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.

KEYWORDS:

• Autoethnography
• gender
• mobile phones
• mobility
• subjectivity

Before the mobile signal we had a limited life in Shimshal. But now we are linked with all the world, and now we are modern and civilized. (Bibi Hira)¹

With our mobiles, we are walking with all the world. We will never look at the ground again, but always keep our faces to the sky. Women in the village might be uneducated, but we can use a mobile phone. (Sania Begum)

Introduction

Mobile phone service commenced in Shimshal village on December 14, 2016. Several months later, we returned to this rural community in Pakistan’s northern Karakoram region – the site of our long-term ethnographic research – to conduct an interview-based project with adult women to understand the significance of this new mobility platform for Shimshali lifeworlds. As is evident in the quotations above, women’s interview narratives represent mobile phones as a sign of Shimshalis’ intensified relationship to the wider world and processes of modernization that enable global connectivity, and concomitantly of themselves as modern gendered subjects who are capable of using contemporary mobility infrastructure. In other words, women used mobile phones as an interpretive frame to communicate something about themselves, to position themselves in relation to modernization as modern subjects who are progressive, up to date, forward looking, dynamic and reflexive (Giddens, 1991). Although our interviews taught us important things about how Shimshali women use mobile phones materially to facilitate their everyday lives, it is clear that these devices’ utility as a discursive resource for producing modern feminine subjectivity is a key aspect of their significance for our research participants.

As we have argued elsewhere (Cook & Butz, 2017), self-representation is always relational and articulations of self are inevitably also self-reflexive performances of self, which are necessarily sensitive to the context of their reception. Interview narratives in particular are shaped by the affordances and constraints of interview methodologies and by characteristics of the social field in which they are employed. In the case of our research with Shimshali women, it is significant that we are two white Canadian researchers, a woman and a man, who have worked in the community for several decades and are well known locally for our efforts to portray Shimshalis’ circumstances and self-understandings to non-local audiences. Nancy, in particular, is sometimes viewed as an exemplar of modern, educated, self-actualized femininity, because of her association with the developed West, her profession as a university professor, her positionality and comportment in the village and the gender-sensitive nature of her research.² The two young Shimshali female college students who helped Nancy conduct the interviews are likewise associated positively with modern femininity, owing to their English language skills, advanced education, familiarity with urban Pakistan and facility with modern telecommunications technology. To ignore or deny that interview participants’ self-articulations are influenced by these perceptions of their interlocutors’ positionality vis-à-vis themselves would be to reject their status as subjects and producers of knowledge in their own right, relegate them to the role of “native informants” (Spivak, 1999) and ignore our own long-term observations of transcultural interactions in the community (Butz, 2001; Butz & Besio, 2004; Cook & Butz, 2017; Butz & Cook, 2018).

As a way to recognize Shimshali women as self-reflexive subjects and by extension to make epistemological sense of their interview narratives and credit them appropriately as knowledge, we draw on the work of postcolonial theorists Pratt (1992) and Butz and Besio (2004) to conceptualize these narratives as “autoethnographic,” in the sense that they are self-performances that our participants deploy to influence how their proximate and more distanciated audiences perceive and understand them. In effect, interview participants’ self-representations pronounce “we are this,” which by extension exhort, “‘treat us as this,’ and ‘this is the us you will encounter when you engage with us’” (Butz, 2010, p. 144). They are thus self-interested, self-conscious and interventionary, produced in this transcultural context for transcultural audiences, including us as metropolitan researchers and those who engage our published research (Butz, 2010; Butz & Besio, 2004; Pratt, 1992). However, they are simultaneously narrative acts that speak reflexively to the self, producing selves for the self that animate self-understandings and self-worth (Butz & Besio, 2004, p. 356). The opening quotations exemplify this complex narrative production of selves for an audience of outsiders (“we are modern and civilized”; “we engage with you proudly”) and of selves for the self (“we are uneducated but can nevertheless use mobile phone technology”).

We understand the “autoethnographic sensibility” (Butz, 2010) with which we approach Shimshali women’s interview narratives as offering us (a) an onto-ethical framework for understanding and treating research participants as knowing subjects, and (b) an epistemological framework for conceiving interview narratives as strategic self-interested self-representations and attending to the ways in which self-representations are shaped by the affordances and constraints of the interview context in which they are articulated. In other words, narrative performances of subjectivity can be more fully and justly understood by considering the transcultural context of their production and reception, as well as being attentive to reflexive research subjects who constitute their subjectivities in relation to researchers in a global field of power that “encompasses and entangles both parties” (Butz & Besio, 2009, 1668). So, our epistemological objective in this paper is to receive Shimshali women’s interview narratives as autoethnographic expressions and transcultural performances of subjectivity. Our interpretive goal is to understand how their reflexive self-representational efforts produce a self that is intelligible locally and transculturally in relation to new mobility infrastructure. In other words, how do Shimshali women employ mobile phones as a discursive resource for performing themselves as gendered subjects in relation to processes of modernization (i.e., increased mobility system complexity; see Sheller & Urry, 2006)?

