Beyond the gender (dis)empowerment dichotomy: The mobile phone as social catalyst for gender transformation in the Global South

Access

The mobile phone, as a portable personal ICT device, enables women to be identified and connected with “while on the move” (Wei and Lo, 2006: 53). Such access opens up communicative channels for those possessing elevated patriarchal statuses to extend their off-line hierarchical power to mobile spaces. The gender hierarchy is thus able to enforce the status quo on women’s situated contexts remotely, such as by imposing rules or collecting information.

For many women, the mobile phone was a “gift” from male family members when they decided to seek work outside. While single women were presented the mobile from their fathers, married ones usually received it from husbands as a form of “bride price” (Pinli聘礼), the conventional token paid by men to their in-laws for engagement. The stated rationale was that “it is not safe for a girl to work in a city alone,” with the major purpose to make women “stay connected” in order to obtain protection and advice in time. Consequently, women reported an obligation to maintain “perpetual contact” (Katz and Aakhus, 2002) with their families “every day,” “every two days,” or “every week.”

Such access also existed in the workplace. Factory workers were required to join WeChat groups that duplicated the power structure of their offline workgroups, which were constituted of a group leader with six to eight subordinates. This mobile practice fostered a “micro-electronic panopticon” (Peng and Choi, 2013: 561), where group leaders could access women anytime and anywhere to disseminate rules and regulations to get a “report of work status.”

Surveillance

Access paves the way for surveillance, a mobile practice that places women under constant monitoring. This study provides further nuances to prior research on mobile-mediated surveillance (see Hannaford, 2015; Wallis, 2011). Rather than viewing surveillance as a homogeneous patriarchal exercise, we find varied mobile affordances shaping it into diversified forms to monitor women in different ways.

First, voice call enables private and real-time surveillance. The dyadic characteristic provides a one-to-one communicative channel, where private topics can be discussed and updated, particularly the conformity with gender norms. Fathers forthrightly inquired whether daughters were dating surreptitiously, and husbands who worked in different cities ensured the fulfillment of maternal duties by their wives. The synchronous nature of voice call further allows this surveillance to occur in real time. This mobile practice caused women to complain about voice calls arising “all of a sudden” to check on their personal status, with queries such as “where are you,” “what are you doing,” and “why you did not call for such a long time,” leaving them “no time to prepare” answers.

Video call, akin to voice call, allows for synchronous dyadic surveillance, yet is seen as more intrusive. Being “the most intimate and private method of communication” (Peng, 2016: 2397), video call makes surveillance visually instantaneous, leaving little scope for ambiguity or hesitation in response. Visual cues permit the observation of both the appearance of women, as well as contextual information of their physical surroundings. Women spoke of family members requesting video calls on occasion to see “what clothes I wear, becoming fat or slim,” and “the environment [where I am staying].”

In contrast, group messaging offers distinct affordances from private voice and video call. It extends surveillance to mobile spaces where multiple parties are engaged via asynchronous messages (Ling and Lai, 2016). In chat groups, intimate matters of women were brought to collective attention and judgment, as a means to amplify social pressure. One single woman revealed her experience of being coerced into marriage in a family chat group.

My aunt yelled [in the chat group] “why Xing [anonym of the woman] still not have a partner at such an age? do you need me to introduce one to you?”

The exposure of her private life in a public forum caused Xing both embarrassment at being single and exerted social pressure to conform to traditional marital norms. The nature of the chat group, being composed of complex and varied familial relationships, ensured that, despite her embarrassment, expected to play the Confucian role of an obedient daughter, Xing had to remain silent.

Similar types of surveillance frequently occurred in women’s WeChat workgroups. Women claimed that the requirement to “report work status” in WeChat groups usually fostered an “anxious atmosphere,” as they would be publicly criticized by group leaders for committing any mistake in following work rules and regulations. The goal of such surveillance was similarly to cause social embarrassment in mobile forums, simultaneously acting as a reminder of the gendered hierarchy in the factory.

When [s]he [leader] scolded you here, other people can see, for what [s]he scolded you, what mistake you have committed, others can learn a lesson. Not to make the same mistake.

Intervention

Surveillance can be leveraged to a final level of oppression—intervention. Intervention is a means of social control over women by actively coercing their behavioral modification via technologically mediated means. It ranges from managing mobile practices of women to confiscation of their mobile devices for a complete ban on usage.

