Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures

10. Spaces of Exception: Violence, Technology, and the Transgressive Gendered Body in India’s Global Call Centers

178 10 Spaces of Exception Violence, Technology, and the Transgressive Gendered Body in India’s Global Call Centers Radha S. Hegde As India defines its place in the global economy as the high-tech solution center for business operations, new forms of work and work environments have emerged in the communication and information-technology sectors. These new work environments have radically altered the social and cultural experiences of everyday life. The outsourcing phenomenon, which casts India simultaneously as a threat, a cost-saving option, and an irritant, has occupied a spectral presence in the Western imaginary. However, unraveling on the ground is a complex transnational narrative about the neoliberal framing of flexible work, enabled by the presence of new forms of mediated connectivity. The high-tech environments of India provide a site from which to examine the dynamics of globalization as it unfolds and to see how local realities of work are embedded within global frames. As global capital is instantiated in everyday practices, it plays on local instabilities and hierarchies.1 In this process, a series of hot buttons are pressed, especially as women find their place in the neoliberal economy and face a grid of old and new power structures. This chapter explores how the growing influence of new media technologies and networks has created conditions of labor for women that disrupt everyday life and entangle the categories of the national and transnational, the private and public. Call centers with rows of young people working the phone lines have become iconic of India’s global presence. With time rearranged to service the Western world, call centers come alive in the middle of the night, when the computer screens light up and phones start ringing. What do these newly scripted jobs and work practices mean for the everyday life of Indian women? Hired for their English-speaking skills and/or technical competence, call center workers provide a variety of services for typically U.S., British, and Australian customers. The media in the United States and India glamorize these jobs and depict the employees as enjoying their fiber-optic journey into a new identity. A popular thread of reportage claims that call-center jobs have liberated Indian youth and turned them into avid consumers, thereby providing a necessary nudge to the traditionalism of Indian society, especially with regard to women.2 However, the ways in which gender issues are set into motion by globalization are far more 179 Spaces of Exception complex than these linear trajectories suggest. This chapter examines how new media technologies are reorganizing labor practices and everyday life for women in India. How does the binary of tradition and modernity get deployed and reworked in the context of technological change? In December 2005, Pratibha Srikantamurthy, a young woman employed in a multinational corporate call center, was raped and murdered en route to her place of work, the Hewlett Packard (HP) Global Delivery application services. Around 1:30 a.m., a driver, one of many hired to transport employees to work, picked up Pratibha from her residence in Bangalore. The cab company, to whom HP had outsourced its transportation needs, later discovered that the driver who picked up Pratibha was not registered on their daily roster. Pratibha’s husband, also a call-center worker, was not able to reach her on the phone at night and hence assumed she was busy. He began to panic when she did not return home at 11 a.m. the next morning. On calling HP, Pratibha’s family was told that she did not report to work the previous day. After a day of waiting and police investigation , the driver who had raped and murdered Pratibha confessed to the crime. Her body was found in a ditch outside of Bangalore’s technology corridor and had scratch marks, suggesting a struggle before her brutal rape and strangulation .3 Her death shook up her colleagues, who held prayer meetings in her memory (see figure 10.1). Fig. 10.1. Colleagues and friends remember Pratibha after her brutal murder. (Aruna Raman) 180 Radha S. Hegde The details of the case sent tremors around the country. The Indian media went into high gear, calling into question both the conditions of call-center work and the responsibility of multinational corporations for employee safety. It was a highly charged case that drew sharp responses from across the social spectrum , evoking discussions about sexuality, violence, modernity, and...