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208 Deborah Wheeler

professional opportunities sensitive to the cultural constraints of
Islam, and as well, improve relationships between men and women,
as greater intimacy outside and before marriage is possible through
Internet chat lines. These “liberations,” however, occur against a
background of continued conservatism both politically and cultur-
ally, which limits overt “revolutionary” impacts of the Internet on
women’s lives. The stability provided by the regulatory systems of
Kuwaiti society, although they limit overt feminist activism, at the
same time provide some semblance of organization, and give
Kuwaitis rules, both spoken and unspoken, of local protocol. The
uncertainties caused by the Iraqi occupation, and the social turmoil
which was and is its legacy, keeps many feminist activists more fo-
cused upon processes of social healing than upon their own “self-
centered” advancement. The increase in drug abuse, divorce, violent
crimes, unemployment, moral crimes, and the unhealed wounds of
the Iraqi occupation, such as POW issues and continued complica-
tions of post-traumatic stress syndrome, help to divide women’s sol-
idarity along social activist lines. The luxuries of life that many
Kuwaiti women enjoy further divide women among lines of haves
and relative have-nots, and divides as well the haves along lines of
beauty and appropriate social presentation. Differences in degrees
of religious observance, as well as sectarian differences also divide
the power of women’s voice. Thus, one comes to understands women
and the Net in Kuwait against a complicated local background of
cultural, social and political givens, which shape and limit activism
along many lines presenting a chorus of women’s voices, each
singing for themselves, and their community, many according to dif-
ferent tunes.
The case of Kuwait shows how activism is shaped by local insti-
tutional and cultural imperatives, factors which discourage the ma-
jority of women in Kuwait from openly testing the chains which male
hegemonies provide them. This case illustrates that just because ca-
pabilities to “know” and to “speak” are provided by the onslaught of
new communications tools does not mean that such tools will be used
freely, without contextual constraints. Rather, a complicated context
of cultural, political and social institutions weaves itself around
women’s use of information in conservative Islamic societies. It is im-
portant to understand the lives and voices of women throughout the
world lest we make the mistake of thinking that “access” is the pri-
mary issue in building global solidarity with feminist consciousness
and activism. Only by understanding the constraints upon women’s
activism across the world can we know where to find, how to inter-