Abstract:

In this presentation I will ethnographically explore the dynamics of moral surveillance on digitally literate, young women entering traditionally ‘respectful’ gendered professions (e.g. teaching, nursing, care-work) in peri-urban India. As professional women acquire smart phones and internet services, local shaming practices morph to challenge their secret on-screen lives and sociotechnical freedoms. I will unpack a ‘scandal’ leading up to the dismissal of a female teacher, Parama, in a school located in the fringes of Kolkata, a city in eastern India. When school authorities uncovered Parama’s activities on an adult sex site, it precipitated extended real-life ‘cancel’ campaigns (including staff, family members, and neighbours) against her inappropriate behaviour as a working woman and role model for children. I will analyse how these collective mechanisms of moral outrage are designed to expose socially decent women with hidden/covert online identities. Punishing and evicting women like Parama also exposes the vulnerability within communities losing control over women, youth and children succumbing to the allure of ‘digital lust’. While my ethnographic landscape highlights the ostracization of women in marginal urban districts in India, I argue that such practices gain vitality within global moral economies by advocating a powerful language of caution against the dangers of digital modernity.

Bio:

Atreyee Sen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Over the course of her academic career, Sen has brought critical insights to studies of gender, childhoods, poverty, urban politics and South Asian cities.  Her more recent publications include ‘An Economy of Lies’ in Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies (2022), and 'Religious Spaces, Urban Poverty, and Interfaith Relations in India' in Current History (2022). In 2023, Sen won the inaugural prize for best article from the journal, Critical Asian Studies, for her article ‘No City for Lovers’. She is currently the PI of an ERC Advanced Grant on collective anger and its rhetorics of legitimation in the 21st C.