This is an atypical approach to studying the social significance of new mobile phone infrastructure for communities in the global South. This question has been addressed largely from an Information and Communication Technology for Development perspective, which tracks the developmental transformations that follow the introduction, diffusion and use of mobile phones (i.e., their improvement “impacts”), with modernizing effects. While much research in the field highlights the poverty reduction potential of mobile phones (e.g., Donner & Escobari, 2010; Porter, 2012; Sey, 2011; Sylvester, 2016), some frames them as interventionist strategies that accomplish social development: political participation (Thinyane, Sieböorger, & Reynell, 2015), healthcare (Chipps et al., 2015), personal opportunities (Sey & Ortoleva, 2014; Smith, Spence, & Rashid, 2011), citizenship (Goggin & Clark, 2009) and gender relations (Asiedu, 2012; Porter et al., 2020). The New Media and Communication Studies literature extends this interest in the diffusion and uses of mobile phones and their impact potential, but with a more critical eye to their limitations and ambivalent effects on everyday life (e.g., Archambault, 2011; Svensson & Larsson, 2016; Taylor, 2012; Walter, 2020; Watson & Duffield, 2016).

We agree with Wiley and Packer (2010) that these literatures tend to be media-centric; in attempting to understand the significance of mobile phones for everyday life, they situate the technology at the center of the analysis by focusing on its “impacts,” which effectively delimits the question of its significance in advance. To bypass this problem, we need to situate mobility infrastructure within a broader social field that encompasses multiple processes, including relations of (re)production, social networks and interactions, the mobilities of people, goods and ideas, the development of other mobility platforms, processes of subjectivity formation and the organization of space. Once everyday life is conceived as comprising numerous and overlapping processes, then we see that mobile telephony “plays a strategic, but not exclusive, role in constituting the social world” (Wiley & Packer, 2010, p. 264).

The mobilities literature has developed this insight by arguing that mobility infrastructure does not act on its own but is part of socio-material assemblages that configure and enable mobilities and social “becoming” more generally (Adey, 2006; Sheller, 2011). Mobile communication technologies, social processes and other human and non-human agents operate relationally to mediate, augment and transform everyday life. Phones, for example, are connectivity points within social, economic and material networks, co-producing new styles of communicating and interacting and new forms of social coordination and connection (Sheller & Urry, 2006). They are thus network capital – a combination of capacities to be mobile – as they facilitate access to network ties and the supports they provide (Elliot & Urry, 2010; Larsen, Urry, & Axhausen, 2006; Rettie, 2008). As network capital mobilized in larger assemblages, mobile phones can contribute to the development of new social practices and forms of mobile life, social interaction and subjectivity.

Yet the mobilities and communication literature has (1) paid little attention to the significance of mobile phones in the global South, and (2) almost none to the relationship among mobility, mobile telephony and subjectivity formation. Cresswell’s (2006, p. 3) characterization of mobility as “socially produced motion” consisting of movement, representation and practice has emphasized the meaning-making processes through which mobility is discursively constituted. But while the meanings that are attached to motion, mobile populations and the platforms that enable movement have become an important focus in ethnographies of roads (e.g., Cook & Butz, 2017; Dalakoglou, 2010; Demenge, 2012; Harvey & Knox, 2012), (3) they are rarely interrogated in relation to new mobile phone technology (but see Chuma, 2014). Our study attends to these three understudied questions as it situates mobility infrastructure within a broad social field. And in terms of meaning-making processes related to mobile phone technology, we do so in two ways: by creating a context for Shimshali women to articulate mobile phones’ meaning to them, and more innovatively by reversing Cresswell’s formulation to show how mobile phones are used representationally (in an autoethnographic register) to give meaning to other aspects of themselves and their lives (producing transcultural subjectivity) (see also Cook & Butz, 2017).

In the following section we outline the context of our study, as well as its methodology. We then develop an argument that details how Shimshali women’s talk about mobile phones constructs, for themselves and transcultural outsiders, a modern feminine subjectivity. It does so by representing women as (a) firmly grounded in the reproductive sphere as responsible homemakers, childhood managers and organizers of multilocal households and (b) embracing the modern values of self-development and gender equality.

Shimshal, mobility and modernization

Shimshal is a rural Ismaili Muslim community of 236 households located in the Karakoram Mountains of Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan administrative unit. Its four hamlets are situated 60 kilometers into a tributary valley of the Hunza River. For most of the community’s history, Shimshalis have relied on a subsistence mode of production involving the cultivation of cereal crops on irrigated terraces in the village proper and transhumant and dairying activity in a few dozen communal high-altitude pastures inhabited by thousands of yaks, sheep and goats. Since the late 1980s, many households have increasingly employed a spatially diversified livelihood strategy that combines men’s (often seasonal) migratory wages with subsistence resources, producing a mixed subsistence/market economy.

Enhanced market integration has overlapped with other modernization forces³ (e.g., biodiversity conservation, NGO development and adventure tourism initiatives) to reshape social organization, self-understanding and self-representation in the village. For example, in 1982, the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) founded a suite of development institutions in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of northern Pakistan to provide services and organizational capacity to inhabitants. Due to Shimshalis’ religious affiliation with the Aga Khan – Ismailis’ living imam – these institutions have been especially influential in the village. In particular, they help constitute Shimshalis as modern developmental subjects who understand themselves as competent, socially progressive (especially in relation to enacting gender equality), well educated, well connected and well organized in the contemporary context of neoliberal development (Cook & Butz, 2017; Steinberg, 2011). Shimshalis’ characterization of themselves as “modern” and/or aspiring to modern ideals is thus shaped in relation to the discursive and material influences and agendas of AKDN institutions, which are themselves prominent agents of modernization.

