Eco-masculinities

Introducing Eco-Masculinities: How a masculine discursive subject approach to the Individual Differences Theory of Gender and IT impacts an environmental informatics project Dr David Kreps, Information Systems, Organisations & Society, University of Salford, UK AMCIS Peru 2010

Agenda

Agenda ✤ Gender and ICTs and Poststructuralism ✤ Individual Differences Theory ✤ Sociology of Masculinity / Masculinities ✤ Understanding power ✤ Ecofeminism ✤ Eco-Masculinities ✤ DEHEMS EU FP7 project

Why Eco-Masculinities?

Why Eco-Masculinities? ✤ Visby Declaration - FP7 €9.5bn 2007-13 on ICTs: Eco-Masculinities in ICTs urgent ✤ Theory of Individual Differences in Gender and IT (Trauth et al) - and (almost) all other Gender and ICT work - is about women’s experience ✤ Masculinities in ICTs - the gay male experience (Light; Kreps) - social networking sites inscriptive contraints ✤ Critical theory approach - bringing poststructuralist understanding of Masculinities, into ICT theoretical awareness - with a Green agenda

DEHEMS ✤ Nowhere is pro-environmental behaviour more crucial than in the home - UK - housing 26% of CO2 emissions - environmentally friendly technologies need to be ‘domesticated’ ✤ “Most domestic energy use, most of the time, is invisible to the user... Hence the importance of feedback in making energy more visible and more amenable to understanding and control.” (Darby 2006 DEFRA report) ✤ Digital Environment Home Energy Management System (DEHEMS) ✤ Improve current monitoring of energy being used by households, through intelligent meters - an ‘energy performance model’ that also looks at the way in which the energy is used

Individual Differences Theory of Gender and IT

Individual Differences Theory of Gender and IT ✤ Eileen Trauth (et al) - constructs and sub-constructs developed from fieldwork with women in IT ✤ (i) individual identity ✤ (a) personal demographics (b) career items Away from binary ✤ (ii) individual influences male/female ✤ (a) personal characteristics towards (b) personal influences individuality ✤ (iii) environmental influences ✤ (a) cultural influence (b) economic influences (c) policy influences (d) infrastructure influences

Sociology of Masculinity: Early years

Sociology of Masculinity: Early years ✤ 1930s/40s Functionalist ideas of ‘gender order’ ✤ Post-war : socialisation of men and boys, and women and girls, into the traditional roles assigned to them by pre-war society “fundamentally damaging for both females and males.” (Whitehead 2002:20) ✤ 1960s - critique of the male sex role focused on “the cost to men which the ideology of a dominant but dysfunctional masculinity elicited, particularly in terms of fractured relationships, damaged health and inﬂexibility (ibid p21). ✤ Assumes men and women to be passive recipients of socialisation processes

Masculinities: Psychoanalysis / Political theory

Masculinities: Psychoanalysis / Political theory ✤ Freud and Jung criticised for the misogyny and archetypal/ mythological gender roles ✤ Liberal feminists criticised for their uncritical acceptance of the established social order, needing only to change sufﬁciently to allow for women to become assimilated, ✤ Marxist feminists criticised for their uncritical acceptance of an overturned social order, in which women would be freed from the capitalist power relations that should be regarded as the sole source of their oppression. ✤ Both such approaches, focusing on changes to the social order, seem to ignore any requirement for men, also, to change.

Masculinities: Power

Masculinities: Power ✤ Central to the issue of considering women and men as political categories, which lies at the core of feminism’s attempts to redress the historical imbalance, is the issue of power. ✤ Notions such as radical feminism’s bette noir, Patriarchy, and the later more nuanced, Gramscian concept of hegemonic masculinity, both rest on an understanding of the nature of power, with which Whitehead takes issue. ✤ Enter Michel Foucault...

