Queering Digital India Activisms, Identities, Subjectivities

by Dasgupta, Rohit K.; DasGupta, Debanuj

• ISBN13: 9781474421171
• ISBN10: 1474421172
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2018-05-01
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Rohit K. Dasgupta is lecturer in global media at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. He is the co-editor of Masculinity and its Challenges in India (Mcfarland, 2014) and Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender and Art (Routledge, 2015). He was a recipient of the Sir Peter Holmes Memorial Award from the Royal Society for Asian Affairs in 2013.

Debanuj DasGupta is Assistant Professor of Geography, Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Debanuj's research and teaching focuses upon feminist, disability, and queer geographies as well as migration, transnationalism and South Asia studies. Debanuj's research has been published in Contemporary South Asia, Disability Studies Quarterly, SEXUALITIES, and the Scholar & Feminist (S&F Online). Debanuj is a renowned trainer in Gender and International Development. He regularly writes on gender, sexuality and human rights for international development organizations.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: Queering Digital India
Rohit K Dasgupta and Debanuj Dasgupta

Part I: Digital Performance and Politics

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

3. Digital Closets: Postmillenial Representations of Queerness in Kapoor and Sons and Aligarh
Rahul K. Gairola

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

Part II: Digital Activism(s) and Advocacy

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

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

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

Part III: Digital Intimacies

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

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

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

Contributors

Index