Meena Kandasamy’s Fieldwork As a Sex Object is a potent deepfake satire

Meena Kandasamy’s books burst with so much energy that you assume she needs a lie down for months after finishing each one. The new book by the the Tamil-born Indian poet and novelist shows that she isn’t slowing up.

Kandasamy’s work has always blended political weight with a playful approach. Her debut novel, The Gypsy Goddess (2014), about 44 low-caste Tamil workers who were burned alive after striking for better pay and conditions, was carried by a comic narrative voice. Her extraordinary autofictional breakthrough novel, When I Hit You (2017), about her experience of domestic abuse, featured the Kandasamy-like narrator wresting control of her own story from her family. And in her last novel, Exquisite Cadavers (2019) Kandasamy surrounded the narrative with notes – in the margins of the page – of her thoughts while she was writing it.

Fieldwork As a Sex Object is framed as a document given to Kandasamy by Amy, an Indian woman living in London, before she goes “off grid”. Amy’s story starts with a bang and rarely lets up. She receives a WhatsApp message from her best friend (“Sorry to ruin your morning :/”) – a video of Amy having sex with a man. Bad news: it’s a deepfake. “It is not me. It is my fucking face.” Worse news, the message carries the ominous header: “Forwarded many times.”

Amy acknowledges that she has previously recorded herself having sex, but “this video is wrong”: “I have a trademark pout.” And also: “I’m slightly annoyed that the woman in the (fake) porn video has a massive ass.” Amy, a self-described communist with a rich, establishment father and a solid Twitter following from an abortive reality TV appearance, quickly goes viral. “I am no longer a name. I am a trend.”

She faces mockery and wrath on social media, especially from “a disparate bunch of Nazi-loving, Islamophobic vegetarian dicks with profile pictures that are either the Joker or V for Vendetta”. She faces a paradox that the only way to get the video taken down from sites is to file a copyright claim: in other words, to say that it really is her. The media gets in on the act: “Does Starlet In Sex Tape Have Jihadi Links?” And then there’s her mother, who has always resented Amy’s social awareness: “You have a saviour complex,” she tells her, “like these woken people.” Her mother thinks it’s futile to deny the video is real: “There’s no hushing up the world’s mouth.”

Her mother is probably right, and the book brilliantly captures the hopelessness of being carried along on a wave of mob hatred. Amy develops a particular antipathy for the “psychotic moral pedantry” of gen Z: “It is like listening to your parents.” 

The book’s bouncy form – made up of messages, lists, rants – is a structure from which Kandasamy can hang views about modern life, the empathy gap in social media, activism and the manosphere. But it comes perfectly balanced between anger and comedy. “Did you really have to take 56 photos of your ass in a four-minute interval?” asks a friend, going through Amy’s phone with her. Later, when Amy is offered a book contract to tell her story, she visualises her author photo (“Think Susan Sontag but brown”) and insists that “the title must incorporate the word ‘sex’ explicitly, because subtlety is the enemy of honest discourse”. Whereupon the reader looks again at the book’s front cover, and smiles.

The narrative becomes more conventional in the second half, as Amy finds out who made the video and sets off in pursuit, aided by acquaintances and friendly hackers. Here we get deeper into her past and her character. “Somewhere, sometime ago,” Amy writes, “a woman dreamt that all her suffering could be a book written in measured sentences that keep pace like moonlight.” But, she adds, “I am no longer that woman.” Polite restraint, in other words, is not equal to the cause. That’s why, like all Kandasamy’s novels, this is an intense book: the reader might need a lie down afterwards too.

Fieldwork As a Sex Object by Meena Kandasamy  is published by Brazen (£16.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £15.29 (10% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Varun Vasudevan