Gendered Technologies: Youth,Gender and Mobile Phones in Chennai City

Narrative 1: Masculinity and Geththu

It was a warm and humid evening in Chennai; I flagged an autorickshaw and directed the driver, Suresh, to my residence. Suresh is a 21-year-old male from Avadi, a suburb situated approximately 24 kilometres from Chennai city centre. We chatted through the journey, and I learnt that Suresh had been driving an autorickshaw in the city for about eight months; that he, along with seven other friends from Avadi decided to make a living here as opportunities in Avadi were scarce. During the journey, I asked Suresh if I could interview them. He replied, ‘nan pacankalai kontu varuven’ (I will bring the boys).

At our meeting, we discussed various issues, including mobile phones. All eight young men owned a smartphone and used social media platforms, particularly Facebook and WhatsApp, in their everyday lives. Mobile phones and social media were seen as crucial markers of globalisation since they could communicate easily and also source information from around the world. It was also seen as a critical marker of social status: the young men linked the type of mobile phone possessed to digital competency, social status, style and importantly, masculinity. As expressed by a young man, ‘smart phone irunda gethaa irupen’ (If I have a smart phone, I will have prestige). His masculine image is a composite that includes a specific technology, digital competency, and their connotations, such as social status. This is in consonance with Clifton Evers’ point that ‘some men aspire to and admit to owning the latest models of mobile phones to openly demonstrate their masculine status’ (Evers, 2014, p. 377). In the view of these young men, a youthful male should know how to dress up in a ‘modern way’, own the latest mobile phone, have a social media profile, and be up-to-date with the latest films, music, trends, viral videos, and apps. The construction of masculinity here is intimately tied to ‘a leisure economy’ marked by ‘the popularisation of the internet in daily life’ (Arora, 2019, p. 8). In her study of the digital ecology in the Global South Arora calls for a shift from a utility driven approach to understanding new technologies, and advises greater critical attentiveness ‘to how and why digital leisure manifests differently amongst…youth outside the West’ (Arora, 2019). The opinions shared by the young men I interviewed confirm Arora’s point: that in the leisure economy the mobile phone and the internet play a central role in their articulation of masculinity. The collective imagination of these men constructs the masculinity of contemporary Indian youth in terms of the logic of consumption and aspiration (Osella & Osella, 2006). Similar constructions of masculinity emerged in interviews with young men from a fishing community, young male students from a government high school, and middle-class young men attending an Engineering College in the city. They expressed their aspirations to purchase the latest models of phones, as this technology was an essential part of being geththu, which can be translated as a source of ‘prestige, haughtiness influence/intimidation’ (Nakassis, 2010, p. 95).

According to Nakassis, geththu is a term, amongst many others, such as style that youth in Chennai use ‘to typify that which is status-ful’ (Nakassis, 2010, p. 96). Youths from these diverse socialities view the mobile phone as a commodity that imbues them with status-fulness, geththu. They explained that mobile phones, for example, are instrumental in cultivating romantic and sexual relationships with women outside their community, class and caste. Some of them teased each other as ‘Aunty Heroes’, a term used to describe young men who have sexual relationships with, typically, older married middle-class women. Photos were shared as evidence of such intimacies, and those in such relationships were identified as having geththu.

