Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (11 page)

12. See—

(
a
) Zia Jaffrey,
The Invisibles: A Tale of the Eunuchs of India
(New York: Pantheon, 1996).

(
b
) Gayatri Reddy,
With Respect to Sex:
Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

(
c
) Gautam Bhan and Arvind Narrain,
Because I Have a Voice: Queer Polics in India
(New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006).

(
d
) Geetanjali Misra, Creating Resources for Empowerment in Action (CREA) and Radhika Chandiramani, Talking About Reproductive and Sexual Health Issues (TARSHI),
Sexuality, Gender and Rights: Exploring Theory and Practice in South and
Southeast Asia
(New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005).

13. Serena Nanda,
Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1990).

14. The term
hijra
refers to ‘a socially constructed role for a group of men with religious and cultural significance, whose primary belief is around the religious sacrifice of their genitalia and who act as women in exaggerated styles’ (Shivananda Khan, ‘Cultural constructions of male sexualities in India’,
Naz Foundation International
, June 1995).

Introduction
69

It includes ‘men who go in for hormonal treatment, those who undergo sex change operations and those who are born hermaphrodite’ (Arvind Narrain,
Queer: Despised
Sexuality, Law and Legal Change.
Bangalore: Books For Change, 2004, p. 2).
Hijra
is

‘not just a third gender’ but ‘also a third sex’, with a ‘well defined social identity…

To be
hijra
the crucial step is to take the vow of
Hijra
hood and became part of the
Hijra
clan, which functions almost as a caste, with its own specific inner workings, rules, rituals, and hierarchy.… In the past kings and noblemen were their patrons…

today… as they beg, sing, dance, bless and curse for a living, the public treats them with a mixture of awe, dread and disdain’ (Devdutt Pattanaik,
The Man Who Was a
Woman and Other Queer Tales from Hindu Lore.
New York: Harrington Park Press, 2002, pp. 11–12).

‘
Kothi
is a feminized male identity which is adopted by some people in the Indian subcontinent and is marked by gender non-conformity. A
kothi
though biologically male, adopts feminine modes of dressing, speech and behavior and would look for a male partner who has masculine modes of behavior’ (Arvind Narrain, 2004, op. cit., pp. 2–3).

15. See—

(
a
) Jigna Desai’s,
Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film
(New York: Routledge, 2004). Deals with the gender and sexual politics of South Asian diasporas.

(
b
) Gayatri Gopinath,
Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures
(Durham, Duke University Press, 2005).

(
c
) Rajinder Dudrah, ‘Enter the Queer Female Diasporic Subject’, GLQ:
A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies,
Volume 12, Number 4. (Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 655–656.

(
d
) Jasbir Puar, ‘The Remaking of a Model Minority: Perverse Projectiles under the Specter of (Counter), Terrorism’,
Social Text
—80 (Volume 22, Number 3), Duke University Press, Fall 2004, pp. 75–104.

16. In articles like ‘Under the Rainbow Flag: Webbing Global Gay Identities’ (from the
International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies,
July 2002 issue; Vol. 7(2–3), pp. 107–124), the authors compare and contrast the analyses of heavily trafficked US gay websites with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender sites originating in Mainland China, Japan and Germany. John Campbell’s
Getting It On Online: Cyberspace,
Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity
(New York: Harrington Park Press, 2004)

deals with the construction of the gay male body in cyberspace. David Shaw has a chapter in the Steve Jones edited
Virtual Culture
(London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997) titled ‘Gay men and computer communication: A discourse of sex and identity in cyberspace’ and Randal Woodland examines gay or lesbian identity and the construction of cyberspace in
The Cybercultures Reader
(London; New York: Routledge, 2000). From an Asian perspective,
Mobile Cultures
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) provides relevant and empirically grounded studies of the connections between new media technologies, globalization and the rise of queer Asia. There are also a few essays available, describing the Indian gay online experience, such as—

(
a
) Chandra S. Balachandran, ‘Desi Pride on the Internet—South Asian Queers in Cyberspace’,
Trikone
(January 1996), pp. 18–19.

