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

Abstract

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.