I just got my own handphone phone. It was quite an exciting period. Mobile phones weren't super cheap then, or subscription rates affordable. Pre-paid was only starting to be introduced. But I had a number to my name, and a device that meant anyone could get in touch with me, and me back, without having to go through 'gatekeepers'. I grew up in a pretty dense household. Grandparents, god parents, another aunt, 5 cousins, 1 brother, kids that my grandma and godma used to take care of for extra income, neighbours... there was always people around and simultaneous conversations making a kind of comforting background noise.

The only telephone in the house was next to the television, and the television was right next to the main door in the living room. There was almost zero-chance of having a private conversation.

So now, with my very own handphone, I could have a heart-to-heart with a friend even when I was having a pee. It felt really liberating. My own space carved through a rectangular, flip-cover, plastic black Ericsson.

I got an SMS one day. By a number I didn't recognise.


How strange. Who is this person? What does s/he mean? A friend I forgot to key into my phone?



What the fuck? I'm starting to feel a little creeped out. Who is this person? How the hell did he (no mistake now) get my phone number? Heard from where? From who? Suddenly, I didn't feel alone anymore, safe to shape my world, my space. Everyone I could have encountered became instantly dangerous, carrying a risk of ripping apart the skin I have made between myself and people I trust. I couldn't take it. I needed to know who this person was. I needed to establish some kind of knowledge, identity, name, space, context, something i can identify and remember. My handphone became a strange object, rattling with quiet fear. It took me some time, but I finally decided to reply.


Now I am angry. Pissed off beyond belief. How dare you intrude my phone, intrude my space, intrude my life, insinuate all kinds of shit, solicit me for sex, hide behind the cowardice of anonymity, spoil my beautiful day, my awesome week!! 

It was the first time anyone I knew had ever encountered this. I didn't know how to respond to it. I didn't know what I could do. How palpable is the danger? Is this person stalking me? Is it someone I know? Is someone watching me when I am not looking? Am I going to be raped? What is happening?

I was working in a domestic violence shelter at that time. I answered counselling calls, and I knew the law. There were no laws against sexual harassment or stalking, and there still isn't. Even if there was a law, it doesn't mean I will be protected. I know how toothless laws can be. How full of gaps and decay. But I'm still not taking this. I refuse to have one fuckwit spoil my experience and what having a handphone has meant to me. And if there is one thing I can't stand, it's assholes who choose to exert their power through sex. I spent 2 years of my life in primary school terrified of this guy who was threatening to rape my best friend - and me by proxy - for some unknown reason. Hanging out near our school, coming to the canteen when no one was around and saying the same disgusting things over and over. I had nightmares about him for years, dreaming of his death so the threat would end. I still remember his face. I'm not a child anymore. I should have told someone, made a report, kicked his balls. Done something. Anything. No more. I refuse to be paralysed by fear and shrink my already small space any smaller.

And they simply stopped. I still have his number, and phone numbers of all other similar stalkers who have made dodgy sms to my friends. I'm saving them up for a class action suit one day!

technorati tags: takebackthetech

once there was a bunch of people scared of a lot of things. they could perceive that their bodies were soft, that it breaks, splits apart, and unknown liquids flow out of them. they were aware that their bodies were in fact, full of fissures. holes, where some things enter, and some things depart.

it did not matter before, when drawing lines were a little less important. and where morphing and moving were part of life. but when it became more urgent to stay in one place and make that work, lines began to take root. they began to have names, rituals, ceremonies, heroes, lores and processes. they became so fat that it was possible to have pockets of anarchy, sarcasm and despair pock-marked within them.

these people lived in such a time. a time of lines, and deferrence to difference. the hallowing of stories and tales was an important way to preserve the sanctity of lines, and contain the messiness that lines create.

the mermaid is one such story. she swims in acknowledgment of untamed female sexuality. her voice - the capacity to legible communication - is woven with seduction at its core, with power to destroy the communal respect for lines. her naked breasts glisten with wanton disregard for the convention of undergarments and metal corsets entombed by lace and needles. she thrives in a mysterious world, unknown to man and his land. the fantastic and phantasmagoric.

and appears when men are most vulnerable, most out of his safe and comfortable universe, where he consciously sail to seek the edges of lines currently known.

but the most fearful of what is female, the biggest monster to the impermeability of lines, is her vagina. it is constantly reproducing mysteries; wetness, blood, womb, human, decay, life, orgasms. in logic as yet unchoked by machinations.

so these people masked it in the form of a fish. instead of legs, she has a fish tail. she cannot walk, or gape her legs and visually demonstrate her puissance. there are some fears so large that you cannot give them a name, or a description. because even to utter would be to empower further.

the mermaid is a nod, begrudging, fearful and in awe, to a might that flows around life as they currently knew it. and how she transforms in time, is how the servants of lines learn how to tame her.


