ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the domestication approach provides a heuristic with which to explore women’s use of mobile communication in the Global South. Drawing on material from Asia and Africa, this chapter examines how women in a variety of situations domesticate mobile devices. This includes their use of mobile communication in tasks such as marketing, managing the flow of money through their households, and interacting with eventual sexual partners. This chapter will consider mobile communication in the phases of its imagination, appropriation, objectification, incorporation, and finally its conversion. It also suggests the phase of decommissioning/recommissioning devices. These phases often assume that there are no countervailing forces as one moves through these phases. However, for women in the Global South, this is not necessarily the case.
