This article explores the role of mobile phones in the lives of the youth in the city of Chennai, South India. Drawing on field research, the article argues that the social life of the mobile phone is gendered. The article curates three narratives to make this argument. The first engages with young men and mobile phones and claims that the technology is instrumental in the construction of normative ideas of masculinity. The second explores the ways in which the technology has empowered young women, enabled mobility, and reconstituted female agency. The third examines the regulation and disciplining of women’s use of and access to the technology through the discourse of maanam. The aim of articulating these three narratives is to demonstrate that the mobile phone is a gendered technology.
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