REVALORIZING FEMININE WAYS OF KNOWING

Abstract

Two robust fields of study – one exploring the impacts of ICTs on medical expertise and the other examining women's online communication – have infrequently been analyzed together. Mothers are heavy Internet users, especially seeking health information, but there is little study on their use of online health communities. Using qualitative research methods, this article explores seven years of mothers’ interactions in one online health community and argues that the mothers create a space in which they produce knowledge and use their communicative acts to rethink expertise and epistemological validity so that the ways of knowing most often associated with women – subjective, experiential, and concrete – are accorded validity and value beside traditional epistemologies that prize objectivity and empiricism.

Keywords:

• Internet
• women
• health
• communication studies
• knowledge
• epistemology

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Razia Ahmed and Miki Tamura for their assistance with data entry, Tom Henthorne and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, the editor, and the engaged and thoughtful mothers of the Sensory List.

Notes

Dalmiya and Alcoff (1993) cite these four values as those central to the practice of pre-nineteenth century midwifery (pp. 224–225) and they translate to the values of mothers’ knowledge as well.