(
b
) Vikram, ‘Cybergay’,
Bombay Dost
, Vol. 7(1), 1999, pp. 8–13.

70
Gay

Bombay

(
c
) Shrinand Deshpande, ‘Point and Click Communities? South Asian Queers out on the Internet’,
Trikone
(October 2000), pp. 6–7.

(
d
) Scott Kugle, ‘Internet Activism, Internet Passivism’,
Trikone
(October 2000), pp. 10–11.

(
e
) Sandip Roy, ‘GayBombay’,
Salon.com 2
December 2002, http://archive.salon.com/

tech/feature/2002/12/02/gay_india

17. Daniel Miller and Don Slater,
The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach
(Oxford/New York: Berg, 2000), p. 5, as cited in Samuel Wilson and Leighton Peterson, ‘The Anthropology of Online Communities’,
Annual Review of Anthropology
(Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews, 2002), Vol. 31, p. 453.

18. Dennis Altman, ‘Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities’,
Social Text
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), No. 48, p. 91.

19. Homi Bhabha,
Location of Culture
(London; New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1–2.

20. Outlined in Arjun Appadurai,
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 27–47.

21. Ibid, pp. 32–33.

22. Ibid, p. 33.

23. Ibid, p. 37.

24. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’, in
Public
Culture
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), Vol. 12(1), p. 6.

25. Ibid.

26. Arjun Appadurai (1996), op. cit., p. 55.

27. Ibid, p. 3.

28. Arjun Appadurai (2000), op. cit., pp. 5–6.

29. Nancy Fraser introduces the notion of ‘counter-publics’ (or sub-groups within the mainstream that are critical of mainstream ideologies and practices) in her essay

‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’. From
Habermas and the Public Sphere
(Ed. Craig Calhoun) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 109–142.

30. Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc, ‘The Culture That Sticks to the Skin: A Manifesto for a New Cultural Studies’,
Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of
Popular Culture
(Duke University Press, 2002), p. 16.

31. David Silverman,
Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analyzing Talk, Text and
Interaction
(London: Sage Publications, 1993), p. 156; cited in Kim Christian Schroder

‘The Best of Both Worlds: Media Audience Research Between Rival Paradigms’, from Pertti Alasuutari (Ed.),
Rethinking the Media Audience
(London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999), p. 50.

32. Kim Christian Schroder, ‘The Best of Both Worlds: Media Audience Research Between Rival Paradigms’, in Pertti Alasuutari (Ed.),
Rethinking the Media Audience
(London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999), p. 51.

33. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Eds),
Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds
of a Field Science
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 34.

34. Joanne Passaro, ‘You Can’t Take the Subway to the Field’, in Gupta and Ferguson, op. cit., p. 156.

35. Stephen Tyler,
The Unspeakable: Discourse, Dialogue and Rhetoric in the Postmodern World
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 199–200, cited in Frank Schaap op. cit., p. 131.

Introduction
71

36. Arthur Bochner and Carolyn Ellis, ‘Series Editors’ Introduction’, Annette Markham,
Life
Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space
(Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1998), p. 8.

37. Ibid, p. 213.

38. John Edward Campbell, op. cit., p. 25.

39. Kath Weston,
Families We Choose
(Revised Edition), (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997 [1991]), p. 14.

40. John Edward Campbell, op. cit., p. 39.

41. See Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’
Feminist Studies
(College Park, MD: Feminist Studies Inc., 1988), No. 14, pp. 575–599.

42. See Gupta and Ferguson, op. cit., p. 32.

43. Kirin Narayan, ‘How Native is a “Native” Anthropologist?’,
American Anthropologist
(Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association, 1993), Vol. 95(3), pp. 672, 682.

