An Indian student abroad in London deals with the fallout of an AI-enabled character assassination in the scathingly funny, deeply wise novel Fieldwork as a Sex Object by Indian writer, translator, and anticaste activist Meena Kandasamy (When I Hit You).
A prologue in the author's voice details a meeting with a young woman named Amrita "Amy" Chaturvedi, a critic of the Narendra Modi regime whose leaked sex videos trended online. Amy gives the author a USB drive containing the only copy of her story, written as a novel. This first-person account makes up the main narrative and begins with Amy's best friend, Nimmi, alerting her to a pornographic video that appears to star Amy. She instantly knows it's a deepfake, not just because she's never made a sex tape, but because the angles and style are nothing like hers. The video goes viral, spurred on by her standing as a student protestor and the daughter of a wealthy Supreme Court judge in Delhi, as well as her few moments on a reality TV show. "I am no longer a name. I am a trend," Amy observes soberly as hashtags accumulate. Her chief supporters are her mother, a traditional wife with "big if-there-is-a-funeral-I-will-be-the-corpse energy," and Nimmi, who often pointedly reminds Amy of her high-caste privilege and with whom Amy is secretly in love. Attempts to remove the video and track down the perpetrators of the hoax repeatedly show Amy is a modern young woman under attack for being a modern young woman. The truth about her character assassins leads her to a crucial crossroads: How radical does one need to become to fight the radicalized?
Kandasamy portrays a fiercely intelligent but privileged and naïve young woman struggling to muscle through blame, shame, and abandonment, openly calling out the cultural misogyny that has fostered her plight. The narrative voice is snappy and filled with furious, unfiltered wit; Kandasamy exhibits a clear understanding of how to package brutal truth into an arresting reading experience. Amy reflects that upper-caste men are perfect targets for indoctrination into incel culture, pointing out, "Yes, we gave the world the Kama Sutra. We also gave the world the hoax called semen-retention. Iykyk!" The inclusion of caste tensions and the repression of feminism layer political complexity around an intensely personal moment of reckoning. This vibrant outcry of a novel will leave readers entertained and shaken. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads
Shelf Talker: A young Indian woman studying abroad fights the fallout of a deepfake sex video in this wise, fierce novel of the personal meeting the political.