Gendered Power and Mobile Technology
Intersections in the Global South
Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality Series

Mobile phones are widely viewed as the information and communication technology that holds the most promise for bridging global digital divides.

Gendered Power and Mobile Technology uses empirical research to focus on changing intersections between technology, gender and other categories of social and cultural power difference (such as age, race, class, and ethnicity) in the use of mobile communication technologies. Asking how these intersections can inform development discourse, practice, and research, this volume seeks to rectify the lack of attention to the Global South, calling for more sensitivity to the contexts and consequences of mobile phone use. Indeed, drawing on case studies from Ecuador, Ghana, Kenya, Mexico, Peru, Tanzania, and Uganda, this book engages with the intersectionality paradigm to tease out the complexities of using mobile technologies for development purposes.

Gendered Power and Mobile Technology will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as media studies, development studies, gender and technology, feminist technoscience, anthropology, and sociology.

List of contributors

1 Rethinking gender and technology within intersections in the global South

Laura Stark and Caroline Wamala Larsson

PART I Mobile money in transacting femininities and masculinities

2 Gender and mobile phone usage in Kenyan women’s everyday lives

Jessica Gustafsson

3 Sex, social reproduction, and mobile telephony as responses to precarity in urban Tanzania

Laura Stark

4 Rethinking financial inclusion: social shaping of mobile money among bodaboda men in Kampala

Caroline Wamala Larsson

PART II Mobile connectivities: negotiating age, gender, and agency

5 One phone, two phones, four phones: older women and mobile telephony in Lima, Peru

Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol

6 Redefining relations: the appropriation of new ICT by young rural women in Peru

Mariana Barreto Ávila and Andrea García Abad

7 Reinforcing inequalities? Mobile telephony and HIV/AIDs in Ghana

Perpetual Crentsil

PART III Mobile continuities at the intersection of ethnicity, class, and gender

8 Women's tech initiatives in Uganda: doing intersectionality and feminist technoscience

Linda Paxling

9 Digital snails? Shuar women and mobile communication in Ecuador

Yolanda Martínez Suárez and Saleta de Salvador Agra

10 Communitarian mobile telephony services in rural Mexico: Red Celular Talea de Castro and Telecomunicaciones Indigenas Comunitarias

Lorena Pérez

Index

Caroline Wamala Larsson is an Associate Professor in Gender Studies and Head of Research with the Swedish Program for ICT in Developing Regions (SPIDER), an independent resource centre at Stockholm University, Sweden.

Laura Stark is Professor of Ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.