Queering the Big Tent

In her much-cited blog post of July 26, 2011, Melissa Terras writes:

In many regards, “Big Tent Digital Humanities” is a nice concept. It is true that the DH community is considerably more open, approachable, welcoming, and willing to embrace new approaches than many traditional areas of humanities academia. Big Tent DH, then, is an ecumenical approach, whilst giving the freedom for individual scholars to explore their own interests, wherever in the research and teaching spectrum they lie. (Terras, “Peering inside the Big Tent”)

However, writes Terras,

Despite all this, there will be a lot of folk left peering into the Big Tent, without ever gaining full access of any paid employment in DH. Institutional support means access to computational infrastructure, journals, money for equipment, conference travel, paid sabbaticals to write up research, payment which enables you to subscribe to journals and scholarly societies, etc.

I open with Terras’s problematization of the “big tent DH” metaphor because it is at once a carnivalesque, inclusive trope and, nonetheless, one whose jouissance for technology often envelops the human conditions that have designed it.

Once uncovered, the funhouse mirrors beneath the big tent of digital humanities distort the reality of digital humanists with different views. Following this allegory, the very fabric of the “big tent” strategically comprises certain materials (heteronormativity), color (whiteness), consistency (English), and shape (citizenship). Perhaps more significantly, the inclusive space inside the tent is always already marked by an outside—an outside that has so overwhelmingly been conceived as Western territory. In this formulation, DH practitioners often unwittingly or intentionally institutionalize Western spaces as those in which DH discourse takes root. Such a formulation is moreover underpinned by heteronormative algorithms of gender and sexuality that several theorists—ranging from Amy Earhart (“Can Information Be Unfettered?”), Radhika Gajjala (Cyberculture and the Subaltern), and Roopika Risam (New Digital Worlds), to Safiya Umoja Noble (Algorithms of Oppression)—have acknowledged in their research. This and other important research compel us to critically evaluate the socially biased foundations upon which technological innovations are based. One of the most normalized “objective” mechanisms of knowledge making continues to be the hegemony of the English language and corresponding global sites, where digital innovation and culture racially conform to the empire’s language and, thus, its dusty imagination.

For example, in the context of colonialism and the hegemony of language, Braj B. Kachru writes, “The alchemy of English (present and future), then does not only provide social status, it also gives access to attitudinally and materially desirable domains of power and knowledge” (Kachru, “The Alchemy of English,” 295). If the digital humanities today is “the future” of Kachru’s influential 1986 study of postcolonialism, then it behooves us to consider how the field lies with other languages. As one might suspect, DH to date seems to imitate life by linguistically privileging English above all other languages. Indeed, as Matthew Kirschenbaum notes, digital humanities feel inextricable from English departments around the world. The reasons range from the link between “computers and composition” to the work of cultural studies in general, and its leading figure Stuart Hall in particular, for being open to “computers and other objects of digital material culture [that] become the centerpiece of analysis” (Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities?” 9).

Digital humanists of diverse backgrounds—Galina (“Geographical and Linguistic Diversity”), Fiormonte (“Digital Humanities from a Global Perspective”), Risam (“Navigating the Global Digital Humanities”)—have increasingly written on this neocolonialist trend of promoting English, and thus the legitimacy of the Western canon. The Special Interest Group Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH) is an allied organization of the Association of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) that actively promotes a global network of multilingual and multicultural DH. Immediately relevant here are the ways in which English as the DH default socioculturally links the violent histories of the empire’s white supremacy to ostensibly progressive and futuristic ideals of DH. The blueprint of networked power that is implicit in the English language and its global hegemony manifests itself, inter alia, in the ways in which “other” genders and sexualities appear to different people the world over.

But how exactly does it manifest itself, and to what end? Can we even ask this within the narrow limitations of DH and given the fact that, as an emergent field of study, it predictably seems to “take place” predominantly in privileged, postcolonial nations? I here want to reconfigure the title of Terras’s influential blog publication in two major ways. First, I speak about peering “outside” rather than “inside” to emphasize that which is neglected, namely the postcolonial nations of the Global South, in big tent digital humanities. Second, I view this tent as “pink” to identify the queer discourses that big tent digital humanities visibly marginalizes. These two conditions set the stage for the comparison that I want to make while comparatively reading two queer, postcolonial communities in urban areas along the rim of the Indian Ocean.

