‘Digital diasporas are products of economic globalization’

By Editor on August 3, 2008 11:00 pm

Radhika Gajjala is Associate Professor in the Department of Interpersonal Communication at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA. She is the author of Technocultural Agency: Identity at the Interface (Lexington, forthcoming) and Cyber Selves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women (Altamira, 2004) and co-editor of South Asian Technospaces (Peter Lang, 2008).  She also runs the blog Cyberdiva. In this email conversation with Rohit Chopra– the second in the Interjunction series on new media and culture– Professor Gajjala reflects on cyberfeminism, methodology for the study of how identity is produced at online/offline intersections and the ways in which ideas of technological liberation reinforce stereotypes about ‘third world’ women, and methods for uncovering marginal voices in cyberspace.

Professor Gajjala, could you explain the concept of ‘cyberfeminism’? How does it relate to feminist practice more broadly?

Early articulations of the notion of ‘cyberfeminism’ are said to have come from VNS Matrix in their 1991 cyberfeminist manifesto for the 21st century where they draw from Donna Haraway’s work. Cyberfeminist artists and collectives formed at online/offline interestions where the body and technology encounter each other and how these mutually shape voice, agency, and action for the empowerment of women the world over. Thus early cyberfeminism was seen to be a feminist response to a male dominated cyber-sphere where mostly male programmers and engineers seemed to be shaping the social and representational aspects of cyberspace. Sadie Plant, the subrosa collective (especially Faith Wilding), Michelle Wright, Ursula Biemann, Coco Fusco, and several other women artists, scholars, film-makers and activists began to be associated with this notion of “cyberfeminism.”

Cyberfeminism is a concept that came into being at the intersection of feminism, cyberculture, and technoscience. Therefore cyberfeminism relies on interweaving of digital art and computer science.  Engineering, artificial intelligence, media production and representations as well as online marketing and dialogues and counter-dialogues are all within the domain of cyberfeminism. Works by feminist and postmodern scholars such as Donna Haraway. Katherine Hayles, Sandy Stone, and Rosi Braidotti among others informs most of the articulations concerning cyberfeminism.

How does this related to feminism? In a simple sentence I suppose one can say since it is about the empowerment of women through and in relation to technology. However, cyberfeminism is indeed more a product of third-wave feminism where there seems to be an implicit cyber-utopianism and a talking back to second and first wave feminist generations as young cybergrrls and riotgrrls take on tools of “new media” to redefine and re-produce themselves.  As Faith Wilding has argued in her article titled “Where is Feminism in Cyberfeminism?”

“If feminism is to be adequate to its cyberpotential then it must mutate to keep up with the shifting complexities of social realities and life conditions as they are changed by the profound impact communications technologies and technoscience have on all our lives. It is up to cyberfeminists to use feminist theoretical insights and strategic tools and join them with cybertechniques to battle the very real sexism, racism, and militarism encoded in the software and hardware of the Net, thus politicizing this environment.”

Your research addresses the ‘third world’ presence in cyberspace, with reference to cyberfeminist practice and more generally as well.  Your work also engages with South Asian diasporas that span the ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds. What are the ways in which one can speak of a ‘third world’ online, and how might this complicate everyday understandings of the category of the ‘third world’? What might this imply about the potential of the internet as a space and tool for activism?

The ways in which we speak of categories such as ‘third-world,’ ‘South Asia,’ and even ‘race’ in relation to internet- mediated online/offline environments has to be much more nuanced than in previous times when we engaged these concepts.  There is a continual interplay of economics, politics, culture, and everyday life in these online environments as more and more people– young and old– work and play in these spaces that they inhabit. Cyber-spaces have become the nodes at which various locals connect and dis-connect in the production of the global. Thus those of us who inhabit online networks are also networked into processes of globalization through an interplay of online global audiences and offline located/situated producers. And no matter where we live in the world we are both– global audiences and located/situated producers– in varying degrees.

