CyberFeminism / Edition 1

by Susan Hawthorne PhD (Editor), Renate Klein (Editor)

Overview

An international anthology by feminists working in the fields of electronic publishing, activism, data delivery, multimedia games production, educational multimedia, the virtual campus and virtual reality creation, program development and electronic product, as well as those developing critiques of electronic culture, this collection explores what the possibilities are for feminists and for feminism in cyberspace.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781875559688
Publisher:	Spinifex Press
Publication date:	10/01/1999
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.76(d)

Read an Excerpt

Cyberfeminism

Connectivity, Critique and Creativity

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By Susan Hawthorne, Renate Klein, Gillian Fulcher

Spinifex Press

Copyright © 1999 Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein,
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-875559-68-8

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CHAPTER 1

Home and the World: The Internet as a personal and political tool

Bandana Pattanaik

This morning there was a message on my desk from RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. RAWA is the only feminist organisation of Afghanistan which is fighting for the human rights of Afghan women. They have requested us to send them a message of solidarity which will be read at their International Women's Day celebration. I look at the long list of signatures below the message. There are about a hundred women and men from practically all over the world who have signed to show their solidarity with RAWA. As I sit in front of my computer in Thailand and try to compose an email message, I have no doubt that it will reach the RAWA office in Islamabad in time for the celebration even though there is only a day left until International Women's Day. So much of my professional communication is now done via email that I am beginning to take such immediacy for granted. In the women's NGO I work for in Thailand now, we receive approximately fifty emails every day and send just as many, or even more. We network with women's groups from practically every corner of the world. We exchange information, initiate signature campaigns and send letters of petition. We also visit each others' Web sites and often make new contacts through such visits. It is difficult to think back to a time when there were no such things as emails and Web sites.

And yet I started using the Internet only three years ago. Coincidentally, over the last three years I have also done some travelling. While I lived in Australia for nearly three years, a large part of my professional and personal life during that time depended on news from Asia. Not surprisingly, India remained the main point of reference, a place which, more than ever before, sharply defined itself as home; perhaps because I had a sense that I would be away from there for some years. But my work also made it imperative that I establish new contacts in other locations in Asia and look for hitherto undocumented information. Going against the grain of established patterns of research has not been easy for anyone. The Internet, however, proved to be an invaluable tool in my attempt at charting an alternative circuit of knowledge production. Long periods of frustration and anxiety were compensated for by moments of unexpected joy.

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In this essay I will describe my experience of using the Internet: as a person away from her familiar world, as a technology-shy woman thrown into a job which required knowledge of new information technology, and as a researcher exploring an area on which there was little documented information.

Three years ago I was teaching English Literature in a university college in Hyderabad, India. I did not have much to do with computers at that time although I was aware of the computer craze around me. Most of my students were opting for advanced level computer courses. Every city, even small towns in India, had begun to boast several computer-training centres. Middle-class parents were buying PCs in a panic lest their children lag behind. But for most of my friends and for me, the computer was a young people's thing. As far as we were concerned, it was a machine for word processing. My friends who did a lot of writing had already acquired their PCs. Since I did not do much writing, I could see no reason for acquiring a computer and learning how to use it. It was not so much my location therefore, as my profession and personal habits which were responsible for my non-technological life.

And then, towards the end of 1995, I felt that I needed a break from full-time teaching. I also wanted a complete change of scene and toyed with the idea of living in some other country for a while. Joining a research programme in a foreign university seemed like a viable option. There was no specific reason for choosing Australia, but no one I knew had been there and I just wanted to be different. So in March 1996, on a cold autumn morning, I landed in Melbourne.

