Gendering processes within technological environments: A cyberfeminist issue
2002, Radhika Gajjala and Annapurna Mamidipuni, Rhizomes
This article explores everyday practices in communities of production and focuses on the processes of gendering that influence, and in turn are influenced, by interactions with technologies of cultural and material production. The historically prevalent patterns of imbalances of power simultaneously get repeated and challenged in the new context. Technologies produced in the socio-cultural context of developed Western countries do not automatically empower the recipients of these technologies and very often, there is a reinforcement of existing hegemonies. The background of the two authors makes this dialogue between them an interesting examination of the need to re-design new technological environments to effectively re-map power structures in established communities of production. Mamidipudi works with a group of volunteers who are trying to "revive" the old technology of vegetable dying and cotton handloom weaving in a few villages of South India. Gajjala is an academic whose work examines cross-cultural dialogue and the expression of women's identity among "virtual communities" and diasporic/ postcolonial/ transnational subject formations. She engages in the production and maintenance of web-based and email-list based interactive e-spaces which are situated within an increasingly digital and transnational economy. Their stated intention is to suggest a close examination of multiple mediated contexts of technology design and use, as a model for understanding the scope for empowerment of women through information communication technologies (Adapted from authors).