So rather than say ‘first world’ and ‘third-world’ or even ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ (which I am inclined to use more often these days because of the trans-rural research I do to look at how Modernity and Development are eating into rural spaces the world over) or even global and local, virtual and real, or east and west, we need to develop a different vocabulary to talk about what is happening. Euphoria about “new” media and internet connectivity is concealing the crucial political and economic shifts that are enabled by the ways in which digital technologies have become key players in processes of globalization. For instance, in our academic investigations of identity online, we rarely link the fact that financial transactions occur through digital networks and the specific ways that that impacts who is online and why. In our celebration of online youth cultures and simultaneously the social panics around teens and children having online access we sideline issues related to how the internet and related media shape future generations of consumers.

So– if we are to talk of ‘cyberfeminist practice’ in relation to third-worlds– I would first say that we need to rearticulate what is meant by ‘third-world.’

Having said that, let me lay out my critique (which in my past work has been labeled ‘third world’ critiques of cyberfeminisms) of discourses of women’s emancipation in online spaces.

I draw my critique of discourses of women’s emancipation in online spaces from my ongoing research at two specific global/local, rural/urban intersections. One is a rural/urban intersection in Northwest Ohio where my students and I are collecting oral histories as well as doing user-end research on children and teens use of the internet and computers. This is a low income bi-racial community comprised partly of Mexican-American descendants of migrant farm laborers who came to this region as far back as the 1940s to pick tomatoes and so on, working for daily wages on the neighborhood farms. The area also houses low income white populations. The second research project that provides me a lens for the critique is my continuing collaboration with the core team of officers (B. Shyamasundari, Annapurna Mamidipudi, Seemanthani Niranjana and Latha Tummuru) at the NGO Dastkar Andhra, in exploring the production and marketing of handloom which leads me to look at what discourses are available online for the selling of indigenous crafts and handloom through the internet (considered to be a ‘new’ media outlet).

Sites of activism online are embedded in discourses of development, which in turn are intertwined with discourses of liberal feminism and work easily to reinstate colonial discourses about oppressed third-world women. These colonial narratives about the third-world female Other– or rather the non-urbanized female Other– on the internet take shape through marketing techniques that rely on producing a third-world oppressed Other who has been ‘liberated’ through acts of techno-mediation and liberal feminist handouts. These images are produced under the gaze of the urbanized Global and Multicultural Self who, it is implicitly suggested, will liberate the oppressed Other through their acts of consumption. Thus it is possible for the urban woman consumer to maintain her dreams of suburbia, while also ‘helping the poor and oppressed women,’ i.e., those less fortunate than her. Of course the irony of this kind of online marketing is that it re-instates racist and westernized patriarchies while highlighting the urban and suburban woman’s post-feminist (so-called) freedom of choice and agency.

Yet the contradiction of the interplay between economics and culture is that consumption patterns do indeed shape the existence or disappearance of indigenous cultures and modes of production not endorsed by the discourse of ‘newness’ embedded in mainstream globalization processes. In addition, the euphoric rhetoric about ICTs’ impact on economically disadvantaged communities, given its implicit colonial legacy, recasts ‘third-world’ and rural women as somehow ‘ignorant’ in light of our high-tech information age.  Thus, feminist activists/scholars wishing to use the internet and related digital media within economic systems in order to highlight issues of concern within such communities are faced with a dilemma that is both methodological and lexical.

In 1996, Spivak published her piece on “Woman as Theatre” which was a commentary on the UN Conference on women in Beijing. The conference was a milestone in that the very fact that the conference happened meant that the UN was beginning to center ‘women’s concerns,’ albeit in problematic ways. But how does this sort of recognition, acknowledge and even examine how international NGOs can benefit women NOT likely to be active participants in the social networks of liberal feminism and economic globalization? Spivak writes:

“The financialization of the globe must be represented as the North embracing the South. Women are being used for the representation of this unity- another name for the profound transnational disunity necessary for globalization. These conferences are global theatre. There is, of course, no politics which is not theatre. But we are interested in this global theatre, staged to show participation between the North and the South, the latter constituted by Northern discursive mechanisms” (Spivak 1996, p. 2).

There is a large and growing body of academic work on identity politics in cyberspace, specifically the modes in which online experience is inflected by histories, identity categories (such as nation, race, gender, or ethnicity), and multiple notions of community. Yet instrumentalist understandings of technology appear to dominate in popular media coverage about the social impact of the internet. I would be interested in your reflections on this issue.

