Life histories in cyberspace: life writing as a development tool for rural women

Geoforum 36 (2005) 59–75 www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Life histories in cyberspace: life writing as a development tool for rural women Donna D. Rubinoff Department of Geography, University of Colorado-Boulder, Campus Box 260, Boulder, CO 80309, USA Received 20 May 2002; received in revised form 9 September 2003

Abstract Increasingly, information and communication technology (ICT) is being used as a development tool. For example, a recent innovative experiment by the FIDAMERICA development cybernetwork (sponsored by IFAD, the International Fund for Agricultural Development) in Latin America used an electronic network to collect, post and discuss rural women’s life histories, intending to support gender mainstreaming in IFAD projects. However, cybernetworking processes can also reflect contradictory agendas and power relations that ultimately make them a site of contestation. In the FIDAMERICA case, the authors did not participate in the electronic conference, nor were there any subsequent efforts to connect them or to develop this process further. In this paper, I argue that the analysis of increasingly complex cybernetworked development efforts must incorporate a correspondingly sophisticated technique that can uncover the nuanced relations of transnational cyber communication; and I propose that an actor-network approach should be investigated as an analytical framework in these cases. I then apply this approach to the case study, using field research conducted with the participants of the FIDAMERICA electronic life history project in Central America. I conclude that an actor-network approach is a fruitful means by which these processes can be both understood and improved.
2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Actor-network theory; Autobiography; Testimonio; Information and communication technology (ICT); Transnational networks; Gender and development; Central America

Does the enlargement of opportunities for cultural resistance afforded by some technological networks, . . . balance out with the narrowing down of real spaces by the forces of a transnational capitalism fueled by the same technologies? (Escobar, 1999, p. 31). Is [autobiography] the model for imperializing the consciousness of colonized peoples, replacing their collective potential for resistance with a cult of individuality and even loneliness? Or is it a medium of resistance and counter-discourse, the legitimate space for producing that excess which throws doubt on the coherence and power of an exclusive historiography? (Sommer, 1988, quoted in Watson and Smith, 1992, xiii).

E-mail address: rubinoff@colorado.edu (D.D. Rubinoff). 0016-7185/$ - see front matter
2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2004.03.009

1. Introduction In 1995, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) established FIDAMERICA, a cybernetwork of IFAD’s approximately 30 development projects located throughout Latin America. Heretofore, the IFAD projects had been operating relatively independently within a hierarchical structure emanating from its central headquarters in Rome; and FIDAMERICA was part IFAD’s overall operational restructuring in response to the perceived benefits of organizational integration. 1 As one of many cybernetworked initiatives since then, FIDAMERICA

1 ‘‘Milestones in IFAD’s History’’ historical documentation no longer fully available. For summaries see: http://www.ifad.org/events/ past/anniv/mile94.htm.

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conducted a life history 2 gathering project in 1997 to identify local women leaders associated with the IFAD projects. Set up as a ‘‘Concurso’’ or contest, and conducted within the structure of an international electronic conference, the project literature states that the life history project was intended to stimulate the telling of life histories by women leaders, so that other peasant and indigenous women in other countries could learn lessons from their experiences. Across this dialogue, we wish to strengthen communication and exchange between peasant organizations across Latin America. Also, we hope that this project will permit rural development organizations at all levels to learn from these autobiographies, and that they will go on in their work to support the development of new women leaders. 3 Submissions to the Concurso were encouraged by monetary prizes for the winners, 4 and the result was that FIDAMERICA received life histories from over 100 local women leaders, most of who were beneficiaries of local IFAD projects. Subsequently, the life histories were published on the FIDAMERICA website, winners were judged during an electronic conference and a small book of winners’ stories was published. But when I asked the director of FIDAMERICA, ‘‘how did this process work, and what were the outcomes and impacts of the life histories and the conference for the authors?’’ the response was that beyond the publication of the booklet, ‘‘who knows.’’ 5 The agenda of the Concurso, as stated in the project literature, included information sharing and communication among Latin American peasants, gender sensitization for development organizations, and ultimately leadership development and empowerment for rural women. This initiative is broad and noble, and represents a potential first step towards ICT related development participation by those on the frontiers of cyberspace. However, as I will show in this paper, a deeper investigation of the details of this process reveals a somewhat more complex story. Alternately, although the cybernetic life histories were simultaneously a vehicle

for the sensitization of IFAD staff to the realities of their beneficiaries’ lives, a model for the formation of an alternative collective subject, and a moderate vector of empowerment for their authors, the Concurso was also a truncated cybernetworking initiative for Latin American campesinas. Although the literature stated that it intended to strengthen communication and exchange, most of the women whose life histories appeared never knew about their placement online, the e-conference, nor did most of them receive any feedback beyond a certificate of participation. No form of broader communication among them has materialized. In the world of ICT for development (currently shorthanded as ICT4D) the seductive glossy screen of development websites and their contents can conceal a deep well of complicated, contradictory, and downright messy relations among the actors represented there. On the one hand, ICT4D holds enormous development potential, and at the same time, it can complicate progressive development agendas, obscure the role of the technology in this endeavor, or even exaggerate the contribution of ICT to development. The multiple outcomes of the Concurso for the campesina authors must be seen within the evolving patterns of interface between ICT and development in the context of global change. Increasingly, the ICT enabled processes of neo-liberal globalization have been challenged by civil society actors using these same technologies to exert agency over global processes at multiple scales. 6 In principle, these groups use ICTs to seek alternatives to neo-liberal globalization and an expansive notion of participation in development processes; but thinking about these groups in ‘‘resistance’’ to globalization sets up a binary opposition that is dangerously simplistic as an explanatory device. On organizational, technical, and theoretical levels, a more sophisticated approach to the analysis of cybernetworking dynamics would highlight the complex and contradictory elements of ICT enabled development networks; the differential power relations that these invoke and produce; and the internal and external sites of struggle where these processes play out. For example, cybernetworked development organizations comprise a heterogeneous range of differentially motivated individuals (including elite, well-educated

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Although the Concurso literature bills it as an ‘‘autobiography’’ contest, I am using the term ‘‘life history’’, because in most cases, the texts were collected as oral histories, sometimes written and reworked and always typed into the computer by intermediaries. As I will show below, these words are politically loaded, and I have chosen the one that seems to align most clearly with the intentions of both authors and organizers of the event; although FIDAMERICA and IFAD staff and authors randomly used the words autobiography, life history and testimonial. 3 See www.Fidameria.cl. 4 See www.Fidameria.cl. 5 Personal conversation, August 15, 2000.

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Well rehearsed examples include anti-globalization social movements and NGOS devoted to social justice and environmental protection; local resistance groups linked to transnational support and advocacy movements, such as the Zapatistas in Chiapas, M
exico, or Narmada Bando Andolan in India; alternative trade networks linking to local collectives of such products as cocoa in the Andes and coffee Central America. (For example see Ribiero, 1998; Balit, 1999; FAO, 1999a, and Zapatista, International Rivers Network, NETAID, World Bank, IFAD, and IDRC websites, www.ezln.org, www.irn.org, www.netaid.org, www.worldbank.org, www.ifad.org, www.idrc.ca.)