Most significant among modernization processes in Shimshal is road infrastructure development. In the mid-1960s, the engineering corps of the Pakistani and Chinese armies began constructing the all-weather Karakoram Highway (KKH) to traverse the length of the Hunza Valley from Gilgit to the Chinese border at Khunjerab Pass, replacing a network of footpaths, pony tracks and rudimentary jeep roads. As sections of the KKH opened to vehicular traffic in the late 1970s, communities in side-valleys began constructing link roads to access motorized transport. By 1985, Shimshal was one of only a few communities that remained remote from this road-based regional mobility system; it was still three days’ difficult walk from the highway. With government and AKDN support the community began constructing a link road that year. Late in 2003 the road opened to vehicular traffic, and the three-day walk became a two-hour jeep ride, with dramatic and socially uneven implications for mobility.

Our ethnography of the Shimshal road traces its implications for gendered mobilities, spaces and subjectivities (Cook & Butz, 2017, 2021). For Shimshali men, the road has enhanced their access to socio-spatial mobility and paid employment outside the village, thus refashioning masculinity from sedentary customary forms to a newly respected nomadic entrepreneurial masculinity, which is embodied by monetary breadwinners to achieve status as successful modern men. As entrepreneurial masculinity acquires community value, Shimshal’s gendered moral framework is dialectically renegotiated to constitute “respectable” men as mobile paid laborers in the productive sphere of the outside marketplace, and “virtuous” women as economically dependent and sedentary housewives and subsistence agriculturalists, as opposed to traditionally (vertically) mobile subsistence pasture-based dairy producers. Productive household and agricultural spaces have been transformed into reproductive “homes” through this process, the new appropriate modern space for women. Shimshali women are gradually inhabiting these new gender norms, practices and spaces, which produces a feminine subjectivity that resonates with their shifting values, aspirations, interests and understandings of modern ways of living. What implications might a new mobility platform in the form of phones have for these processes of gendered subjectivity (re)formation?

Mobile phone service was inaugurated in Gilgit-Baltistan in 2007 through the Special Communication Organization (SCO), a public sector institution operated by the Ministry of Information, Technology and Telecommunications and maintained by the Pakistan Army (Rahim, Qutoshi, Sahar, Jabeen, & Ali, 2020). Before 2018, SCO mainly relied on 3 G network technology, but a major upgrade to cellular infrastructure was facilitated through the China Pakistan Fiber Optic Project, a subproject of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (Rahim, Qutoshi, Sahar, Jabeen, & Ali, 2020). Consequently, most residents now have improved access to 4 G internet and phone service through SCOM, SCO’s nonprofit mobile network, although other ICT companies also provide service at a higher cost.

After years of community campaigning, SCO finally agreed to build a base transceiver station in Shimshal, which was facilitated by road access, labor contributions from Shimshal’s Volunteer Corp and Boy Scouts and a German-funded solar panel system and backup generator that supply electricity to the tower. Villagers who negotiated with SCO told us that Shimshalis were motivated to acquire cellular service because they were impressed by foreign and downcountry tourists’ proficiency with cutting-edge phone technologies that provide myriad advantages, and thus by their advanced level of modern social development, which Shimshalis aspired to for themselves. Their lobbying efforts ushered in 2 G SCOM service (with very low internet capacity) in mid-December 2016, and already by early 2017 approximately 200 villagers were service users. In June 2021, SCO upgraded the service to 4 G, which villagers can access on their mobile phones within village limits, but not along the road or in high pastures.

In keeping with our autoethnographic commitments and interest in understanding the significance of new mobile phone infrastructure for Shimshali lifeworlds, we employed an interview methodology that created a productive transcultural context in which adult women could articulate mobile phones’ meaning to them. We hired two young Shimshali women as research assistants; they had been studying outside the village for several years but had returned home for a visit during a school vacation. Hakima and Shamim – who speak Wakhi (the local language), Urdu and English – organized interviews (by phone!) with 25 adult women between the ages of 28 and 58 who live full-time in the village. Our wide-ranging conversations, which usually lasted a couple of hours, involved the key interview participant, Nancy, Hakima, Shamim and any other female family members and neighbors who were around the house. Some participants spoke English, but conversations were mostly a mixture of Wakhi and English. Nancy followed the Wakhi to the best of her ability and directed the conversations but relied on research assistants to clarify understandings and convey probes to participants. Hakima and Shamim often consulted with each other or with participants about the best way to translate comments. Meanwhile, Nancy produced as complete a written record of the conversation as possible (in English) and the conversation was audio-recorded and later fully transcribed. This was a context in which self-representation was strongly mediated by the uncertainties of translation, the perspectives of our assistants and the interventions of family members and neighbors, not to mention the identity interests of all involved. What Shimshali women said was what they wanted their interview audience to hear on that day, in that context, in relation to the questions we asked. What was recorded was some imperfect approximation of that. In the next section we explore how Shimshali women’s talk about mobile phones deploys them as resources for performing a modern feminine subjectivity.

The discursive construction of modern feminine subjectivity

Road construction has intertwined with other modernizing forces to precipitate changes in Shimshal’s political economy (i.e., the separation of productive and reproductive spheres), gendered movement patterns, the gendered division of labor and the spatialization of gender, and in this context Shimshali women have begun to perform a form of modern femininity commensurate with these changes. We interpret their talk about mobile phones as part of this process; it constructs, for themselves and transcultural outsiders, a modern feminine subjectivity by representing women 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.

