Digital Dose of Didactics: Reinforcing Patriarchy through Moral Stories on YouTube

Abstract

Should girls get a formal education? Should women earn? And who should handle the money they earn, if at all? Can a woman’s personality be tied to learning and earning? These questions may be easily overlooked in the 21st century, when women have forayed into almost all possible careers. However, these and more questions related to women’s education, employment and empowerment find clear answers in the so-called moral stories in Hindi and other Indian languages, one finds on YouTube these days. The paper analyzes a selection of such stories centered on women and argues how these ‘moral stories’ ultimately emerge as schemes to keep the patriarchal structure alive by creating an easily accessible digital repository, and end up patronizing women in the pretext of empowering them. The paper focuses particularly on the idea of ‘moral’ these stories contain and argues that the moral messages they convey are actually detrimental to the empowerment of women as their deep structures work to cement the foundations of patriarchy.