be closer to the local understanding of the world and also opens up hitherto obscured paths of thought. In this anthology, we see the use of terms ‘digital snails’ (Martínez Suárez and de Salvador Agra in this volume) and ‘girl geek’ (see Paxling this volume) from developing contexts as useful metaphors for technology analyses. Language is an important social variable of inequality that needs to be taken into account in intersectional analyses.

We consider both gender and mobile phone practices to be deeply cultural, and we similarly argue for gender as a cultural expression that is historically dynamic and structurally informed and systematic. While these expressions are held in check by individual interactions, they are also shaped by them. The intersections of variables in this volume acknowledge power relationships between and within genders, where hierarchical uses informed by age or class contribute to the expression and affirmation of variable gendered identities.

Use of mobiles by women in the Global South: benefits and barriers

It is by now axiomatic in the literature that mobile phones help many women in developing countries to keep in touch with relatives and friends, and, if they have professions or businesses, to run them more effectively (Svensson & Wamala-Larsson 2016; Tawah 2013). For migrant mothers communicating with children in the Philippines and in rural South Africa, where many children live with grandparents while parents work in distant cities, mobile phones are a communication tool for so-called ‘stretched households’ (Madinou & Miller 2011; Porter et al. 2012, 14). Women use phones for social networking and to expand their culturally constructed spheres of activity (Gustafsson this volume; Tenhunen 2014b; Stark this volume). Mobile phones have been used by women in India and Sub-Saharan Africa to circumvent gendered norms and constraints and to extend their contacts and social space without violating physical gendered boundaries of movement. Mobile phones help deliver agricultural information to female farmers in India (Balasubramanian et al. 2010; Mittal 2016) and medical advice to midwives in Indonesia (Chib & Hsueh-Hua Chen 2011). The use of mobile phones also creates safety nets in case of emergency and reduces the need for travel in settings where travel may be time-consuming, expensive, and even dangerous (Jouhki 2013; Murphy & Priebe 2011; Tenhunen 2014b, 166).

As Porter et al. (2012) point out, calls, text messages, and beeping in which the caller lets the phone ring once before hanging up as a signal for the call recipient to call back are not merely social chitchats or keeping up with news. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, livelihood and resource networks (money for schooling, medical care, housing, jobs in the city, and capital for starting businesses) are dependent on social, usually kinship relationships (see also Donner 2008; Molony 2007). These relationships require nurturing, and when key contacts are located at distances that are expensive and hazardous to travel in person, mobile phone becomes the key enabler of social ties vital to physical and economic survival (Porter et al. 2012). Women in both India and East Africa who have married into patrilocal marriage arrangements use phone calls to stay in close touch with birth relatives (Murphy & Priebe 2011; Tenhunen 2014b). Resource networks maintained through mobile phones are also important for men (see Wamala-Larsson this volume), but particularly so for women, given their relative lack of access to services and livelihoods – even informal livelihoods – in many countries.

This is linked to an important trend in the recent gender and M4D research: the recognition that beyond more measurable benefits like increased income and increased communication, it is important to focus on the subjective and intangible benefits or barriers expressed and understood by women themselves. This calls for broader visions of development and empowerment and a shift from the assumption that financial independence is the best – or even clearest – indicator of empowerment to a recognition that benefits can only be understood within social contexts. In societies where individuals are dependent on family and informal networks rather than official social institutions for their well-being and security, social relationships maintained via the mobile can be very important in maintaining freedom from hunger, drudgery, fear, and danger, as well as possibilities of maintaining social interaction (Murphy & Priebe 2011).

Mobile devices have become an extension of self and identity, signifying the interconnected nature of lives. They have become unique portals that carry, transmit, create, and archive various aspects of ourselves and are conduits to external worlds where our perceptions of self, other, and realities collide (see Martinez Suárez and de Salvador Agra this volume). Mobile technologies permit a range of new developments that undermine the traditional model of democracy by allowing for shifting and multiple identities, enabling persons to belong simultaneously to a number of different constituencies. They also make it possible for individual identity to be concealed. Mobile technologies can thus open up new forms of participation (Huws 2008, 47; Tenhunen 2014a, 2014b; Wamala-Larsson & Svensson 2015). Mobiles have enabled especially women to initiate interactive dialogues by helping rural women run local, voluntary support groups and setting the agenda of public debates through participation in public service broadcasting, which is particularly effective in discussing domestic violence and abuse of women’s rights in rural areas (Millanga 2014, 291; Murphy &...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Rethinking gender and technology within intersections in the Global South
• Part I Mobile money in transacting femininities and masculinities
• Part II Mobile connectivities: negotiating age, gender, and agency
• Part III Mobile continuities at the intersection of ethnicity, class, and gender
• Index