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staff professionals in the global south and north, numerous categories of beneficiary/marginalized populations or clients, academics, and sometimes even corporate sponsors), whose various linkages shape ICT4D networks. Furthermore, development institutions and their critics have become increasingly intertwined as a function of the use of ICTs. For instance, the World Bank’s 2001 World Development Report on Poverty was heavily influenced by internal and external Bank critics, whose pressure for greater attention to social justice paradigms was channeled partly through online forums, and whose results were exemplified in the Bank’s ‘‘Voices of the Poor’’ initiative. 7 Likewise, as Bair and Gereffi (2001) have shown in their analysis of global commodity chains, critics of export processing zone (EPZ) production must be seen as part of the chain of production in some sense. In parallel on a technological level, the term ‘‘digital divide’’ is widely used to explain the conditions of access to cyberspace, yet it also simplifies the complexities of ICT access and use by people within developing spheres. In the rich countries, access is understood mostly as an economic factor in the private domain, 8 but in the developing world, ICT use is complicated by a host of conditions that stratify, control, and limit participation. These include material conditions such as access to telephony and electricity; social conditions of gender, racial or ethnic bias; and the training that allows people to envision how ICTs might be used for development. Even with the growth of community access to ICT (IFPRI, 2000), the digital landscape is guarded in some rural locations by the internal politics of the organization controlling the hardware. Concerns about the use of ICT for development are especially pertinent for women in the developing world, where the feminization of the global economy, 9 gender bias in development, 10 and impacts of new technology introduction for women 11 have had mixed results for women. While the international women’s movement has been on the forefront of ICT use for regional and global organizing, 12 the tentacles of electronic networking

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have extended in limited and spotty patterns into the margins of the rural developing world. 13 Despite the concurrent rise of local grassroots women’s organizations that address issues of economic, political and subjective empowerment, 14 Alvarez (1998, p. 316) has noted that the ‘‘NGO-ization’’ of some parts of the Latin American feminist movement, supported in large part by their growing use of ICT, is in danger of leaving the issues and concerns of rural women behind. The problematic role of ICT for rural women has been supported by evidence from a variety of studies and conferences. 15 Most recently, UNSTRAW and UNIFEM research in preparation for the upcoming World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) incorporated input from rural women, however this input continues to be largely mediated by elite women with access to the Internet. In recognition of this problem, gender and ICT4D advocates within the WSIS process have coalesced a common policy statement that not only derives from the concrete ICT4D experiences of rural women, but also seeks to extend the reach of policymaking networks to rural women. 16 All these examples illustrate the contradictions and challenges inherent in a basic ICT4D assumption: that the increasing local presence of ICT and the existence of networks, in and of themselves, will necessarily support the accomplishment of more participatory development agendas. Instead, it asks us to view the digital divide as a complex fracturing of opportunity and constraint at many sites, which triggers differential individual and group capacity to access, command, and produce the electronic tools and cyberspaces of alternatives within global change. Analytically, the demystification of this elongated and intricate field of struggle requires sophisticated techniques. While studies have evaluated the Internet-linked EZLN movement, 17 and the gray literature is beginning to report evidence of innovative experiments around ICT related development, 18 the truth is that scant attention has been paid to the ethnography of development networks at a refined scale

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See: http://www.worldbank.org/poverty/voices/. I do not mean here to discount the important issue of public access in the rich countries, just to argue that the primary form of Internet access there remains private. 9 For example Fernandez-Kelly (1997), Ong (1987), Beneria and Feldman (1992), Ong and Peletz (1995), Afshar and Barrientos (1999), Afshar and Dennis, 1992, Gladwin (1991), Jacobson (1992). 10 For example Elson (1995). 11 For example Paris et al. (2001), Carney (1992, 1993), Stamp (1986), Agarwal (1994), Boserup (1970). 12 Burch, S. ‘‘The Internet: a tool for women’s organizations’’, Discussion note prepared for the UN Expert Workshop on Global Information through Computer Networking Technology in the Follow-up to the Fourth World Conference on Women, United Nations, New York, June 26–28, 1996. 8

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Rubinoff (2003), Harcourt (1999), Cummings (1999), Garcia (1999), Gittler (1999), Radloff (1999). 14 Afshar and Barrientos (1999), Alexander and Mohanty (1997), Grewal and Kaplan (1994), Chhachhi and Pittin (1996), Jaquette (1994a,b), Radcliffe and Westwood (1993), Rocheleau et al. (1996). 15 APC (1997), Farwell et al. (1999), Huyer (1997), Harcourt (1999), Beijing + 5 website (http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/followup/ beijing+5.htm). 16 See Rubinoff (2003). 17 For example Froehling (1999), Rabasa (1998), Belausteguigoitia (1998). 18 For example IFPRI (2000, 2001), FAO (1999b, 2001); World Bank ‘‘Gender and the Digital Divide’’ Seminar Series (http:// www.worldbank.org/gender/digitaldivide/index.htm).

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(Escobar, 2001). 19 This is partially because it is somewhat early to report on impacts of experiments in crossing the digital divide (FAO, 2001). But beyond that, clearer understandings of the constructions of cybernetworks require theoretical frameworks that can cope with geographies of cybernetworking and cyberspace. As Graham (1998) has explained in his review of geographical theorizations of cyberspace, early notions of cyberspace saw it as a separate sphere that either substituted for or mirrored life. This vision resulted in the transcendent virtual realities that have come to pervade discourses, media and entertainment related to ICT; and produced a version of cyberspace that was technologically deterministic in that it was seen as a force that would transform society unidirectionally. This early thinking about cyberspace paralleled the binary oppositions of orthodox globalization theory emerging at the same time. This work conceptualized a ‘‘network society’’ of ICT-enabled flexible accumulation and integrated cultural flows 20 in which ‘‘some places may be switched off the network, their disconnection resulting in instant decline, and thus in economic, social and physical deterioration’’ (Castells, 1996, pp. 413 and 133– 135). While neo-Marxists saw globalization as a source of uneven development and social injustice, this critique still fell into strong global–local binaries. 21 In contrast, and increasingly, counter-discourses of globalization deny the black and white dichotomies of orthodox scenarios (Kelly, 1999; Vertovec, 1999). Recent research on global processes, including economic restructuring and value chains, 22 transnational migration and entrepreneurship, 23 transnational social movements, 24 political organizing, 25 and cultural flows, 26 contradicts the binary oppositions of early globalization discourse, and show that global change is not only more multidirectional, but more complex, than previously assumed. These conclusions have been mirrored by more nuanced understandings of cyberspace, such as the ‘‘coevolutionist’’ approach, that emphasized the dialectical and articulated production of cyberspace and place. Despite this recursive interaction between places and ICT networks, however, Graham (op. cit. p. 171) argues that the coevolutionist approach retains

political economic orientations to binary opposition between global and local. Alternatively, Graham argues that a better spatial framework for understanding cybernetworks can be derived from actor-network theories (ANT) that take ‘‘relational views of the social construction of technology further’’ (ibid p. 177). Below, I draw on Graham’s recommendation in a review of the key ingredients of an actor-network analysis that make ANT a valuable framework for evaluating ICT4D, and in doing so situate the discussion of FIDAMERICA cybernetic life histories that follows. 2. Cybernetworks, rural women, and the actor-network approach ANT originated within the sociology of science and technology studies (STS) along with other post-structural approaches. Murdoch (1998) has shown how early work by Latour and Callon drew from Serres’ ‘‘sociology of translation’’ as it traced the ‘‘punctualization’’ (in materials, technologies, patterns of behavior, bureaucracies, and texts, for example) of the networks that comprise them. Developed later by John Law and others, 27 these ideas emphasize the intersecting, complex articulation of technologies with humans and a host of other components embedded in places. ‘‘Each application has associated with it whole multiplicities of human actors and institutions, who must continually struggle to enroll and maintain the communications technologies, along with other technologies, money and texts, into producing some form of functioning social order’’ (Graham, 1998, p. 179]). As Law (1992, p. 3) points out, This then, is the core of the actor-network approach: a concern with how actors and organizations mobilize, juxtapose and hold together the bits and pieces out of which they are composed; how they are sometimes able to prevent those bits and pieces from following their own inclinations and making off; and how they manage, as a result. . . to turn a network from a heterogeneous set of bits and pieces each with its own inclinations, into something that passes as a punctualised actor.