Rather than reading queer and postcolonial identities as mutually exclusive, I instead view them through an intersectional lens that renders a less Anglocentric and Eurocentric model of DH (Noble and Tynes, The Intersectional Internet), and instead promises a more democratic model of global DH. Indeed, this is a timely viewpoint adopted by many scholars in the field who argue for a robust intersectional analytic in ongoing dialogues in DH (Bordalejo, “Walking alone Online”; Risam, “Beyond the Margins”; Wernimont and Losh, “Problems with White Feminism”). I too engage with this heuristic while adding that digital technology routinely consolidates human erotic experiences as xenophobic precarity by making many borders impermeable for certain sexualized bodies. As we shall see, conducting a robust, intersectional analysis of various sites and sights, routes and roots, can be challenging, given the biases instilled in the algorithm-like logic of the digital humanities—even in some attempts to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

Coloring the Queer Digital Humanities

My earlier suggestion, that the social, cultural, and political domination of English in DH links the field to ideologies and histories that have buttressed empire and Western colonialist ventures, is worth further exploring, despite the generative impact of DH. In Alex Gil and Élika Ortega’s assessment,

The explosion in the number of DH practitioners, funding programs, curricula, and publications in the English-speaking academy has, in many ways, rendered English as the lingua franca of the field . . . it is also true that its domination has overshadowed work done in other languages and communities. (Gil and Ortega, “Global Outlooks in the Digital Humanities,” 25)

Within the frame of Gil and Ortega’s call for DH work to be carried forward in “other languages and communities” (emphasis mine), we can interpret this call as a disruptive strategy as described by Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel. They assert that DH “has been consistently and frequently imagined as a white, male, able-bodied, cisgendered, heteronormative space,” whereas their formulation of disruption produces “multiple-voiced counternarratives about the hegemonic center of digital humanities [which] disrupt the formation of DH and its definitions of itself by slanting the out-look, mixing and blending hierarchical frameworks, shaking up the terms and frames” (Kim and Stommel, “Disrupting the Digital Humanities,” 26).

Kim and Stommel’s call to challenge hegemonic DH is, like the rally cry issued by Gil and Ortega, a much-needed development in the field today, especially within the frame of place, race, and space. Martin Roth and I have argued elsewhere, in the context of digital Asia, for what we have dubbed “digital spatiality”:

At this bleak historical moment, we increasingly felt that we must emphasize, rather than downplay, the ways in which place and space matter, even in the construction of the seemingly omniscient ubiquity of the digital milieu. We thus open with the term “digital spatiality,” which serves as an entry point to a critical dialogue on the qualities of digital space, taking into account these differences and boundaries between different terrestrial and virtual spaces. Digital spatiality invokes the intangible electronic spaces of the internet and beyond, at the same time that it connotes material space—a contradictory nexus that produces a number of tensions in various contexts. The majority of the labour that we expended on this special issue “took place” in digital spaces as well—spaces that are separated by thousands of kilometres and many time zones. (Gairola and Roth, “Cyber Zones,” 5)

In speaking about “digital spatiality,” we mean to recognize that the digital always “takes place” somewhere in material form: that is, the digital milieu is always anchored to a materiality, even if this is hidden from view and relegated simply to an ostensibly ubiquitous cloud on a clandestine server. Even metadata depends on place, space, and race: it is not a monolithic formation. For our purposes here, I would extend this argument by adding that the material form is always already critically shaped by the contours of home, nation, gender, erotic practices, randy fantasies, and so on. In other words, sex and sexuality are always in the background, if not the foreground, of the digital milieu, just as race is. However, despite this material reality, the “fable” that posits digital humanities as a neoliberal tool (Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia, “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives)”; Brennan, “Digital-Humanities Bust”) is effectively “free of women and people of color as digital humanities innovators” (Wernimont and Losh, “Introduction,” 3).

In their essay titled “Toward a Queer Digital Humanities,” Bonnie Ruberg, Jason Boyd, and James Howe attempt to locate “the queerness in digital humanities” (108), and thus recalibrate the spatialized playing field of DH. They write:

Queerness offers invaluable conceptual frameworks, but a queer digital humanities represents far more than a set of concepts. DH can and must do more to directly address issues faced by those who are marginalized—not despite the fact that, but precisely because, digital fields have long been problematic spaces for those who live life otherwise. For much of their history, these fields (such as computer science, video games, and humanities computing) have been implicitly structured as white, male, heteronormative spaces. (Ruberg, Boyd, and Howe, “Toward a Queer Digital Humanities,” 112; emphasis mine)

In exploring who or what this other could be, Ruberg, Boyd, and Howe admirably plumb current trends in DH to extract a model for queer digital humanities. In seeking answers to their dilemma, the authors rightly turn to the pioneering work of Alan Liu and Roopika Risam to demonstrate that “currently dominant DH methodologies are not sufficient for the development of a queerly inflected digital humanities” (Ruberg, Boyd, and Howe, “Toward a Queer Digital Humanities,” 113).

