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New Technologies, Old Culture 207

strain women’s voices than to liberate them. In the case of Kuwait, a
woman’s reputation, and the ways that local information can be dis-
tributed to harm it, creates an institutionalized pattern for women’s
activism and voices. Even in an age where the Internet offers women
great freedoms of information and self-representation, women in
Kuwait, including activists for social and gender equity, view local
problems as better solved by a “kitchen cabinet” (or, more appropri-
ately for Kuwait, a parlor committee).
Just because the Internet in Kuwait is not supporting open, or-
ganized, and sustained feminist resistance does not mean that
women are not an important part of Internet culture in Kuwait, nor
that their cyberactivities are not having any social impact. As Car-
olyn Marvin observes, “Electric and other media precipitate new
kinds of social encounters long before their incarnation in fixed in-
stitutional form” (Marvin 1988, 5). This statement could easily be
applied to the emergent Kuwaiti Internet culture and women’s place
within it. On the one hand, we are not yet seeing the emergence of
new “fixed institutional” relationships for women within Kuwaiti so-
ciety (like the vote) at the advent of the networked era, as so many
Western social critics predicted would generally be the case. Kuwaiti
women have yet to use their new communications possibilities “to
put themselves on equal footing” with men (Talero and Gaudette
1996, 2). Yet the Internet is supporting a whole range of “new social
encounters” in cyberspace. The Internet in Kuwait is enabling
women to go to new places (like chat rooms where they can converse
unescorted with members of the opposite sex) and to speak without
having their gender influence the response of the conversant. It is
enabling young couples to meet and choose mates independent of the
family patriarchs. The Internet is opening new employment oppor-
tunities to women like Internet cafe ownership, or home page de-
sign. These incremental changes could result in significant social
gains for women in Kuwait in the near future; but for now, cyber-
practices continue to be shaped by the givens of Kuwaiti culture,
until the result of this dialectic between old culture and new tech-
nologies takes root in local landscapes, producing an institutional-
ized synthesis.

Conclusions: Kuwait and Women in the Larger
Muslim World

My research in Kuwait suggests that the age of the Internet could
bring increased gender equity for women by providing them new