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Escobar notes two dissertations in progress on the ethnography of anti-globalization networks at the University of Massachusetts. 20 For example Harvey (1989), Castells (1996), Appadurai (1996). 21 For example Kelly (1999), Harvey (1989); Smith (1992), Dirlik (1996), Brecher and Costello (1994). 22 Dicken et al. (2001), Gereffi et al. (2001), Sturgeon (2001), Tiffen and Zadek (1998). 23 Landolt et al. (1999), Mahler (1999, 2001). 24 Escobar (2000, 2001), Edelman (2001), Smith (1998), Keck and Sikkink (1998). 25 Edelman (1998, 2001). 26 Friedman (1990).

Central to the ANT approach was a refusal to assume a priori the existence of structures; a curiosity with microsocial interactions and the power relations through which they are repeatedly performed into the patterns of 27

For a good introduction to actor-network theory, as well as an extensive bibliography, see Law’s website http://tina.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/jlaw.html, especially Law (1992, 2000), also see Law and Hassard (1999).

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the macrosocial; and how agency is dispersed throughout a chain of participants in the network. Intrinsic to this approach were notions of heterogeneity, translation, and punctualization. For example, actors were thought to be heterogeneous, different from each other, to begin with. It was enrollment and translation that linked them together and provided a focus for analysis; or as Star (1991, p. 32) describes it: the ‘‘process of translating the images and concerns of one world into that of another, and then disciplining or maintaining that translation in order to stabilize a powerful network’’. This process, however, must include the periodic sedimentation of power relations into something solid, as John Law points out in his explanation for how networks are ‘‘translated’’ into solid ‘‘punctualizations’’ that embody and simplify underlying networks of power and relations: Thoughts are cheap but they don’t last long, and speech lasts very little longer. But when we start to perform relations––and in particular when we embody them in inanimate materials such as texts and buildings––they may last longer. Thus a good ordering strategy is to embody a set of relations in durable materials (Law, 1992, p. 3). The texts produced in cyberspace, such as the FIDAMERICA Concurso de Mujeres life histories, represent intermittent ‘‘punctualizations’’ of a long network of performances—the actions of various people in multiple places that work to move them from source to cyberspace. These texts are representations of past power relations and set up a framework for future action that may or may not occur, as I will show in the discussion of the FIDAMERICA life histories below. The differential functioning of power relations at the sites where network segments meet are central to the building and disintegration of actor-networks and their analysis. Graham (1998, p. 179) reminds us that it is important to recognize that actor-networks are ‘‘always contingent, always constructed, never spatially universal, and always embedded in the microsocial worlds of individuals, groups and institutions,’ that they ‘always represent geographies of enablement and constraint’’’ (Law and Bijker, 1992, p. 301, cited in Graham, 1998, p. 179). Thus, in cybernetworks, every point on the constellation of nodes and flows that comprise them becomes a point of struggle, a switch that can be opened or closed. In the context of ICT4D, these switches can be seen as conditions of access to development resources channeled by ICTs or, alternatively, they can be seen to influence the pathways by which marginalized people participate in shaping ICT related development processes. A key ingredient of ANT was its incorporation of technological, non-human entities into an analysis of the ‘‘mechanics of power’’ (Law, 1992, p. 1). For example,

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human connections with technology are treated the same as human/human relations; and technology is given equal weight with other actors, including discourses, texts, humans, buildings, etc. In the context of the FIDAMERICA life histories, it becomes possible to trace their path from memory to website placement and beyond via a string of interconnected humans, technology, and texts. Beyond its explicit incorporation of technology, though, ANT analysis presumed that all human interaction was mediated by technology, even invisible technology, such as that which weaves the material for our clothing. ‘‘If human beings form a social network it is not because they interact with other human beings. It is because they interact with human beings and endless other materials too’’ (Law, 1992, p. 2). Thus, regardless of whether actors have direct access to ICT, or whether they are conscious of ICT related processes, they can be implicated in and impacted by ICTs. Within the ICT4D sphere, powerful actors, such as development institution staff, utilize ICTs to shape the development process for so-called ‘‘beneficiaries.’’ Even perhaps more significant is that global and state level ICT4D policymaking is currently rewriting the development arena in ways that are invisible to many ICT4D actors. 28 Making an accurate account of the FIDAMERICA life history project network requires a capacity for incorporating the view from the margins, from the perspective of the women who contributed their stories. Although this requirement seems self-evident, early iterations of ANT precluded the possibility because the focus of ANT was on enrollment of bits and pieces by the centers of power, the ‘‘heterogeneous engineers’’ at the center of a network. In one of the original ANT analyses, Latour featured Louis Pasteur as the driving force of the institutionalization of pasteurization (1988). In a pivotal critique, Star (1991) drew on discussions over inclusion and difference prominent in feminist social theory at the time to argue that ANT was too managerialistic: that not only the senior scientists, but the lab assistant and the janitor should present viewpoints on pasteurization systems as well, that we must also understand the construction of social networks from the perspective of the enrolled. This critique spurred a rash of liberal concern for the incorporation of what Latour called the ‘missing masses’ into ANT analysis (1992, cited in Hetherington and Law, 2000). As those on the margins were incorporated into the analysis, it became clear that not only would the networks of participation extend further to the margins, but that these participants would bring with them spheres that were outside of the dominant frame. These spheres would challenge the color and tone of the

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Rubinoff (2003).

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whole network. For example, in a review of the FIDAMERICA life histories, one of the Concurso judges commented: ‘‘These women show an almost athletic competence to hurdle over obstacles of different dimensions.’’ ‘‘Why do we then continue, stupidly, speaking of the weaker sex, and of rural women like a vulnerable group, if the force, persistence, and tenacity appear to be their most notorious skills?’’ 29 The realization that campesina ‘‘beneficiaries’’ had met their life trials with such vital and powerful inner resources was a concept that had been outside the dominant thinking about these women. The life histories brought with them stories of worlds far different than what had been previously conceptualized and these worlds needed to be integrated into the dominant development visions in which campesina women were vulnerable, weak, and victims. This was the world of the ‘‘other,’’ and the next step in the evolution of ANT was first addressed by Lee and Brown (1994), who argued that ANT had no place for the ‘‘other,’’ not only the marginalized, but that which was outside and not containable by the network. As Law argued, ‘‘ANT is involved in an intellectual and political refusal to try to squint beyond the possible. To find, to make, the undiscovered continent and discover the shady and heterotopic places, the places of Otherness that lie beyond the limits of the current conditions of possibility’’ (1992, p. 2). This critique challenged ANT thinking to explore alternative spatial visions which evolved into ‘‘after ANT’’ theory. Some of these were Haraway’s image of a cat’s cradle, in which parts of the network are convoluted, variable, broken or misshapen (1994); Escobar’s ideas on meshworks (2000); and metaphors of fluidity that allow actors to shift identities and meanings across space and scale (Mol and Law, 1994; Law, 2000; De Laet and Mol, 2000). In a most provocative line of thinking, after ANT theorists have also voiced concern for the incorporation of the Other, that which is outside of the network in a way that is not contained within the logic or the discourse of the network. In this vein, Law (2000) argues that we need to think about not only networks but the fluid space outside those networks; and Lee and Brown (1994) have argued for the importance of blank space as an under evaluated and under appreciated structural factor within networks. Relations between actors are another key aspect of both classic and newer ANT approaches. But, as Hetherington and Law (2000) note in their introductory editorial to a special issue of Environment and Planning D, titled ‘‘What is a Relation?’’ they are difficult to

