Queering Digital India

Activisms, Identities, Subjectivities

Edited byRohit K. Dasgupta,Debanuj DasGupta

The first book to look critically at digital technologies and the role they play within queer lives in contemporary India

This pioneering interdisciplinary collection works across mainstream and alternative spaces such as Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Grindr and gay men’s health websites. These digital platforms are then situated within the contemporary socio-political conjuncture in India, offering a way of understanding queerness and Indian-ness in contemporary India.

Queering in this book does not simply refer to a sexual category rather queerness is a mode of dispossession through which certain bodies are rendered as bodies marked for discipline and regulation. This book takes on diverse strands of queer theory in order to name the ways neoliberalism, nationalism, digital technologies, and movements for queer rights converge with each other within present day India. This analytical approach to queerness in India is the first of its kind and the result is a pioneering interdisciplinary collection.

Key Features

Takes on diverse strands of queer theory to show where neoliberalism, nationalism, digital technologies and movements for queer rights converge in present-day India
Integrates academic pieces with activist and practitioner narratives
Looks at sexualised online communities: their aims, compositions and potentialities
Discusses hook-up apps and social media, and how institutions use them to control, discipline and repress
Engages with new forms of queer politics, feminist politics and online activism

Contributors

Niharika Banerjea, Ambedkar University, New Delhi, India

Aniruddha Dutta, University of Iowa, USA

Amit S. Rai, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

Jack Harrison-Quintana, independent researcher and Director of Grindr for Equality, USA

Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA

Rahul Gairola, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India

Kareem Khubchandani, Tufts University, USA

Ila Nagar, Ohio State University, USA

Rohit K Dasgupta, Loughborough University, UK

Pawan Singh, University of California San Diego, USA

Sneha Krishnan, St John’s College, University of Oxford, UK

Debanuj DasGupta, University of Connecticut, USA

Inshah Malik, recently Yale University, USA

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Contents

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: Queering Digital IndiaRohit K. Dasgupta and Debanuj Dasgupta

Part I: Digital Performance and Politics

2. Queering Digital Cultures: A Roundtable ConversationNiharika Banerjea, Debanuj Dasgupta, Rohit K. Dasgupta, Aniruddha Dutta, Radhika Gajjala, Amit S. Rai and Jack Harrison-Quintana

3. Digital Closets: Postmillenial Representations of Queerness inKapoor and Sons andAligarhRahul K. Gairola

4. Cruising the Ephemeral Archives of Bangalore's Gay NightlifeKareem Khubchandani

Part II: Digital Activism(s) and Advocacy

5. Digitally Untouched: Janana (In) Visibility and the Digital DivideIla Nagar

6. Digital Outreach and Sexual Health Advocacy: SAATHII as a ResponseRohit K. Dasgupta

7. The TV9 Sting Operation on PlanetRomeo: Absent Subjects, Digital Privacy and LGBTQ ActivismPawan Singh

Part III: Digital Intimacies

8. 'Bitch, Don't Be a Lesbian': Selfies and Same-Sex DesireSneha Krishnan

9. Disciplining the 'Delinquent': Situating Virtual Intimacies, Bodies, and Pleasures among Friendship Network of Young Men in Kolkata, IndiaDebanuj Dasgupta

10. Kashmiri Desire and Digital Space: Queering Indian Citizen and National IdentityInshah Malik

ContributorsIndex

Reviews

This collection gives voice to the identities, practices and cultures of LGBTQI people living in the world’s biggest democracy, interrogating their engagements and entanglements with digital communication technologies. It provides a critical response to the hegemony of digital scholarship and forces those of us in the West to look beyond our own digital backyards.
–Sharif Mowlabocus, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media, University of Sussex

About the Author

Rohit K. Dasgupta is Programme Director and Lecturer in Global Communication and Development at Loughborough University. He is the co-author ofSocial Media, Sexuality and Sexual Health Advocacy in Kolkata (Bloomsbury, 2017) and co-editor ofFriendship as Social Justice Activism (Seagull/Chicago, 2017),Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender and Art (Routledge, 2015) andMasculinity and its Challenges in India (McFarland, 2014).

Debanuj DasGupta is Assistant Professor of Geography, Women’s Gender and Sexuality studies at the University of Connecticut. His research interests are broadly in the areas of feminist geography, transnational migration, international health and South Asia studies. He has published inContemporary South Asia,Disability Studies Quarterly,SEXUALITIES, and theScholar & Feminist (S&F Online). Debanuj is a renowned trainer in Gender and International Development, and he regularly writes on gender, sexuality and human rights for international development organisations.

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