---
do you remember how it feels like
to lose concentration
in a phone conversation
that stretched so long
about nothing and everything?

such careless intimacy
is a great privilege.
---

Just tried clicking on the map. Hopefully it works!

technorati tags: takebackthetech

and it begins...!

the sun has risen, my tongue is burnt,
i can smell yesterday's sweat trying to squirm
into tomorrow.

16 days of manic blogging!

***************************
ka-BLOG! TAKE BACK THE TECH!
www.takebackthetech.net
25 Nov to 10 Dec
***************************

ka-BLOG! Calling all bloggers to contaminate the blogosphere with activism on VAW for 16 days.

ka-BLOG is a 16-day blog fest for the Take Back the Tech Campaign. It is open to anyone and everyone - girls, boys, everyone beyond and more -- who want to share their thoughts on violence against women, and how online communications can exacerbate or help eliminate VAW.

---------------------------
What is the campaign about?
---------------------------
Take Back The Tech is simply a call for every person– women and men, who uses information & communication technologies, e.g. mobile phone, internet, radio etc., to use them for activism against VAW (violence against women). Unequal power relations lie at the heart of VAW, and this is apparent from the streets to online spaces. So we are saying technology should be used for equality, not to perpetuate violence.

---------------
How to ka-BLOG?
---------------

1. *commit*: commit yourself to 16 days of blogging about violence against women and technology.

2. *email*: email jac AT apcwomen DOT org, with your blog address & name/handle/nick
OR register yourself at the campaign website: http://www.takebackthetech.net/user/register
If possible, before 25 November. If you don't have a blog yet, this will be a great place to start! Email us, and we'll send you links on how to start your own blog :)

2. *identify*: make it known by putting a takebackthetech icon on your blog — create your own or grab a few icons from our Campaign Tools and Materials.

3. *post*: post one thing a day from 25 nov to 10 dec on this issue

4. tag it: add the "takebackthetech" tag your posts; just cut & paste the following code to to the bottom of each post:

<!-- technorati tags begin --><p style="font-size: 10px; text-align: right;">technorati tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/takebackthetech" rel="tag directory">takebackthetech</a></p><!-- technorati tags end -->

5. link back: send in your bloglinks and and we'll rss your posts to the campaign website throughout the 16 days

6. expand: widen the campaign to your readers by linking your blog to the campaign site.

-----------------------
What to ka-BLOG! About?
-----------------------

Anything as long as it's about violence against women and gender relations,and their connection to technology. We've come up with some questions for exploration because we know can be difficult and exhausting to think of things to write about for 16 days! If you have any ideas, share it with us through email, or blog about it. We'll find your post and add it to the list on the campaign website.

1. Do role playing games or communities promote sexual violence?
2. Are webcam girls victims or sexually empowered?
3. Is online harassment really harmful?
4. How can right to privacy coexist with right to expression?
5. Is sex online ‘real’ or just harmless ‘fantasy’?
6. What does it mean to take back the tech when 5 billion people in the world have no internet access?
7. The State can’t even get serious about domestic violence, how is it possible for something like cyberstalking to be a public safety issue?
8. The internet is for… (porn?)
9. Should internet service providers like Yahoo! have a right to my data since they’re free?
10. Is internet censorship the only way to deal with violent or sexually degrading content?
 
But also, feel free to skip any of these and blog about anything that's on your mind :) It does not matter if the blog entries come in the form of jokes, limmericks, poetry, short stories, blurbs, graphics, pictures, articles, creative narratives.

We welcome bloggers in different languages!

So ka-BLOG! with us!

