Gendered Languages, Gendered Spaces And Local Transformation

Fragmented And Integrated Observations On Gendered Languages, Gendered Spaces And Local Transformation

Fragmented And Integrated Observations On Gendered Languages, Gendered Spaces And Local Transformation

Third World women have generally less access to productivity-enhancing technology than do men ? and new technologies are likely to favor men over women (Ahmed ? 1985; Whitehead ? 1985). Studies have demonstrated extensive displacement of women as wage labor is technified in places as diverse as Bangladesh ? Malaysia ? India ? Sub-Saharan ? and Turkey.

In gender-development literature ? men's relative success in technology acquisition is attributed to women's resource poverty ? and to gender divisions of labor.

As Ahmed notes ? "... men take over responsibility for women's tasks as soon as they are mechanized or when they are transformed from a subsistence into market production" (1985 ? page 1). These empirical trends in technology acquisition have long been challenged by active institutional efforts to tip the balance in favor of women ? by providing technologies to women's groups (Moser ? 1993; Priigl ? 1996). In the present paper ? comparative gender analysis concords with previous analyses ? and I extend labor-process theory ? drawing upon case material from an indigenous village community to argue that successful technology acquisition depends upon 'labor-organization technology'

. Technology ? in this view ? cannot be confined to tools and machines ? but includes the "concrete form taken by an actual labour process in a given instance ..." (Harvey ? 1982 ? page 99). In this definition Harvey usefully recognizes that technology utilization is not a 'plug-and-play' proposition ? but confronts a difficult accommodation process ? a reworking of the time-geography of men's and women's everyday life's.

Labor-organization discourse encompasses both techniques of power (sanctions ? surveillance) qua material practices and negotiation of meanings of labor ...