The first book to look critically at digital technologies and the role they play within queer lives in contemporary IndiaThis 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 FeaturesTakes on diverse strands of queer theory to show where neoliberalism, nationalism, digital technologies and movements for queer rights converge in present-day IndiaIntegrates academic pieces with activist and practitioner narrativesLooks at sexualised online communities: their aims, compositions and potentialitiesDiscusses hook-up apps and social media, and how institutions use them to control, discipline and repressEngages with new forms of queer politics, feminist politics and online activismContributorsNiharika Banerjea, Ambedkar University, New Delhi, IndiaAniruddha Dutta, University of Iowa, USAAmit S. Rai, Queen Mary, University of London, UKJack Harrison-Quintana, independent researcher and Director of Grindr for Equality, USARadhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USARahul Gairola, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, IndiaKareem Khubchandani, Tufts University, USAIla Nagar, Ohio State University, USARohit K Dasgupta, Loughbrough University, UKPawan Singh, University of California San Diego, USASneha Krishnan, St John's College, University of Oxford, UKDebanuj DasGupta, University of Connecticut, USAInshah Malik, recently Yale University, USA
Author Biography:
Rohit K. Dasgupta is Programme Director and Lecturer in Global Communication and Development at Loughborough University. He is the co-author of Social Media, Sexuality and Sexual Health Advocacy in Kolkata (Bloomsbury, 2017) and co-editor of Friendship as Social Justice Activism (Seagull/Chicago, 2017), Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender and Art (Routledge, 2015) and Masculinity 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 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, and he regularly writes on gender, sexuality and human rights for international development organisations.