The term geththu in Tamil is complex, its meanings contingent on context and tone, and can mean a number of things or a combination of things including but not limited to signifying badass, cool, status, swag, and a rough kind of masculinity. In his study of youth and status in Tamil Nadu, Nakassis (2010, p. 96–97) argues that ‘geththu invokes a rougher kind of masculinity…used more often to typify literal transgression…[and]…the dominance relationships between individuals’. Geththu, as a ‘rougher’ form of masculinity, is about power relationships and transgressions. So what power relations are transgressed in these instances? Moreover, what does this say about the expression of masculinity? The mobile phone as an object contributes to young men’s status, and when their status is expressed, it is framed as an act that challenges normative expectations and assumptions about themselves and their communities. For example, the young men spoke about how the mobile phone gave them status, contributed to their feeling of being a big man (geththu) who was comfortable hanging out in a mall, a space marked by social class and status. The mobile phone is an essential accessory to this transgressive act because, as they tell me, their ‘types’ are not expected to be in such places. In these instances, the mobile phone enters into a status economy to underscore a masculine identity. The young men also used the term geththu to signify the solidarity formed by living in the same neighbourhood and as a form of comradeship. Geththu is expressed ‘as an important constitutional element in the practice of male friendship’ (Nisbett, 2007, p. 941). The young men from the fishing community, for example, kept reminding me that they had geththu where they lived, that no one would come by and disturb them unnecessarily, that they had people around who would send for them if someone unfamiliar came into their neighbourhood and that they could get me anything I wanted, it was just a phone call or a text message away. This is geththu expressed ‘through hyper-masculine displays’ (Nakassis, 2010, p. 105): the power to exert authority over a place, intimidating some and protecting others, into which the mobile phone is sutured. The chain of significance that these young men articulate functions in two ways: first, it is a ‘key import in the formation of these young men’s masculinity, as part of their friendship practices’ (Nisbett, 2007, p. 944), and second, it moralises gender relations and affirms the misogynistic rendering.

The narratives the young men shared demonstrate that the commodity (the mobile phone) is sewn into notions of masculinity, transgressions, and heterosexual desires, illustrating that ‘the commodity situation in the social life of any “thing” be defined as the situation in which its exchangeability…for some other thing is its socially relevant feature’ (Appadurai, 1986, p. 13). Importantly, it tells us that ‘mobile phones have become affective technologies’ and as such must be understood as ‘objects which mediate the expression, display, experience and communication of feelings and emotions’ (Lasen, 2004, p. 1). The rendering that takes place is masculinist, demonstrating that the phone, as a commodity, means more than the economic or utilitarian thing in itself. It is a gendered technology.

Narrative 2: Women and the Politics of Mobility

In this section, I draw on interviews with young women participants to frame a second narrative that emerged to underscore the argument that the mobile phone is a gendered technology. The young women I encountered unsurprisingly echoed the views of the young men and framed mobile phones as a material manifestation of India’s emergence as a superpower and mark of its technological advancement. Furthermore, like the young men, young women also admitted that mobile phones are central to their lives in many ways. For instance, the phone enabled them to ‘connect with friends beyond normal time’, ‘have friends around the world’, ‘learn new things’, and given them freedom previously unimaginable in Tamil society. They cited mobile phones and social media as central drivers of change now and in their future to come. Comments such as the following—‘it has empowered women’; ‘smartphones give me freedom’ and ‘there are more opportunities for women now’—exemplify a contemporary, shifting set of conceptions about their place as young women in an urban city.

According to Hanson, ‘mobility/immobility stand at the core of traditional gender ideologies, which are infused with notions of space, place and mobility’ (Hanson, 2010, p. 9). Mobility here is understood as movement (physical, digital, imaginative) across social, cultural, gender and political borders that we inhabit as subjects of this world. While young men, like these young women, did speak of the mobilities enabled by mobile phones, it is not inscribed in the social reproduction of gender as intimately as it is for young women. In the Indian context, one of the critical instruments employed in the patriarchal social reproduction of gender is the regulation of women’s mobility (Cowan, 2020; Gera & Hasdell, 2020; Krishnan, 2018; Siwach, 2020). The majority of female participants noted that because of mobile phones their subjectivity had been reconstituted. By this, they are referring to the transformation of the various modalities that mark their subjectivities such as gender and class; shifts in social and cultural norms and practices; and changes in everyday lives ranging from consumption and lifestyle choices to civic and political engagements. Mobile phones have been instrumental in enabling young women to challenge boundaries and reconfigure their sense of who they are. All the female participants spoke about how mobile phones have made mobility a possibility: mobility into different places, at different times, and with people who are not family members. The ability to go out late in the evenings, to the cinema or restaurant, or for ‘timepassing at the mall till closing time’, ‘just hanging out with friends’, developing romantic relationships beyond the conscripts of specific places (college, suburb or neighbourhood), engaging in global/national political and civic communities, networking with activist groups and attending protests were cited as examples of mobility. Young women’s narratives about mobile phones and mobility go like this: mobile phones have enabled them access to a plethora of information and digital experiences that have spurred some of them to participate in NGO activities in Chennai; others spoke about their growing social networks enabled by social media; some noted that their content generation on social media has been crucial to their empowerment while still others cited the ease with which they could access varied streams of popular culture and diverse news content.

