I
want to highlight two aspects that I found particularly compelling (and related
to my personal experience and interest) in this week's readings. The first is
the issue of feminist labors using blogs and websites for self-presenting and
self-branding in the academic areas. In their writing, Juhasz and Banet-Weiser
claim that “if a person’s blog or website were considered part of their
academic project, or if the job asked for proficiency in these technologies,
then these practices should be included as alternative forms of scholarship.”
(p. ) While I share with them the
perspective that the internet offers feminists the place to gain “voice” and
“visibility,” I hesitate to embrace their claim above. From the perspective of
a graduate student who considers feminism as a field of my academic interest, I
found a dilemma in this claim. On the one hand, feminists can earn benefits
from the internet – a virtual space. On the other hand, to gain such benefits,
they have to sacrifice their time and energy learning extra technological
knowledge and skills to maintain their jobs in the workplace just as other
white-collar workers in the media industries have to spend a large amount of
time on social networks, such as Gregg carefully analyzed.
Second,
regarding social networks, I would like to bring up here an aspect of female
laboring in these spaces. Van Zoonen proposes that “the political new economy of the Internet
hat primarily tends to construct women as online consumers” therefore, many companies encourage their employees to take advantages
of friendships in social networks to develop their business (Gregg). In the
sphere of online business, small-scale business taken over by young-mothers as
a way to increase the income for family because of the economic recession
should be examined. Within the past two years, the sudden emergence of personal
business on Facebook has paralleled the dramatic inflation in Vietnam. It is worth noting that 19.6 million people,
equal to 21.42 percent of population, 71,4 percent of them internet users, have Facebook accounts (from the
Information Technology News website). Among about 500 friends of mine on
Facebook, one fifth of them try to sell goods on Facebook. Most of them are
young mothers; very few are men and single females. They either have separate
Facebook accounts for their personal business or are using their own Facebook
to promote products which includes wide varieties: cosmetics, clothes,
medicines, food and ect. None of them are housewives; instead, they have their
own jobs – usually working in governmental sectors with low income. In the grey
context of the economy, both men and women face the salary-cut and hardly can
find a substitute income for their family.
However, it seems that women have more chances to do small-scale
business on social networks because they
have an available community that they share information and experiences with
everyday. Furthermore, as Gregg points out, online business is somehow a type
of “emotional marketing” which is more suitable for women. This phenomenon
stroke into my mind as an example of the way social networks are not only
constructed for female consumer-orientation but also for female-labor –
orientation which puts more financial burden on women besides the heavy
domestic workload that they already have to take care of. Ironically, their work have been not counted as a type of laboring. In this sense, these women are "invisible" and not being taken into account when the government assess their incomes and financial contributions.
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