First, intervention involves forbidding certain mobile media affordances available to women that may possibly lead to their divergence from control. Women, especially the married ones, were sometimes banned from deploying mobile social apps such as WeChat and QQ. This ban stemmed from a widespread rumor that using such social apps could contribute to the infidelity of women. Women divulged that, according to the rumor, social apps that enabled chances to meet and socialize with online male strangers might expose them to “seduction.” Such behavior might culminate in their abandoning traditional moral codes and relationships to “run away,” chasing romance and sexual desires. Being afraid of “losing control,” their family members responded by curtailing their access to social apps.

This intervention could, under certain circumstances, escalate into the action of taking away women’s mobile devices altogether. It was not uncommon for fathers to confiscate mobiles of migrant daughters as punishment, upon discovery of their concealed romantic relationships. In doing so, fathers aimed to perpetuate traditional marriage values that emphasized parental authority (Xu and Whyte, 1990). As a woman recalled,

My dad did not allow me to work outside again [forcing her to go back home] and took away my phone. He locked my phone and claimed clearly [that I could not use the phone]. I was always afraid of my dad. My dad put my phone away, shut it down, and then even pulled out the telephone [land]line.

It is worth noting that, in an era when the mobile phone is becoming “an identity on the move” (Fortunati, 2001: 85), such intervention can be viewed as equivalent to exerting domination over their gender identities.

In summary, the escalating processes from access, to surveillance, and eventually, to intervention are accompanied by constantly intensified structural forces to depress agency. Especially, the mobile phone provides a variety of media affordances for monitoring and control, which can be deployed progressively to reduce the individual autonomy and freedom of women to deviate from deep-rooted gender practices. Such mobile practices act as recurrent reinforcement of established patriarchal orders that underpin gendered power structures in society, in rural as well as urban areas.

Avoidance

The strategy of avoidance aims at evading those exerting patriarchal pressure. Rather than deploying the phone to engage in direct communication, women hide their mobile communication from access and surveillance. This relatively “passive” (Kandiyoti, 1988: 274) strategy was activated in women’s situated patriarchal contexts where they felt safer to obtain autonomy and freedom without risking confrontation that might evoke further control and oppression. Our data reveal “blocking” and “deleting” as two major types of avoidance practices.

Blocking is defined as granting entry of particular people to selected mobile communicative channels while excluding them from others. This strategy is allowed by the affordance of separating mobile spaces to hold different social relationships. While maintaining connections with family members via messaging, voice and video calls, women commonly blocked them on social media platforms such as QQ Space, and Moments or Friends’ Circle on WeChat. These platforms afforded the construction of “hidden spaces of resistance” (Wang, 2007: 706) with their peers, usually migrant workers from the same hometowns or newly established social relationships during migration, who could share modern articulations of viewpoints and lifestyles. Women provided examples of their reading and re-posting of online articles on these platforms that introduced them to visions of gender equality and feminist thoughts, such as those titled, “If you [a husband] drive your wife crazy, it is your failure” and “Each couple is not afraid of fighting, but afraid of not talking to each other.”

Deleting serves the erasure of mobile communicative records with the intent to hide identity and practices from selected others. While blocking allows for a certain level of privacy enacted in remote situations, the underlying records may continue to reside on the physical device. The practice of deleting came into play once those of greater patriarchal status attempted to check women’s phones to enforce surveillance. This strategy was widely adopted by single women to hide their supposedly illicit relationships from family members. A single woman gave her example of concealing the relationship with a male migrant worker from her sister who banned her dating. Her sister, employed in a city nearby, would check her phone while visiting. This woman countered by deleting all records of mobile communication with her boyfriend.

[I] delete everything, then my sister came back to check [my phone], and she won’t find anything.

Accommodation

When direct intervention brings women face to face with patriarchal control and oppression, they can no longer avoid it and instead turn to strategies of accommodation. Their strategic deployment of mobile affordances to accommodate themselves with structural orders at a surface level usually aims to veil their real purpose of pursuing modernity that addresses their own interests and desires (Pei, 2019).

One commonly observed mobile practice of accommodation was women taking the initiative to cater to intervention from those of higher patriarchal statuses over their mobile phone use. For instance, some single women, rather than hiding their phone usage, turned to ask family members who migrated with them to act as guardians in filtering their mobile contacts. They would suggest interested male workers ask their family members for their mobile contacts. As mentioned by one woman, when her ex-boyfriend enquired after her phone number, she replied, “ask my uncle.” In this way, women could superficially manifest adherence to conservative Confucian values about female chastity. Meanwhile, once family members permitted mobile contacts of women to men, this could be further deployed as the excuse to justify their further intimate interactions with men on phones.

