'Cyborgs or Houseelves: WhatApp Mothering in a Greater Mumbai Suburb',
Beyond Consumption India’s New Middle Class in the Neo-Liberal Times, Edited By Manish K Jha, Pushpendra, SBN 9780367565718 Published October 15, 2021 by Routledge India
24 Pages Posted: 20 Mar 2022
Date Written: June 15, 2020
Abstract
Instant messaging application WhatsApp, owned by the technology giant Facebook revolutionized social media communication in India, enabling 400 million people to share their views and thoughts with each other in real time, everyday. Based on participant-observation of school groups and interviews with women who constitute them, this chapter examines how the affordances of WhatsApp such as privacy, scale and cost, enable solidification of the forms of sociality that women traditionally used to reinforce the boundaries of precarious middle class lives. Patterns of participation and evaluation of engagements by participants reveal how the patriarchal and competitive middle class is being shaped by neoliberal economic growth that in turn is creating newer demands on women’s ‘status production work’. WhatsApp supports offline sociality and builds cooperative bonds that mediate the unequal mothering race for producing middle class achievers. As net utopians propound transformatory promise and critics caution against the exploitative potential of web 2.0, WhatsApp activities of school groups add visibility to the performance of mothering labor that once happened offline and back stage, however, they also indicate the demands of formal institutions on women’s unpaid work. Are school mums like ‘house elves’ bound by the magic of patriarchy while they learn the tragic dreams of ‘cyborgs’?
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