For more information on ka-BLOG!, go http://www.takebackthetech.net, or email jac AT apcwomen DOT org

[FYI. In Filipino slang, "ka-BLOG" would mean someone you blog with.]

technorati tags: takebackthetech

found quite an interesting resource on pontianak on the web. seems like i have been confusing pontianak with langsuir with penanggalan -- mainly because of the stupid hantu exhibition i went to at the Sarawak museum, or maybe my bad recollection of what i read there.

so for clarification, these are the differance (according to derrida, this means both to differ and to defer, meaning negation of the self in 2 ways, temporally and phenomenologically; or in less desperate language, to say that "i" is both not you or now. meaning what? i have no idea. and this is only at page 5 of the non-preface. maybe the whole book is about non-being. if i am defined through a series of what i am not, then i can only be a puffy potential, malleable and fantastic. bla bla bla):

* pontianak, also known as puntianak or kuntilanak or matianak. is a female apparition, observed through her long hair and white dress (what kind? baju kurung? though think they have existed way before baju kurung was popularised in the region. pontianaks were recorded since at least the 17th century; and when baju kurung replaced the sarong or if it ever did, i can only guess.)

she is also notable for her shriek. if everyone in the vicinity can hear a pontianak shrieking in the dead of the night, and you're the only person who can't, it means the pontianak is near you. she is probably calling out in search of her child.

a pontianak is a woman who died in childbirth and her spirit cannot rest because of this. if you are caught -- or increasingly so, seduced -- by a pontianak, she will drink your blood till you die. i think neck is the location of choice.

in some stories, pontianaks have a hole in their nape which is their only point of weakness. it's covered by their long hair (which came first? the hair or the hole? hmm... :|). if you can stuff the hole with a nail, she'll remain as the gorgeous apparition that first ensnared you. but if it ever comes out... die la. in earlier stories, she flies around in the shape of a bird and kills an expectant mother and her child by driving her long claws into the belly. the motivation is generally cited as jealousy.

so while before, she kills women and their unborn baby (motivation = self & maternal desire), she now she kills perverse men who allow themselves to be seduced by women sitting alone in remote place (motivation =  punishment of the other's/male desire). maybe this is also why some origin stories are blurred, with the pontianak becoming a pontianak from rape & murder, or suicide after being impregnated after rape.

a pontianak is usually caught by being secured in a see-through glass bottle. she's sometimes said to like hanging out under banana trees.

a sultan, Syarif Abdurrahman Al-Qadri, was so disturbed by a pontianak in the 17th century that he eventually named a land after this apparition in west Kalimantan of indonesia.
to chase the pontianak away, a canon was shot, and where it landed, was the heart of this new settlement, Pontianak.

there's also a a town called Pontian in Johor. but i have no idea if it has any relation with the hantu pontianak.

* langsuir, also known as langsuyar. female, and can appear either also as a beautiful girl|woman or as an owl with the face of a cat. the same dude who wrote the resource hypothesised that owl-sightings are mistaken as pontianak-sightings, but maybe it's just a case of mistaken langsuir sightings?

a woman becomes a langsuir if she and her child dies within the 40 days of her confinement period. sometimes, it is said that her dead child becomes a pontianak. sometimes, it is said that a mother was so shocked to find out that her dead child has become a pontianak, she clapped her hands and flew to a tree, becoming a langsuir. origin stories are sometimes quite circular and self-referential.

the features of both are very similar actually, and can be quite confusing. both have the unearthly shrieks, are often cited as beautiful women, have holes at the back of their necks and similar long black hair, kills by sucking their victim's blood, and have to do with thwarted journeys into motherhood. sometimes it is said that langsuir looks like owls, sometimes it is said that pontianak looks like owls. not sure which is which.

langsuirs hangs out on trees and they can fly. to prevent deceased mothers from turning into langsuirs or their dead child from becoming a pontianak, glass beads are put in the mouth to disable the shrieking, hen's eggs are placed under the armpits to prevent the flapping of arms for flying, and needles are placed at the palms of her hands so that "she may not open or clench them to assist her flight" (1951, The Malay Magician, Richard Windstedt).

both pontianaks and langsuirs have the status of jins. i am not sure if this is because the citations come from a charm that borrows from Islamic texts/culture, or if pontianaks existed after the 14th century after the influential golden age of Islam in the region's history. either way, it's linked to both Malay and Muslim systems of belief.

oh, and apparently, langsuirs like to eat fish, and if they are hanging about in a tree near you, you just have to get naked and they'll fly away.

