Introduction:
Gender, Space and Technology
Kate Boyer1
Department of Science and Technology Studies/School of Architecture
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12208, USA
email: boyerl@rpi.edu
This thematic section of ACME is intended to showcase recent scholarship
in geography on the relations between gender, space and technology, featuring the
work of Reena Patel, Anne Bonds, Valorie Crooks, Maria E. Fannon and Jennifer
Fluri. One of the places where disciplinary interest in this set of themes first came
to light was in a double-session at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Association of
American Geographers organized by Mei-Po Kwan and Pamela Moss. The
following papers are based on a set of sessions presented at the 2005 Meeting,
organized by Kim England and myself, which grew out of the enthusiasm
generated the previous year. By drawing this scholarship together in one place, we
seek both to showcase what has become a vibrant new strand of research in social
and feminist geography, as well as strengthen geography's linkages with Science
and Technology Studies (STS).
A growing body of scholarship within and beyond geography has begun the
examination of the spatial dimensions of socio-technical systems (Graham and
Marvin, 2001; Kwan, 2002b; Wheeler et al., 2000; Urry, 2004). Indeed, the
1
 Kate Boyer, 2006
ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 5 (1), 1-8 2
discipline's enthusiasm for this topic can be seen with the publication of
Geography and Technology, a twenty-five essay compendium published by the
Association of American Geographers in honor of the organization's centennial
celebration in 2004 (Brunn et al., 2004). Though a full review of geography's
engagement with issues relating to information technology (IT) is not the purpose
of this Introduction, some of the main themes to have emerged in this literature are
the ways in which the information economy has changed urban space and social
opportunity (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Wheeler, Aoyama and Warf, 2000); how
new information technologies have re-shaped our daily routes through space and
time (Adams, 1999; Kwan, 2002b); the social politics of geographic information
systems (Curry, 1998; Schuurman, 2002; Kwan, 2002a; Kwan, 2002c); and the
way in which information technology and the information economy shape and are
shaped by social relations of gender, race and class (Boyer, 2004; Downey, 2002;
Miewald, 2001; Moss and Kwan, 2004; Smith, 2003). While this last vein
represents an especially vibrant and rapidly expanding field of scholarship ­
addressing questions of gender and mobility in socio-technical systems (Boyer,
2004; Downey, 2002); technology and the body (Moss and Kwan, 2004); and
instances of women in marginalized communities using IT as a tool for advocacy
and cultural preservation (Miewald, 2001; Smith, 2003) ­ we feel that as a whole
this research has been under-emphasized in the discipline. It is the intention of this
section to begin to correct this.
Engagement between Geography and STS has emerged as a lively field of
scholarship in recent years (Barnes, 2001; Braun & Castree, 2001; Demeritt,
2001; Law & Mol, 2001 & 2005; Schuurman, 2002; Whatmore, 2002).
Scholarship in this vein has begun to explore the range of ways the two disciplines
might inform one another; and has generated, among other things, a much more
theoretically vigorous understanding of the "more than human world",
destabilizing dichotomized understandings of nature and culture as separate
analytical categories, and arguing for an understanding of bodies, machines
and knowledges as precarious, relational achievements. Building on these
insights, we seek to broaden the conversation to examine relations between
technology, place, and gender. The papers in this section build on the shared
interest in STS and in feminist geography with the ways in which technology plays
into the co-construction of meanings about gender and about place (Bondi and
Davidson, 2004; Nightingale, 2006). In recent years, feminist geographers have
become increasingly interested in both how gender relations are produced in the
workplace (Brown, 2004; McDowell, 1997), as well as the processes by which
women move into and out of different sectors of the labor market (England, 1997;
Kobayashi, 1994; Pratt, 2004). In a related vein, feminist STS scholars have called
our attention to the ways in which technology shapes and is shaped by gender
relations and gendered divisions of labor (Bray, 1997; Cockburn and Ormrod,
1993; Grint and Gill, 1995; Gorenstein, 2000, Mackenzie and Wajcman, 1985;
Wajcman, 1991; 2004; Webster, 1996). This scholarship has illuminated the ways
Introduction: Gender, Space and Technology 3
in which ideas about gender difference can be "built-in" to technology at the design
phase (Cockburn and Ormrod, 1993), as well as how work technology constitutes
gender relations in and beyond the workplace (Bray, 1997; Gorenstein, 2000;
Webster, 1996).
If we are to believe popular culture, the so-called "IT Revolution" has been
pitched as a source of increased freedom, with seemingly unlimited potential for
connectivity and community building. To be sure, new information technologies
such as the cell phone, personal computers, e-mail and the internet are opening up
new ways of being (Urry, 2004; Wajcman, 2004). Often, these innovations can lead
to increased mobility and the expansion of certain kinds of freedoms for their users.
Yet, concerns have been voiced in different quarters of both geography and STS
over the extent to which the promises of the information age are being met
(Cockburn, 2004; Cowan, 1983; Winner, 1986). Can technology on its own change
gender-based relations of power and inequality? Are the goods of new technology
being distributed equitably? And, are the new ways of being, which information
and communications technologies afford, as good as they first appear?
