ABSTRACT
As the mobile phone grows into a multimedia device and becomes mobile media, one dominant issue has continued to haunt the device throughout its various permutations and incarnations. The rise of mobile media could be clearly read in terms of arising and existing gender inequalities that stretch across many notions of mobility and immobility. The purpose of this paper is to use the lens of the mobile media to reflect upon constructions of gender over the last couple of decades. One of the central arguments of this paper is the need to problematize categories such as gender, generation, domestic sphere, social relationships, family, and so on. I argue that often these notions are used in a statistical, aseptic way. With the plenitude of sociological debates around notions of mobility spanning at least a decade, I argue that we have an expansive and sophisticated material in which to expand upon debates around gender. In particular, I will focus upon the intersections between questions of gender, generations, and especially domestic-sphere categories. I argue that it is time to develop research that is specifically designed to study the role, meaning, representations, models, and practices of use of the mobile phone beginning from women’s life conditions.