After a break of more than a decade, I was a student again: as they say in Australia, a mature age student without any support system. I was in a new country where everything, even the trees and the sky, looked unfamiliar. There was no one I could call a friend. However, universities around the world do share many common features. Having spent a major part of my life in academia, both as a student and as a teacher, I knew, for example, that the university library could be an excellent refuge. It was wonderful to be able to read again without having to worry about teaching. But books, trusted companions though they are, could not replace the people I had left behind. I missed my friends, my students, in short the entire network which had grown around me over a period of time. I could not afford long-distance telephone calls. And because replies took an inordinately long time to come, I feared that most of my letters were not reaching their destination.

It was at this point that I got my computer account, a letter from the Information Technology Services department of the university with my email address and password. Until then, I had been putting off the visit to the computer lab, telling myself that I could go there just before the first assignment was due, that I would write everything in longhand first and then it would be just a matter of typing it out. I did know a little about emails because some educational institutions and government departments in India had already got their email connections by mid1995; and while leaving Hyderabad, I had noted down some email addresses for contacting friends.

I took the ITS letter and a diskette and made my first trip to the university computer lab. The letter had instructions on how to set up one's own email — but I was hoping that there would be someone to help me out. I noticed a woman instructor in the lab that afternoon. After some half-hearted attempts to set up my own account, I went and asked if she could help me. She looked at the printed instructions — clearly wondering why I wasn't able to follow them — and came over to set it up for me. She looked brisk and very efficient, just the kind of woman I would have associated with technology, the no-nonsense hi-tech kind. Within minutes my account was set up and I was told that I could now send emails wherever I liked. I sat down and typed a long, miserable letter to a friend in Hyderabad.

Guymer 3

In the following days, the computer lab became a favourite stopover. It was wonderful to open the in-box and find messages waiting for me. None of my friends in India had their personal email addresses at that time. I knew that, for them, the process of sending or receiving an email was quite cumbersome: it usually involved a trip to the local service provider or to someone whose organisation had an email connection. Some public telephone and fax booths had started adding emails to their list of services. Often, when going there my friends found that there was a blackout so the computer did not work. Many of these email centres did not allow the customers to use their machine so one just had to leave the message with them and trust that they would both send it and then ring when a reply arrived. Obviously there was no privacy. Despite these hassles, emails were attractive to us because they took much less time than a letter and cost less than a fax or a telephone call.

From the email to the World Wide Web was only a small step for me. Homesickness was, once again, the main motive behind my netsurfing. Using some clues like the names of universities or research organisations in the US or the UK, I was able to renew contact with friends I'd lost touch with. I also used to do searches by typing in random, mostly India-related words. Those searches used to bring up a lot of irrelevant, sometimes completely unrelated material, but that was also how I found a mailing list to discuss South Asian literature, a site which posted an Indian news digest and the wonderful South Asian Women's Network (SAWNET): http:www.umiacs.umd.edu/usrs/sawweb/sawnet. Most of the India-related sites at that time had been developed in the US and were being updated there. What struck me in many of the sites, was the nostalgia of the people away from what they still thought of as their homelands, and the desire to construct identities and build communities on the basis of common interests.

Pollock and Sutton 2

While the virtual world was helping me to maintain a link with the real world I had left behind, my immediate reality was getting difficult to cope with. Given the currency exchange rates, it was imperative that I find some job to support myself in Melbourne. But nearly three months were over and I had found no paid work; I was beginning to doubt my skills and abilities. It was desperation which made me send an email to Susan Hawthorne at Spinifex. I wasn't sure what I could do there, but since I liked what they had published I thought it might be good to know them any way. Email seemed a less intrusive mode of making contact than a telephone call, impersonal and yet immediate. A few days later I received a reply, we had a meeting and to my relief I was offered a job. So desperate was I for work, that any work would have been fine; however, not in my wildest imagination had I hoped to design a Web site!