Performing household management

Modern homemaking

As men become wage-earning breadwinners in workplaces outside the village and relations of production increasingly focus on money-making activities, women, who participate minimally in waged employment, have been reciprocally reconstituted as economically dependent and domesticated housewives. They discursively perform a corresponding femininity in interviews, by representing themselves as astute, rational and competent modern homemakers who responsibly manage men’s salaries, their own busy homemaking schedules and men’s honor in a context of increased mobility system complexity and global connectivity.

In terms of performing responsible money management, most women foreground the high costs associated with having and using phones. For Saba, “The expense of the phone is difficult. We need to sacrifice other things to afford balance cards. We are wasting our savings on the phone, which could rather be spent on our daughters’ school fees. This is why I am not so interested in mobile phones. They are not as important to me as educating my five daughters.” The threats mobile phones pose to monetary savings and children’s education – modern practices instituted through various development initiatives in the village – are not a concern for Bibi Hira, who underscores her male relatives’ stable relationship to paid employment outside the community: “New phone expenses haven’t affected our household budget because all four men have regular salaries. Mostly our husbands bring in balance cards when they come to visit. And if we need to buy cards in Shimshal, we have salary money available here.” But these threats need to be explicitly considered by all responsible money managers, according to Samira: “People make many calls a day, unaware about how much this costs. They don’t understand how that relates to real money and how that money gets made. Most women do not make money, are not aware of how much their calling costs and cannot estimate their balance. It is an important lesson they need to learn.”

Women claim to employ several cost reduction strategies to manage mobile phone expenses. First, nine participants share phones with their husbands, children, brothers-in-law or daughters-in-law (cp. Avle, Quartey, & Hutchful, 2018; Burrell, 2010; Sylvester, 2016; Tacchi, Kitner, & Crawford, 2012), while 16 have their own. Second, most women have cheaper “simple phones” without internet capability, and the four who have “smart phones” do not access the internet. Rukhsana “would like to have my own phone, but if I want to talk to someone, I can easily borrow my husband’s phone, he doesn’t mind. In this way I don’t need to have my own. And we don’t have expensive smart mobiles, just simple ones.” Third, women stress that their personal phones were gifts from husbands or other family members (cp. Hahn & Kibora, 2008; Handapangoda & Kumara, 2013; Murphy & Priebe, 2011; Tawah, 2013). Fourth, they minimize costs by sharing phones with extended family (cp. Handapangoda & Kumara, 2013). Tahira Begum explains:

We spend only 100 rupees a week on our phones. My husband uses 50 and so do I. We can manage this amount because we use the missed call method; we call our relatives and hang up before they answer, so they will call us back and pay for the call. We also call family saying we need balance, and they send 50–100 rupees through an SMS that I can load on my phone. I need to be very careful with money over time. We have children to educate.

Like most participants, it seems that Tahira Begum radically underestimates the weekly cost of operating her phone as she claims she does, even using these cost-cutting strategies; we interpret her as performing household management wisdom and capability for the researcher, research assistants, children and neighbors overhearing the discussion. Fifth, mobile phones save money by replacing physical with virtual mobility (cp. Hahn & Kibora, 2008; Handapangoda & Kumara, 2013; Murphy & Priebe, 2011; Sylvester, 2016). According to Yasmin Peri, “Before the signal I travelled out by road to call my children. But now I save the cost of the jeep by phoning them from here, so I am actually saving money by having a phone. A return trip would cost about 1000 rupees. Balance cards are much cheaper.” Finally, those who are literate communicate via texting rather than calling (cp. Handapangoda & Kumara, 2013; Murphy & Priebe, 2011; Sylvester, 2016; Tacchi, Kitner, & Crawford, 2012). For example, Sanaam Begum and her husband “use only 50 rupees a week because I’m mostly texting, which is much cheaper than making phone calls. Because messaging saves money that is needed for our children’s education, it was important that I learned to text.” Texting remains a challenge for most participants, who are not literate in English and therefore have difficulty using the keyboard character set. But they strive to learn and employ it to spell Urdu words, mostly with the help of their children (Jouhki, 2013; Sylvester, 2016; Tawah, 2013), which demonstrates a disposition toward self-development: acquiring literacy skills that enable them to competently understand, use and have some control over modern mobility technology.

Shimshali women also discursively perform modern femininity by representing themselves as competent managers of their own demanding domestic schedules. Two distinct narratives are deployed here; women refrain from using mobiles so as not to waste valuable time and they use them to save time and money. Rather than framing these as contradictory narratives, we understand them as a discursive practice of balanced reflexivity through which women evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of mobile phones for domestic success in particular circumstances.

Accentuating the importance of her housework against the frivolous use of phones, Samira argues that, “The more I use the phone the more I waste my time when I am so busy. And I see women talking on their phones for one hour, two hours when they also have important work. Or they call their relatives simply to ask, ‘how are you’ or ‘what do you think about this social issue.’ This is such a waste of their time.” Farida only uses “the phone a limited amount because I am so busy with my work. And phone calls disturb others whose time is also precious. I’m happy to use it for emergencies, at a specific time or for a very short period of time.”

