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The term “digital divide” is on the verge of becoming passé in our high-tech world of the twenty-first century. Once coined to draw attention to the socioeconomic, racial, and gender gaps between the wired class of computer-savvy “techies” and the “unplugged” masses, the term identified untapped consumer markets that high-tech corporations could target while promoting equal opportunity “access” to computer technology. Our lives have thus increasingly become technologically driven and saturated with diverse information. There are even claims that our 21 st -century information age is one of “information pollution” and “overload,” thus creating “information anxiety.”

Within the field of women's studies, how do we contribute to and/or dismantle the discourse of information technology (IT)? More importantly, how can we situate women's studies to integrate IT with social justice? Will we identify as our main goal the challenge of stereotypes that categorize most women, people of color, the poor, and citizens of the “ Third World ” (or Two-Thirds World) as “technophobes” who resist the use of IT? Or, will our concerns solely address women's “access” to computers? What constitutes “access” and notions of “the digital divide”? Will we envision technological justice as one that provides computers to all people, or do we imagine technological justice moving beyond issues of “access”? Finally, what parallels might we draw between virtual “pollution” and environmental pollution, which impacts the sites where the hardware of our IT age is produced?

Applying feminit theory, in response to these questions, can offer a critical tool of intervention as we explore intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, etc. that can fill in the gaps of an IT discourse, which often overlooks gendered and raced power dynamics, social inequities, and goals for social change on a global scale.

The seemingly gender and race-free environment that characterizes our digital and technological hopes for the future conveniently ignores the power structure that still leaves in place the un-demarcated category of whiteness or the assumed gender of maleness that confronts any nonwhite, non-male surfer of the Internet, for example. Having experienced the unchecked racism and misogyny that unleashes in chat rooms and on discussion boards – when participants are immediately assumed to be white males – remind me that a virtual version of Adrian Piper's “calling card” would suffice in these moments when black female bodies such as mine partake in cyberspace “passing.”

IT discourse, which ignores the intersectional oppressions of race, class, and gender, proves particularly problematic through its emphasis on the computer inter face while conveniently invisibilizing the hands of countless US immigrant and third world women laborers – such as the maquiladora workers on the US/Mexican border – that assemble our computer chips. While presenting an optimistic, raceless future through the “progress” exemplified in digital technology, we risk silencing those who question the racial and sexual politics of economic power. As performance artist and critic Coco Fusco challenges:

It seems to me that the emancipatory script of the digital revolution is simply inadequate
to interpret the situation of those on the ‘have not' side of the access divide, and the situation
of the maquiladora [emphasis in original] workers is a case in point. Calling these women ‘cyborgs'
naturalizes the economic order to which they are subjected and mythifies the political nature
of their interface with technology, which is precisely what needs at this point to be clarified. [1]

Ruminating on the digital divide, as well as on the feminization of this gap – as represented by these workers in technological industries – Fusco reminds us that these political scenarios must enter our academic and artistic discourses on the liberation of technology. As she suggests, “What their lack of access represents for me . . . is a challenge to expand the imaginative and metaphorical dimensions of telepresence, collapsing cultural and geographical distance so as to broaden and strengthen a sense of connection to them.” [2]

The online essays, art, and writings assembled on these pages have expanded on these dimensions by exposing the gendered and raced structures of our digital technologies - from cyberspace to information society to information architecture. Donna Haraway's classic essay, "The Cyborg Manifesto," encourages feminists to embrace the digital revolution and acknowledge the ways in which our cyborg bodies encounter technologies. As she provocatively concludes, "I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess."

Virginia Eubanks' "Paradigms and Pervisions: A Woman's Place in Cyberspace," critically examines the ways in which computer technology - as represented by cyberspace - have created hostile virtual environments, thus placing her e-zine, Brillo, in a a subversive context that dares to claim a space for articulating a feminist agenda. Adding to this critique are essays by Gail Hawisherand Daphne Dresser that remind us of the unequal access to the Internet - both in terms of those who remain without computers and those who cannot "write" their way into cyberspace - and the gender politics that perpetuate virtual sexism through Internet communications.

Thuy Linh Tu's assessment of Prema Murthy's Bindi Girl, which satirizes porn sites and denies viewers sight of the South Asian female body through the "bindi," a mark of East Indian Otherness, reminds us that women, especially women of color, can contribute to the shaping of IT, even as mainstream IT discourse imagines women of color on the margins of digital technology. Murthy continues in her satirical theorizing through her spoof search-engine site, "Mythic Hybrid," which exposes the ways in which women of color from "developing" nations generate the hardware of our digital technologies. Expanding on this discourse are Radhika Gajjala and Annapurna Mamidipudi's "Gendering Processes within Technological Environments," which challenges us to resist the optimistic rhetoric about IT's impact on marginal communities, given its legacy in colonial domination that recast "Third World" and rural women as somehow "ignorant" in light of our high-tech information age. Such high-tech/low-tech contradictions are explored in the artwork of Latina artist Praba Pilar, who questions whether or not "Computers are a Girl's Best Friend."

Other web-based feminist interventions include the e-zine work of Asian American authors Mimi Nguyen and Kristina Sheryl Wong and the artistic and creative work of African American artist Damali Ayo and Anglo-American hypertext fiction writer Shelley Jackson. Their virtual subversions in digital culture begin the necessary work of reflecting on cyberfeminist critiques based on gender, race, class, and sexuality.

As the feminist online sites assembled here suggest, the “digital divide” is less about “access” and more about technological dominance by a privileged few with global repercussions that threaten all of us, especially now that we have become so closely connected in the information superhighway. Marginalized groups, in particular, feel the impact of the high-tech age in profoundly personal and political ways. However, they are not just acted upon by technology; they have a creative and dynamic role in shaping our digital culture. Nonetheless, they must confront how we are implicated in a larger global network woven by U.S.-dominated high-tech corporations; they must also envision a more inclusive and less toxic environment that transforms “information” into knowledge.

Our digital revolution has yielded contradictory narratives about "progress": from guerrilla warfare and genocides in the Congo region, waged over the lucrative mining of raw materials used in computer chips, to the maquiladora workers who assemble these chips, risking their lives in a border city that targets young women for violence. From the proliferation of Internet porn sites that simulate the very same violence underlying the femicide on the U.S./Mexico border to the hazardous tech waste sites in countries like China and Nigeria, stemming from the destruction of outdated computers in North America and Europe, which have been exported back to the developing world. Our high-tech connections to these low-tech subalterns thus entangle us further in a (world wide) web of deceit and (mis)information. Perhaps our feminist theorizing and practices can disentangle us from these intricate networks while dismantling our intersecting oppressions. - Janell Hobson

1. Coco Fusco, The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (New York: Routledge, 2001), 200. [Return]
2. Ibid, 201. [Return]