Cross-generational gender constructions. Women, teenagers and technology

Despite the supposed inroads of feminism, gender equality and new ‘democratic’ means of technological communication, adult women and teenage girls in the UK continue to emphasise what Valerie Walkerdine has termed the ‘habitual “feminine” position of incompetence’ (2006, 526). This article draws on...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Sociological review (Keele) 2011-02, Vol.59 (1), p.64-85
Main Authors: Thornham, Helen, McFarlane, Angela
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescents
Females
Femininity
Feminism
Gender
Gender identity
Gender roles
Ideological influences
Ideologies
Ideology
Sex
Sex inequality
Sexual Inequality
Social construction
Sociology
Technology
Teenagers
Telecommunications
United Kingdom
Women
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Summary:Despite the supposed inroads of feminism, gender equality and new ‘democratic’ means of technological communication, adult women and teenage girls in the UK continue to emphasise what Valerie Walkerdine has termed the ‘habitual “feminine” position of incompetence’ (2006, 526). This article draws on two complimentary research projects in order to investigate the cross-generational gender constructions women and teenagers articulate. Drawing on Negra's notion of a ‘cover story’ (2009, 44), this article suggests that we can read the claims and practices of the women and teenagers in terms of how they frame new ideologies of femininity. Further, the continual recourse to an essential feminine position of exclusion is detrimentally shaping not only technological use, but also the wider operationalization of gender in public and private arenas. Focussing specifically on the female populations of the research projects, we demonstrate how gender continues to emerge and be produced by women and girls in negotiated, but highly problematic ways. Rather than considering gender as a determining force, it emerges here as a carefully constructed tool for engagement, and as a distancing device facilitating a claim of, and towards, disinterest. The two projects suggest implications for future mediations and relations with new media technology; they also suggest that across generations, women are detrimentally fixing and restricting potential and actual performances of gender through the evocation of a more traditional femininity.
ISSN:0038-0261
1467-954X
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-954X.2010.01992.x