ABSTRACT

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kolkata and rural West Bengal and engaging with literature on mobile phones in the global South, and on gender and sexuality in India, this article seeks to understand the incongruence between widespread mobile phone use in India and commuting domestic workers’ own accounts of their mobile phone use. It illustrates the important role that mobile phones play in enabling commuting workers (who are mostly women) to find work and manage relationships, but also how commuting workers play down their mobile phone use, guarding against suspicion from husbands, sons, and others. Such suspicion reflects the stigma around women’s mobility/sexuality, connected to ideas about women’s ‘honour’ and the perceived risks associated with women’s work and journeys. When workers’ mobile phone use is, then, perceived to be ‘inappropriate’, or if workers transgress norms and expectations relating to ideas about women’s ‘honour’ in other ways, they can face (further) surveillance and abuse, their access to phones thereafter often being controlled by men. Contributing to gendered analyses of mobile phones in the global South, the article shows how phones can at once create new possibilities and freedoms for commuting domestic workers while at the same time reinforcing gendered power relationships.

摘要

本文借鉴加尔各答和西孟加拉邦农村的人种学实地调查，并参与全球南方关于手机的文献，以及印度的性别和性行为，本文试图了解印度广泛使用手机与通勤家庭工人自己的手机之间的不一致他们使用手机的帐户。它说明了手机在使通勤者（主要是女性）找到工作和管理人际关系方面发挥的重要作用，以及通勤者如何淡化手机使用，防止丈夫、儿子和其他人的怀疑。这种怀疑反映了围绕女性流动性/性行为的耻辱感，与女性“荣誉”的观念以及与女性工作和旅行相关的感知风险有关。当工人使用手机时，那么，被认为是“不适当的”，或者如果工人以其他方式违反了与女性“荣誉”观念相关的规范和期望，他们可能会面临（进一步的）监视和虐待，此后他们使用手机的权限通常由男性控制。这篇文章为全球南方手机的性别分析做出了贡献，展示了手机如何为通勤的家政工人创造新的可能性和自由，同时加强性别权力关系。