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Formerly on www.Fidamerica.cl; no longer available on line.

analyze. Here, ANT has dovetailed with a vibrant body of work developed by feminist theorists of ‘‘relations of difference’’ during the early 1990s, 30 and extended by geographical, postcolonial and transnational feminists since then. 31 Relations are a central motif to this group of feminist theorists, who argued that identities are constructed in relation to others, and as such, become a function of a collective process. Also, identities become fluid and responsive to various situations, being produced and changing depending upon the context and the relation to another person, process or place. Furthermore, identities are situated in a body that connects to the variety of multi-scalar contexts and multiply aspected (gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality) relations in which it operates. Finally, this body operates in space and time through the ‘‘performativity’’ of speech, writing, and action to solidify social processes, relations and identities. 32 For academics and analysts, an emphasis on relationality would require a self-reflexive placement into the overall scheme of research or activism. In their discussions of cybernetworks, both Escobar and Graham invoke the work of Doreen Massey’s ‘‘power geometries’’ (1993, 1994) in stressing the importance of ‘‘relationality’’ for theorizing the construction of cyberspaces, and Escobar (1999, p. 51) goes on to suggest that alternative or subversive cyberspace might incorporate feminist notions of interactivity, positionality and connectivity. All of these concepts provide a vocabulary for more specifically placing and describing actors and the extent and quality of their relations. One of the most important metaphors for both ANT and feminist theories of difference has been Haraway’s ‘‘cyborg’’ (popularly seen as the quintessential emblem of the transcendence of technological and human boundaries). 33 For Haraway, the cyborg was not just a science fiction character; it was more importantly the ultimate metaphor of an alternative form of relationality, which replaced oppositional and hierarchical relations with a relational form that could cope with the ‘‘tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true’’ (1990, p. 190). This metaphor was also the essence of Haraway’s vision of the political potential of the cyborg: that it modeled a world where identities and relations could be built upon

30 For an introduction to feminist theories of difference see Nicholson (1990), Rose (1993), Massey (1994). 31 For an introduction to geographical, postcolonial and transnational feminisms, see Mohanty et al. (1992), Alexander and Mohanty (1997), Grewal and Kaplan (1994), McDowell (1991), Hooks (1991), Blunt and Rose (1994). 32 See Butler (1990) for discussion of performativity. 33 Haraway (1990 [1985]) ‘‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’’ shows that she was much more concerned with the cyborg’s subjective and political potentialities than its science fictional titillation.

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difference that was seen as equal. Feminist notions of relationality have supported more than the description of relations and the building of networks; they have supported a political project that envisions a more just and empowering world for marginal actors such as the FIDAMERICA campesinas. Ultimately, feminist theories of difference have been influential to the evolution of ANT approaches, and have contributed to the usefulness of ANT for this analysis, which continues below.

3. IFAD, FIDAMERICA and the Concurso de Mujeres Broadly, my research investigates the ICT interface of rural women in the FIDAMERICA cybernetwork. Founded in 1995 by the UN affiliated International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), FIDAMERICA is a cybernetwork of approximately 30 IFAD rural development projects throughout Latin America. These local projects each cover several departimentos, benefit several thousand families each, and have budgets funded by IFAD, national governments and other development institutions ranging between $10–20 million in loans and grants typically over a three-year period. The local projects support poor small farmers with a wide range of technical and material agricultural assistance, micro enterprise advice, social and health support, and increasingly, community organizational development. FIDAMERICA’s cybernetworking agenda supports IFAD programs by facilitating the project level exchange of information and experiences through electronic lists, training and systematization workshops, international cyber conferences, and working groups that address financial systems, peasant economic organizations, integration into markets, and natural resource management (www.Fidamerica.cl, IFAD, 1998). At the same time that cybernetworking has become a central operational tool for IFAD, gender mainstreaming has also been integral to its development strategy; and together these elements have manifested themselves in the umbrella projects, PROSGIP and PROGENDER 34 which together have consolidated and transnationalized the lessons of gender experimentation conducted in local projects (Campana, 1997). These include gender analysis at the household level, capacity building, and leadership training for women in community development and organization, agriculture, health, and micro enterprise (PRODAP, 1999; PLANDERO, 1998). Together, these streams of organizational 34

PROSGIP: Program for the Strengthening of Gender Issues in IFAD Projects; PROGENDER: Program to Consolidate Gender Main Streaming in IFAD Financed Projects in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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structure can be seen as part of the foundational network of the Concurso, which further entwined the networks of cybernetworking and gender initiatives in a mechanism to address women’s needs on multiple levels. Yet, the truncation of the Concurso left unanswered questions and for me, a research opportunity. I felt that this group of stories represented an important and inventive attempt to accomplish several goals of gendersensitive progressive development with the help of ICT; and I also felt that this group represented an obvious incipient network. When I found out that not much had been done with this group subsequent to the Concurso, certainly that no network had ensued, I sensed valuable lessons and further opportunities in the following questions: ‘‘What are the dynamics under which transnational cybernetworks are created?’’ ‘‘How can this form be utilized as an alternative development tool?’’ In order to answer these questions and to delineate the contours of women’s insertion into the FIDAMERICA network, my research focused on the a subset of the Concurso authors located in El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica. Data was collected by using a feminist research methodology that included content analysis of the life histories, personal interviews with 21 authors, 35 as well as a focus group of authors in Costa Rica. Furthermore, I interviewed current and former project staff of IFAD projects, IFAD and FIDAMERICA managerial staff, and local and regional consultants charged with developing the gender program within FIDAMERICA. The Concurso de Mujeres life history gathering process can be seen as an extended actor-network of people, institutions, technology, and discourses that produced and placed texts intended to shape development for the campesinas of this study. As I will show below, by looking at the Concurso life histories as textual punctualizations of an actor-network of interlinking segments, it is possible to show how the network accomplished or failed at various objectives. It supported the gender sensitization of IFAD staff; it delineated a collective testimonial process that preliminarily inscribed a network of communication among the campesinas; and it personally empowered the authors in subtle ways, especially through the writing of the life

35 All are rural women agriculturalists or resource managers who have demonstrated leadership in business, political, organizational capacities, whether self-originated or ‘‘trained’’ by a development project. Most are in their 40s or 50s, although some are in their 30s and a handful in their 60s. Most have partners, but 5 are heads of households. Most live in varying levels of poverty, but the economic situation of subjects varies from extreme poverty to upper lower class, transnationally and within countries. Their primary leadership issues include economic development and exporting, indigenous issues and land rights, and local political organizing and community development.

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histories. However, by ‘‘cutting’’ the network of life history production and publication prior to its full resolution back to the campesinas, the Concurso process can be seen to have failed to incorporate campesinas’ complete participation, promote their development visions, initiate the preliminary structures of a rural women’s cybernetwork, or contribute to a more transformational level of empowerment for rural women in the sphere of ICT4D.

