Daughters, devices and doorkeeping: how gender and class shape adolescent mobile phone access in Mumbai, India

ABSTRACT

How do gender and class work together to shape adolescent girls’ unequal access to mobile phones within the family in Mumbai, India? What are the everyday practices and cultural logics upon which these inequalities are built? This paper addresses these questions by using a mixed-methods study of 59 group interviews and 268 surveys with adolescents aged 13–15 in Mumbai. Taking an intersectional analytical framework, the findings show how gender and class together create varying standards of ‘respectable femininity’ and class distinction that families aspire to and cultivate in adolescent girls. The mobile phone can be seen as both a threat and a necessity to the maintenance of these standards of respectability, resulting in families variously enabling or constraining access to mobile phones by girls. Rather than interpreting the findings through binaries of low-income/high-income or empowered/constrained, I instead consider how classed ideals of ‘respectable femininity’ create different aspirational conditions for girls belonging to each class group, and form the cultural frames of everyday life.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescents
• Inequality
• Mobile phones
• Gender
• Class
• India

Acknowledgements

This paper is dedicated to my adolescent respondents. I am very grateful that they chose to share their experiences, analyses and reflections with me and I wish to credit them for their contributions. I am deeply grateful to Rachel Goldberg for her outstanding support through every step of this project, and Lakshmi Lingam for her excellent mentorship and for inspiring me to work on this topic. Many thanks to Francesca Polletta and David Frank for their insightful and constructive feedback on early drafts. Finally, my warmest gratitude to Shilpa, Namita, and Jayadev, who provided invaluable encouragement and feedback during the ideation and writing stages of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Isha Bhallamudi

Isha Bhallamudi is a PhD Candidate in Sociology and a fellow at the Irvine Initiative in AI, Law and Society. She holds an Integrated MA in Development Studies from IIT Madras and an MA in Demographic Analysis from UC Irvine. She studies gender, technology, work, culture and inequality in India [email: [email protected]].