In other circumstances, phones are represented as efficient homemaking tools (cp. Jouhki, 2013). For instance, Bibi Nina describes how “we used to waste time before the signal by having to travel outside to shop and speak with relatives. I always worried because no one was home to look after the animals and fields. But now I am relaxed. I just phone shopkeepers for supplies, and they send them by the jeep. Now I can stay in our home, do my housework and be relaxed that I am managing my home in a proper manner.” Rukhsana adds that, “We no longer need to drive out to get what we need. But we also don’t need to go from home to home to invite people to a meeting or for a visit. We just phone each other. No need for so much walking!” Tania also identifies how the phone efficiently replaces pedestrian with virtual mobility: “I walk far less than I did before I had my phone. I used to walk to my relatives’ homes, to invite them to my home as guests, to ask for their help with fieldwork and to give condolences. But now I just call them. Previously I wasted my time by walking so much when I am busy with house, farming and animal work. Time is precious when you are so busy.”

Finally, women perform as responsible modern homemakers by managing men’s honor in a context of enhanced virtual connectivity, which demonstrates their awareness of mobilities and their place in a distanciated social network. Many, pressed by husbands and sons, self-govern their “respectable” use of phones. In Sania Begum’s words, “If we use the phone to call an unknown person, it will have a negative impact on our character and our men’s reputation, by talking with the wrong people. And people will talk about you for that.” Raising the issue of gender inequality, Bibi Anita places the governance shoes more squarely on men’s feet:

Men use phones far more often than women. Women do not use them because our men are very strict. They think that women will use phones in the wrong way. Men are always worried about their reputation and that women are trying to contact people outside their families. Sometimes they think this is due to women not knowing how to use the phone and they will call or receive the wrong number. But they are worried about how their honor will be affected if this happens. So, they strictly control who women talk to and how they can have or use phones.

Because mobiles enable intimate contact across space with strangers as well as family, moral concerns about “stranger danger” shape women’s use of and anxieties about mobiles (cp. Anderson, 2013; Jouhki, 2013). The gendered moralization of phones involves a close monitoring of wrong number calls and use of the internet, a potential “fantasy space” that can get naïve and illiterate women into trouble through mechanisms of trickery that create new gendered intimacies (Anderson, 2013), especially across religious lines. Karishma thinks “Problems occur with messages and calls coming from wrong numbers. We may call them back due to lack of understanding, and troubles can come from this. And we waste our time and money. So, I am concerned about the cost and the dangers of talking to people I don’t know, from outside our religion. I only speak to my relatives and friends.”

Some women focus on their illiteracy and lack of technical skills as reasons not to use their phones more often and access the internet. In Samira’s opinion, “the internet is not useful for women here, we are not interested in it because our basic need is just to attend to or dial a call. That is enough for us with our knowledge and skills. It would not be suitable or proper for us to learn how to use the internet and maybe meet new people. We are relaxed and happy with making and receiving calls.” Others highlight active restrictions on their learning, while also acknowledging the threats posed by their inexperience with mobile phone technology. Bibi Anita is

interested in using Facebook, but my son insists I don’t. All the world is connected through Facebook. So, if you make a mistake, then everyone will see that on the internet. Also, you can send a friend request to many people, but they also have many friends they are connected to on Facebook. There is the possibility that your mistake will spread widely and will have a negative impact on your family’s reputation. So, he forbids me because he fears I will do something wrong. I really would like to learn to use the internet. I’d like to read the news, the updates from people on Facebook and information about the world, not just about Pakistan. But I am also worried about the problems I would face with my family if I made a mistake.

As many women are apprehensive about what they might find and how they represent themselves online, they often remain content to share simple phones and leave the internet to men.

Managing children

A modern feminine subjectivity is also performed in interviews through women’s self-representations as careful childhood managers who monitor children’s responsible and respectable use of phones, “remote mother” (Kwami, 2016, p. 159) youth living outside the village and oversee children’s educational and virtual skill development. According to Bibi Anita, “Mobiles are now the basic need for everyone, but parents need to think carefully how their children use phones in ways that protect their lives. They need to respect parents’ advice about how to properly use phones.” Two concerns related to children’s “proper” use of phones are repeatedly raised: forming illicit romantic relationships and being distracted from their studies.

As an extension of “stranger danger,” mobiles are producing new moral worries that youth will develop virtual romantic relationships with unsuitable outsiders (cp. Jouhki, 2013; Kwami, 2016), which mothers feel compelled to head-off. Rukhsana nicely summarizes these worries and her management strategies:

I am worried that my children might start a relationship with some stranger they met over the phone. I worry less when I have taught them how to use the phone in the right way and what their responsibility is to our family’s honor, and when the girls are married or engaged. But there is still a chance they might build relationships, talk with people from another religion. I have heard that girls sometimes talk to strange men, and then leave their homes and run away with them. This causes a lot of problems and brings shame on her family and parents.

Similarly, phones engender maternal concern about their effects on children’s studies (cp. Jouhki, 2013), as Tahira Begum describes: “Students are using their phones at school and when they are studying after school. This disturbs their learning. This is why I am not giving my daughters phones. They would concentrate on texting their friends and not on their work, and this wastes their time. I ask them, ‘Which is more important, what you are writing on the phone or in your schoolbook?’” Sania Begum’s children also “do not have phones because they are in school. Their studies come first. When they get admission to college and are living outside Shimshal, then they can have phones, for educational purposes.”

