Girls, Gadgets and Gatekeepers: How Gender and Class Aspirations Shape Adolescent Access to Mobile Phones in Mumbai, India

Within a largely patriarchal family context, how do gender and class work together to shape adolescent girls’ access to mobile phones? How do adolescent girls mediate their own independent aspirations and desires to variously fit within or challenge family frameworks of class stability and social morality? I investigated these questions through a mixed-methods approach, conducting 59 group interviews and 278 surveys with adolescents aged 13-15 in Mumbai.

Using an intersectional analytical framework, I find that 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 lower-class/upper-class 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.

My paper on this project has been provisionally accepted at Information, Communication and Society, and presented at AoIR, 4S, ASA and SSSP.