Mutations of the interior: The political in the new media regime

ABSTRACT The article uses the controversy around the March 2018 cover of the conservative Malayalam magazine Grihalakshmi to reflect on the implications of the collapse of the earlier distinctions between the public and the private. Though the magazine cover comes from the field of print media, representing the values and traditions of the old media regime, I argue that it can be understood as a response to the processes through which popular practices of the internet and social media have destabilized the coherence around the notions of the public, the private and the political that we have come to take for granted. I propose that we could try to make sense of the contemporary by relying on theoretical frameworks that engage with two ongoing processes: a) new media’s popularity, and b) the post-industrial economy’s expansion into the domains previously considered as reproductive and/or unproductive.