Building on this timely work of Ruberg, Boyd, Howe, Liu, and Risam, I would like to note that not all strains of DH can always be comprehensively intersectional or this might default to the very brand of tokenism that feeds the kind of neoliberalism for which the aforementioned scholars have critiqued the digital humanities. My observation is perhaps best borne out by Padmini Ray Murray’s observation that “Your DH is not my DH—and that is a good thing” (“Making Culture”). In meditating both on the relatively recent development of postcolonial digital humanities (Risam, New Digital Worlds) and on queer digital humanities in the field, I would like to robustly fuse both these movements toward social justice in DH with the work of Gayatri Gopinath, Roderick Ferguson, and other cutting-edge scholars working in queer of color critique. By doing so, I intend to contribute to the deepening of postcolonial digital humanities by making questions of gender and sexuality constitutive of, rather than additive to, the interface of postcolonial history, culture, and ethos with the digital milieu.

In addition, by drawing on scholars working in queer of color critique studies, I want to critically read the emergence of a queer digital humanities through the panoramic lens of race and class. That is, I wish to destabilize the elitism, the elision of intensive inquiry into race, and hegemonic heteronormativity, often in and through certain brands of feminism that unwittingly deploy feminism as a veiled alibi for racism in digital humanities discourse.

Briefly, queer of color critique is a term introduced by Roderick Ferguson in his pathbreaking book Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Ferguson draws upon postcolonial studies, queer theory, woman of color feminism, and African American studies to forge his urgent and timely critique. In that text, Ferguson elaborates his formulation: “As an epistemological intervention, queer of color analysis denotes an interest in materiality, but refuses ideologies of transparency and reflection, ideologies that have helped constitute marxism [sic], revolutionary nationalism, and liberal pluralism” (Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 3).

Ferguson goes on to argue that queer of color critique opts for

an understanding of nation and capital as the outcome of manifold intersections that contradict the idea of the liberal nation-state and capital as sites of resolution, perfection, progress, and confirmation. . . . To restate, queer of color analysis presumes that liberal ideology occludes the intersecting saliency of race, gender, sexuality, and class in forming social practices. (Aberrations in Black, 4)

I would like to view postcolonial and queer DH—two separate but essential subfields, for lack of a better word, of hegemonic DH—as meeting at the intersection of queer of color critique in the digital milieu while provincializing the dominant global spaces of the digital humanities. As I have elsewhere argued, queer of color critique enables us to reappropriate the xenophobic and heteronormative manacles of “home” in contemporary literature and film (Gairola, Homelandings). I would like to press this project further into the realm of digital identities and media.

Mapping Queer Sexuality along the Indian Ocean

This chapter thus surveys the ways in which digital culture and praxis are separated yet connected throughout two postcolonial cities that were once jewels in the British imperial crown: Durban in South Africa and Chennai in southern India. This chapter is a small part of a much bigger project of thinking and tracking the meaning of digital home for South Asian diasporas living domestic lives online around the world. I had expected to track the intersection of postcolonial and queer DH through the unifying heuristic of queer of color critique, while analyzing how different languages shaped this fusion of theories, but my findings defied this neat research plan. While I anticipated encountering queer, multilingual (Zulu, Hindi, and English) communities networked across the Indian Ocean rim, I discovered that the popular chat rooms for exploring queerness that queer colleagues in those two cities recommended were definitively in English—a discovery to which I will return in a larger discussion of LGBTQI+ identity formations in cyber zones of the Indian Ocean region (Gairola and Roth, “Cyber Zones,” 4).

Given the strong presence of the Indian diaspora in South Africa, and in the wake of the Supreme Court of India’s September 2018 ruling—which struck down part of the ban on queer sex enshrined in the draconian Victorian-era Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (1864)—I had expected to unearth a wealth of online scripts that complicated the ways in which space, place, race, gender, sexuality, and class cohabitate in the “digital homes” formed by online alliances and communities. In other words, I expected to find that the two urban loci of Durban and Chennai facilitated counterpractices in the digital Global South for queer subjects who seem to feel “at home” in the English language, even if they are not fully online. While this perspective shifted the more I researched, I also explore here how the digital milieu in this sector of the Global South (itself a problematic term) is shaped by its displacement from the male/female binary, enabling instead a flexibility that reflects the acceptance of the third gender. This displacement from the cisgender binarism, as earlier stated, is inextricably linked to sexuality and the ways in which gender identity in material and cyber spaces invoke queerness.

