Testing the Future
Gender and Technocapitalism in Start-Up India
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3945948 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hemangini Gupta (0000-0001-5951-0441, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 123 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 74-88 |
| Publication date | 2019-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Feminist Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0141778919879740 |
| OpenAlex | W2996061357 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
| References cited | 32 |
In this article I examine how start-up capitalism recalibrates transnational 'outsourcing' or the work of so-called 'cyber coolies' to instead create labour as a site of innovation and experimental consumption. First, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in India to theorise digital labour as a form of experimental mediation and temporal work oriented to the future. Second, I show how work is deeply embodied and centres on the racialised and gendered bodies of non-elite workers. Finally, I show how invitations to innovate with work processes encourage workers to cultivate attachments of love and care for the company that ultimately privatise affect and conceal class and labour hierarchies. Tracing employees' experiences through a period of automation and layoffs, this article argues for an understanding of how precarious feminised work creates the conditions of possibility for postcolonial and transnational technocapitalism to flourish
Capitalism · Care work · Consumption (sociology) · Elite · Embodied cognition · Ethnography · Mediation · Outsourcing · Political science · Sex work · Social science · Sociology · Work (physics) · Anthropology · Cultural Studies · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Employment and Welfare Studies · Engineering · Gender Studies · Labor Movements and Unions
Working the Night Shift
The Economization of Life
Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor
High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy
Phone Clones
Genders in Production
Who's On the Line? Indian Call Center Agents Pose as Americans for U.S.‐Outsourced Firms
Encoding Race, Encoding Class
Invisible Labor
Dreamscapes of Modernity
When Experiments Travel
Telling histories of the future
Disciplinary spaces and globalization
Valuing Women’s Voices
Appropriately Indian
Landscapes of Accumulation
Recycling modernity
The Economy of Anticipation
Down with Love
Professional Women, Good Families
From dreams to discontent
Experimentality
Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, Second Edition
Looking Good and Sounding Right
Bodies, Markets, and the Experimental in South Asia
Taste Tests
Rethinking knowledge for development
| Unique citing works | 7 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,4 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 7 |