Another example of accommodation was observed in women’s workplace, where the mobile phone was likewise pivotal to their goals of incorporating themselves into the factory’s management structure. Such practices could be seen as demonstrated by the group of female group leaders who earned leadership within their workgroups due to outstanding professional performance. As mentioned before, in the factory, each group had an online WeChat group that mirrored its offline hierarchical structure. These online groups facilitated efficient deliveries of messages by female group leaders from shop-floor managers to workers under their command. Examples of messages included “new work requirements,” “wage clarification of last month,” and “temporarily altered workplace for the next day.” In addition to this, within messaging groups, these female leaders were also able to collect “reports of work status” from workers which allowed them to relay information efficiently to their managers and impose criticism upon workers who failed to reach performance standards.

At first glance, the mobile practices of female group leaders in WeChat groups only served to sustain existing power hierarchies of the factory that kept women at the bottom. However, if one takes a closer look, these groups provided female group leaders with platforms to establish and reinforce their modern management abilities and professional authorities. This further equipped them with the strengthened discursive power that challenged the prevailing patriarchal ideology in the factory that “women were born to be worse than men.” With their newly gained confidence in their professional worth, these women stated that they were “no less than men.”

Collaboration

The social connections enabled by the mobile phone allow for collaboration among individuals that could result in an emergent collective power. We noticed two types of collaboration practices. While the first type of collaboration centers on the sharing of informational and social support to foster women’s social independence, the second one foregrounds a direct challenge to structural constraints as a manifestation of accumulated feminist power.

The first type of collaboration occurred via the exchange of work experiences and recruitment information. To encourage the migration of left-behind female peers in villages, mobile enabled migrant women to deliver messages about working conditions and employment opportunities. Mobile communication also facilitated information flows among migrant women to compare “how much you get paid” and “whether the payment is on time.” The phone, women joked, made “everything under control,” enabling them to be informed about jobs with “higher payment and better working conditions.” This communication enhanced women’s autonomy to make migration decisions, which allowed them to be less dependent upon “advice and protection” from male family members who usually played a dominant decision-making role.

The second type of collaboration usually occurred in social platforms of mobile messaging groups. These platforms, while enabling multiple women to engage in conversations at the same time, allowed them to “back up” one another. Public communication within groups granted individuals the courage to express themselves in response to patriarchal oppression in a manner that they probably would not dare to do in private dyadic mobile communication. A common observation was women’s confrontation with unwelcome provocation and even sexual harassment from their male colleagues in WeChat workgroups. While the primary purpose of these groups was to exchange professional information, workers often engaged themselves in personal conversations for amusement in their leisure time. Some male workers abused these platforms to exhibit male authority and reinforce their superior patriarchal positions, referring to themselves with titles such as “big brother” or “big father.” In some cases, these exchanges involved sexually provocative languages, such as stating, “let’s check in a hotel when we are drunk.”

While Confucian culture allows men the freedom to joke about sex, even in public spaces, women are socially constrained from broaching this sensitive topic (Ruan, 1991). Social norms dictate that a woman addressing men in a flirtatious manner could potentially ruin her reputation. Therefore, when encountering harassment in private spaces, women would usually hold their silence. However, in messaging groups, mutual support emboldened women to seek retaliation. These public mobile formats enabled women to observe how other women responded to male provocation and prompted them to render assistance to others for the collective goal of countering unwanted sexual advances. For instance, faced with the casual sex invitation outlined above, a respondent replied, “we should go [to hotel] one day when we are sober,” implying the lack of courage in the provocateur. Another woman reinforced the contempt, commenting that “he needs to be encouraged by alcohol, otherwise, he would not dare.”

In general, the progression from avoidance to accommodation, and later to collaboration, embodies the reinforced agency of women to act upon structural constraints. We notice the growth of women facilitated by the connectivity allowed by mobile across two dimensions. First, negotiation of agency to obtain individual autonomy and freedom allows for nascent gender consciousness, or noting the presence of collective goals. Second, while individual resistance often occurs in subtle and hidden forms in the practices of avoidance and accommodation, collaboration enables women to mount overt challenges to uneven gender power relationships that move toward structural changes.