Negotiating Digital Autonomy in Rural Kerala: Gendered Constraints and Everyday Resistance

This study examines how intersecting identities of gender, caste, class, and religion shape rural women’s smartphone usage and perceptions of privacy in Kerala, India. Despite Kerala’s high literacy rates and progressive gender policies, entrenched patriarchal norms continue to regulate women’s digital autonomy. Based on qualitative fieldwork including interviews, and focus group discussions, the research highlights gendered disparities in smartphone ownership, intense familial surveillance, and self-censorship shaped by cultural expectations. These practices collectively constrain women’s use of smartphones as tools for communication, expression, and connection. Using Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology and informed by intersectionality, the study shows how smartphones simultaneously reinforce control and enable covert resistance. Caste-based labor roles and religious customs further shape women’s digital experiences. The findings call for culturally grounded, intersectional policy interventions that go beyond access to address the sociocultural structures limiting women’s smartphone use, offering insights into gendered digital inequalities in the Global South.