The gendering of Asian Indian transnationalism on the Internet

Online activities offer immigrants an important way to maintain and recreate transnational linkages across space and time. Even though one enters cyberspace as a disembodied participant, fundamental aspects of bodily difference – gender, age, and race – shape the online activity that occurs on the Internet. Results from an Internet survey of Asian Indian Internet users in the United States provide evidence of the gendering and age-based divisions of virtual space with particular reference to the varying levels of access to the Internet, different amounts of Internet use, and distinctive types of online activities. In particular, women differ from men with regard to their total time online, the types of websites they visit, and their overall pattern of mediated communication, and these differences have a significant age-based component. Rather than seeing such differences simply as a matter of varying use of online resources, we see them as an indication of the internal segmentation of virtual space to form particular techno-social places.