The Red Dot and the Red Flag: Digital Surveillance and the Marxist-Patriarchal Paradox in Meena Kandasamy's When I Hit You

This paper analyzes the connection between digital surveillance, domestic violence, and ideological farce in Meena Kandasamy’s autofiction When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife. This paper will show that her husband instrumentalizes his political knowledge as a die-hard Marxist revolutionary to impose his patriarchal will over her and make her household a laboratory of instrumentarian power. The theoretical framework for this paper combines Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, Post-Feminist Marxist theories of social reproduction, and Foucauldian theory of the docile body. To this end, this paper will show that her husband extracts surplus value from her literary and reproductive labour and attempts to perform archival violence on her by erasing her digital history. In the reading that follows, the husband is seen as the Big Other to his wife’s data as the ‘red dot’ that he attempts to track and tame. In conclusion, the protagonist’s deployment of l’écriture féminine can be seen as her rebellion against the surveillance performed by her husband, the Comrade.