Gender and Power in the Digital Age: A Comparative Reading of Contemporary Tamil and English Narratives

Abstract

The rapid expansion of digital culture has transformed the ways in which gender, identity, power, surveillance, and resistance are produced and negotiated. Although digital platforms have created new possibilities for self-expression and visibility, they have also intensified older structures of social regulation by extending surveillance into everyday life. Contemporary Indian literature offers a productive space for examining these tensions because literary narratives frequently expose the relationship between intimate experience and wider structures of caste, patriarchy, social conformity, and institutional power. This article presents a comparative reading of Perumal Murugan’s Tamil novel Pyre (Pookkuzhi) and Meena Kandasamy’s English novel When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife. While Pyre dramatizes the intersection of caste, gender, community surveillance, and violence through the story of an inter-caste marriage, When I Hit You examines patriarchal domination through domestic violence, intellectual control, sexual coercion, and the suppression of female subjectivity. The article argues that the power structures represented in these apparently different narratives can be productively reread through concepts associated with contemporary digital culture. Community gossip, social monitoring, control over women's bodies, enforced visibility, silencing, and the policing of identity in Pyre parallel contemporary forms of digital surveillance and networked social control. Similarly, the protagonist’s struggle to retain her intellectual and narrative identity in When I Hit You anticipates contemporary debates surrounding digital identity, technological control, and gendered self-representation. Drawing upon feminist theory, Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity, Michel Foucault’s understanding of surveillance and disciplinary power, and intersectional approaches to gender and caste, this study demonstrates that digital modernity has not displaced traditional patriarchy but has provided new conceptual frameworks for understanding its continuing operations. The comparison ultimately reveals literature as an important counter-space in which marginalized female voices can transform imposed silence into agency and resistance. Keywords: Gender, Power, Digital Culture, Patriarchy, Caste, Surveillance, Feminism, Tamil Literature, Indian English Literature, Resistance