Negotiating gendered media: learning ICTs in transnational Taiwanese families

Abstract

This article argues that the gender politics of information and communication technologies (ICTs) impedes the social process of digital empowerment in Taiwanese transnational families. It examines the changing patterns of ICT use of each family member when some family members migrate, and explore how learning to use ICTs for the purpose of transnational family communication is highly gendered. By conducting 18 in-depth interviews, I examine the accounts provided by the daughters regarding intimacy, ICTs and gendered inequalities in Taiwanese transnational families. I use reducing digital inequalities to describe that the daughters teach their parents how to use different kinds of ICTs for a fairer distribution of digital resources. Moreover, through two case studies of fathers with lower digital literacy, it examines how men distantiate themselves from ICTs to reclaim their masculinity. Through accounting their parents, the daughters are also constructing a new, mobile and digital savvy image as the freely moving single women’s identity. This finding helps to fill the gap in the literature, which has thus far paid little attention to how such men reclaim their masculinity when they are computer illiterate. Furthermore, Taiwanese daughters experience mobility through ICTs and migration, which differentiates themselves from their parents’ generation.