gisw13_chapters

Whose internet is it anyway?Shaping the internet – feminist voicesin governance decision makingHeike JensenGender politics in internet governance can be fruitfullyexplored at two levels. At the level of feministinterventions, gender is often conflated with womenand girls, on whose behalf normative commitmentsand specific measures are sought. Attention to thelink of gender with other forms of social hierarchiesmay lead to nuanced propositions on behalf ofparticular groups of women and girls, for instance,rural women or poor black girls. Nevertheless, thefemale category appears quite straightforwardly asthat which defines these groups of people and theirspecific roles and needs. At the level of the largerpolitical processes in which these feminist policy interventionsare embedded, gender can be analysedas an abstract system of power and representationthrough which the dominant, hegemonic forms ofmasculinity are negotiated. Here, gender remainsimplicit because the institutions, constituenciesand issues appear deceptively gender-blind. Withsuch twofold analysis, I will now contextualise theachievements of progressive gender politics as partof the complex gendering mechanisms currently atwork in a sphere like internet governance.Normative feminist legaciesat the global levelFeminists working in internet governance can drawon a substantial legacy created by many decadesof feminist involvement at the global political level.Most recently, feminists have become a highlyvisible political constituency in the course of theworld conferences on women held by the UnitedNations in 1975, 1980, 1985 and 1995. The agreedconclusions and the follow-up process of theseconferences, and the Convention on the Eliminationof all Forms of Discrimination against Women(CEDAW) that entered into force in 1981, constitutethe most comprehensive global political tools todate. They have spelled out a normative frameworkof non-discrimination, women’s human rights, genderequality and women’s empowerment that ismeant to be applied in all spheres of policy making.Gender mainstreamingTo apply this normative framework, the strategyof gender mainstreaming has been mandated atglobal as well as regional, national and sub-nationalpolitical levels since the late 1990s. Gendermainstreaming calls for an analysis and a considerationof women’s and men’s stakes in all policiesand programmes and at all stages, from design toimplementation to monitoring to evaluation. Unfortunately,gender mainstreaming has never beenconsistently applied. Because of this, in internetgovernance, just as in any other field of politics thatdoes not exclusively and explicitly address gender,political processes are initiated and agendas are setwithout any explicit attention to the gender stakesinvolved. Such an approach does not create randomgender effects, however, but bolsters male hegemonyand hegemonic masculinity.Male political hegemonyThe crux is to understand that male hegemony andpatriarchies perpetuate themselves in political andeconomic arenas by not drawing attention to themselvesas gendered and hierarchical undertakings.Instead, they claim a universal outlook, but this outlook,far from being universal, is informed by quitespecific standpoints and habits of perception. It isan outlook indebted to privileged positions in thehierarchy between men and women as well as thehierarchy among different groups of men. In internetgovernance, in which privileged perspectivesof the global North and the global South meet, informationand communications technologies (ICTs)are for instance predominantly framed as tools foreconomic power or as tools potentially threateningnational sovereignty and security. While theseframings are challenged by those who frame ICTsin relation to development and human rights, eventhe latter contribute to male hegemony as long asthey relate development and human rights only toan abstracted citizen-subject and not to specificgroups of women and men with differing concernsand needs.55 / Global Information Society Watch