The Wired Home

This chapter examines the idealized construction of the Indian immigrant home and household in online grocery stores, shopping sites, and banking sites. Through close readings of these sites, it reveals how the textual, cultural, and institutional politics of a diverse set of Indian and Indian immigrant players has shaped the production of an idealized version of the immigrant home as a household organized around elite imaginations of mobility, the reproduction of the filial thorough the financial, and the agency and labor of male technology professionals. It situates the idealization of the immigrant home in the context of the ideologies of e-commerce and online financial transactions that first emerged in the late 1990s, and continue to be mobilized around the domestic and transnational needs and desires of Indian immigrants in the United States.