*penanggalan, also known as hantu tengelong. she is female. in some stories, instead of a victim of tragic circumstances, she becomes a penanggalan through the practice of black magic. these magicians have mastered (mistressed?) the arts so well that they can separate their heads from their bodies.

in other stories, she is a normal woman who was seated in a large wooden tub (used to hold nipah vinegar) while performing a religious penance when a man suddenly surprised her by asking what she's doing. she jumped up and her head literally popped out of her body. the shrieking head flew to a nearby tree.

the detached head with trailing entrails (but i don't understand why the entrails start from the neck instead of the lower part of the torso) continues flying about at night especially to houses of expectant mothers, waiting to feed upon their blood. penanggalan also likes the blood of babies and young children.

their entrails are also their only point of weakness, as it can get caught on tree branches and thorns. the practice is to either plant trees or place thorns around the house to prevent them from getting in. the entrails also need to be soaked in vinegar and its discharge (or drops of blood depending on which story) is poisonous and can cause kudis as well as thorny weeds to grow. kinda a flaw since thorny weeds are the kinda things which can trap it.

anyway, there are much less lore about the penanggalan than the pontianak. probably because not so many movies are made about it. but maybe also because part of the origin stories of the penanggalan contains some element of agency and deliberate intent as opposed to the pontianak. but also maybe because a ghost with no tits in its strategy is less sexy.

so here we have it. the pontianak, langsuir and penanggalan. repeated symbols of long black hair, shrieking voices, birth, blood, dead babies. mixed in with a little seduction and tales of monstrous sexuality.

a fair bit more to deconstruct, but too penat. so later la.

----

protest against dodgy judicial appointments

first there was knowledge, then there was assumptions, then suddenly... you tube! check out the video clip yourself.

march & handover of memorandum on impartiality of judicial appointments, organised by the Malaysian Bar Council:

wed, 26 sep 2007
11am from the steps of the Palace of Justice to the Prime Minister's office
hop on the bus at the bar council at 9am

is it? is information about sexual behaviours, relations, actions and fantasy everyone's right? if there is a right to information, and information enables active participation in social, cultural and political life, through dissemination of knowledge, promotion of individual and community content creation and exchange, about stuff that matters to people, then why not porn?

if people of diverse sexualities have a right to be recognised, and has a history of acceptance that is only recently embedded in a taboo of shame and secrecy, how similar is this to porn?

not sure about the veracity of the information. malaysia is mis-spelled (to malayasia), and i wonder where the other 4% of porn comes from (japanese hentai?). so an entire country is mis-spelled, it makes me wonder about the rest of the stuff.

either way, the treatment is interesting, especially since the actress is named, and puts herself forward as a conscious individual involved in this whole ecosystem -- with a knowing smile accompanying her plug at the end. at least she's not another victim, but at the same time, something is a little unsettling.

the comments after the you tube video is the thing i'm most interested in :)

a blogger has decided to declare 30 march as "stop cyberbullying online harassment day" (in the spirit of anarchic declaration of days, i've decided that cyberbullying doesn't cut it for me;)). it's partly in support of a prominent female blogger/techie who's been the target of violent and sexualised threats at several blog spaces, and partly as a strategy to address this issue.

i'm not really sure how to start. i've known a few people who's had their private email conversations or chats hacked and sent back to them by anonymous fuckheads. i've received smses by unknown creeps who claims to know my sexual fetishes and generously offers themselves for my pleasure. and less obviously, i've gotten a series of comments on this blog which seems alright at first, then gradually weirded me out because i don't know who the commenter is, but the commenter claims to know me. as in the offline me. it's a very disconcerting feeling.

sometimes it's easy to forget that anything online means it's not secure. that passwords are fragile locks, IPs are slippery snakes and nicknames can play ominous hide-and-seek games. so once the illusion of security is broken, it's also easy to feel completely paranoid. that some unknown omnipotent dickhead has access to everything of mine imaginable that is coded in binary.

the way i've dealt with it is to make it a point and find out more about secure online communications. installing firewalls, proxy servers, keystroke scramblers blablabla. i figured, the more i know, the better i can protect myself no?

