Stewardship
Although our camps take place in different locations, serve different populations, and emphasize different things, the common call to interrogate gender in and through technologies remains the same throughout all iterations of the camp. Specifically, we believe it is imperative to focus on girls’ use of technologies because, as girlhood scholar Sharon Mazzarella (2010) reminds us, “the cultural and social structures in which girls live today and the role new information technologies play in their lives mutually affect each other in inseparable ways” (p. xii). In her 2004 work, Technofeminism, Judy Wajcman considers this technology question for modern feminists: “Can feminism steer a path between technophobia and technophilia?” (p. 6).
This tendency to characterize tech spaces and practices as either dangerous or damning for girls or, conversely, as saviors and gender mitigators misses the point that technologies are always both. “What it means to be a man or a woman is no longer ordained by ‘nature’ – gendered identities are contested terrain,” writes Wajcman (pp. 2-3). “These... changes are associated with the unprecedented technological options available to us” (p. 3). Although technology offers many options for enacting gender, it does not erase gender, and so performing one’s gender in online spaces is most definitely within the purview of our field. Because there are no rules or easy answers about how to “be” online, perhaps the best approach is to invite young people – armed with critical questions, supportive mentors, and useful skills – to explore these areas and genders themselves.
Wajcman (2004) explains the reciprocal nature existing between technologies and users. “We have begun to conceive of a mutually shaping relationship between gender and technology, in which technology is both a source and a consequence of gender relations. This is what I will describe as the emerging technofeminist framework” (p. 7). Taking up Wajcman’s technofeminist lens, we offer these camps as spaces for re-visioning young women as techno-rhetoricians able to command multiple media in order to communicate their opinions and identities. As discussions of the gender gap in STEM careers and access to technology persist, we believe that interventions embedded in communities are essential to changing the ways we experience and engage the technologies around us and in shrinking that gap. Blair, Erin Dietel-McLaughlin, and Meredith Graupner Hurley, writing about the third iteration of the Digital Mirror camp, explain this sort of outreach is needed because “twenty-first century girls don’t seem to get the same messages about technology-based career options within the larger culture, as the gap between women and girls as users of technology versus women and girls as producers of technology continue[s] to be a wide one” (2010, p. 122). Because many of us are dedicated to researching and writing about the intersections of technology and gender, we hope this guide inspires and equips others to “develop action-based research projects designed to benefit those communities” (Blair, Dietel-McLaughlin, & Graupner Hurley, 2010, p 142).
This tendency to characterize tech spaces and practices as either dangerous or damning for girls or, conversely, as saviors and gender mitigators misses the point that technologies are always both. “What it means to be a man or a woman is no longer ordained by ‘nature’ – gendered identities are contested terrain,” writes Wajcman (pp. 2-3). “These... changes are associated with the unprecedented technological options available to us” (p. 3). Although technology offers many options for enacting gender, it does not erase gender, and so performing one’s gender in online spaces is most definitely within the purview of our field. Because there are no rules or easy answers about how to “be” online, perhaps the best approach is to invite young people – armed with critical questions, supportive mentors, and useful skills – to explore these areas and genders themselves.
Wajcman (2004) explains the reciprocal nature existing between technologies and users. “We have begun to conceive of a mutually shaping relationship between gender and technology, in which technology is both a source and a consequence of gender relations. This is what I will describe as the emerging technofeminist framework” (p. 7). Taking up Wajcman’s technofeminist lens, we offer these camps as spaces for re-visioning young women as techno-rhetoricians able to command multiple media in order to communicate their opinions and identities. As discussions of the gender gap in STEM careers and access to technology persist, we believe that interventions embedded in communities are essential to changing the ways we experience and engage the technologies around us and in shrinking that gap. Blair, Erin Dietel-McLaughlin, and Meredith Graupner Hurley, writing about the third iteration of the Digital Mirror camp, explain this sort of outreach is needed because “twenty-first century girls don’t seem to get the same messages about technology-based career options within the larger culture, as the gap between women and girls as users of technology versus women and girls as producers of technology continue[s] to be a wide one” (2010, p. 122). Because many of us are dedicated to researching and writing about the intersections of technology and gender, we hope this guide inspires and equips others to “develop action-based research projects designed to benefit those communities” (Blair, Dietel-McLaughlin, & Graupner Hurley, 2010, p 142).