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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 02/03
Voice and Silence in an Email Conversation Group Involving Rural and Urban Women in Australia
June Lennie
December 2000
Abstract
Email discussion groups potentially offer ‘safe spaces’ for women to communicate in ways that are consistent with feminist principles and goals. They have been found to facilitate the creation of supportive ‘virtual communities’ that enable diverse groups of women to give voice to their issues and concerns, and to share information and network, without the limitations of location, travel costs and time associated with face to face communication (Rural Women and ICTs Team, 1999). However, email groups can also emphasise gender, cultural and other differences that can have disempowering effects. Thus, while email groups may provide women with a potentially empowering and inclusive means of communication and interaction that meets their needs, this paper argues that there is a danger in making too many assumptions about their emancipatory power.
The analysis presented in this paper is part of my doctoral study which aims, in part, to critically analyse the power relations and the discourses of empowerment and inclusion that were used in the feminist action research project ‘Enhancing Rural Women’s Access to Interactive Communication Technologies’ (ICTs). The project researchers established the successful online conversation group welink that is discussed in this paper. The welink group connects over 100 women (and a few men) living in rural, regional, remote and urban areas of Australia, and in a few overseas countries. However, although a ‘safe’ space for women to talk was created, highly contentious or political issues were usually avoided.
Using a participatory methodology labelled ‘feminist deconstructive ethnography’ and a feminist poststructuralist framework of theory and analysis, this paper presents a detailed analysis of a welink discussion on the controversial and divisive High Court of Australia’s ‘Wik’ decision on native title and the related issue of reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. This topic was one of the most contentious that had been discussed by the welink group. This analysis raises significant questions about feminist assumptions that the process of ‘giving voice’ to women will lead to empowerment. Feminist poststructuralists such as Walkerdine (1990) have highlighted the way in which discourses can be powerful or powerless, depending on the contexts in which they are produced. The discourse analysis and deconstruction of the welink conversations suggests that the dominant ‘care and connection’ discourse is a particularly powerful one that can sometimes render powerless other opposing or more critical discourses within the context of this online group.
From a feminist poststructuralist perspective, the aim of ‘empowering women’, which was one of the methodological aims of the Rural Women and ICTs project, and the binary oppositions empowerment/disempowerment are particularly problematic, given Power’s (1996, 10) argument, following Foucault, that ‘no individual can be understood as totally powerless’. This suggests a need to take the different contexts, and research participants’ multiple, shifting and contradictory discourses and subjectivities into account when we construct women as ‘empowered’ or ‘disempowered’.
The analysis presented in this paper highlights some of the complex and contradictory power relations and issues related to empowerment and inclusion that arose during the contentious ‘Wik’ discussion on welink and the value of the theoretical and methodological approach that was used. In part, these power relations and issues occurred when the feminist researchers and many welink participants sought to use a framework that takes an inclusive ‘politics of difference’ (Young, 1990) into account, but made somewhat naive assumptions about the power of email communication to overcome differences.
This analysis raises questions about the limitations that can become imposed on email groups that include women who speak from very different political, social and cultural subject positions and contexts, and have a wide diversity of needs. The ‘politics of difference’ framework appeared to be in conflict with ‘the ideal of community’ (Young, 1990) that many of the women who took part in the group also valued. This ‘ideal of community’ was signified by the desire to focus on commonalities rather than differences, and the comments by some non-farming women that they felt they did not really ‘belong’ to the welink group.
While the welink group was clearly empowering for many of its rural members, this analysis has indicated that there is a danger in making too many assumptions about the emancipatory power of email and the extent to which highly contentious topics can be discussed in ways that do not lead to silencing, disempowerment and exclusions. Email’s lack of body language to assist in interpreting the meaning of communication is one factor here. The analysis illustrates the contradictory ways in which the welink group’s friendly, inclusive and supportive ethos and the dominant discourse of ‘care and connection’, contributed to the silencing of the farming women, who were usually the most active members of the group. In comparison, the professional women living in rural towns and urban cities, who were often less active welink members, were empowered to speak openly about these controversial issues. The analysis showed that there were many ways in which the silence of the farming women could be interpreted and several different reasons for it.
This analysis challenges the feminist assumption that giving voice to women will lead to empowerment, and suggests that silence can, in some circumstances, produce empowerment or be a more appropriate strategy in maintaining important relationships. However, the analysis also indicated that both the women who spoke out on the Wik issue and those who remained silent were constrained by the powerful ‘care and connection’ discourse and the friendly, supportive ethos of the group which the welink members wanted to maintain. Both groups were also found to have experienced various forms of disempowerment as a result of the discussion.
The feminist poststructuralist framework used in this analysis is argued to enable feminists to think differently, and more critically and self-reflexively, about important concepts such as empowerment, inclusion and voice which raise many difficult issues for contemporary feminist theory, research and praxis. This framework also challenges feminists to adopt a more complex view of gendered power relations. This account highlights the limitations of the feminine discourse of care and connection and its diverse effects on women. It has also indicated ways in which the concepts of voice and silence, and empowerment and disempowerment can be seen as interpenetrating one another and not as separate and distinct from one another.
Identifying the multiple, shifting subject positions and discourses used by participants in feminist projects is a useful means of drawing attention to the sometimes contradictory effects of feminist strategies and processes, and proposing strategies for change. This approach is valuable in that it enables feminists to be more open and honest about the limitations of feminist strategies for empowerment and inclusion, such as the establishment of online groups that seek to give voice to a diversity of women.
