Book Review | When a Woman’s Life Becomes Just a Hashtag
The humour stops the novel from being merely a story of victimhood. The result is an angry, funny, formally experimental and deliberately discomfiting novel
The story begins with a violation that is technologically new, but socially old. Amrita Chaturvedi — Amy — stumbles across her fake porn video on the internet. “It is not me. It's my f***ing face.” Hyperreality and fragmentation (of face and body) in the post-truth era, thus, ushers in at the very onset. Amy is a curious choice of victim. She is an enlightened Marxist-feminist activist. She also hails from a privileged, wealthy Brahmin family. She is sexually adventurous and can be selfish, hypocritical, impulsive, vain and insensitive. Yet none of these traits make the violation any less real. This refusal to make a morally perfect victim is one of the novel’s greatest strengths. The author ensures that the deepfake as a technological weapon seems to be running on pre-existing prejudices, misogyny and the culture of objectification. Amy’s name, face and sexuality become disembodied chunks of content, ripe for commentary, ridicule and consumption. Her personhood is replaced by her algorithmic virality, courtesy the ecosystem of trolls, incels and right-wing culture warriors, who act as a part of a broader political vendetta. The attack is at once a punishment for her sexuality and her politics.
The supposedly progressive spaces are not romanticised either. The liberals, feminists, politically correct communities and progressive-coded social media users have their own forms of cruelty. Kandasamy rejects dichotomies: those of oppressor/oppressed, villain/ victim, privileged/ persecuted et al. The novel works through a number of overlapping power structures: gender, caste, class, sexuality, nationalism, religion and technology.
Amy’s body is a battlefield where ideological battles are fought. The twist however is hinted at in the title. Amy is more than an object of observation/ digital fieldwork, that is, something to be studied, classified, circulated and consumed. She begins to watch those who have been watching her. The object of the gaze is also the observer, suggesting an implicit reversal of power. This reversal is closely related to another major concern of the novel: the theft of narration. Amy must reclaim authorship of herself. The deepfake, the trolls, the family, the political communities, the media, the well-wishers — all of them are trying to tell her story. Kandasamy’s novel gives Amy an opportunity to reinscribe the narrative.
The novel does not provide us with a smooth, conventional narrative. It is written in brief fragments, mimicking the fractured experience of living through an online crisis: a tweet here, a photograph there, a notification, a screenshot, a rumour, a comment, a hashtag trending. The form also reflects Amy’s psychological state, bouncing from anxiety to memory to desire to anger to self-doubt. The reader is robbed of the reassuring view of a well-structured narrative. However, at times it is weighed down by its theoretical and political vocabulary and some of the characters are less well developed than Amy.
The descriptions of trolls, political culture and Internet masculinity are frequently savage and funny. The humour stops the novel from being merely a story of victimhood. The result is an angry, funny, formally experimental and deliberately discomfiting novel.
Fieldwork as a Sex Object
By Meena Kandasamy
HarperCollins
pp. 240; Rs 599