Mothers also perform intensified childhood management by using mobiles as an “extension of the umbilical cord” (Martinez, Aguado, & Tortajada, 2012, p. 512) with children attending school outside the village, to keep in touch and monitor their wellbeing, safety and needs. “After the SCOM tower was constructed,” Sanaam Begum said, “I’ve been able to keep in close contact with my children. And I’m very happy and grateful for that. I used to worry about them, but now I can phone to check on them, find out how they are doing and where they are, and meet their needs. It has made me much more relaxed.” Bibi Hira claims that her children’s worry is also tempered through regular phone contact: “I was always worried about my daughter and son who are living outside. But now I am relaxed and happy that I can talk with them daily if I like. And they are also happy and relaxed to hear from me and can concentrate better on their studies. They are no longer worried about what is happening here in Shimshal.” Providing more detail about the spatially distanciated and multidimensional care mothers can provide via their mobiles, Khadija asserts that,

Using the phone, I am more able to guide my children who are studying outside, like ensuring that they do their studies in the best way they can, respect their teachers and complete their work on time. I am also able to remind them about drugs, to stay far away from drugs. And to remind them to be careful about their health, make sure they do things to stay healthy. I am able to guide them in all of these ways, which reduces my tension. But when the signal is out or balance cards are finished, I worry a lot, and wait anxiously for them to come again. I am in tension when I cannot check on our children and how they are doing.

Finally, mothers use phones to monitor and enhance children’s education and skill development when they live at home (cp. Sylvester, 2016). Rukhsana claims that,

Mobile phones are useful for mothers who live far away from the school. The walking distance made it impossible for me to know about parent meetings and visit the school to find out how my children were doing and what problems they were facing. Now I just call the teacher to learn these things. Teachers are accepting our calls to keep us informed because they also cannot travel to speak with us, and they encourage more contact with parents about their children’s education so we can better check their work and attend to their copybooks and homework.

Beyond educational development, mothers foster children’s virtual and cultural skills by encouraging them to watch religious videos, listen to religious music and play educational games on their mobiles. According to Yasmin Peri, “Phones have even changed small kids, because they are now able to play games and listen to religious music and poems on them. Kids can do that now. They take their mothers’ phones and learn how to do this, so phones are an important part of their learning.”

Managing multilocal families

As the last element of modern homemaking, Shimshali women ground themselves in the reproductive sphere through narrative self-representations as organizers of multilocal households. We borrow the concept of “multilocal” from Andreas Benz (2014) to describe how spatially diversified livelihood strategies that scatter family members across the nation and beyond turn households into distanciated units, which cohere and function through nurtured interpersonal relations across space. Mobile phones, as network capital, enable Shimshali women to create and coordinate such virtual familial networks for the emotional and material benefits they provide (cp. Hahn & Kibora, 2008; Handapangoda & Kumara, 2013; Kwami, 2016; Murphy & Priebe, 2011). So, women’s invocation of being connected to a “wider world” through mobile technology relates as much to the production of a larger, tighter and more unified network of spatially dispersed relatives as it does to being linked to a less familiar outside world accessed through the internet.

Nurturing virtual familial interactions to produce strong, comforting relationships alleviates women’s worries about family members’ welfare. Yasmin Peri claims that, “Before the signal I was very worried about how my family members were doing, but now I can easily talk with them. Knowing they are fine makes me happy and relaxed, so I worry much less. And calling them regularly helps me feel that we are a family that is connected to each other, that we are a strong group with deep feelings for each other.” Sanaam Begum is “speaking with our children frequently now, so we are becoming much closer, our relationship is growing deeper and deeper. I talk to my children more often now that I have the phone, but also to our extended family members who live all over the country. I feel much closer to these people.” In terms of nurturing relationships with extended family, Rukhsana was

always worried about my parents, brothers and other older relatives who I rarely saw or spoke with. Now, I am very happy to be able to talk with them. This decreases my worry, but also builds stronger relationships among us. The mobile has made it easy to know they are well or have any sickness or other problem that requires that I should visit them. They can now call me if they need me. This is a benefit, just keeping the family feeling they belong together.

Being able to attend to sick relatives who live outside Shimshal is not the only material advantage associated with developing strong multilocal households using mobile phone technology. “Before the signal,” Leila Begum explains, “if one of our relatives died outside we were often two or three days late and missed the funeral. But now our relatives call us immediately so we can go and be part of important family celebrations. So we now feel we are part of our relatives’ lives.” Everyday needs are also more easily met by outside family members, according to Habiba: “Our relationships with family members are much stronger now than they were before the signal. It creates a closer relationship between us. So they now ask us on the phone what we need and they send it to us. It’s now easier for us to care for each other’s needs using the mobile phone.” It is important to Zohra “that I am communicating with my married daughters and other relatives time-to-time, so I don’t need to worry about them. But I am also getting gifts from them as they call to ask me if I need anything and send it to me. My relatives are satisfying my needs quickly, where before I often did without things for long periods of time.”

The virtual networking efforts undertaken by Shimshali women to craft strong multilocal households produces emotional and material benefits that enhance women’s wellbeing and their self-understandings as modern feminine subjects.

Performing modern values

In addition to producing a modern feminine subjectivity by representing themselves as skilled homemakers, Shimshali women’s mobile phone talk positions them as embracing the modern values of self-development and gender equality. Following Rose (1999), we understand self-development as conscious efforts at self-improvement and personal growth achieved through improved skills, competencies and knowledge to realize a version of the self that can capably manage modern life. Historically, life management values and practices have been generationally transferred through elders, as Bibi Nina explains: “In the past, our elders guided us about how to live and work in a productive manner. They educated us for the times. But in this modern age, our mobiles and the internet are replacing their advice, which is not useful for these times. Guidance from the internet is necessary for us to understand the world we and our children live in and how they can be independent.” According to many participants, like Saba, technologically-mediated self-development is key to learning how to be a self in step with modernization: “If a person doesn’t have a mobile, then they will feel themselves out of touch with modern times and worry about being left behind. Before, being illiterate with technology did not make much difference to Shimshalis. Now people feel it a great deal.”