4. Actor networks of life histories in cyberspace In the placement of rural women’s life histories on the Internet, the producers of the Concurso de Mujeres extended authorial space to women who were previously silenced at the global scale and in the realm of literary publication. In itself, this spatial opening can be seen as an achievement. However, the cybernetic e-texts of the Concurso can be more clearly understood by conducting an ANT analysis in which the life histories are seen as network ‘‘punctualizations’’. By taking them as a starting (or ending) point, it is possible to trace at least four primary strands of the networks in which they are embedded, including: • the networks of production from author to electronic placement of texts; • the linkages between the online life histories and their readers; • the recursive networks from the electronic conference back to the campesinas; and • the internal networks of empowerment that flowed from the writing of the life histories back to the authors. To better understand the process and content of the life history production, it is important to locate them within the literary continuum between western genres of autobiography, a form that arose in conjunction with the humanism of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and testimonio, a genre of ‘‘resistance literature’’ which coalesced during the 1960s within Latin American movements for national liberation, especially in Cuba. 36 The intention of the autobiographic form was originally to inscribe the lives of important historical figures, and autobiographies traditionally centered on those who had power. Furthermore, autobiography emphasized the individual (historically male), the rational actor and celebrated the ‘‘singularity of each individual life.’’ 37 They became ‘‘really popular during the Renaissance and Reformation when self-made men

became the rage.’’ 38 In contrast, testimonio arose during resistance movements that challenged social domination, and represented the attempt to use a cultural product as a symbolic and active token of resistance. This was accomplished by using a singular author to represent the collective self, and promoted the ‘‘illusion of singularity, an illusion of standing in for others as opposed to standing up among them.’’ 39 The writing/collection process followed by many of the participants in the FIDAMERICA life history gathering process itself clearly linked many of the life histories to testimonio. Less than one third of the subjects interviewed ‘‘hand wrote’’ their own texts. The rest of the stories were recorded as oral history, narrator working together with a listener (with or without a tape recorder) who then transcribed verbatim or rewrote the material. While in a few cases informants were not even aware that a life history was being produced as their story was given during an interview conducted during a broader training workshop, there were several cases in which authors ‘‘spoke to,’’ greeted, or otherwise addressed other women (not the interviewer) in their narrative, hoping that the story would provide information, help or solace to those in similar situations, the other entrants in the contest. Clearly, these authors understood the conversational process of the testimonial, and perhaps on some level knew that the Concurso could have been the beginning of a conversation between themselves and other similar women. Lydia Gonzalez, 40 whose life history began with a salute to the other participants of the Concurso: ‘‘A fond greeting to the participants of this event: God bless you.’’ During our interview, Lydia commented that she thought there could be important benefits for both the writers and the readers of the life histories, including information and experience shared, but also a reciprocal benefit achieved because of the transnational element of the exchange: I was satisfied at the beginning. Then I started to think, this could be very useful, right, to teach others and that other people should see, that perhaps what they know could be something in life, right. Because people in their place or in their country, there is an adage that says, one isn’t a prophet in their own land, while on the other side, perhaps what you know, right, maybe someone else could benefit from this. Right, because suddenly, one knows things and they are not appreciated, only pushed down and down. And so, well sure, I felt, right, I did my work and I felt satisfied and happy because I said, at least somewhere else they are

38 36 37

For example Beverley (1992), Kaplan (1992), Sommer (1988). Gusdorf, 1980, p. 29, cited in Sommer (1988, p. 111).

39 40

Sommer (1988, p. 111). Sommer (1988, p.112). All women’s names are pseudonyms.

D.D. Rubinoff / Geoforum 36 (2005) 59–75

going to know a bit about the strength that we have had. . . But in reality, doing it was not so much for the prize but for the participation. And it seemed to me very interesting and it would be lovely that other women could also do it, because there are other women who also have their experiences, perhaps in other countries, but they have them. 41 In this sense, the collection of the life histories set up a testimonio like process in which multiple actors played a role in the production of the texts as representations of the larger collaborative network and agenda behind them. In many subtle ways, as Lydia showed above, the life histories resonated with the tradition of testimonio as a written form, as a resource for campesinas’ struggles. But what of the remainder of the life histories that were not ‘‘told’’ to an interviewer but personally written and submitted to an intermediating advocate? It would be a mistake to assume that these individually written texts were necessarily autobiographies in the western sense. As Sommer remarked of her own study of testimonio, ‘‘At first, I assumed rather naively that the testimonials I had been reading by Latin American women were ‘autobiographical’ ’’ (1988, p. 107); but she goes on to argue that even personally written testimonios form a psychological collusion very different than that produced in the reading of an autobiography. As Sommer (1988, p. 118) points out: Autobiography, to make a stylistic distinction, strains to produce a personal and distinctive style as part of the individuation process, but testimonial strives to preserve or to renew an interpersonal rhetoric. That rhetoric. . . addresses a fleshand-blood person, the interviewer. . . This appeal is not only consistent with existing cultural assumptions about community as the fundamental social unit; it has political implications. . . When the narrator talks about herself to you, she implies both the existing relationship to other representative selves in the community and potential relationships that extend her community through the text. . . . The testimonial produces complicity. . . the map of possible identifications through the text spreads out laterally. . . The Concurso life histories, whether they were collected through an oral history process or personally written, were part of a collective subject formation by virtue of their collection process. Even in the most sophisticated case of writing, none of the entrants entered herself in the Concurso: a person who read the call

for life histories on the Internet web page of FIDAMERICA solicited the story. All of the entrants were contacted by staff members of IFAD projects, NGOs, academics or government workers who had access to the Internet and who had previously developed a personal relationship with the author. In over half the cases, the author saw this contact as a type of mentor, a personal facilitator who helped her with her development agendas. After the collection or writing of the life history, it was in the hands of the intermediary who then typed it into the computer and sent it to the FIDAMERICA email server. Some intermediaries left the original text unedited, meaning that words were left as they were written or spoken, without added punctuation or spelling changes. In some cases, interviewers/intermediaries inserted their voice in an editorial version that described the woman, and in a few cases, the intermediary rewrote the piece, so that it was only occasionally punctuated with the subject’s words. Finally, the life histories were posted by FIDAMERICA staff as part of an electronic conference, where they were read, analyzed, discussed and ultimately awarded prizes. The individuals who participated directly in the life history collection showed a range of attitudes towards their subjects, and they all had their own motivations for initiating, soliciting or supporting the process. While some of them maintained a slightly elitist attitude towards the life history subjects, in general they had a solid commitment to and respect for the individuals whose empowerment they sought, as evidenced in the tone and attitude that they conveyed in their interviews. 42 While most of them were university trained, with backing in western discourses of social justice, most of this group also had personal experience of modest upbringings that tied them in a very personal and gracious way to the women. In this sense, the professional participants in the Concurso embodied or acted as a location for the overlapping of ideas, experience and commitment flowing from both dominant and marginalized spheres. As such, their positioning, actions and decisions facilitated the production and linking of several segments of the life history actor-network: the campesinas, the collectors of the stories, perhaps the drivers or the funding that transferred individuals so that they could meet each other; in some cases funding to organize workshops in which the life histories where collected; the tape recorders, typewriters or computers, and/or notebooks and pencils, software and telephone lines with which the typed stories were transmitted to FIDAMERICA. Furthermore, senior IFAD staff members were also instrumental in the life history collection, although they were not necessarily directly involved. The directors of

42

41

Interview, Lydia Gonzalez, May 2001.

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Interviews with IFAD staff in El Salvador and Honduras, May, June and August 2001.