The comments of the young women demonstrate that mobile phones enabled them to circumvent normative gender expectations in Tamil society. Furthermore, this newfound mobility was affirmed as empowering—for instance, Saras noted that her mobile phone had transformed her social life as her parents are quite happy for her to stay out late as long as she kept them informed where she was. She no longer had to return home straight after college; she can experience the city differently and has built up a (digital) social network of peers beyond her college friends. For Saras and many others who shared similar stories of being able to move freely without the pressure of normative gendered notions of space and time because of the mobile phone, this is a mark of an empowered woman in urban India.

These examples of empowerment and expansion of spatial freedom are driven by access to technology and various kinds of mobility resulting therefrom. Mobility, as the field research confirmed, is articulated variously. For the young women, mobility signified ‘the movement of people from one place to another in the course of everyday life’ (Hanson, 2010, p. 7), including everyday mobilities such as going shopping, socialising and hanging out. It also signified digital mobilities such as developing friendships outside of typical everyday places (home, the neighbourhood, college), virtual mobilities such as ‘access to places via the internet or other forms of information technology and imaginations’ (Hanson, 2010), and social and political mobilities such as civic engagement and grassroots mobilisation. These statements reinforce the point that mobile phones, the Internet and social media have led to the transformation of female subjectivity, and challenged established gender norms and practices. The statements from participants suggest that mobile phones have enabled women to rupture established norms, practices, ways of seeing, doing and being. The connections drawn between mobile phones, notions of freedom, impact on cultural norms, and female empowerment clearly show that the social life of the technology is central to gender politics. That said, young women, more than men, had to develop tactics to manage their phones, and this included installing app locks, additional passwords, and encryptions to ensure that their digital footprints were not traceable by family members. This was because their phones are monitored. I will discuss this further in the next section.

Narrative 3: Mobile Phones and the Politics of Maanam (Honour)

The mobile phone experience, however, is not just about the empowerment of young women. As previously noted, young women digitally encrypt their phone because it is monitored. The field findings reiterate Sambasivan et al.’s conclusion that women proactively engage in ‘performative practices…to maintain individuality and privacy, despite frequent borrowing and monitoring of their devices by family and social relations’ (Sambasivan et al., 2018, p. 127). And one of these performative practices relates to digital encryption. On what grounds does this monitoring take place? And how might we understand the articulation of the gendered surveillance of mobile phones? The social life of mobile phones is implicated in the reproduction of gender discrimination, and women are both the object and subject of discrimination legitimised through the discourse of maanam. The following narratives that I recount affirm how culture-specific attitudes towards mobile phones function to regulate, discipline and subject young women to surveillance.

Suresh, the autorickshaw driver I mentioned earlier, is married but does not go home daily because this is uneconomical. The daily trip from Chennai city to Avadi was unaffordable. He only went home on Tuesdays. What this also meant was that the recently married couple did not have the opportunity to spend much time together. That was not an issue, Suresh told me, because both of them had mobile phones. He has a smartphone, and his wife has a feature phone. Suresh informed me that his wife is permitted to spend only a specific amount of money on phone charges. I asked why, and he replied, ‘I do not want her to spend her time chatting to her friends and relatives; she can use the phone, but there needs to be a limit; otherwise she might do things that I don’t like, and this can bring shame to my family’. He then added, ‘my wife does not need a smartphone. With a smartphone, she will know about the world. That is not necessary’. Suresh’s response draws a specific chain of equivalence between a technology and ‘different regimes of value’ (Appadurai, 1986, p. 4). In this case, the regimes of value are underwritten by a masculine, patriarchal Indian culture and normalised ideas about domesticity and gender roles.