but then maybe it's because no one's sent me death threats, or photoshopped pictures of me being strangled in a pair of knickers, or being gang-raped... or maybe i've never been tracked in detailed ways, like someone letting me know that they know where i've been, who i've seen, who i've chatted with in the last 24 hours and about what. that can be pretty fucking freaky. and i can imagine, really hard to just brush aside with widgets and gadgets.

how different is online harassment from offline ones? is it simply a case of assholes with access to more tools and spaces? kind of, but at the same time, not really. okay, for example, the minute public transportation came about, public wankers decided it's a great place to squeeze against throngs of people and rub themselves off. using the crowd as a way to provide anonymity. or the conventions of that space to make sure that the target doesn't scream (thereby drawing attention to her self and to her shame).

if it's in online spaces, then anonymity is even easier. how would you know who is the person behind the handle "psycho_misogynist" who's been leaving tracks of nasty comments addressed to you? or in fact, how could you know if it's many, many people, or simply one person with multiple nicks using proxy servers? it's tough whichever way you look at it.

do you shrug it off? laugh it off? construct your own army and start a flame war? delete your blog? change your handle? make a police report? complain to the forum owner/manager?

part of the outrage in this recent case is that many of the comments were left in "a-list" bloggers/techies-managed spaces. and that they did nothing in response. so whose responsibility is it to monitor speech?

the person who made the space? but if we think about it in terms of web2.0 paradigms, it's not the creator/manager of the space/platform that actually "owns" the space, it's the users who make the space alive by inputting content. and even if we could somehow make the linkage to the site creator/manager, should it be hers/his responsibility? how is her/him empowered with that duty? it's not as if s/he is voted by all the users as the encumbent to represent a collective ethics of respectful behaviour.

if it's hers/his responsibility anyway as an ordinary person with respect for rights, then shouldn't it be everyone's job to make sure the space they hang out in an alright one? but then not everyone enters into the space with equal power relations in the first place. so inevitably, the dude with better connectivity, higher techie skills and lots of contacts in that universe will win. which means those who are usually targetted in online harassment situations will lose out even more since they're usually more marginalised/less powerful groups in the first place.

so should it be (god forbid) the government? but if we say hey, cyber harassment is an issue, that might mean a licence to start monitoring all kinds of speech, not just those that result in actual harm.

even though i cringe at the term 'cyberbullying' (too many connotations with movements to regulate content on the internet in the name of "child protection", and sounds very silicon valley if you ask me), i quite like the idea behind this call. in the sense, getting bloggers & content creators -- i.e. the very people who are the targets of harassment or the harassers themselves -- to engage with this matter. it's a little anarchic, it's a little 'socialist', it's a little bit like saying everyone needs to take responsibility for this in their own way.

hate speech and freedom to express opinions are strange things. it's hard to negotiate the disparity between those who can speak and those who can be heard and what kinds of stuff gets circulated and gain resonance. but at the end of the day, if i don't like it, the least i can do is say as loud as i can, in as many languages as possible, in all the spaces i can get access to, that seriously, i don't like it. saya tak suka.

macam tu lah.

• gender harassment on the internet
  
• working to halt online harassment
  
• online safety toolkit
  

technorati tags: takebackthetech
stopcyberbullying

it's been awhile since i blogged. not for lack of thoughts, or questions. but maybe lack of time, or attention to move closer to this space. i've just spent some time thinking about sexuality, re-presentations, spaces, censorship and control. it's been mind-bending, and a little exhilarating. but i'm not at a space where there are any answers, or new questions even. pinning down some thoughts.

representation in terms of cinematic gaze and spectatorship is different from representation online, where the capacity for spectator to agitate the representation through re-presenting by adding content (comments, posts, pictures etc) is present, simply because of the space. so how does scopophilia figure when it is consumption of particular blogs (for example?). even if the reader is a 'lurker' and never adds to the content, does its potentiality do anything? arguably so i guess. because the person who represents is aware of this. and the construction of this fragment of reality is coloured by this knowledge. no?