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the Latin American Division of IFAD and FIDAMERICA, with strong feminist and social justice orientations, motivated and originated the idea of a Concurso after conversations with gender consultants and project directors also sympathetic to gender analysis. In addition, Concurso directors in Honduras and El Salvador were especially supportive of the process by directing their staffs to work on the life history collection. These two individuals with their long personal histories of concern for social and gender justice were motivated towards the participation and empowerment of campesinas in their development projects. But differential motivations and professional objectives by IFAD staff also subtly colored their orientation to women’s development and can be seen as clues to the outcomes of the Concurso. While one IFAD project gender specialist had a personal feminist orientation towards the empowerment of her beneficiaries, another gender director was a bit more practical, and maintained a strong position for an IFAD specialist presence in promoting women’s empowerment: The act of people doing a life-writing exercise is important for the person, who reflects and learns a lesson; but it’s also useful that other people in other places should see this situation of life, how to share could be important for other people, to see what the paths have been. I think that a life history, not to say a collection [of them] could be useful to define strategies to tackle the problem of poverty of a country for a group of investigators. Well, if the limitations of this woman were the social environment, if the limitations were credit, if they were training, if they were education, if they were health, logically this gives me clues to formulate strategies, to combat poverty. Let us say that it would have an importance very much larger than the simple act of telling a story. Better it would be to identify bottlenecks in the rural. . . society in this case, Latin American there. It could be very useful. 43 At the same time that this quote firmly positions the IFAD professional staff into the networks of development and empowerment for rural women, it also gives clues as to the priority audience for the life histories. For this we turn to an exploration of the second segment of the Concurso: that which extends from the FIDAMERICA website to the potential readers of the life histories. Here, I discuss three groups of readers: the general public; IFAD staff; and the authors themselves. Once the life histories were collected, their public posting gave the outside reader a glimpse into the pre-

43

Interview, IFAD staff member, August 2001.

viously invisible historical experiences of rural women’s lives and in doing so created a linkage between the campesinas and to the public sphere where none formerly existed. Although we do not know who else has read the life histories other than those who registered for the ‘‘e-conference’’ in which they were discussed (mostly IFAD and other NGO professionals), we do know that unidentified readers visited the website; and at least one other person like myself (a Spanish journalist) was interested in exploring the campesina stories more completely. Regardless, every reader of the Concurso potentially became part of its actor network. Sommer (ibid) has emphasized the process of collective subjectification that involves an active participation by the writer, the listener/collector, and perhaps even the reader of testimonio. She argues that the politics of testimonio––its design, intentionality, and participatory requirements––remind us that we as readers are asked to play a role in its political agenda (in this case, to identify, honor, and support the empowerment of rural women leaders); and in this way, the actor-network extends out to us, and we become part of the network as we read. As Sommer (ibid) notes, Once the subject of the testimonial is understood as the community made up of a variety of roles, the reader is called in to fill one of them. . . If we find it difficult to entertain the idea of several simultaneous points of activity, several simultaneous and valid roles, the testimonials help to remind us that politics is not necessarily a topdown heroic venture. Irma Martinez recognized the even more extensive interactive potential of her submission, when she responded to my question, ‘‘did she think there would be an outcome beyond the awarding of prizes?’’ ‘‘Yes, because maybe I felt that there were people who would want to contact, who would look for me. I think that perhaps at the root of this, [it would provoke] more communication.’’ 44 Ultimately, what you are reading here is a segment of the actor network that has resulted from the Concurso de Mujeres: it is an extension of the network leading outward from the FIDAMERICA website, though myself as a researcher, on to the publication of this article and to those who read it. In this sense, the authorial space has extended over time and space to a wider audience, but what happens next is a function of transnational publishing, institutional budgets, and a host of other issues that will determine the continuity of the this network of interest in campesinas electronic life histories. The difficulty of bringing the reader into the development community reminds us of

44

Interview, Irma Martinez, April 2001.

D.D. Rubinoff / Geoforum 36 (2005) 59–75

John Law’s admonition that the punctualization of actor-networks is only constructed with much effort. With testimonio, readers are no longer passive; we have become active participants in the network construction of the literature. However, whether or not we continue the political threads or its designs depends on our extending the web, and/or returning our response back to the writer in an iterative circle. In contrast to the general reader of the life histories, their primary readers were IFAD staff members, who already had some form of linkage with their ‘‘beneficiaries.’’ The main upshot of their participation was that linkages were not so much created, as qualitatively colored by the rich details of the campesinas’ stories of overcoming adversity. On several occasions, IFAD staff mentioned these details in our discussions, as we drove to interviews or chatted over lunch, generally with much admiration in the tone of their voices. Two IFAD staff informants noted that there seemed to be an easing of tensions around gender mainstreaming in their projects after the Concurso. In this regard, as a part of the overall regionalization of gender mainstreaming within IFAD projects in Latin American and Caribbean countries, and as part of the overarching objective to sensitize IFAD staff, the Concurso was successful. 45 According to project literature, the third audience for the life histories was the other campesinas. However, this goal was never accomplished, nor were campesinas involved in any way in the e-conference. Approximately one half of my informants received a ‘‘certificate of participation’’ after the conference, the rest nothing, and only three knew who won the contest. Otherwise, not one of them participated in the electronic conference, and only a few had seen written copies of their life histories. Except for the winner, and for two women who felt that their status in the community was improved by their participation in the contest, my informants noted that until my arrival in their community, there had been no public repercussions of the Concurso for them. Importantly, like the pictures of the people looking out from a website, there was not any iterative feedback between the authors of the life histories and other campesinas: the life histories existed primarily as input for elite readers with direct ICT access, to take away lessons for themselves. In this sense, the Concurso can be seen to have benefited the readers, and not the authors of the stories; and this segment of the network can be seen to have been ‘‘cut’’ or truncated by the organizers of the conference and by IFAD. However, despite the lack of direct communication among the authors, the writing of the life histories had important personal impacts for the campesinas, and in this sense, it is possible to ask: how did participation in a

life history gathering project, the process of writing, and the creation of the collective subject play out for the author herself? The personal impacts of the Concurso included enhanced self-esteem, a sense of conscientization and ‘coming to voice,’ and contribution to campesinas’ politicization. In a certain respect, the achievement of self-esteem was accomplished simply by virtue of the act of the interview or request for a life history. Several of the subjects referred to their surprise and delight that anyone should want to know about their lives and what they thought. Delmira Garcia thought it was a: ‘‘magnificent experience, because really they pay attention to you, so you feel like telling. . . everything about how you live, how you work, about how you are guiding your children, right?’’ 46 For Manuela Azares, I feel high self-esteem, because I tell myself I’m a person of value, not in money, not in riches, not in anything, but I feel valuable, right. Having had this interview, with the licenciada, I tell myself that I have not been improved, but yes I have been taken into account, right, by some institutions, . . . Because like the daughter Manuela here and the daughter Manuela there, people will know me, I am known, recognized. I feel that this is an experience. . . I feel more appreciated, even though I am what I am, I feel more appreciated. Despite what could be seen as the ‘‘magisterial relativism’’ (Kaplan, 1992, p. 139), a sort of benevolence bestowed by the producers of the Concurso, for the authors themselves, simply participating in the life history gathering process was a recognition of the importance of their lives, regardless of whether they felt ‘‘heard’’ by a broader community, regardless of whether they knew what finally happened to their stories, and regardless of the ultimate location of the life histories. For other authors, seeing their life’s accomplishments written down gave them a sense of accomplishment that had heretofore been invisible. Irma Martinez: ‘‘Well, perhaps in some way, perhaps I felt excited, more to know that I had done all that, a sense of satisfaction.’’ 47 Mohanty, Trinh, and others 48 have noted that the act of writing a personal narrative, which requires not just a retelling, but also an interpretation of the course of a life over time, is an important component of subjectification. Mohanty et al. (1992, p. 34) argue that ‘the very practice of remembering and rewriting leads to the formation of politicized consciousness and self-identity. . .

