Queering Mobilities, Imagining Desire

• In Event: Digital Sexualities, Biomedical Practice, and Queer Realities: Culture + Identity

Abstract

This exploratory ethnographic study investigates how gay men use mobile mediated technologies to imagine and articulate erotic desire in Gurgaon, India. Despite the current criminalization of homosexuality in the country, public performances of queer identity in urban centers have continued to grow in visibility. For people with same sex desires, the proliferation of smartphones has made moving between multiple platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp and geolocative dating apps integral to coordinating physical in-person social interaction with others who express similar desires. This raises questions about how Internet-enabled polymedia environments complicate ideas of mobility and what influence this might have on emerging queer spaces. Investigating the intersection of digital movement and physical bodies, I trace how attendees of Gurgaon’s first Gay Pride Parade (2016) switch among multiple cellphone applications as they travel between home and the city they work in: Gurgaon, a tech hub to the south of India’s capital that draws in migrants from across the country who have left small towns in search of better socioeconomic opportunities. Analyzing how mobility is simultaneously structured by the affordances of physical bodies (co-presence at the gay pride parade) and digital “bodies” (shifting among Facebook, WhatsApp and Grindr), I examine spatial and temporal dynamics in the use of cellphone applications to navigate queer interactions.

Author

• Vishnupriya Das, University of Michigan