Before surveying the links and differences between queer presence on social media sites in these urban centers linked by the Indian Ocean, we must recall that some of the most significant DH scholarship has implications for the ways that both bodies and land masses carve out space while being marked by discourses of subjectivity. For example, in formulating his conception of “geocriticism,” Robert Tally discusses the ways in which diverse forms of literature convey a literary cartography that supports spatial, intellectual, and cognitive maps. Tally says,

To draw a map is to tell a story. . . . Literature is not the only way to imagine spaces, of course, but insofar as the literary is peculiarly attuned to matters of interpretation, figuration, and speculative thinking, literature is well suited to the task. The point is that space and place are understood through imaginary or figurative means (the map being one of the most evocative figures), and to the extent that literature is a fundamentally imaginative “science” (I use this in the broadest, nineteenth-century way), then literature becomes a privileged medium through which we can perceive, understand, and explore spaces and places, while also perhaps projecting alternative spaces. (Darici, “To Draw a Map Is to Tell a Story,” 27–29)

Tally’s scholarship focuses on histories and technologies of mapping that present as objective knowledge an entire suite of situated power relations. His notion of mapping as a critical methodology for reading literature compels us to expand the notion of cartographic readings of literature. This is especially useful in nascent directions of the digital humanities since, in the formulation of Ian Gregory and Patricia Murrieta-Flores, “Geography, location and place have traditionally been under-studied by the humanities. . . . [M]anually attempting to map these places on paper is a time-consuming and unsatisfactory process resulting in a map that would frequently be an end-point of the research . . . in a new field termed spatial humanities” (Gregory and Murrieta-Flores, “Geographical Information Systems as a Tool,” 177).

Gregory and Murrieta-Flores’s call to put technospace at the center of the agenda of global DH is a welcome invitation to those who study the people in those spaces and the historical power relations that frame their lives. For example, in his Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said forcefully describes the stakes of mapping when humans tether the idea of empire and belonging to it (Anderson, Imagined Communities; Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands; and “fictive ethnicity,” in Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, especially 96). Said writes,

Territory and possessions are at stake, geography and power. Everything about human history is rooted in the earth, which has meant that we must think about habitation, but it has also meant that people have planned to have more territory and therefore must do something about its indigenous residents. At some very basic level, imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others. For all kinds of reasons, it attracts some people and often involves untold misery for others. (Said, Culture and Imperialism, 7)

As Said and many others have detailed, this control of the land also leads to the authority to institute sweeping generalizations about the kinds of people living there and their erotic practices. I believe that this is abundantly clear even in DH projects that attempt to give much-needed agency to both queer and postcolonial subjects and cultures.

Though these countries are separated by the vast Indian Ocean, the oceanic stretch that divides them nonetheless enables queer affiliations across borders and time zones. The urban sites that I explore around the rim of the Indian Ocean from South Africa to southern India are linked by digital queer sites that include the dating apps Planet Romeo and Grindr, as well as queer global chat rooms like QueerSA sponsored by Chatzy, and Chennai Gay Chat on Mingle2. Unlike hook-up apps that facilitate real-time meetings, these chat rooms and websites help queer communities from South Africa to south India to produce transnational, erotic imaginings that may be taboo, outlawed, or impossible within the material limitations of queer subjects in urban enclaves. Moreover, these digital connections recalibrate the meaning of queer diasporas across the Indian Ocean, and cast wider implications throughout the Global South.

Indeed, the communications of queer diasporic subjects with affiliations throughout these sites “travel” in ways that compel us to rethink the relationships between digital humanities scholarship, on the one hand, and its limited relationship with queer diasporas with postcolonial histories, on the other. Such a project thus invokes Kara Keeling’s imaginative meditation on what a queer operating system (OS) could be. In the interface of living and technological subjectivities, Keeling describes “Queer OS” as a digital media heuristic that “insists upon forging and facilitating uncommon, irrational, imaginative, and/ or unpredictable relationships” (Keeling, “Queer OS,” 154). Despite Keeling’s proposition and the seemingly liberating throes of digital and queer space, exclusionary trends persist in new ways. However, I believe that Tally’s notion of language maps and Said’s historical context of imperialism allow us to read the human body itself as a cartographic organism. I read Tally’s notion as applicable to human bodies as cartographic archives made of tissue and flesh. Like other diagrammatic representations of place and literary texts as cognitive maps, these spatial topographies of body and space are forged in the fraught crucible of history and the unequal power relations that subtend it.