46

Interview, Delmira Garcia, June 2001. Interview, Irma Martinez, April 2001. 48 For example Mohanty (1988), Trinh (1989), Personal Narratives Group (1989). 47

45

Rubinoff (2003).

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It becomes a space for struggle and contestation about reality itself.’’ This process is part of the construction of a transformational and empowered voice. The construction of a self-conscious identity becomes a key element of transformational and empowered development because it opens channels through which a woman’s power can flow more easily to achieve her objectives. For Inez Maz, it is a question of practicing moving the internal out to the public sphere: ‘‘it [writing] is good for you, because you take what is inside and put it outside; it allows you to put forth your ideas about how to move forward.’’ 49 For Celestina Voste, writing itself stimulated her personal development and reinforced her ideas about how to engage with the public sphere, and for here, the writing process became an important component of development: I’ll tell you one thing, since I started to write to send this, I have felt a greater development because I’ve been thinking about many things and when you have been thinking about everything that has happened to you in your path, all the tradition that has happened, and you say well, I can take something from this and this has awakened in me a passion that has at times caused me to write things, when I go to bed there are times that I start writing, to see what else comes out. But this passion has arisen since the Concurso. 50 The development of political consciousness was clearly important for several of the Concurso entrants who acknowledged the contribution of life history writing to their political agenda. Irma Martinez: ‘‘I think that it is what one does for the ideas that one has, to strengthen the development (of these ideas), that for this reason it’s worth it, because for me it will strengthen my fight.’’ 51 For others, writing was a way of reinforcing the leadership roles already self-defined or recognized by others. 52 Delmira Garcia argued that it helped her contextualize her development activities: For example, the ways that studies were limited in those times, now you think about how the children don’t want to stay like we are, that they want to surpass you, right, because in school, in work that they should develop better. It helps you do all this, right; to think about helping the children go forward, right? And one does what one has to do; because of this, I have always worked, here in the

49 50 51 52

Interview, Inez Maz, June 2001. Interview, Celestina Voste, June 2001. Interview, Irma Martinez April 2001. Interviews with authors, April, May and August 2001.

community. I like participation, and all that. Yes, because everyone [should have] their life history, because the life that we live now is very different than that which we lived before, because I tell my kids, the life that we had in my childhood, when we were young, was very different life than the one we have now. 53 Marta Esmeralda Cartes captured the practical political aspects of writing: ‘‘For me it was very important. It motivated me to write our autobiography. I collected information in one document.The Concurso captured me. Only for this, it was worth the effort. Thank you.’’ 54 For the most part, the authors who reaped benefits from their writing were those who had invested time and effort in the writing process and who were less ‘‘conscientized’’ prior to writing. Alma Gutierrez, who had dashed off her one page story after a last minute request to submit, allowed that that writing her story had not affected her much personally. 55 Not all authors saw their writing experience as empowering. Teresa Galanes, a Costa Rican radio show host/revolutionary said that she doubted whether the life history stories would be read or heard. In the statement below, she has a clear consciousness of global political economy, but she does not see linkages between writing and empowerment for social change: We as Latin Americans don’t refuse to pay external debts that strangle us and as a result we are sick. We won’t leave underdevelopment and we don’t know how much time it will be until we leave. Campesinas writing, talking. . . If I tell you everything that I carry inside me, when that government of the US is not going to know, and later on the politicians won’t know. . . that they give us a few crumbs so that we won’t really struggle for our power, the power in a country like Costa Rica and I believe at the level of Latin America, because they arrange a plate of rice and beans and for this I want to read my autobiography? I know that the fight won’t finish unless it starts because a moment will arrive in which the peasants will unite and we will have a solid organization, not only for a plate of rice and beans, but for real reforms in the political and cultural system of the peasant sector of my country. Beyond the process of collection and publication, the content of the life histories stands on its own as a con-

53 54 55

Interview, Teresa Galanes, April 2001. Interview, Marta Esmeralda Cartes, April 2001. Interview, Alma Gutierrez August 2001.

D.D. Rubinoff / Geoforum 36 (2005) 59–75

tribution to empowerment for their authors in several ways. It does this by contributing to gender and development debates from the perspective of the authors; by highlighting their concepts of social spatiality; and by modeling cyborg-like subjectivities that could imbue cybernetworking with political potential. In the first instance, several stories refer to their author’s previous leadership experiences in military guerilla insurgencies or indigenous rights movements, and these can be seen as a ‘‘bearing of witness’’ useful to the historical preservation of their struggles. But most of the Concurso life histories tell primarily of their authors’ emergence as leaders after lives of struggle, but within the realm of community development: building bridges, schools, sanitary facilities, and community organization. Furthermore, the discussion topics for most authors ranged freely from collective, political and leadership concerns to highly personal experience: births, abortions, miscarriages; love affairs, marriage, divorce, betrayals by husbands; personal relationships with spouses and children. The everyday material that these stories contain makes them oppositional in content to the heroic characters and content of the autobiographical form. Moreover, the incorporation of a broad range of experience across public/private divides was astonishing in stories that would be posted on the Internet, and this fact was remarked upon by several of the interviewers and project staff that I interviewed. While it might not have been intentionally political for the subjects to cross this divide, this move models a social spatial framework that contradicts the assumptions of western public–private divides similarly critiqued in much of the gender and development literature. 56 As such, the placement of these unedited stories in public space challenged the rules for its use and revalorized the experience of life across the public/private continuum. And thus, despite, or perhaps because of, this quotidian focus of priorities, we can locate these stories, according to Kaplan (1992, p. 133), as ‘‘resistance literature and outlaw genres on the borders between colonial and neocolonial systems, where subjectivity, cultural power, and survival are played out in the modern era.’’ Another important aspect of the life history content was the subjectivity that was evidenced there and supported by interviews with authors. Many postcolonial and feminist critics 57 have described the radical subjectivities originating with postcolonial, subaltern, migrant, and borderlands subjects; in which the shifting and multiple identities are not so much fragmented or splintered, but simultaneously ‘‘held’’ in dynamic ten-

56

For example Jelin (1990), Massey (1994). Compare Anzaldua (1999), Moraga and Anzaldua (1981), Hooks (1991), Torres (1991), Mohanty (1988), SISTREN (1987), Sommer (1988).

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sion of ‘‘both/and’’. This ‘‘both/and’’ form was shown in different ways by Concurso authors as they described their complex multi-tasking lives, but nowhere more literally and dramatically than by Celestina Voste, El Salvadorian high-ranking guerilla in the FMLN, whose history recounts the story of the birth of her fourth child amidst full out battle. 58 ‘‘Even with my pregnancy, I continued my work, and on January 9th 1983, I woke up with labor pains. I was giving birth.’’ [She then describes going on with the birth amidst rocket airplanes strafing the area throughout the day, and at one point parachute troops falling from 48 airplanes.] ‘‘But there my son was born.’’ [Afterwards they had to evacuate the area because the enemy controlled three flanks of the battle zone; and soon thereafter, Sra. Voste found herself struggling through a river at night with her newborn son and her gun in her arms. Someone asked, ‘‘Whom are you going to throw away, the gun or the child?’’ And she replied: neither.] ‘‘Because my son is from my core, my essence; and my gun is my defense, after the All-powerful. And we kept on marching.’’ Sra. Voste’s consciousness can be seen to straddle several different borders: that between essentialist female caring and essentialist masculine ‘‘warrior’’ identities; that between private and public identities; and that between individual and collective subjectivities. Much feminist theory has addressed the debilitating impacts of dichotomizing public and private identities for both women and men. In contrast, a simultaneous ‘‘holding’’ multiple identities appeared to be a comfortable form for several of the authors who described their ‘‘conscientization’’ as women not only individually, but also in the context of their families, communities, or political struggle. What is the value of this ‘‘both/and’’ form for a politically alternative cyberspace? Trinh (1989) argues that the ‘‘both/and’’ subject is a strategy of subjective ‘‘displacement.’’ This displacement can work internally by uniting the multiple aspects of self, resulting in a subject that has ‘‘both this and that’’ form; and ultimately, it can work externally to dissolve the binary oppositions of unitary self and other. The implication is that the subject is able to feel or empathize with two frames simultaneously, or is in ‘‘relation to’’ the other, instead of being only ‘‘one or the other’’. This configuration is an important antidote to the categorical power of modernity to reify binary difference and its hegemonic outcomes. Set up as a model for resistance against the

57

58

See www.Fidamerica.cl.

