Argentine rural women on Instagram: Virtual sociability and identities in tension

MARINA POGGI; ALEJANDRA DE ARCE

Ontario

Conferencia; RWSA Triennial Conference: Kitchen Table Talk to Global Forum?. What?s on the table (food production, preparation, rituals, hospitality, etiquette, and display); 2021

University of Guelph

Historically, rural women were installed ?gates inside?, as the owners of household chores and support for their husbands, the household providers. However, we observe that nowadays, they have conquered other spaces of participation that placed them in an active and entrepreneurial role. By using social networks they have appropriated new knowledge and different uses of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). In this context, virtuality appears as an identity-building tool, in which these rural women gain visibility (both as individual and collective subjects) as though as theirs diverse experiences.As the ECLAC Gender Equality Observatory points out, ?the approach on gender issues has prioritized women as technology users in most countries? (ECLAC 2009). Taking into account the national agenda, our analysis will focus on observing the variables that gender can introduce to the dynamics of ICT uses. We will take Instagram as a case for studying several diversities within argentine rural women such as the geographic space they inhabit, age and the forms of association. We will focus on the presence and construction of identities of rural women in social networks, based on the notion of appropriation of ICT and its relevance for the display of activities, virtual sociability, a tool to bring experiences, ways of working and living in rural Argentina.