Women’s desire to learn how to use their phones and achieve modern goals with them is an indication of a disposition toward self-development. For example, Sania Begum aims for personal growth through increased competence with her phone: “Whatever people can teach me about the mobile I would like to learn. I don’t just like to look after the cattle and the house and do the chores and farming. I want to do all of it, including learning new things that are happening in the world. It will be good for my future too; when my children are educated I want to be able to talk with them and understand their lives.” This desire exists in tension with women’s reluctance to use their phones due to time, money and moral concerns. But overcoming technological illiteracy is important for accessing information, developing knowledge and individual potential, expanding personal horizons and building women’s economic activity.

For example, Farida is “interested to learn about the phone to gain information and knowledge. I want news from all over the world. I want to know about the world, what is going on and how people work in a good way to achieve their goals.” “Before the signal,” Sanaam Begum “was only thinking about how to do the farming and look after the animals. Now the phone is helping me think well beyond Shimshal, what work I can contribute to outside. We have to go out and participate in important social work. With the mobile, my mind has become much broader, and I feel like I’m a part of a larger community.” In terms of economic opportunities, “I have taken the first step with my sea buckthorn business,” says Tahira Begum, “but with the internet I could learn an even better process. And when I become expert at this business, I will make a large group for collecting and marketing, and we will sell the fruit together. I will contact marketers directly and send out the fruit. So phones can become useful for women’s business.” As a shopkeeper, Khadija is “interested to learn the internet. I’m interested to search potential stock on the internet, which items are good quality and from which place I should order them. Because good quality products are not available in Shimshal, people usually buy things outside. I want to change the products in my shop so they are the same quality as what people buy outside.” These quotations demonstrate women’s commitment to self-improvement through acquired competence with mobility infrastructure to produce a feminine subjectivity that is in step with modern life.

Several of the above quotations also gesture toward women’s sense of gender equality, in relation to making their own money, accessing knowledge, developing skills and living beyond the confines of the domestic sphere (which does not necessarily sit incongruously alongside their desire to be competent household managers). Gender equality is a modern value and development goal espoused by the Aga Khan Development Network (https://www.akdn.org/about-us/akdns-approach-development), which is active in Shimshal through community initiatives supported by the Aga Khan Rural Support Program (AKRSP) (https://www.akdn.org/pakistan/akrsp). Women embrace this value in interviews by representing themselves as experiencing gender inequality or claiming that they live in a gender equitable context that supports their aspirations and independence.

Participants demonstrate their awareness of gender equality by pointing out the circumstances in which they experience inequalities in relation to phones. Leila Begum is concerned about the prospects for women who do not have their own mobiles. Her “husband decides who has a phone in our family. He thinks his mother and sister do not need mobiles. But all the men have smart phones for using Facebook and WhatsApp, calling, messaging, getting news, downloading music, searching Google. I am only allowed to use the phone for calling and messaging my family and friends, so I am missing many chances.” Missed chances include constrained opportunities for women’s self-development. Bibi Uzma explains that, “Before the signal, AKRSP would send messages about women’s training opportunities through the jeep drivers, and these men usually did not give us the information or not in time so we could travel out. So women missed many opportunities. Now organizers can call us about a workshop, so women who have phones may not miss these training chances.” Aisha’s depiction of the gendered use of phones in Shimshal highlights an inequitable gendered division of labor, women’s financial dependence and their disproportionate illiteracy:

Men use mobile phones far more than women because men are earning the money. And most men do not give phones to women in their families, so women have limited opportunities. Another problem is that women are too busy, they are working all the time. Many are also illiterate, so they cannot learn how to use the phone. Women without mobiles feel tension and worry that they can’t communicate with relatives and access information like men can. Women are mostly disheartened by this. So it’s not a good situation for women. They can’t bear the shame that they cannot afford or use this new and important facility. I’m nothing, I’m not participating, I’m only at home doing my work and duties. So it gives a poor impact on women.

Tahira Begum reinforces this perspective on the impacts of women’s financial dependence when she stresses that “Husbands have the earning source, which women do not have. So women depend on their husbands for phones and cards, they have to ask men for these things, which is difficult. Saying ‘I need pocket money’ is shameful for women.”

Women also embrace the value of gender equality by claiming they live in families and a broader community structured by modern gender norms. In terms of access to phones, Tania argues that, “Absolutely, men and women are using phones equally. There is no difference.” Sanaam Begum’s more subtle assessment of access begins with the assertion that, “Women’s limited access to phones is related to financial problems, not gender. Now husbands and wives share phones. But this is only the beginning of mobiles in Shimshal. Mainly men travel outside, so they bought phones long ago. I expect that within a year men will place a mobile in the hand of every woman. It will take time and money; it is early days.” Decision-making authority related to phone access is also an indication of gender parity, according to Bibi Nina, who stresses that, “We collectively decide, me and my husband, who in our family can have a phone. My elder son is still studying, so we decided not to give him a mobile. But we have agreed to give him one when he has matriculated.”