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space which disciplines difference and the ‘‘other,’’ be it the classed, racialized, gendered, ethnic, literary or another other, this radical subjectification holds a promise of interrupting the ease with which the construction of difference constantly erodes movements for social change and justice. According to Haraway, ‘‘both/and’’ subjectivity is an important component of an ‘‘earth-wide network of communications, including the ability to translate knowledges among very different and power differentiated communities’’ (1990, p. 187). Training oneself to see and hold two ‘‘points of view’’ at the same time not only defines a radical form of relationality, but it reorganizes the boundaries and connections through which networks can be formed and operate. Shohat (1998) captures the political potential of collective writing succinctly in her introduction to Talking Visions, which she says strives to transcend the narrow and often debilitating confines of identity politics in favor of a multicultural feminist politics of identification, affiliation, and social transformation. It even involves making representation less of a burden and more of a collective pleasure and responsibility. It is less about who can speak than about how the diverse constituencies of multicultural feminism can interweave resistant voices together; and about how to work from cacophony to effective political polyphony. (pp. 9–10) From an ANT perspective, the life histories’ ability to reach into, connect to, highlight and valorize the campesinas’ spheres places the histories into the actor networks of empowerment for the authors. Sites of personal subjectivity also become implicated in networks of cybernetworking. The reworking of relations here potentially influences the operation of the entire network in multiple ways, not only by changing the pathways of the network, but by qualitatively changing the social relations through which power flows through the network.

5. Conclusion Given the potential impact of the FIDAMERICA Concurso life histories by virtue of their construction, personal impact, and content, what is the reality of their impact so far? On the one hand, the collective process has allowed them to be manipulated by the actors who have controlled the Concurso process. Over the last three years, the life histories have been buried within the FIDAMERICA website, and parts of this conference, (including recently, judges comments), have been deleted. As part of my research, I have discussed the possibility of creating a women’s cybernetwork for the

women involved in the Concurso and other women connected to FIDAMERICA, but I have received mixed responses and support for this idea from IFAD and FIDAMERICA staff. IFAD high-level staff have been very supportive of what one of them has called an ‘‘innovation,’’ 59 but without offering money. Although the director of FIDAMERICA is willing to cooperate by setting up a web page and offering his time to put together a one-week computer training and organizational workshop for the participants, he has clearly stated that there is no additional money within FIDAMERICA for this effort. One project director has been collaborative, in the sense that he would like to integrate this project with the planned construction of office centers for new agricultural cooperatives in his region. On the other hand, the FIDAMERICA life histories represented an expansion of the collaborative testimonio process applied to a progressive and innovative experiment in challenging dominant cyberspace. It gave top administrators and project staff of IFAD and FIDAMERICA projects and other interested transnational parties the opportunity to listen to the voices of rural women; it set up a preliminary collaborative structure for building, layering and creating knowledge and political action; it positively impacted the authors in several ways; and it modeled alternative subjectivities. In all these ways, it began to systematize the use of life history writing as a ICT related development tool. In the end the Concurso de Mujeres represents the mixed potential of a collaborative cybernetic process at this scale. Website gatekeepers can passively ‘‘disappear’’ information; collections, discussions and interpretations of original material can adjust original meanings intended by life history authors; institutional financial support can be ‘‘unavailable’’ to continue the project; or the ball can be dropped completely on a project. In these perhaps unintentional but unfortunate erasures, voices stay marginalized. On the other hand, while it can be argued that the Concurso de Mujeres has not provided tangible, direct benefits to the women participants so far, it has had indirect effects on IFAD staff, for the authors themselves, and it attracted my attention as a sympathetic northern researcher and inspired my activist objectives to help develop a cybernetwork for this group. From an actor-network perspective, the current gap in movement towards the production of a network can also be interpreted in the frame of a blank figure. 60 The blank figure represents nothing, and certainly, there are important hurdles to be crossed to continue the work of the Concurso. However, since my visit to the authors

59

Personal communication. May 2001. The concept of the blank figure has been well summarized by Hetherington and Lee (2000). 60

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and IFAD staff, the idea of a campesinas’ network has been planted. No longer is it an empty blank. It is now a blank space that holds a vision for what might lie ahead. As Metcalfe (2001, p. 247) argues: Although we routinely talk of distance, separation always retains an implicit sense of connection. Surrounding ever thing is no-thing, a ground or horizon which is and isn’t there. This nothing is formless flesh which holds in place the things that, in turn, hold it. Kaplan (1992, p. 135) calls a transnational approach that emphasizes collaborative work like that shown in the FIDAMERICA life histories, ‘‘feminist writing technologies.’’ She argues that this approach ‘‘can transform cultural production from individualized and aestheticized procedures to collaborative, historicized, transnational coalitions.’’ In doing so, it can incorporate difference and still achieve feminist agendas based on common problems that operate in different ways in different places. This would be an important step in incorporating disenfranchised rural women on their own terms into the process of gendering ICT related development and governance policies at state, regional and global levels. 61 In the actor-network sense, it is possible to situate the Concurso into IFAD’s larger regionalization of gender mainstreaming and leadership development, which is in turn situated within broader networks of gender and ICT4D policymaking. New IFAD projects in Honduras (and to a certain extent in El Salvador) 62 have been designed to transfer complete planning and development power and initiative to the beneficiaries; and this would bode well for ongoing leadership and empowerment for the rural women who are part of this process. Yet, as ICTs become an increasing part of development, how will IFAD integrate these technological elements more directly into its GAD agenda? The experience of the Concurso de Mujeres suggests that IFAD is not quite ready to transfer control of this technology from the institutional level to the grassroots level. Yet, for rural women in an era of ICT4D, access to the technology, capacity to envision its potential, and the use of its communicative processes are vital to their ability to influence the creation of a more participatory, empowered and transformative form of ICT4D. Will technological bias prove to be the barrier that it has often been for women in development, or will campesinas be able to fully link to cybernetic actor networks that have been

61

I discuss the gendering of ICT4D policy in Rubinoff (2003). See www.IFAD.org for information on FONADERS and PRODAP II. 62

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created by IFAD, and in doing so, surmount this historical border?

Acknowledgements I am enormously indebted to Tony Bebbington and Rachel Silvey for their steadfast support of this research and their intellectual contributions to its development. The fieldwork discussed here was funded by a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant (BCS-0002S14), the Dart Program and the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado-Boulder. I am grateful also to IFAD, FIDAMERICA, RUTA, PRODAP, PLANDERO, PPZN and PRODAPEN, for their support.

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