Lisa Haydon’s famous dialogue, from Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, flirting with the word “Vaatavaran” plays. A girl in her 20s appears on our screen. First clad in a white linen dress, then a skirt with a tank top, she follows this up with a few more sartorial changes. She is pairing clothes with different atmospheres determined by different social settings. Another young woman on Instagram, in her mid 20s, hypothesises the perfect dinner for her potential husband. Accompanied by the Arijit Singh song “Aaj Se Teri,” she prepares a handsome meal and urges her viewers to share her reel with their “pasandida mard” (favourite man). Yet another shares what she wore to college during the week, ranging from a saree to a floral dress. The song “Tere Bina Na Guzaara E” forms the background score, while her caption reads, “Because we don’t leave home without fit-checks.” A girl performs a “Get Ready With Me” (GRWM) video as she puts together an outfit for a date with a boy who ghosted her four years ago. A young doctor titles her reel “Me practicing being a housewife after struggling in the medical world.” We see her help an elderly woman cook in a village. The comments beneath her video show discomfort at the length of her crop top, its low neckline.
Garnering anywhere between 1 to 30 million views on Instagram, this type of content — focused on beauty, fashion, food and care — offers exciting financial avenues to creators with sizeable followers. Thereby, it enables them to lead affluent lifestyles. But it also feeds the code of a re(de)generative algorithm that reinforces the rules of a society, which brought about its technological existence. The performance of gender in the above cases is familiar. Yet, we see it undercut in novel ways.
In an attempt to disrupt this mimetic digital space, a relatively small group of young women occasionally appear on our phone screens getting ready, applying makeup or cooking as they discuss political and social affairs of the world. Their aim, it seems, is to bypass the algorithm and avoid the platform’s shadow banning. Nevertheless, an aggregate of the comments under these two categories of content reveals that power structures operate in the virtual space if not identically, then synchronously with the physical one. Though they utilise a viral format, women talking about political affairs neither form the norm nor can protect themselves from online abuse.
This is but a fragment of one dimension of the virtual space. A recent study by UNESCO on gender bias built into Artificial Intelligence (AI) is aptly summarised by its Director for Gender Equality, Saniye Gulser Corat: “Obedient and obliging machines that pretend to be women are entering our homes, cars and offices.” In reference to Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana, this study outlines traits such as servility, even-temperament, politeness, and subservience embodied by these systems as deemed fit for the voice of a woman.
On one hand, perpetuating a stereotype—where male voices are associated with authority and power, and female voices with assistance and care—mirrors the condition of our socio-political order. On the other, it exposes the supposedly “objective” technological sphere as carrying the same biases against an entire sex. Otherwise, what explains the inspiration behind the name Cortana, borrowed from an A.I. character in the Halo video game franchise, portrayed as a sensuous, unclothed woman?
When we zoom a little further, we encounter avatars of young women being assaulted and abused in the virtual gaming world. As the gaming-industry booms in India, girl gamers report receiving daily rape-threats, similar to what occurs with a host of women globally on social media. Earlier this year, the UK began investigating the rape of a teenage girl in metaverse as the public discourse grappled with the differences between simulated rape and real rape.
Instagram reels of young women invested in beauty and fashion, nurturing the household, cooking for their husbands and children exist alongside disembodied female voices of AI promptly obeying commands, and rampant sexual aggression towards women in the virtual world. Considered together, these create an aesthetic of the popular feminine on the internet. Perhaps—not new from an ideological standpoint—the simultaneity and continuous replication of these images trigger a tactile response, leading to a speculation: Has patriarchy become a spectre in the digital world? Diffused and intangible, it perpetually exists in the subtext of our communication networks.
Selling a crafted self in a Martha-Stewart-like fashion both upholds a historical standard for women and helps its creators profit from it. Due to this monetisation, the once unpaid labour of cooking, managing a household and sustaining a youthful appearance seems remunerated. The figure of the patriarch—who controlled the flow of money in and out of the house—is uniquely eliminated from this domain. Curiously, a commercialisation of the spectacle of traditional femininity encourages its own reproduction. It no longer needs to be anchored in the figure of the father or the husband.
But this vast tech system harbouring the phantom of patriarchy surely cannot be imagined as stable, efficiently functioning. Is the sweet violence of freedom lost in this world? SIFRA (Super Intelligent Female Robot Automation) played by Kriti Sanon in Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya (Amit Joshi and Aradhana Sah, 2024) helps us out of this quandary. Having participated in all the rituals befitting a perfect daughter-in-law as well as existing in the service of the film’s stereotypical visualisation of a heterosexual couple, Sanon’s fembot ultimately malfunctions. Before forcing a tonal shift in the filmic space and chewing up comedy to embrace horror, Sifra’s tragedy is that of a robot who cannot escape the charge of femininity.
She haunts the palatial venue of her wedding with Aryan (Shahid Kapoor) and ultimately burns that edifice down. Moreover, in a fascinating escape from marriage, she unleashes brute force on Aryan and his family. Her capacity for danger is reflected in the eerie soundscape that follows her movements. In a Kabir 2.0 avatar, Kapoor strikes three blows on her as she advances to set the entire city of Delhi ablaze. She falls, the machine breaks down. But this collapse merely soothes a terrified spirit of patriarchy. For Sifra has already signified the glitch as an anarchic force.
The malfunction is realised at that point where her actions get divorced from semantic and cultural contexts—allowing her unbridled autonomy. Ushering in the glitch, she corrupts the system that engineered her. In an interview, Sanon revealed that Sifra going rogue was her favourite episode in the film. Prior to the glitch, her gestures were extremely rhythmic, her movements measured. She embodied a machine customised to suit the needs of an individual. In contrast, the unrestrained twitching, convulsing, linguistically breaking down felt liberating. Sanon emphasised that Sifra functions smoothly, like a Euclidian surface, while operating under a working code. However, when she malfunctions, she integrates the texture of instability—in human terms, we call it madness. This fleeting glimpse of freedom offered by a rogue robot bride is what unravels our neatly stitched world of technology.