As suggested in our formulation of the notion of “digital spatiality” (Gairola and Roth, “Cyber Zones,” 4), the materiality that subtends the digital milieu includes human agents as well as the worldly and biological processes that map out the universe within, joining it with the Anthropocene. In her recent study on postcolonial biology, Deepika Bahri even charts out the universes within bodies as a means for reading the “civilizational standing” and internalized impacts of colonialism (Bahri, Postcolonial Biology, 13). Geeta Patel’s recent work explores the meaning of “risky bodies,” and how jugaad (life hacking) comes into play in the daily lives of postcolonial Indians (Patel, Risky Bodies & Techno-Intimacy, 6). As we mull over the transposition of postcolonial studies in the twenty-first century, one of its most pronounced academic developments is, arguably, into the arena of techno bodies. As risky bodies that are a nonreproductive anathema to the state, queer bodies face bullying and abuse even in the most ostensibly safe cyber zones. In the interest of creating a safe zone within this chapter, those who have guided me toward resources must remain anonymous at their request.

Speaking in Code from Durban to Chennai

Re-placing discourses of mapping in the context of the colonial domination of lands and bodies is, conversely, a crucial turn for global DH. Indeed, it remains to be seen what the impact of the Supreme Court of India’s support of “sexual autonomy” in partially repealing Section 377 will be in and beyond India (Sheriff, “Section 377 Verdict”). For this reason, mapping and technology are crucial for the physical bonds, social connections, and survival strategies of queer folks along the rim of the Indian Ocean, albeit in different ways. Analog mapping has its own histories that creep into many digital humanists’ observations of the gaps in DH as it has largely been conceived by Risam, Earhart, Bordalejo, and others. In his blog post “Maps in Colonialism,” Ryan Nock writes: “The two main areas which Europeans mapped because of the colonial drive were Africa and the Indian subcontinent. . . . Throughout the seventeenth century, the focus of map-making in India shifted from coastlines to interior rivers.”

We should here note that such analog maps into the “heart of darkness” and the “jewel in the crown” were also cognitive maps for erotic exploitation of dusky and exotic lands that the digital maps of today often obfuscate. Travel guides began to map not only geography, but also the “social and cultural aspects of the various empires in the subcontinent” (Nock, “Maps in Colonialism”). Today, Google Maps’ monopoly in the public sphere gives it supreme hegemony over how we imagine bodies in space, with the notion of technology as a means for marking space, place, and personhood. Such mapping technologies are lifelines for queer subjects, who, by necessity or choice, must arrange hushed trysts with others who transgress the heteronormative mandates surrounding them. Yet, as I discovered, sometimes presence on social media applications for queers was marked by silence in these spaces—a silence that punctuates the need to remain closeted online as a means of avoiding unwanted attention or surveillance in these electronic “safe spaces,” while always being shaped by colonial histories and the wars that attend them as the mainstay for competing Western interests.

For example, in analyzing the use of Tinder in the Middle East, Anya Evans writes:

With the range of distance that Tinder allows, I discovered users over Israel’s Apartheid Wall in Jerusalem (14km), Tel Aviv (45km), Amman in Jordan (75km), and the south of Lebanon (140km). Searching closer to home, Tinder provided an unpleasant reminder that for those who stay within their West Bank cities, illegal and often hostile Israeli settlers are everywhere. I was horrified and yet fascinated as I swiped my way through hundreds of profiles to see Israeli man after Israeli man, as close as 2 kilometers away, inside Palestine . . . looking at everyday life, daily routines, and how people use and understood the ethnically segregated space around them, I was hooked. (Evans, “Tinder as a Methodological Tool”)

Evans’s account demonstrates the ways in which libido is an agent for Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine, thus underscoring the ways in which gay men often willingly participate in the social oppression of their own queer brethren—an oppression emerging from the ashes of racialized empire. It moreover gestures toward discourses of pink-washing by the Israeli state to veil and/or validate violence against Palestinians.

Despite India’s recent partial repeal of Section 377, and South Africa’s legislation (in place since 1996) to guard sexual minority rights, the line between public and private remains intact. What also ostensibly persists in these online communities is the social status and “modernity” that attends the English language in LGBTQI+ communities in and beyond Durban. Although South Africa became the world’s first jurisdiction to offer constitutional protections to queer people in May 1996, queer folks’ reticence to speak openly on social media about queer sex suggests that social stigma, bigoted violence, and other consequences attend representation in the chat rooms of cyberspace. Public queer identities are still taboo in Chennai, India, even though popular media—notably films including Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1998), Ligy J. Pullappally’s The Journey (2004), and Sridhar Rangayan’s Evening Shadows (2018)—have powerfully shaped the emergence of queer Indians into the public sphere and the digital milieu. Indeed, visual texts like these have permitted queer South Asians to emerge from what I have elsewhere called “digital closets” wherein “the threshold of the closet pivots on the digital apparatus” (Gairola, Homelandings, 56).

