ABSTRACT
Unlike cultural studies, media and communication studies is yet to make big strides in critiquing global knowledge production that is skewed in favour of the North and imbues Northern narratives with implicit superiority (Tomaselli 1998, 2005). Willems (2014) argues systematically and clearly for the need to go beyond the idea of making the Global South more representative empirically and to centralize the theoretical perspectives of the periphery which have long been introspective and created alternative taxonomies that challenge Eurocentrism. For example, feminist literaturesfrom the Global North and South-have offered comprehensive critiques of the Northern colonial male gaze but not looked at how media usage compounds and augments definitions of gender (Mohanty 2013; Columpar 2002; Mahmood 2006; Moore 1998, 2013). I argue that gender studies literature is very helpful in understanding how media is used in everyday life as media usage is gendered and so are media themselves. Drawing on ethnographic literature from Africa and Europe, gender studies and the postcolonial canon, this chapter examines where agency is manifest, and moves away from (Northern academic) normative, prescriptive dialogues of what agency ‘should be’. Instead, I discuss what role old and new media play in the ‘everyday’ (Sabry 2010; Asad et al 2009; Bayat 2010) lives of women in Zanzibar. Applying a feminist post-colonial lens (Mahmood 2006; Spivak 1988; Hill-Collins 1999; Mohanty 2013), and carrying out an intersectional reading (Crenshaw 1991) of empirical work conducted in Zanzibar, I examine the extent to which ‘new’ media shift the balance of power to female consumers of media in formations and iterations of their own agency. New media change the nature of agency for ‘ordinary’ women and allow them to adopt new ways of communicating with each other and negotiating exterior spaces. Women as consumers, users and audiences of new media have blurred and now adopt multiple roles, thereby changing and adapting new media to fit their private worlds and renegotiating public spaces.