A young man working in the IT sector related the following: his sister (Maya), who had been an independent working woman in the IT sector before her marriage had recently moved into her husband’s middle-class home where she lived with his parents and sister. Her husband and in-laws think that she spends too much time on the phone talking to her family and IT friends. Whenever there is an argument between her and her husband or members of her husband’s family, she is invariably accused of being ‘in constant contact with her friends and family’. They claim that ‘outside’ people have been instrumental in advising her on how to deal with her husband and his family. Things came to such a pass that her husband banned her from using the mobile phone when he is not around. He thinks his wife’s use of the phone needs to be monitored; otherwise, he suspects that she will do things that will bring shame on his family. The mobile phone is seen as a device that enables Maya to bring the outside world into the domestic space that she shares with her husband and in-laws, transgressing the perceived inside/outside, private/public distinction. The technology is seen as disrupting the regimes of inclusion and exclusion that are foundational to the joint-family home.

I lived with an extended middle-class family in the suburb of Triplicane for some time in 2019. The family employs a young married woman from a lower socio-economic class, Shanti, as a domestic worker. Shanti is from a fishing community and used to live nearby, but now lives at Ezhil Nagar, a rehabilitation settlement in Thoraipakkam about 18 kilometres from her place of work after her family home was demolished by the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board. She is married to a young fishmonger, and they have a young child. In our conversations she shared her travails. Her husband mistrusts her, she says, and suspects that she is having an affair. This is because she uses her smartphone ‘excessively’ and ‘constantly’ at home. He tried to access her phone, and when she refused his suspicions grew. He says, ‘If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear’. He is now seeking a divorce alleging that she is a woman without maanam.

In 2017, I interviewed a young woman, Sunitha, in a group. During our discussion, it emerged that Sunitha was in a relationship with a young man, Ravi, for three years. He was from a different community and caste, but this did not matter to her. She intended to inform her parents of her desire to marry him after she completed her studies, hoping that they would agree to the marriage. In 2019, I learnt that Sunitha’s family had objected to her relationship with Ravi, had physically assaulted her and warned Ravi to keep off. They found his number after trawling through Sunitha’s contact list in her mobile phone. They forced her to resign from her job as a teacher, confined her to her home, and confiscated her smartphone which was blamed for its role in bringing shame to the family.

Raja is a 21-year-old youth studying engineering in a reputable college in the city. He comes from a middle-class family and lives with his parents and sister Anu. The siblings own a laptop and a smart phone each. He tells me that he is an avid Facebook user, and his parents can be categorised as digital immigrants who do not use a computer or have a social media profile. Anu too is on Facebook, and he is ‘friends’ with her because he wishes to keep an eye on her social media feed so that he knows what she is up to. He also claimed that he makes a ‘noise’ whenever he thinks Anu spends ‘too much’ time on her mobile phone. His parents, he lamented, do not know the ‘dangers’ of the technology, and he is concerned that his sister might do things that could compromise her honour. Raja’s control of his sister’s digital habits is closely bound to the patriarchal discourse on honour and the fear of her possible transgressions whereby she would fall short of being the ideal Tamil woman. In his study of social media in South India, Venkatraman similarly noted that women’s visibility on digital media ‘was generally not accepted as a good example of womanhood; it is not considered a normative ideal for a good Tamil, or even a [good] Indian woman’ (Venkatraman, 2017, p. 123).

The narratives outlined above tell us the following: first, that technology is ‘an object of distrust, unless it is monitored’ (Jeffrey & Doron, 2013, p. 175) and that it is in the hands of women that it becomes an object of distrust because the technology ruptures the distinction between domestic space (private) and the world (public). It challenges established social and cultural norms, and ‘may threaten the reputation and honour of the household’ (Jeffrey & Doron, 2013). Second, the equivalence between maanam and the technology articulated by participants is contained within specific contexts: marriage, romance, community and family. Other contexts like education and social class, which also affect and relate to how maanam functions in Tamil society, did not emerge explicitly in the ethnography. This demonstrates that it is in specific contexts that maanam and technology are interlinked to regulate women’s use of and access to mobile phones. Third, it demonstrates that the connection drawn between the technology and maanam is confined to women only. In other words, maanam is gendered, for a woman must bear the responsibility for keeping her and her family’s honour intact. When I spoke to young men and women about the ways in which mobile phones are connected to women’s honour, I was informed this was because women were both the architects and bearers of maanam. This term, maanam, cropped up numerous times during the interviews, which begs the question: how might we understand the workings of maanam to legitimise gendered surveillance of mobile phones?