Despite the “range of gender relations in African societies” (Evaristo, “The Idea”) that characterize Buntu same-sex relations between older and younger men, the Queer SA Chat room is sensitive to sharing any information online that could jeopardize users. Indeed, upon joining the room, a message instructs visitors, “Welcome to GaySA—SA’s SOCIAL gay chatroom! RULES: *Do not ask for location or private chats in main.* Do not cruise/solicit/manhunt/camhunt/advertise what you’re looking for in the main room [sic].” These directives dominate this popular site and offer us insight into how local queers place themselves into “an imagined political community” of the nation-state (Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6). As if in response, there are very few posts aside from those inviting chat room participants to meet at another online site. This suggests that in this chat room, the English language functions like a colonial algorithm for human behavior and connection. It acts, in other words, as a kind of homological connector of members of the queer community in greater Durban and other urban areas in South Africa. However, this kind of identity privilege that linguistic privilege affords those on Queer SA seems to be stifled by the ongoing threat of identification, even in a supposedly “liberal” country like South Africa. I interpret this online hesitation as an emergent residue from the era of British colonialism, forged from fears of physical violence and hate crimes ranging from homophobic violence to conversion therapy and “corrective rapes” of lesbians. We should also recognize in the language of LGBTQI+ social media platforms the fear of reprisals rooted in the colonial history of apartheid, even at a time of crisis during which white settlers are seeking to migrate outside of South Africa.

Stripped of their legally enshrined white privilege and increasingly challenged on their land claims, these white settlers see international migration as the only viable way to reclaim white privilege when black lives begin to matter in South Africa. Given the uncertainty, potential danger, and predatory behavior that come along with anonymous chat rooms in Durban, we might ask how and where queers are meeting with the use of digital apps. Two especially popular websites emerged that publicly offer safe spaces available to anyone, rather than private chat or sex rooms, online or in real life, that may endanger queer folks who stray from the company of friends, lovers, and allies when out and about town. I mention them here because they act as portals for the local queer community to chat and meet up, both socially and for sexual escapades, and thus warrant closer examination of how language and visuals converge in constructing a queer digital subject in contemporary Durban.

The first digital resource is GayDurban.blogspot.com, which seems to openly pander to gay Caucasian men from Europe, as evidenced by the blog’s unending scroll of a topless white model with abs flexed, hand on hips. This image literally frames the top and right side of the blog as visitors scroll through the contents, which is populated with images of white male tourists. I mention these web pages of whiteness because it would be deceptively simple to assume that they do not impact the kinds of people who use the blog as a portal to meet other “likeminded individuals,” as a way of preserving a colonialist nostalgia that supports visions of an exotic other—visions fueled by white privilege underwritten by the thrill of eroticized danger. As Joseph Boone has powerfully detailed in The Homoerotics of Orientalism,

The act of crossing—whether traveling, writing, or reading—also tacitly signifies one’s willingness to offer oneself up to unsuspected, multiple ways of being. The traveling mind and mindful traveler become, in such instances, intimate participants as well as spectators in culturally specific situations that, on occasion, transform hitherto unquestioned certitudes into unknowns that must be confronted and worked through. (Boone, Homoerotics of Orientalism, xxxiv)

Boone’s opening meditations on the homoerotics of Edward Said’s most popular concept from postcolonial studies crystallize in what we can think of as “digital orientalism,” circulating through this blog as a means of representing a valid or legitimate subject as white, male, upper class, and with a low body mass index. As previously stated, default to the English language on this blog underscores and validates the taut, white bodies as the signifiers of desirable gayness in South Africa. Unsurprisingly, this erotic alignment through digital orientalism reflects the distorted mirrors within big tent digital humanities, even if “pink-washed” with pro-LGBTQI+ rhetoric. As I have earlier argued in the context of the racial masquerade of like bodies in the Physique Pictorial magazine of the 1950s and 1960s, gayness appears to emerge from “the white closet” within which the origin of gayness is manifest in skin color and the social and cultural capital that it affords its beneficiaries on a daily basis (Gairola, “White Skin, Red Masks,” 3).

