Masters Thesis

Voicing online: catalysts and constraints for women's empowerment

This study uses the framework of feminist standpoint theory to investigate how women experience voice online and under what conditions that experience leads to empowerment. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 23 women who are members of World Pulse, a global online media network, and analyzed using a grounded theory approach. Participants indicated that voice manifests online with the aid of certain conditions, such as knowledge and skills, access to resources, and offline empowerment. Catalysts for voice include invitations to speak and an emotional response to a perceived injustice. Women have expressed themselves in a variety of ways online from blog posts to sharing poetry in web presentations, but participants reported it wasn’t until the moment they experienced the feeling of being heard that their online voice was finally realized. Participants reported empowerment outcomes as a result of voicing online at the intrapersonal, interactional and behavioral levels. These have been facilitated by their interactions with others, official validation, and their access to resources. However, as the women indicated, they still experience a range of barriers and constraints to voicing themselves online including external, internal and interpersonal barriers that restrain or silence their voices. Based on the study’s findings and the participants’ own language, an ecological analogy of a tree’s growth is offered to help explain the complex communicative processes women experience in voicing themselves online and to provide future directions for researchers. The findings also have direct implications for communication scholars and practitioners looking to the web as a source of voice and empowerment for marginalized groups.

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