Cronies in gendered practices in the hey-day of globalization and new technology

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) as the most important catalyst in the process of globalization has generated enthusiastic anticipation  that they will empower women by transforming gender relations while  eradicating gender inequalities. The purpose of this Sociological reflection is to debunk the myth of ‘gender neutrality’ in the halcyon days of globalization, that digital technology is pure and unbiased and hence free from any gendered implication. Judy Wajcman points out that the mutability of gender discourses in the virtual world is severely inhibited by the ‘visceral, lived relations of the material world’. Even Second Life, a virtual online world with over two million registration and recognized as champion of anti-establishment values is major source of virtual pornography. The paper demonstrates that the global communication network, within the process of capitalist globalization, has emerged as a sort of global marketplace for selling and buying of commodities --- human bodies, their parts or images of both women and children. The Internet has grown into an inviting medium as a marketplace for sexual partners and pornographic goods and services of every conceivable kind.

                             The study, thus questions the disembodied character, neutrality and gender blindness of cyberspace.It unfolds the deeper point of making women’s bodies as the target for commodification and female body parts subject to  a virtual  panoptican gendered  gaze, and therefore, continually re-erecting a new-fangled gendering process through ICTs in the zenith of Globalization.  The massive literature on both Globalization and ICTs paid only scanty attention to this particular gendering of new technology and thus, hopes for  gender-neutral democratization of science and technology remains a pipe dream. The paper is premised upon  feminist post colonial perspective(s) which indubitably rejects widely assumed neutrality of male scientific/technological practices, and successfully unveils the hidden power relations underlying technological knowledge and skill.