Social networking media, cultural imperialism, and gender

Sociology grad student Sarah has an interesting post up at Facile Gestures that makes some important points about social networking media. One key point is about the coverage of the role that Facebook, Twitter, and other U.S.-generated media played in the Arab Spring and other social movements:

[T]there is a imperialist undertone to the notion that the uprisings could not have occurred without these social media platforms. By placing US-centric, English language platforms at the center of reportage on Middle Eastern unrest, we colonize the revolutions and claim them as victories of our own. Look at these tools of freedom we have created, we say, pointing towards our own techno-social accomplishments and feeling heroic that we provided such a space. This not only elides the fact that a significant proportion of political organizing outside the Western world happens outside of the services that we are most familiar with, but also diminishes our understanding of the relationship between online communication, political action, and information sharing outside the confines of those platforms we’ve deemed to be "important."

Exactly. While this is often done without malice, just offering us a way to understand foreign social movements in familiar terms, the result is to give us credit for something in which we played a very, very small role. (Given the larger role our country has played in supporting the targets of these revolutions, one can certainly understand our interest in feeling like we're on the side of the good guys.)

Sarah makes another interesting point with regards to gender:

We know that the feminist blogosphere runs a secondary parallel to the mainstream progressive blogosphere. Twitter — when not being used for celebrity gossip (an eminently female pursuit) — is the outlet for male dominated news outlets, mainstream or otherwise, to make their voices relevant. Facebook, though more personal and thus less likely to carry with it the gendering that comes with journalistic engagement, appears in the news as a gathering place for social movements gendered masculine by their leaders and tactics.

She contrasts these sites with LiveJournal, which is dominated by women. While LiveJournal is generally not listed among the sites facilitating political activity, it plays an important role in doing precisely that outside the United States.

I was thinking a lot about this topic during an impromptu "summit" of political scientist bloggers and their journalist counterparts at APSA last summer. It was hard not to notice that our group was overwhelmingly white, male, and young (defined as "≤ my current age"), and at least 50% Jewish. To be sure, this was hardly an unbiased sample of such bloggers, and we're drawn from a somewhat skewed population to begin with.

Nonetheless, women make up a substantial percentage of younger political scientists. Either a lot of these women are doing some political blogging in one form or another and we male bloggers just aren't aware of it, or they're declining to blog. I'm not sure if there's something particularly gendered about blogging in general. (I think a lot of us were computer nerds in high school, and that tends to draw a largely male population, as well, but that doesn't really answer the question.) I'm open to ideas on this.

(h/t John McMahon)

The Democratic Palin?

The Speaker of the House of Representatives is a Democratic woman (although she'll be replaced by a Republican man should the GOP pick up 39 seats this fall).  The Secretary of State is a Democratic woman.  So are thirteen U.S. senators (compare to four Republican women).  So are 56 members of the House (compare to 17 Republican women).  So are three associate justices of the Supreme Court (compare to zero Republican women), including the two most recent appointees.  So are 17 percent of state legislators (compare to seven percent who are Republican women).  So are 50 statewide elected executive officeholders (compare to 20 Republican women).  But what Democratic women really need, according to Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister, is a failed vice presidential candidate who can babble incoherently at rallies, on television, and on Facebook.

I don't get it.  Neither does Jonathan Bernstein, whose rebuttal is excellent.

This is a song Sarah Palin stole from Gloria Steinem; we're stealin' it back

I'm presenting a paper along with Michael Heaney, Joanne Miller, and Dara Strolovitch later this week at APSA on the topic of feminism and anti-feminism.  This paper is the product of our 2008 convention research.  This time, we're looking at convention delegates' evaluations of two key female candidates: Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.

We're still working on some of the details (which is why I haven't linked to the paper yet), but the main finding appears to be that delegates' evaluations of these candidates is strongly affected by their beliefs about gender discrimination.  Specifically, Democratic delegates who believe that workplace discrimination against women exists hold a higher opinions of Hillary Clinton than those who dismiss claims of such discrimination.  Conversely, Republican delegates who believe workplace discrimination against women exists hold a lower opinion of Sarah Palin than those who don't.

The research suggests that there are two different versions of feminism at work here.  The liberal version of feminism, exemplified by Hillary Clinton, is more or less unchanged since the 1970s -- it maintains that women should have a stronger presence in the business and political world in order to redress various forms of gender discrimination that still exist.  The form of feminism that Palin is articulating also seeks to encourage women to be active in the professional and political worlds, but also maintains that gender discrimination largely doesn't exist anymore.  This conservative version of feminism strikes me as somewhat new, far from the arguments that Phyllis Schlafly and others were making a few decades ago about women's best destinies lying in the kitchen and the nursery.

The terminology here is tricky.  Some refer to the conservative version as "anti-feminism."  And, to an extent, it is arguing the opposite of what more traditional feminism argues.  Except that it also does seek some empowerment for (conservative) women.  Palin, for example, has, at times, called herself a feminist, and she famously tweeted that feminism was "hijacked" by a "cackle of rads." And she has been very publicly backing female candidates across the country and encouraging others to run.  Is this the opposite of feminism?  Well, of course, that depends on what feminism is, and there's the debate.

I hope to have more on this after we get some feedback at the conference.