Mobile phones as an autoethnographic resource for constructing modern gendered subjectivity

Abstract

Most research on the significance of new mobile phone infrastructure for communities in the global South tracks its developmental “impacts.” Our autoethnographic approach to this question rather draws on qualitative interviews to analyze how women in Shimshal, a rural village in northern Pakistan, employ mobile phones as a discursive resource for producing modern feminine subjectivity in a context of intensifying modernization and mobility system complexity. Shimshali women’s talk about mobile phones delineates this significance by representing themselves as firmly grounded in the reproductive sphere as responsible homemakers, childhood managers and organizers of multilocal households, and as embracing the modern values of self-development and gender equality.