gisw13_chapters

Male hegemonic institutionsWhen male hegemonic factions compete for thepredominance of economic, multilateral, developmentalor human-rights related frameworks for ICTpolicies, their comparative influence can alreadybe judged by the kinds of political institutions inwhich the crucial debates and power brokering arehoused. The internet governance sphere is particularlyvaried in this regard. It ranges from the globallevel of institutions such as the Internet Corporationfor Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), theWorld Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO),the International Telecommunication Union (ITU),the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), the UNEducational, Scientific and Cultural Organization(UNESCO) and the UN Development Programme(UNDP), to regional and national institutions andtheir divergent approaches and mix of stakeholdergroups. Each of these institutions has a unique historicaltrajectory of hegemonic positions, reflectedin the internal agreements these have achievedover time.From a feminist perspective, the institutionsvary tremendously in terms of the possibilities formeaningful involvement, from relatively open setupssuch as the IGF to relatively closed ones suchas the ITU. Many deliberative processes that areopen to all concerned stakeholders are very drawnout and consequently require a lot of time, attentionand financial resources, such as the negotiationsconcerning generic top-level domains (gTLDs) thattook place in ICANN. In other scenarios, the politicalweight of the final outcome may be very uncertain,such as with the IGF, UNESCO or UNDP. Yet otherprocesses with high political stakes may largelybe conducted behind closed doors, for instance atWIPO.Homosocial setupsIn internet governance, as in many other spheres ofpolitics, women are still under-represented in eachstakeholder group, and particularly so as real powerbrokers and visible experts, including panellists.Because of this, a special measure for women thathas consistently been advocated by many feministsis affirmative action in internet governance deliberativeand policy-making bodies. But normativecommitments, such as the acknowledgment of theWorld Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)that women should fully participate in all decisionmakingprocesses, are not even implemented inforums that directly follow from WSIS, such as theIGF and comparable forums at the regional level.Conceptually, women’s involvement of courseneeds to be differentiated from feminist involvement,since both men and women can either becomplicit with male hegemony or oppose it and takefeminist stances. However, it has long been arguedin feminist circles that a critical mass of women inany institution is needed to enable women to begindeveloping feminist positions. This includes ananalysis of the gendered stakes in supposedly universalissues.Hegemonic framing of issues and agendasThe standpoints and habits of perception of comparativelyprivileged men lead to the identificationof certain political issues and their adoption withinspecific rhetorical frameworks. Consequently, anymainstream political agenda of issues already representsthe outcome of power struggles amonggroups of privileged men, and the outcome of thesubsequent policy debate largely reflects whichgroups of men have achieved dominance, or in genderedterms, which groups of men now representhegemonic masculinity.Such processes of agenda setting and framingsuccessfully serve to alienate many women – andalso groups of men – and keep them from enteringthe political process in the first place. Manymarginalised groups neither relate to the issues,nor is it easy for them to adopt the perspectivesfrom which these issues have been identified.Consequently, these groups also cannot immediatelysee how these issues connect to their ownlived realities or the political issues they find mostcritical. For many feminists, for instance, clear-cutgender-political issues such as violence againstwomen, the feminisation of poverty or the exploitationof women workers represent reasonablechoices to engage with politically in scenariosthat expressly address them. The fact that internetgovernance issues such as cyber crime, digitalintellectual property rights and neoliberal ICT policies,respectively, may have a crucial bearing oneach of these feminist issues is not immediatelyapparent, even though their influence might bequite decisive.The problem of setting priorities for feministadvocacy needs to be understood in the contextof a scarcity of resources that feminists can utilise.Scarce resources require a careful selectionof the issues and political venues that we think aremost pressing to engage in. In addition, abstractedinternet governance issues in particular requiresubstantial resources because a lot of feminist56 / Global Information Society Watch