The Spinifex project began in July 1996. Initiated by Susan Hawthorne, it aimed to set up an electronic forum which small, independent feminist publishers from the Asia Pacific region would be able to use to publicise their books and communicate with each other. Although I was keenly interested in women's writing, particularly those of marginalised women, I did not know much about feminist publishing houses in Asia. Most of the women authors whom I'd read were either published by mainstream publishing houses or by feminist publishing houses in the West. Kali for women was the only Asian feminist publishing house I knew of and I was not sure if there were any others in the region. I was keen to find out. From Susan I learned of a few others such as Narigrantha Prabartana and ASR. From talking with her, I became convinced of the political relevance of such a project. The technical aspect of the project did not make any sense to me, but I decided not to worry about it at that point. Our immediate task was to contact feminist publishers in Asia and find out whether they thought this kind of a project was relevant to them.

When months went by and we did not receive any replies, it was difficult to avoid a sense of futility. In addition to feeling personally responsible for the failure, I also started worrying about the irrelevance and arrogance of such a project. I felt that, given my background, I should have realised that an electronic network would be a ridiculously outlandish concept in the third world. I thought that it would be a long time before the women's groups in Asia started using the new information technology: I am glad that I was proved wrong.

Responses started to trickle in by the end of 1996, and when we decided to make a small beginning with whatever information we had, we received encouraging feedback from many people. The academics and activists in Melbourne whom I spoke to regarding the project, readily offered their contacts in the Asian region. They were as fascinated with the simple and small Web site as we were. Women's publishing groups in some parts of Asia — who could not even access the World Wide Web at that time — were happy to send copies of their books for use on the Web site. Their enthusiasm provided us with the moral support and the rationale to continue. In retrospect it became clear that their silence hadn't derived from suspicion of the technology or disagreement with the project's assumptions. All the factors responsible for the initial freeze in the project were, in fact, justifications of the need for such a project. As Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon point out:

The very first problem arises with lack of information on what is being produced and by whom and where; currently there is no source of information on this, either within each country, or regionally (Butalia and Menon 1995:60).

Since there was no updated directory of Asian feminist publishing groups we used a variety of sources to contact groups whom we thought might be bringing out publications. Many of our letters had not reached their destination simply because, in addition to unreliable postal services, the addresses we used were sometimes no longer valid. Some groups who replied very late told us that they were terribly short-staffed and had been unable to make time for a letter. But no one had any doubt that the Internet could be used for feminist networking.

By January 1997, the feminist publishing in the Asia Pacific section of Spinifex's homepage had a fairly good number of entries from the entire region. We had been able to show that women's publishing is also active outside the developed world. We had succeeded in putting the new information technology to political use. Once the project got underway, I started enjoying the serendipitous way of finding information. A search which had brought up thumbnail pictures of Thai mail-order brides also had an entry on Voices of Thai Women, a feminist newsletter. There was an email address below, and that was how I got in touch with Foundation for Women, the feminist group in Bangkok. One day I found a query on the South Asian Women's Net mailing list. I didn't know the answer to the query but from the last two letters of the email I realised that the person was located in Nepal. I had been wanting to get in touch with Anju Chetri and Susan Maskey, the two women who had started Asmita, the feminist publication centre in Nepal, but I had no contact details. I sent an email to the person who had posted a query on the mailing list. To my delight there was a reply almost instantly with the necessary contact details. This aspect of the Internet is the one which fascinates me most. No amount of technical explanation has been able to diminish the almost childlike joy which I experience when I send an email to a remote corner of the world and a reply arrives within minutes.

Questions regarding what constitutes legitimate feminist knowledge and what role geographical locations and economic realities play in the production of such knowledge were to occupy me in the next few months. I found it ironic that, although a substantial amount of material pertaining to women's issues is published in the so-called third world, not many people know about them. And even when they do, such publications rarely find their way into academia. In order to explore the issues further, I needed to strengthen the contacts I had established with women's groups in Asia during the Spinifex project. While working on my thesis on feminist publishing in Asia, I noticed the rapid growth of Internet in the region. A large part of my correspondence could be done through email. I also noticed that there were many Asian sites that had started to be developed and maintained in Asia. The mailing lists related to third world women had also started having members who were physically located there.