In and beyond the colonialist histories carried by the English language, we must also appraise the “language” of these images against the historical moment in which they appear. While it is somewhat pedestrian for me simply to observe this in the context of GayDurban.blogspot.com, we can critically read Boone’s contention in the context of digital orientalism alongside the available images of nonwhite subjects. This is because these images are social articulations of oppressed sexual identities on the global stage throughout the digital milieu. For example, the promotional flyer of an “Aladdin adult panto” in Durban demonstrates the extremes to which digital orientalism stretches. On it, a light-skinned, big-bottomed woman sits splayed atop a skinny, darker-skinned man. The advert solicits comic relief from gay Western tourists through caricatures that reverse traditional gender roles. In this vision of Aladdin, set against the background of a pink cityscape, the terrified male is clutching onto the edge of the magic carpet while his red Fez cap remains fixed on his head.

The caricature of the postcolonial native in this social, English articulation of digital orientalism on the website “speaks,” so to speak, to queer orientalist ideals in the promo photo of the acting company. In stark contrast to the pages and pages of homonormative whiteness and the richly clad white performers who flank them, here two black performers round out the tableau in submissive poses with minstrel-like grins. Like the predominant use of the English language in the chat-room posts, these visual markers reinforce orientalist ideals in the digital milieu. Perhaps more importantly, we can deploy queer of color critique as a means of critically reading what I believe are two of the most striking aspects of these Durban chat rooms: first, the ubiquitous use of the English language to mark this digital space as progressive, contemporary, and aligned with the neoliberal ideals that attend homonationalist (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 39) sexual tourism; and second, the ubiquitous juxtaposition of white male homonormative bodies against brown others who are orientalized as weak, effeminate, or buffoonish.

In other words, the ideology implicit in the chat room’s use of the English language is visually articulated in the attendant images, as displayed in the stills I have described from the chat room. Here we can clearly survey the stark contrast between these racialized figures—a contrast harking back to centuries-old caricatures and stereotypes. Such figures complicate the equitable and inclusive formation of postcolonial digital humanities in a nonheteronormative frame, and a modality of queer DH that rigorously addresses racialized disparities underwritten by class privilege. Within recent framings of queer of color critique, such images in the digital milieu speak in English and with caricatured images that ultimately fail (even in warning subscribers of privacy limitations on the chats) in establishing a queer aesthetic that speaks to nonwhite diasporas versus rich white Western men. Gayatri Gopinath opines that such an aesthetic mediates against limited representations such as these, in language, images, and culture that open the vista to “alternative horizons of pleasure and possibility” (Gopinath, Unruly Visions, 61) in Durban’s online queer chat rooms.

In contrast to this image of postcolonial queerness, the social apps of India changed drastically while I was composing this chapter. For example, Mingle2’s Chennai Gay Chat room went behind a paywall after the Supreme Court of India lifted part of the ban on queer sex that was enshrined by the British Crown’s draconian Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Clearly, this is excellent news to many persecuted LGBTQI+ Indians (not just those who would plumb the country for its sexual adventures). The September 2018 ruling now legalizes consensual sex between partners of the same sex/gender—a decision with ramifications that “travel” across the Indian Ocean to members of the Indian diaspora in countries as diverse as South Africa, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Bali, and Australia. These queer journeys of languages, laws, and representations in and through the digital milieu allow the restrictive “space of the region as a way of decentering and destabilizing dominant nationalist narratives, and foregrounding ‘other’ narratives that tell entirely different stories of gender, sexuality, and nationalist subjectivity” (Gopinath, Unruly Visions, 29).

Gopinath’s observation, and her formulation of an aesthetic practice of queer diasporas, mediates against the domination of the English language and the interpellation of upper-middle-class white Westerners as the default for queer subjectivity on chat rooms in the digital Indian Ocean. It also mediates against the elision of lesbians and queer women of color sexualities in these very areas. In this digital arena, too, such elisions are common. Sneha Krishnan specifically addresses “gendered forms of playfulness” in which middle-class women in Chennai “engage in practices of eroticism with each other” (Krishnan, “Bitch, Don’t Be a Lesbian,” 152). In this piece, Krishnan explores the ways in which social media in general, and taking selfies in particular, consolidate queer aesthetic practices for young women in Chennai. As such, Gopinath and Krishnan speak from divergent sites of visual culture that have similar goals, and thus they forge a meaningful purpose between queer of color critique and queer digital humanities, which moreover echoes the call by Ruberg, Boyd, and Howe. For the latter coauthors, queer DH must “seek out systems of meaning-making that can account for nonbinary relationships . . . that support ambiguity, permit play, and engage difference” (Ruberg, Boyd, and Howe, “Toward a Queer Digital Humanities,” 121–23).