Masculine Discursive Subject

Masculine Discursive Subject ✤ Stephen Whitehead (and others) ✤ Masculine Discursive Subject ✤ Pro-feminist male ✤ Michel Foucault ✤ Poststructuralism ✤ Discourse - Power/Knowledge ✤ History of Sexuality - sexuality as discourse ✤ Techniques of the Self

Juridico-disciplinary power

Juridico-disciplinary power i. There is a negative relation between sex and power: sex is always something that power constrains; ii. Power acts juridically - as a law - determining how sex should be treated; iii. Power acts only to suppress sex; iv. Power says sex cannot be permitted, cannot be spoken of, and ultimately doesn't exist; v. Power works in the same manner at all levels: everywhere, there is uniform repression.

Power / Knowledge

Power / Knowledge i. Power is positive, immanent; it is being exercised at all times and from all points in any relation ii. Power is not applied externally upon such relations, but internally within and between them, and in idiosyncratic conﬁgurations at all levels of society iii. There are no individuals who are singly or collectively exercising power within society, whom the rest ultimately obey; all individuals are caught up in the nexus of power relations. iv. Resistance to power is therefore part of the power relationship, and not external to it, and takes different forms in different contexts, (Foucault 1998).

Ecofeminism

Ecofeminism ✤ Power relation between the human and the material, between the social and the ‘natural’. ✤ Rosemary Radford Ruether, New Woman, New Earth, (1975) Mary Daly Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978) Karen Warren Ecofeminist Philosophy (2000) ✤ The morally loaded concepts through which we understand ourselves and reality are at the core of the terrible ecological and social messes we currently face ✤ “the unjustiﬁed domination of women and “other human Others,” ... and the unjustiﬁed domination of non-human nature” (Warren 2000:xiv) ✤ technological solutions, feminist concerns, and local and indigenous concerns must all overlap

Eco-Masculinities

Eco-Masculinities ✤ Suggestions that women are “closer to nature than men” (Warren 2000 p193), ...or some essentialist core to all men needs to reconnect with nature (Bly 1990) clearly need to be avoided ✤ Oppressive power relations between men, between women, and between men and women, contain and depend upon material fundamentals such as control of and access to physical resources ✤ Eco-masculinities invites us to extend our understanding of discursive power relations to include “non-human Others”.

Eco-Masculinities and technology

Eco-Masculinities and technology ✤ Domestic ANT - a micro-politics of power relations - human and non-human actors in a ‘power-aware’ ANT - focused on relations between us and on the impact of our domestic lives upon the natural world. ✤ Planetary ecology (Lovelock 1979) - Cybernetics/ ANT - the feedback mechanisms of environmental change and disasters can be viewed as an inevitable balancing resistance, forming a counterpart to those elements of oppressive behaviour in men and women that extend to the world of nature.

ICT Domestication

ICT Domestication ✤ “White goods are equated with family consumption and hence a female user, and this is what in part confers low value” [Cockburn, 1997, p. 363]. ✤ DEHEMS - men’s or women’s domestic technology? ✤ Broadband, gas and electric mains, gadgets, plugs - ‘traditional’ men’s technology? ✤ Technologies of the gendered self (Royse et al 2007) ✤ Average social gamer, sitting at her computer, playing Farmville, is a 43 year old woman (Robyn 2010).

Conclusion

Conclusion ✤ Introduction to the concepts behind the notion of eco-masculinities, and its potential impact for ICTs ✤ DEHEMS surveys and focus groups to shed light on these issues. ✤ ICTs for domestic carbon reduction - new technologies of the gendered self – but will such gendered selves be pro-environmental, pro- feminist male gendered selves?

Contact

Contact ✤ Dr David Kreps ✤ Director, Centre for Information Systems, Organisations and Society, University of Salford, UK ✤ http://www.isos.salford.ac.uk ✤ http://snipr.com/davidkreps ✤ d.g.kreps@salford.ac.uk

Eco-masculinities

by David Kreps on Aug 14, 2010

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Eco-masculinities — Presentation Transcript