In March 19981 travelled to Korea for a conference. I was amazed by the level of Internet use by women's groups there. My friends at the Korean Women's Institute told me that a lot of their correspondence was done via email and they also used the World Wide Web for accessing information. A couple of months later my work took me to Nepal. There I met up with Susan Maskey and Anju Chetri of Asmita Publication and Resource Centre with whom I'd had only email correspondence until then. It may sound paradoxical, but for me one of the pleasures of dabbling with the virtual world is that it has enabled me to make new friends in real life. There are some people in Melbourne I would never have got to know but for the Spinifex project. I have also been fortunate in travelling to places and meeting up with people I had contacted electronically for my research. In fact I have not been able to understand why some people are worried that the virtual is replacing the real. Nor will I ever be able to comprehend the desire of those people who want to become cyborgs. For me and for many other women I know, the Internet is a fast and economical way to communicate with others who share our interests and politics, as well as to access relevant information. And perhaps because we link up with like-minded people there is always a possibility we'll meet in some conference or workshop. We do not have the time, need or inclination to netsurf to meet people only in cyberspace.

Korenman 4

Within Asia, countries differ greatly in the level of Internet use. For example, in Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore, it is much easier to access the World Wide Web. In Nepal, India, Laos and Burma and many other countries, on the other hand — barring a few commercial places — the World Wide Web is unavailable to most users. In these countries, email is also not very efficient. In India, for instance, the telephone lines are unreliable and blackout is not infrequent in many places which affects the immediacy. In spite of these handicaps, email is still considered a more reliable and certainly much faster mode of communication than the existing postal system. It is also very economical. A friend who lives in China tells me that it costs her almost the same to make a call from China to Hong Kong as it does to the US, and that the connections to Hong Kong are unreliable. Moreover, an email costs a fraction of the money one would spend on overseas calls.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Cyberfeminism by Susan Hawthorne, Renate Klein, Gillian Fulcher. Copyright © 1999 Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein,. Excerpted by permission of Spinifex Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

CyberFeminism: Introduction,
Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein,
Connectivity,
1 Home and the World: The Internet as a Personal and Political Tool Bandana Pattanaik,
2 WomenClick: Feminism and the Internet Scarlet Pollock and Jo Sutton,
3 Online Teaching: No Fear of Flying in Cyberspace Laurel Guymer,
4 Email Forums and Women's Studies: The Example of WMST-L Joan Korenman,
5 Everyday Use: Women, Work and Online Play Alesia Montgomery,
6 Connectivity: Cultural Practice of the Powerful or Subversion from the Margins? Susan Hawthorne,
Critique,
7 Information for People or Profits? Beth Stafford,
8 The Internet and the Global Prostitution Industry Donna Hughes,
9 If I'm a Cyborg rather than a Goddess will Patriarchy go away? Renate Klein,
10 Cyborgs, Virtual Bodies and Organic Bodies: Theoretical Feminist Responses Susan Hawthorne,
11 Feminist Poetics and Cybercolonisation Josie Arnold,
Creativity,
12 Why Virtual Reality? Miriam English,
13 The Nickelodeon Days of Cyberspace Kathy Mueller,
14 Cyberfiction: A Fictional Journey into Cyberspace (or How I became a Cyberfeminist) Beryl Fletcher,
15 Making a Multimedia Title Virginia Westwood and Heather Kaufmann,
16 Fiction and Interactive Multimedia Carmel Bird,
17 A Meme of Great Power or What the God Vishnu has to do with the Internet Suniti Namjoshi,
18 Other Locations: A Hypertext Fable and Some Explanation Suniti Namjoshi,
19 Unstopped Mouths and Infinite Appetites: Developing a Hypertext of Lesbian Culture Susan Hawthorne,
Glossary,
Notes on Contributors,
Index,