Women also claim gender equality by emphasizing their ability to make and spend their own money. “I now have earnings from my sea buckthorn business,” says Yasmin Peri. “I keep this money for myself. I have a savings plan and savings account. I spend it on clothing or anything I need for the household, beyond what my husband gives me for supplies. It is mine to use as I like. I also send my sons pocket money from that account.” She spends money on gifts for friends as well: “I have a friend who lives downcountry during winter, and I sent her a balance card, to make her happy that we could still talk. It was a special gift for her, from my own money. I would like to get a balance card for a gift!” Bibi Uzma’s “brother used to send money to cover our phone expenses. But I now have an income from my fruit business, and my sister has learned to sew. So we women are managing these expenses from our own money.” Independent access to financial resources that fosters women’s use of and facility with phones is an aspect of gender equality and modern femininity to which many women aspire.

Conclusion

We know a lot about the developmental “impacts” of new mobile phone infrastructure in the global South. However, this approach to studying mobile phone’s social significance is media-centric and, in transcultural research contexts, does not employ a form of critical reflexivity that positions research participants as knowing, reflexive subjects or frames their talk about mobile phones as strategic self-interested self-representations that are shaped by the transcultural affordances and constraints of the interview context in which they are articulated. Our objectives in this paper have been to receive such narratives as autoethnographic expressions and transcultural performances of subjectivity, and to understand how their reflexive self-representational efforts produce a self that is intelligible internally and transculturally in relation to new mobility infrastructure. We have also aimed to augment a communication and mobilities perspective on mobile phone infrastructure by attending to the relationship among mobility, mobile telephony and subjectivity formation in a global South context and to meaning-making processes related to mobile phone technology.

We addressed these objectives by analyzing how Shimshali women employ mobile phones as a discursive resource for performing themselves as modern gendered subjects in relation to processes of modernization, including increased mobility system complexity. Women accomplish this construction of subjectivity for themselves and transculturally by discursively situating themselves in the reproductive sphere as competent household managers and subjects who embrace modern values. As our analysis demonstrates, their aspirations for modern feminine subjectivity are constrained by several gendered dynamics, including illiteracy, financial dependence on husbands, lack of individual access to phones and gendered surveillance of their mobile activities. Nevertheless, many women envision bright modern futures for themselves, realized through processes of self-development, global connectivity and gender equality as modern values that shape community social relations.

Consequently, these interview narratives demonstrate that mobile phones are productive material and discursive resources for women in Shimshal, in terms of the sorts of communications and interactions they enable, the material projects they facilitate and the discursive possibilities they provide for women to understand and represent themselves as modern, agential and knowledgeable. In this sense they may be understood as power resources that enhance women’s capabilities. Women certainly talk about them this way, often using the language of “gender equality.” On the other hand, women’s access and use of mobile phones is largely the “gift” of men in their lives who control to a large extent when, how and how much they use phones. Moreover, women actively govern themselves and their daughters to ensure that their telephonic comportment conforms to gender norms of women’s modesty, respectability and responsibility for maintaining family honor (as well as “modern” values of entrepreneurship, household management, etc.). For this reason, it is difficult to speak of phones as technologies of women’s empowerment or as challenges to local gendered power relations.

Our conversations with Shimshali women yielded many “factual” details of telephonic activities and strategies that would be unlikely to differ significantly in other speech contexts. The discursive framing of these details, on the other hand, was undoubtedly shaped to some extent by the specifics of the interview interaction: it derives from conversations among Shimshali women (our participants), young Shimshali female post-secondary students living and studying outside the village (research assistants), assorted women onlookers from within the participant’s family and a Canadian feminist academic with deep and long-standing connections in the community. Moreover, they understood that their self-articulations would be used to represent themselves and their community to a transcultural academic readership. In this context, women evidently were inspired to articulate aspirations to modernity and use mobile phones as a prop or resource for performing their visions of modern femininity. In other contexts (e.g., in the presence of their husbands or fathers-in-law, or without the presence of foreigners or young local college students) or spaces (e.g., the high pastures, which are understood as more “traditional” and in which women’s productive role is foregrounded), mobile telephony may be framed differently, other aspects of women’s subjectivities may be foregrounded and gendered power relations may be enacted differently. Given contemporary theorizations of power and subjectivity as multiple and contradictory, it would be unreasonable to imagine otherwise. Therefore, it has not been our intention to argue that the discursive or performative framing we discern in our research participants’ discussion of mobile phones and how they used them is the only framing used by or available to these women. Rather, our analysis shows that one significant affordance of mobile phones and cellular connectivity for Shimshali women is to enable their discursive performance as modern subjects. In a context of rapid modernization and all this entails in terms of changing household economies, gender relations, mobility, networked connectivity and intensified transcultural communication, this is itself an important aspect of mobile phones’ recent introduction to the community.

Ethics statement

Brock University Research Ethics Board, file number 08–306-COOK.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank our research assistants and participants for their contributions to the execution of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identity of research participants.

² David, who was not involved in conducting the interviews, has a long-term research relationship with the community, and is well-known locally for his collaborative work with community organizations on a variety of development and advocacy initiatives. David and Nancy and their daughter have lived with a family in the community for numerous field seasons of several months each.

³ Modernization is a multidimensional process consisting of economic, social, cultural, political and material elements (e.g., social mobility, mobility system complexity, technologization, centralized political and social control, rationalization, institutionalization, urbanization, market integration and transformed social relations, including a forward-looking orientation to time and changes in identity and modes of subjectivity formation) (Benz, 2016; Mostowlansky, 2017; Steinberg, 2011).