Something Rotten? A think-piece

     In 2007, when Maya Indira Ganesh and I started working on sexual rights and the internet in India, it was a sparse field. We had both worked for a decade already on gender and sexuality as feminist activists and researchers, but the question of how technology was affecting women and girls in India was something new. 

      We were excited by our findings in the EROTICS research study that the internet (then defined as a fearful place for girls and women) was actually a space where girls and young women were able to bypass social morality and construct their “self” in new, empowering ways. They were able to transgress social norms and try out fantasies, both big and small. They were wearing sleeveless tops and taking pictures of themselves posing like film stars, and suddenly seeing themselves anew through this mirror of the camera. They were experiencing a feeling of carefree loitering for the first time as they roamed the digital highways, and searched for their ‘Raj Malhotras’ and ‘Rahuls’ in this online world. Some shared stories of how the internet had helped them work through gender dysphoria and had become a space where they had been able to begin a journey of self-determination over their gender and sexual identities. Lesbian activists shared how the internet had become a safe space for building a transnational movement for queer women. Many people we met had made emotional connections with people they’d never have otherwise interacted with. 

      When I was doing the research in 2012 for Intimate City (on sex work online) I found that technology had diversified the sex industry, and sex work had taken nuanced forms under the gig economy. People were articulating their desires, learning to express consent, taking risks and tasting new pleasures online. Those exploring sexual transactions were queering heteronormativity too, through transgressions of what was the norm in their contexts. People shared fantasies of intimacy across caste and religious lines, something that was filled with risk in real life. Some shared culturally coded desires, like a ‘suhaag raat’ fantasy of an unmarried woman that she sought from a male service provider. Others were just looking for communities online where their desires were not judged or shamed. 

       Over the next decade, this feeling of hopefulness that the online will become a path to freedom from offline social and sexual norms and taboos hovered in the air. However, it was short lived. The field is buzzing with scholarship today on gender, sexuality and the digital. Yet, the mood is sombre: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. 

      The corporate takeovers, state surveillance, political agendas and data capture has forced caution into the water. A dissatisfaction lingers with having to participate in a world of stalk-troll-sell-scroll. It is hard to shake off the feeling that the Digital is controlled by forces that straitjacket us and our desires into being obedient consumers and part of a herd. Today, digital desires seem to be far from the liberatory erotic that Maya and I once found. Something has changed, which has derailed the promise of the internet as a space for freedom and exploration, and I can’t seem to put my finger on it. 

      While every aspect of living is morphed into the digital, the Digital today is largely defined by social media – the central impulse of which is performance. Ironically, if once we were ‘performing gender’, we are now performing desire. I sometimes think of how the Reels culture has changed dance choreography. With all the locks and pops choreography has become about moving within a constrained frame – that of the mobile phone camera, rather than occupying and shaping larger spaces like that of a stage. There’s only so much you can move when doing that. It’s like a metaphor for what the Digital has done to desires. Made it dance in a box, stay within the lines, within the frame of the mobile phone screen.

      On dating apps, influencer handles, fashion blogs and vlogs, GRWM videos, Pride photos or DEI declarations, this performative impulse spreads like barnacles sticking to all kinds of whales of desires. Heterosexuality becomes pinned to templates of the filmed surprise proposal, Maldivian honeymoons, Sabyasachi lehengas, and dancing at sangeets, all of which we are expected to also now desire and emulate. Queerness online has its own template, tethered to a global queer politics often critiqued for being homogenous and Westernized. Within this form of the Digital, queerness is flattened into an aesthetic more than a politics. 

      This spectacular nature of the visual performance online does two things – it drowns out the voices of people, and it excludes the unspectacular. 

First, the voices. What we see online does not tell us enough about what it means to be a desiring human being. It hides the kinds of messiness and transgressions that desiring often involves. It looks away from the vulnerable position that desiring puts us in, and the physical and social risks of loving across caste, religion or the same sex. 

     Second, the unspectacular. Last year, I worked on an archival book for a feminist organization that turned 40 years old. We had decided to do an illustrated alphabet book to reflect the ABCs of the organization over the decades. When we got to Q, we knew our word had to be Queer. The organization had been a place where many queer women had found a space to build new lives. When we tried to do the visuals, however, we would get stuck in flags and rainbows and representing diversity. Through a series of conversations on what we meant by queer, we ultimately went with a visual of two women walking through a garden with birds flying overhead, because that was the essence of queerness that the organization felt was more authentic for them – a sense of freedom, fluidity, self-determination, and spaciousness. Desires look different in different contexts and times. Desires are usually spectacular in experience, but not always a spectacle. 

     These non-spectacle desires are not the only things excluded in the current circulation of the Digital. The disconnect between the discourse online and field realities is stark. 

I find it hard to reconcile the visible branding of queerness with the dangerousness that I see being queer really is on the ground. I have heard testimonies of violence and discrimination, especially natal family violence, in the field that I never see online. Stories of not only people who are trans or non-binary but also of girls and young women, or young men, who are straining against norms of masculinity and femininity that are becoming more rigid in their contexts. Small gender transgressions (even desires of wearing jeans or a crop top) are increasingly met with terrible consequences, inviting the wrath of families, relatives, community leaders and more. Where are the stories of everyday transgression, punishment, harshness, beauties, discoveries on gender and sexuality that technology has precipitated?  

       The government, corporations, banks would have us all believe we are in the Digital age. It is assumed almost everyone is online. Yet, of the 160 girls and young women I met over the last two months in rural India, very few had their own mobile phones. Most of them do have access to phones, even if they don’t have a personal phone – their brothers or fathers’ phone usually, an access that is conditional (for educational purposes only) and closely surveilled (no social media, no talking to boys). 

       In the workshops we did together, when asked to “walk like boys and men” they would immediately put up a phone to their ear, or an imaginary earpiece while tending to their hair or catcalling girls. For them, the mobile phone and the digital world is a marker of masculinity and its associated freedoms, like motorbikes once were. These girls don’t have digital desires. Only the desire to be digital. 

      These are the same ‘girls and young women’ who are part of the statistic – ‘40% of women in India do not have access to a smartphone’. Do they even matter to the field of scholarship on gender, sexuality and technology? The digital divide might refer to a swathe of 150 million people kept away from digital life. But it also works the other way around. It is the gulf between the people online and those who are not online – of communicating, understanding and relating to one another.

      The internet’s radical and revolutionary potential is that it really makes the world smaller, and easier to build solidarities with one another across our struggles. It is through this connection that we begin to see that the root causes for our un-freedoms are shared: the violent, relentless, institutionalized overt and covert coercion to stay within caste, religious, class, gender norms and social rules. 

        It worries me that the unidimensional and sanitized performance of desires that the Digital today offers with millions falling through the cracks, is a disservice to what desiring looks like in reality. It detracts from the real struggle of articulating and grasping at our desires and the real exhilaration when we do. I fear it reduces empathy, and dialogue between different kinds of people. But mostly, I fear that if we have only well-marketed, homogenous and safe templates to refer to, we will lose our ability to imagine new ways of being and our own ways of desiring.  

Acknowledgements 

The author would like to thank Apeksha Vora and Tara B Gupta for their excellent inputs on earlier drafts that helped shape this piece.