In my work I write about the production of identity– raced, gendered, queered, and so on. My efforts researching the internet are currently closely linked to my teaching– pedagogy– where I focus on trying to make my students understand how meaning making in their everyday lives and in online settings are interrelated. I design assignments in class to try and guide students to understand the production of raced/classed identities through online/offline intersections. This examination is layered and multimodal. In my classes, graduate and undergraduate students are asked to interact within online socio-cultural networks.

Researchers studying the production of identity in this manner must engage in the production of culture and subjectivity in the specific context while interacting with others doing the same in order to gain a nuanced understanding of how identities form and are performed in such online spaces. This enables us to talk about the meaning-making that goes on there.

My work occupies intersections of media and critical/cultural studies as I continue to develop critical ethnographic methodologies– under the heading of ‘cyberethnography’ and ‘epistemologies of doing’– for research and pedagogy at online/offline and global/local intersections and nodes.  Communication and the understanding of organizations as well as the role of culture, politics, economic, and everyday life, are central to my research, as I conduct ongoing participant and performative ethnographies in the emerging areas where digital communicative environments impact and shape globalization, and in the emerging areas where development work produces unexpected encounters between the so-called new and old technologies. For instance, the study of ‘emerging technocultures’ for me and my collaborators is as much about emerging forms of handloom technologies as weavers and marketers of handloom negotiate how transnational capital flows to and away from them as it is about the study of emerging forms of digital communicative environments and financial instruments.

Thus I examine how individuals act within communities as their subjectivities are shaped and they are produced as actors or subjects within interdependent global/local hierarchies. I not only ask who gets mapped out and why but seek to understand HOW this happens processually and structurally. I seek to understand, for instance, how what I term ‘voicings’ are produced in either offline development contexts or in diverse online contexts (including development projects using online venues to facilitate their work) and under what conditions ’subaltern’ speech gets heard. However, rather than stop at a euphoric celebration of this emergence of voice from thus far marginalized groups, I also try to investigate what implications these emerging voicings might have for the existing and emerging structures of power. I wish to understand how voice emerges in any of the contexts I examine in order to understand where oppression shifts to when particular marginalized groups gain voice within structures of globalization.

Globalization processes include material and discursive hegemonies produced at the intersection of the economic, the cultural, and the social, and are mediated in multiple ways through old and new mediascapes. These processes feed into economic and cultural local formations. Global technospaces are produced through and are a consequence of economic globalization. For instance, digital diasporas from regions such as South Asia are a product of transnational commerce. Thus, the theoretical lenses for engaging these contexts continue to be developed, as I immerse myself in various (trans)rural, (trans)urban, online, offline, first world and third world locations. These lenses serve to pose questions and to describe how seeming contradictions contribute to situated praxis within the global-local continuum of everyday economic and communicative practices.

As you suggest, rigorous methodologies are critical for analyzing practices in cyberspace. What are some of the main concerns in trying to frame adequate and innovative research frameworks for studying social life online?

As far as methods go, as an ethnographer of technocultures in diverse enviroments, I actually believe that we must use multiple tools to look at the phenomena at hand. So for me the understanding and critical engagement with the site is very important and this needs to be done through the use multiple, layered, and nuanced tools. Thus descriptive tools such as quantitative analysis tools, survey tools, and textual analysis are as useful as a way to enter the site. A more in-depth understanding can be gained through immersion, ethnographic living with and living in these environments while acts of production that create an awareness of social, political, cultural and a variety of other factors that impact the site to be examine– online and offline– simultaneously helps provide a radically contextual as well as a global understanding of the site being studied.

Therefore the design and entry point into the research need to be clearly mapped out, the location of the researcher at the beginning point for the study need to  stated clearly. As the researcher continues to be drawn further into engagement with the site, there will be shifts. The researcher’s relationship to the object/subject of study will necessarily shift and lead to a re-evaluation of methods at each stage of the research. At each point where there are findings and analyses, we are able to provide insights about the situated nature of technospatial practices and identity production in relation to cyberspace.

Categories: Interview