Queering Digital India

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