The articles represented here weigh in on these issues, focusing especially
on the IT workplace, and how technology is re-shaping the work of coalition
building among groups of women experiencing varying degrees of social
marginalization. Reena Patel and Anne Bonds draw attention to the way patriarchal
relations of power reproduce in the information-age workplace and provide new
spaces and opportunities for challenging those relations. Maria Fannon, Valorie
Crooks and Jennifer Fluri address some of the ways in which various kinds of
women's organizations and support groups are using IT to build solidarity and
group identity, adding to the fledgling literature on cyberactivism (Meikle, 2002;
McCaughey, Martha and Michael Ayers, 2003) the import role the web can play
for feminist organizations.
Building on Linda McDowell's (1997) work on how gender and sexual
relations are produced in the workplace and through the experience of labor, Reena
Patel's article examines the physical, temporal, social and economic mobility of
women working in transnational call-centers in Mumbai, India. After outlining the
geo-political economy of call-centre work, Patel argues that this work has created
new geographies of opportunity ­ and constraint ­ for women thus employed. In
response to the temporal demands of trans-continental commerce, call-centers have
stretched the workday, "turning night into day" for large numbers of Indian tech-
sector employees, rendering the worksite a key social space and even a marriage
market for women employees who must sleep during the daytime. Patel examines
how traditional Indian gender relations have been instantiated within Twenty-First
Century post- industrial workplaces. Through interviews with call-center
employees, Patel notes how these new work environments are marked by
surveillance, corporate paternalism and an impulse to constrain women employees
ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 5 (1), 1-8 4
under the auspices of protecting their virtue in a way that harkens back to anxiety
about women in public that are a century old and older (Cope, 1996).
Anne Bonds' article retains the focus on call-center work developed in
Patel's piece, but re-locates it to rural American worksites. As Bonds argues, these
worksites constitute an important (and understudied) site in the new information
economy. Bonds examines the performative elements of call-center work, arguing
that these sites are about carrying out feminized, emotional labor. Harking back to
the female switchboard operators in the early days of the telephone (colloquially
referred to as "hello girls"), women constitute the majority of workers toiling in
call-centers globally. As Bonds notes, call-center work itself is highly feminised in
that it involves relational work of dealing with sometimes angry or frustrated
customers. While this work can be emotionally draining, like so many other forms
of feminised wage labor it is also poorly paid. At the same time, Bonds argues, the
largely female workforce in this sector is carefully trained so as to obscure regional
accents, thus offering callers a voice that is marked as female but otherwise socially
and geographically unlocatable.
The article by Valorie Crooks examines internet use among Canadian
women living with fibromyalgia syndrome. This syndrome is a "troubling
diagnosis" for several reasons: there is no cure; it carries with it a wide range of
seemingly unconnected symptoms; it is poorly understood; and it affects mostly
women. As Crooks argues, the internet provides both an important source of
information as well as a means of building support networks over a sometimes
large territory for women thus affected. As interviews with patients reveal, the
internet can provide an important reprieve from corporeal space when the body
becomes a locus of pain and contentious diagnosis. Building on the rise of patient
advocacy groups emerging from the women's health movement, Crooks examines
the internet and e-mail as important means of building communication and support
networks among patients suffering from a disease that is poorly understood.
Digging deeper, however, Crooks also notes how the relative ease of access to
information on the internet has enabled a shift in the work of informing patients
about their conditions from health care professionals to the patients themselves.
The expectation that patients participate in their own diagnosis and treatment
echoes a more general shift under neoliberal social policy calling for more "active"
forms of citizenship, described by Nicholas Rose (1999) and others.
Maria E. Fannon's article considers the role of the internet in the emergence
of midwifery as a global movement. As Fannon argues, new information
technologies have enabled a variety of changes for a movement based on an
activity that is not generally considered "global" in scale (giving birth).
Technologically-enabled, trans-local alliances have both expanded midwifery's
reach as well as highlighted tensions between different groups with different
outlooks within this movement ­ such as between the older International
Introduction: Gender, Space and Technology 5
Confederation of Midwives, which is based on institutional structures and nation-
states, and the newer International Alliance of Midwives, which is not. In addition
to opening up different possible meanings for what global midwifery might mean,
the rise of midwifery at the global scale has had the dual effects of advancing a
notion of birth as a universally similar experience, while, at the same time, re-
producing geo-political hierarchies in which the "traditional knowledge" of
midwives from the global south are differentiated from the modern/scientific
methods of midwives from industrialized countries.
Finally, Jennifer Fluri examines the transformative role the internet and e-
mail have played in building organizational strength and trans-national support for
the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). In addition
to showing the significance of new information technologies toward building
solidarity and communication networks across national boundaries, this study also
highlights the need for groups operating in politically volatile environments to be
strategic about information. In RAWA's case this has meant maintaining a delicate
balance between creating an internationally known web presence while preserving
the anonymity of individual members from a government which might wish them
harm. Fluri further outlines how members maintain a distinction from individual
and group identity, and the utility of RAWA as a means of complexifying partisan
and/or over-simplified versions of events offered by the mainstream US media.
Against the backdrop of mainstream American media's awesome power, the voices
of indigenous groups being affected by American policy first-hand with
interpretations in their own words become an increasingly valuable resource in
today's strife-ridden geopolitical climate.
Collectively, these essays advance the aims of critical geography by
showing how different kinds of socio-technical systems are marked by power and ­
sometimes ­ oppression, and by showing how that oppression is being challenged
in explicit and implicit ways. As these diverse papers illustrate, much work remains
to be done in terms of understanding both of these aspects of technological change.
Taken together, we hope that these works will enrich both critical geography as
well as science and technology studies; building important new linkages between
them and opening the door for further work on this set of issues.
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