Virtual sisterhood

Recently, feminist critics and artists have challenged utopian rhetorics of electronic media theory that stress the liberational aspects of the technology. History demonstrates that often such rhetorics differ drastically from the actual deployment of the technology. Feminist critiques underscore the realities of women's exploitation and oppression in the global capitalist system of production. [1] It is now clear that not only poor, young, and uneducated women in areas of the "Third World" are exploited, but also white-collar workers and highly educated women in the "First World" working part-time or at home in exchange for underpayment, longer hours, and no benefits. [2] Women do approximately two-thirds of the world's work and earn about one-tenth of its income, and the electronic revolution has done nothing to change this. [3]

Recent critiques of digital utopianism are an improvement over the situation in late 1980s and early 1990s, when most theoreticians and practitioners of electronic media were far too involved in their affair with the computer to engage with these subjects. But recognition of the problems is insufficient to bring about change. It is now necessary to devise strategies of organization and intervention.

Most theorists agree on the potential of electronic communication to bring together women from diverse geographical and ethnic backgrounds. Some already see the emergence of a global "virtual sisterhood" but recognize that access to electronic technologies is often class-based. [4]

In order to reconcile the local and the global, the virtual and the lived worlds, communication and collaboration among women must occur in parallel with local organization and activism. [5] But this is no easy task. Even at the local level we fail to communicate effectively because of long-standing barriers. In order to surmount them, it will be necessary to become acquainted with feminist history and reexamine obstacles that curtailed dreams of a "universal sisterhood" during the 1970S and early 1980s. At that time, the utopia of an alliance among the world's women was challenged by women of color, who questioned the validity of the notion of a universal woman. [6] At present, few feminists would argue for the homogeneity of women's experience, yet this assumption is implicit in much of cybertheory. Issues of race are underdeveloped, and class is addressed with much unease. As Cameron Bailey has noted, the anonymity of electronic communications facilitates what in the past used to be called "passing." [7] In public forums, people of color often prefer not to reveal their race and ethnicity. As demonstrated in various studies of the construction of race, "no color" is associated with whiteness. A person of no color is thus imagined as a white person. While adopting an identity of no color allows for easier communication in cyberspace, it does little to disturb boundaries constructed to alienate groups from each other in the lived world. Much has been written, for example, about the prominent role that attitudes toward racial difference have played in the splintering of workers movements in the United States. [8]

If successful organization among women is to occur at both the local and the global level, we must examine and confront our discomfort with issues of race and class. The Third World maquiladora worker much discussed and even fetishized in recent cultural criticism for many of us remains an abstract entity. First World cultural critics are at a loss about what to say and how to act with these women in the flesh. [9] It would seem that empathy for their plight is intellectual but not embodied.

Recent writings by feminists of color reiterate problems seldom discussed in electronic media theory: universalism, marginalization, stereotyping, strategies of silencing, and rendering invisible. These practices, controversial in the 1970s and 1980s, are still with us; but we wish them away in front of the computer. Contrary to the emphasis on disembodiment persistent in much of cybertheory, these issues are intimately related to the body, to the flesh, to the way we relate to others in an embodied way. The racialized body as sign is always already overdetermined. [10] How can we produce change if we continue to be trapped within boundaries that promote alienation? Most of us abhor prejudice and domination but have not yet learned to recognize the ways in which we support the very structures we wish to eradicate. [11]

In order to promote change, I would like to propose a very modest starting point: the reevaluation of the old dictum, "the personal is the political." The personal has usually been understood as our most intimate relations. Feminists have spent great amounts of energy observing and reevaluating inherited attitudes and roles in this sphere, and those efforts have eventually resulted in change. It is now necessary to apply comparable energy to becoming aware of how we deal with differences perceived or imagined. Many of our attitudes to difference are also inherited.