Perhaps most importantly, both social justice projects resist the marginalization of women in queer online discourse, which substantially transposes misogyny and sexism into the cyber zones of digital subjectivity in the so-called Global South. In mapping the past and present potentials of the interaction of South Asian studies and digital humanities (Risam and Gairola, “South Asian Digital Humanities,” 152), I predict that the erotic experiences of users around the globe will become more and more materially rooted as digital spatiality negotiates the digital Indian Ocean and the crosscurrents of capital that often serve as its vehicle. In the context of queer Indian women in and beyond the Chennai chat rooms and across the subcontinent, I would conclude this section by mentioning that we must include in this formulation transgender women of color who suffer from odious discrimination and violence in liberal bastions in both the Global South and the Global North (Bailey, “#transform(ing) DH Writing and Research”; Gairola, “From Bombay Dost to Global Host”; Gairola, “X Factors of Sex”).

From Digital Closets to Equitable Articulations in the Global South

The quest for a nonbinary DH informed by a queer of color critique also compels all of us to make the transition from one subjectivity to another in perpetuity, like diasporic nomads always on the move as strategy rather than under compulsion. This process will certainly set off a revolution throughout the digital networks of kinship and affiliation that now constitute the daily lives of queer people around the rim of the Indian Ocean, negotiating the residue of colonial racism even in the celebratory throes of life outside of the closet. It would further enrich the goals of both postcolonial DH and queer DH in championing equity and inclusivity: queer of color critique enables a more robust reckoning with LGBTQI+ studies alongside racially and historically nonhegemonic DHs, while empowering queer DH to meditate more deeply on its racialized parameters, which have inextricable, intersectional relationships with other identity categories.

I conclude with this statement not as a criticism of either of these timely, emergent fields in the superstructure of DH, but rather as a wake-up call to allies across the Global South who wish to gain a deeper understanding of how the erotic lives of people of color in this part of the world experience and interface with the digital milieu. For as Dorothy Kim states in “How to #DecolonizeDH: Actionable Steps for an Antifascist DH”:

What I think many people hoped for the digital humanities was that technological access to a larger public would mean that communities of color, LGBTQ communities, differently abled bodies would finally get a chance to have their narratives told and their archives curated. But in fact, what has happened is that the digital humanities, particularly the kind of DH that builds projects and applies for government and foundation funding, has mostly reified and made more extreme the inequities we have seen in scholarship. (Kim, “How to #DecolonizeDH,” 484)

The sense of sullen disappointment that underpins Kim’s betrayed hope is shared by many of us, owing to the lack of a multilingual DH that enjoys as much prestige as the subjects and institutions dominating the field in the Global North. I would add that a queer DH that is intersectional and nonbinary must also tackle the life-and-death issues of trans women of color who deal with unspeakable bigotry and are exposed to daily public violence (Bailey, “#transform(ing) DH Writing and Research”; Gairola, “From Bombay Dost to Global Host”; Gairola, “X Factors of Sex”). This is especially important in a postcolonial nation like India, where transgender subjects are simultaneously outcast yet legally recognized, and moreover culturally codified as auspicious harbingers at life milestones linked to marriage and childbirth. Addressing these issues in the digital spatiality of the so-called Global South potentially offers the digital humanities of the twenty-first century a more equitable and inclusive methodology that responsibly acknowledges the marginalized histories of both colonialism/racism and sexuality/gender, and the revolutionary possibilities that they hold for radically augmenting the limitations of DH today.

Notes

I owe thanks to a global network of warm colleagues who have generously served as sounding boards for my scholarly meditations on queer and postcolonial subjectivities in the digital milieu. I thank, for counsel big and small that all came to matter, Aman Alagh, Paul Arthur, Deepika Bahri, Tully Barnett, Ethan Blue, Barbara Bordalejo, Elisabeth Burr, Carol Chiodo, Adrian Chitralla, Kate Cummings, Megan Cytron, Rohit Dasgupta, Tim Flanagan, Radhika Gajjala, Alex Gil, Helena Grehan, Thomas Josham, Dorothy Kim, Christian Mauri, Nirmala Menon, Vijay Mishra, Paige Morgan, Geeta Patel, Tyler Ray, Roopika Risam, Martin Roth, Dibyadyuti Roy, Jentery Sayers, Nishant Shah, Ray Siemens, Tayler Jay Smith, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Tyne Daile Sumner, and Lauren Tilton.

The work contained here was substantially shaped by the provocative “Queer Digital Humanities” seminar offered by Jason Boyd and Jamie Howe at the 2018 Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), University of Victoria, Canada, and the 2018 site-intensive workshop on “Humanities Data and Mapping Environments” led by David Wrisley and Randa El-Khatib at the European Summer University in the Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig, Germany. A portion of the introduction has appeared in different form in Postcolonial Studies 22, no. 4 (2019).

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