When I asked participants why maanam is gendered, I was informed that this was because ‘woman’ represented the earth, divinity and community, thus immediately drawing up a rich tapestry of equivalences that confer female subjectivity with mythic qualities. And men’s roles, I was told, was to keep her maanam intact. We can connect this disposition to broader discourses amplified in Hindu religious texts, cultural performances, and patriarchy which reinforce the importance of safekeeping women’s maanam (Stocker, 2017). Additionally, ‘in Tamil everyday life, maanam does not refer to the individual, but is extended to the social environment, including family, kin, caste, religious community or village. Family status basically signifies a collective form of maanam’ (Stocker, 2017, pp. 137–138). This means that the surveillance of women’s digital use and access becomes ever more urgent because at stake is the collective honour of the family, community and caste. Thus, the mobile phone is viewed as a technology that is connected to women’s bodies, desires, relationships and social networks and therefore its use needs to be disciplined and regulated. A pivotal way to regulate the technology is by mobilising maanam as a form of power and means of control.

In saying this, I am alluding to a conception of maanam as a technology of disciplinary power and biopower following Michel Foucault’s elaboration. Foucault (1997) notes that power works through two oppositional and complementary technologies of power: disciplinary power, which emerged sometime in the 17th century, and biopower, which emerged around the late 18th/early 19th centuries. The former ‘centres on the body, produces individualising effects and manipulates the body as a source of forces that have to be rendered both useful and docile’ (Foucault, 1997, p. 249). The ways in which maanam is used to discipline women’s use of mobile phones seeks to ensure that she does not transgress specific social, cultural, and religious registers. Put differently, it functions to keep the gendered body docile. Biopower, Foucault writes, ‘is a technology which aims to establish a sort of homeostasis, not by training individuals, but by achieving an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers’ (Foucault, 1997). Biopower is focused on the government of life. Maanam functions biopolitically by first controlling the possibility of a randomness by ensuring that specific gender expectations are adhered to, that ‘things remain as they are’. It seeks to ensure that patriarchal order and cultural norms remain the dominant order. The normative discourses of the ideal Tamil woman that were shared as well as the associated perceptions of mobile phones, social media and the Internet that construct masculinity as the invisible norm, an equilibrium, legitimise the surveillance of women’s mobile phones. When I inquired further, male participants emphasised that the maanam of women and that of the community and family cannot be gambled with; it has to be kept pure, intact and uncontaminated. ‘Our women must tell us whom they are talking to’, Basha a 21-year-old autorickshaw driver commented; ‘Why should we allow our women to go out whenever they want just because they have a mobile phone?’ voiced Raman; and ‘women should be careful about how they use their phones’ added Durga, a female participant. Both young men and women thus mobilised the term maanam to legitimise the regulation of women’s access to and use of mobile phones. However, it should be noted that a majority of women participants resented being subjected to surveillance and were critical of the way maanam is used to discipline and regulate their lives.

The narratives above demonstrate that surveillance is gendered. The gendering of surveillance takes place in two keys ways. The first can be summed up in this way: if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear. Male/family surveillance is legitimised because it is necessary to maintain the security and sanctity of socially and culturally constructed gender norms. As such, young women should be open to checks of their mobile phones, and if they refuse, then it is assumed that they have something to hide. So, when Shanthi or Sunitha protested the checks on their mobile phones, they were assumed to be guilty of hiding something (relationships, boyfriends). It is this logic that is articulated when women’s phones are checked by their family members to ensure that they do not communicate with someone the family disapproves of. The second way of justifying surveillance and to call it essential is to plant firm rules in the present so that they will shape what women might do in the future. Surveillance is cast as a necessity in that it encourages specific behaviours, regulates what is the expected norm, and discourages disruptive practices. As Jasbir Puar (2014) notes, surveillance is pre-emptive: it seeks to control the now so that having to repress (the woman) in the future is avoided. The cases of Maya (whose husband banned her from using a mobile phone because of what he perceived she could possibly do), of Anu (whose brother Raja undertook surveillance of her digital footprint), and Sunitha (whose phone was confiscated) exemplify this second dimension of surveillance. Banning, or limiting the use of the mobile phone or taking it away altogether are forms of surveillance that will foster certain kinds of behaviour, discourage others and shape what a woman will do in the future.