what's been interesting is a return to questions related to embodiment that i kinda left behind a couple of years ago. i thought about phenomenology, arguments about reality, discursive representations, textual embodiment and movements that it compels. if i read a poem, and it moves me, can i distinguish between an emotive movement to an embodied one, when all that i know about the world and myself stems from embodiment? how is it possible to be moved without the body? but what does this mean when i chat with some unknown dude in IRC who uses 'male' textual signifiers, but whose embodied identity is in fact, constantly unstable or unknowable? and how does this change in something like second life, where avatars and 3d thingamagics further concretises imagined reality? teledildonics?

a question i asked at the panel was, how does one have sex in digital spaces? where a lot of silences demands for a deliberate engagement of imagination to construct reality. but at the same time, there is a knowledge that some of this is fantasy, unreal.

i dont even know if there is a point to asking these questions. or it's just another one of those masturbatory exercises. not to negate the pleasures. it's fucking fun to push my sensibilities out of the window. but i guess the inner 'activist' in me is asking for a practical point.

i keep returning to censorship. all these arguments for it. it seems so hard to talk about it without going back to censorship of female sexuality. how to enter into the debate of civil and political rights without losing the particularities of being hailed as 'female', but without calling myself into invisibility as a 'political dissident'? i've read through 5 different articles, all rich in information and analysis. but i didn't find one thread or analysis that made my heart go thump. it's either seen as a gendered impact, appended to censorship justified through morality and decency, or how real is the harm that is propounded through arguments of pornography = violence against women. feels like something is missing. something that plonks the whole thing smack bang in the centre. not as an oddity, or by the way, or 'special'.

i've thought myself into a rut again.

crap.

---

saw some cool music videos last night through British Council's Antenna project. Woof Wan Bau was a featured director, and he had quite a cool repertoire of moody, evocative videos that had a little more conceptually thickness than most of the eye candy i lap up when there's nothing else on telly. quite a privilege actually. to be in KL, knowing about this event, having the transport to go there. it was free; not only free entry, but i got a pack of cool stuff, t-shirt, a drink, some small cute food thingies that came in trays, heard an interview with Jason Groves (who also had a hand in the animation for Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy), watched Eclectic Method (official remixers of U2 apparently) do their thing.... all in all, felt like a bizarre alternate universe kind of experience.

kinda nice that more and more stuff seems to be happening in the city. an opening of spaces and appreciation of all things artsy and fancy. i dont know if i've been sleepwalking all these while, and it's always been here. very possible, since i have only lived here for a relatively short period of time. but either way, i'm liking it. more poetry readings! more videos! more indie shorts and documentaries! more questions in the midst of crap!

more more more!

all blogged out.

there are private jeepneys with rolls royce heads and rickety van tails. i saw a beautiful specimen on the way to makati. someone told me that one large jeepney manufacturing company was shut down a couple of years ago due to the popularity of vans, with air conditioners and the class markers they suggest. now it's back to the zinc-walled mechanics to create as they see beautiful. there is something romantic about it. paint and metal and clockwork. a distant flirtation with the industrial revolution.

---

having read the MOU and the plans, i getting quite excited about the working meeting tomorrow. if ONI-Asia is seriously planning to implement a country-by-country in-depth research on censorship and surveillance practices and frameworks in asia, i think that would be fucking awesome. a little unsure about their anxiousness to retain copyright and jealousy over shared information, but i guess it will depend what happens tomorrow. academics are a fucking pain the butt sometimes.

so it's almost midnight and i still have no clue what to present on the censorship and surveillance practice bit. had a chat with chat (heh), and i guess i'll just talk about stuff i know.

