Women Speak: Gendering the Mobile Phone

Abstract

This book seeks to provide a better understanding of the relationship between women and technology through an inquiry into the significance of mobile phones in the lives of Portuguese women. Recent theoretical developments suggest too little emphasis has been placed on differences between women themselves. The initial impetus for carrying out this research stemmed from contributing towards meeting this gap by investigating the scope of mobile phones as the basis for the increased technological intimacy of women whilst without reinstating the old binary oppositions between men and women. The study focuses on the mobile phone as a site where the nuances of women’s experiences with technology become visible and on adult women as a meaningful yet underrepresented group. In choosing to conduct a case study of Portugal, I wished to contribute to the development of future cross-cultural analysis on the gendering of the mobile phone. This work is theoretically grounded in the more recent feminist debates that identify cultural representation and discourse as important carriers of the gender system. In turn, this is rooted in the understanding that the relationship with technology proves a gendered relationship and that gender is socially constructed. The study is located at the crossroads of feminist studies, cultural studies and new media studies and correspondingly proposing new insights and approaches to the phenomena interconnected with the gendering of mobile phones – drawn from feminist cultural studies of mobile communications. The research methodology therefore aligns with the assumption of a cultural perspective on mobile communications and clearly opting for a qualitative method designed to ascertain the actual meanings of the mobile phone to different groups of Portuguese women across different stages in their life trajectories. This then argues that the role women play proves determinant to their usage of mobile phones. Moreover, this role is determined by their positioning in the life course and not by their positioning in the cohort. The key findings resulting detail how, contrary to a theory of some dominant usage for a technology, an Apparatgeist as proposed by James Katz, the mobile phone instead takes on different roles and affordances depending on the women’s respective life stages. As embodied objects, mobile phones constitute part of very complex power relationships and, while women truly have conquered mobility in many ways, they still remained constrained in their achievements by an unbalanced gendering of time, space and the expectations about their roles in society. The book concludes by putting forward several insights for the industry and urging it’s actors to move on from a functional perspective to a broader sociocultural perspective and correspondingly developing products and services capable of resonating with women’s lifestyles. The book also proposes a new agenda for future work, namely that of post-convergence, and opening up new paradigms such as the life stage and life course approaches.