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The Mobile Phone in the Lives of Palestinian-Israeli Young Women: Notes on the Domestication of a Mobile Communication Technology
Unformatted Document Text:  The Mobile Phone in the Lives of Palestinian-Israeli Young Women: Notes on the  Domestication of a Mobile Communication Technology The paper sheds light on mobile phone practices among young people within particular cultural contexts, and contributes to the discussion about the domestication of mobile communication technology. It constructs an account of mobile phone use among Palestinian Israeli young women who, at the time of the fieldwork (2003-6), used mobile phones given to them by their illicit boyfriends unbeknownst to their parents. The analysis explores the ways in which the phone use dialectically reaffirms and challenges intergenerational and cross-gender relationships; and reflects on the "domestication" of mobile technology. Our starting point for this account is a field trip taken in 2003, in which the first author  participated as an assistant teacher. Around midnight, as she was making her rounds in the hostel in  which the group spent the night, she was surprised to learn that in the privacy of their sleeping bags  behind closed doors, the girls were busy talking on mobile phones whose presence was unbeknownst  to the adult staff. These phones, she later learned in conversations with the girls, were hidden from  the girls' parents as well; they were given to them by their boyfriends as a symbol of and a practical  means for sustaining their romantic relationships; and inasmuch as these were forbidden, this gift  (which turned out to be a loan once the romance came to an end) required an intricate system of  concealment and collaboration. These relationships between the young women and their boyfriends and parents, their friends  and teachers, and their mobile phones, may be interpreted as an encounter between a traditional,  patriarchal society and a technology that is conceived in the literature as "emancipating" (Ling,  2004). In examining young women receiving mobile phones from their boyfriends and hiding them  from their fathers, brothers and schoolteachers, we can appreciate the role of technology in the  construction of gender, age and ethnicity among young women in Palestinian towns and villages in  northern Israel. The moves of these women are constrained by men, by their parents, and by the 

Authors: Ribak, Rivka. and Omari-Hijazi, Hiyam.
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The Mobile Phone in the Lives of Palestinian-Israeli Young Women: Notes on the 
Domestication of a Mobile Communication Technology
The paper sheds light on mobile phone practices among young people within particular 
cultural contexts, and contributes to the discussion about the domestication of mobile 
communication technology. It constructs an account of mobile phone use among Palestinian 
Israeli young women who, at the time of the fieldwork (2003-6), used mobile phones given 
to them by their illicit boyfriends unbeknownst to their parents. The analysis explores the 
ways in which the phone use dialectically reaffirms and challenges intergenerational and 
cross-gender relationships; and reflects on the "domestication" of mobile technology.
Our starting point for this account is a field trip taken in 2003, in which the first author 
participated as an assistant teacher. Around midnight, as she was making her rounds in the hostel in 
which the group spent the night, she was surprised to learn that in the privacy of their sleeping bags 
behind closed doors, the girls were busy talking on mobile phones whose presence was unbeknownst 
to the adult staff. These phones, she later learned in conversations with the girls, were hidden from 
the girls' parents as well; they were given to them by their boyfriends as a symbol of and a practical 
means for sustaining their romantic relationships; and inasmuch as these were forbidden, this gift 
(which turned out to be a loan once the romance came to an end) required an intricate system of 
concealment and collaboration.
These relationships between the young women and their boyfriends and parents, their friends 
and teachers, and their mobile phones, may be interpreted as an encounter between a traditional, 
patriarchal society and a technology that is conceived in the literature as "emancipating" (Ling, 
2004). In examining young women receiving mobile phones from their boyfriends and hiding them 
from their fathers, brothers and schoolteachers, we can appreciate the role of technology in the 
construction of gender, age and ethnicity among young women in Palestinian towns and villages in 
northern Israel. The moves of these women are constrained by men, by their parents, and by the 


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