1) i have not done any intensive research on the kinds of censorship/surveillance practice in the region. i have bits of information that can be shared, and others will have more to add, but this may be more on details rather than frameworks.
2) first fact is that asia is incoherent as a region. the languages alone is enough to tumble babel several times over. so censorship can also be seen through the lens of access, and this links to question of content creation by whom, for whom, and legible to whom (intentional or not). this complicates the actors involved in censorship -- not just state, but content creators through an assumption of audience, and the perpetuation of privileged subjects through this interpellation. state enters when the audience or content creator is sufficiently powerful as a group to destabilise status quo, especially in relation to political and economic power. therefore, marginalised subjects rarely enter into the debate as equal partners invested in the shaping or outcome of any content regulation concerns, except, as in the case of pornography, to be mobilised as objects under the discourse of protection.
3) this is something that WNSP has been working on. engagement on global policy platforms on ICT is quite lonely for gender advocates. to provoke greater participation and political investment in larger women's movements, we attempted to make linkages with more 'mainstream' women's issues with technology. violence against women was seen as an effective entry point. several research papers were published to identify the connections between VAW & ICTs. one on trafficking of women and girls, another on different aspects of VAW (domestic violence, women in situations of conflict, sexual assault and violence etc) and then one directly engaging with pornography. a campaign was created to popularise the discourse, and to enrich existing knowledge through enabling specific and multiple standpoints.
4) the issue was reclaimed and the usual framework of patriarchal protection is rejected (safe from harm). instead, the language of rights is re-inserted. right to safety, right to self-determination, right to mobility, right to communicate, right to expression and information, right to privacy, right to participate in democratic governance. here, the 'enemy' is not automatically assumed as the state, but also as private individuals.
5) the question of stakeholders and actors is thickened to include the state, private sector (who stands to benefit from the discourse of protection), private individuals and civil society groups. the intervention on several discourses around right to information and expression is seen through a feminist lens.  for example, when a freedom of information bill is advocated for in parallel to calls for more freedom of expression, this is linked to questions of accountability, transparency and good governance. how is this complicated when gender is revealed as an illuminating dimension? a concrete example from malaysia. the internet has been guaranteed several times over to be a space that is free from state censorship through the communications and multimedia act. but speech is still governed through other laws, whatever space they appear in. defamation suits is a growing favourite, with two prominent bloggers recently sued by a major english language newspaper. printed media also called for the government to place similar content regulation mechanisms onto bloggers as they do for publications through the printing and publications act. this cracked the stronghold of FOE that has been comfortably assumed by internet users in the country. a naive assumption since ISPs have supplied the government with emailers of stuff that have been considered as a threat to national security. so we have here, a very serious issue, where the players are all big boys. the state, politicians, celebrity bloggers, mainstream newspapers. the people who continue to self-proclaim as having a stake in this issue are more celebrity dissident bloggers, MPs (that do not include the national women's machinery), hard-news journalists etc., with more ostentatiously political language that has no patience with whiny women claiming for their rights to write inane diaries about their sexual life on blogspot. the value set and reset recreates a dominant masculinist environment. the political worth of multiple discourses around sexuality, particularly female sexual agency, is again, deprioritised as irrelevant to the question of FOE, FOI, democracy, governance. this gives the state licence to create huge billboards that cautions citizens against visiting pornographic sites, raise censorship as an important issue to be debated in WSIS II Prep Comm 3  in tandem with a regional partner, indonesia, who contingently shares the same moral concerns by having a similar dominant social construction based on Islam, and legitimises the use of surveillance software in state funded computer centres, as well as surreptitious installation by private companies to track employee's internet use. in other words, both civil society actors and the state are responsible for the omission of feminist perspectives and concerns by benefiting through its circulation through exclusion. how would a research into censorship and surveillance on the internet be framed so as to not commit the same politically unaccountable error? the connection between discursive mobilisation of gender concerns, its diverse impact on affected parties, attention towards relevant socially-constructed identities that are assumed and excluded, and strategies that directly intervenes into this reality will make a difference.
6) APC has materials around internet rights that places prominence on security issues, such as privacy, censorship & surveillance, through its internet rights campaign and the campaign for communication rights through information society. this material might be useful for the research at hand.
7) APC members such as Jinbonet, FMA etc also conducted national campaigns and research around this issue, and this research can invite their participation.
8) At the recent IGF, WNSP organised a panel on content regulations from gender and development perspectives. the gendered impact of content regulation frameworks can be explored deeper through this research. some interesting outcomes included the contentious definition of "harmful content", usually dispatched as the rationale for content regulation and the processes involved in negotiating this act of defining, self-regulation frameworks and how guiding principles that do not omit gender dimensions and capacity building strategies can be integrated, problematising content classification over the internet and the role of network operators in content regulation, and interrogating internet safety software solutions on political and economic terms. the panel was a good start to locate gender into the centre of these debates, but more information needs to be gleaned for deeper analysis towards more effective interventions.

fucking sleepy now. hope my dreams will inspire more things.