44. Suad Joseph, ‘Feminization, Familism, Self and Politics: Research as a Mughtaribi’, in Soraya Altorki and Camilla Fawzia El-Solh (Eds),
Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your
Own Society
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998), p. 47.

45. Kirin Narayan, op. cit., pp. 681–682.

46. Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap (Eds),
Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay
Anthropology
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 12.

47. Frank Schaap,
The Words That Took Us There: Ethnography in a Virtual Reality
(Amsterdam: Aksant Academic Publishers, 2002), p. 1.

48. John Edward Campbell, op. cit., p. 185.

49. Jenkins, McPherson and Shattuc, op. cit., p. 3.

50. John Edward Campbell, op. cit., p. 185.

51. Kath Weston, ‘The Virtual Anthropologist’, in Gupta and Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 171–172.

52. David Silver, ‘Internet/Cyberculture/Digital Culture/New Media/Fill-in-the-Blank Studies’,
New Media and Society
(London; Thousand Oaks, CA; New Delhi, India: Sage Publications, 2004), Vol. 6(1), p. 55.

53. See David Silver, ‘Looking Backwards, Looking Forward, Cyberculture Studies 1990–2000’, in David Gauntlett,
Web.Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age
London: Arnold, 2000), pp. 19–30.

54. William Gibson,
Neuromacer
(New York: Ace Books, 1984), p. 51, cited in David Silver (2000), op. cit., p. 21.

55. In this context, Allucquere Rosanne Stone’s definition of cyberspace (from ‘Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures’, in Michael Benedikt, [Ed.]
Cyberspace: First Steps
[Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991], p. 85) would be more apt: ‘…incontrovertibly social spaces in which people still meet face to face, but under new definitions of both “meet” and “face”’. Reproduced in David Silver, (2000), op. cit., p. 21.

56. See Barry Wellman, ‘The Three Ages of Internet Studies: Ten, Five and Zero Years Ago’,
New Media and Society
(London; Thousand Oaks, CA; New Delhi, India: Sage Publications, 2004), Vol. 6(1), pp. 123–129.

57. See David Silver (2000). op. cit., pp. 18–30.

58. These utopian or dystopian visions are not unique to the Internet, but have accompanied every major new communication invention. See, for example—

72
Gay

Bombay

(
a
) Daniel R. Headrick,
When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in
the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

(
b
) Tom Standage,
The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the
Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers
(New York: Berkley Books, 1998).

(
c
) David E. Nye,
Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology 1880–1940.

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

(
d
) Elizabeth Eisenstein,
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

59. John Perry Barlow, ‘Is there a There in Cyberspace’,
Utne
Reader 68 (Minneapolis, 1995) cited in Barry Wellman (2004), op. cit., p. 124.

60. Texas broadcaster Jim Hightower, quoted in Fox R, ‘Newstrack’ Communications of the ACM 38(8), 1995, pp. 11–12, cited in Barry Wellman (2004), op. cit., p. 124.

61. David Trend (Ed.),
Reading Digital Culture
(Malden, MA/Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2001), p. 2.

62. Manuel Castells,
The Rise of the Network Society
(Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), cited in Nina Wakeford, ‘Pushing the Boundary of New Media Studies’,
New Media and Society
(London; Thousand Oaks, CA; New Delhi, India: Sage Publications, 2004), Vol. 6(1), p. 132.

63. ‘A Rape in Cyberspace; Or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society’,
My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion
in a Virtual World
(New York: Owl Books, 1999). This article first appeared in the New York based newspaper
Village Voice
in 1993 and has since been included in several cyberspace anthologies.

64. A MUD (multi-user dungeon/domain) is a multi-player Internet-based computer role-playing game, where players adopt
avatars
or roles of certain characters, see textual descriptions of rooms, objects, and other
avatars
within the game and interact with other players by using text commands. MOO stands for
MUD
Object Oriented
and is a kind of MUD text-based virtual reality system that is programmable by utilizing the MOO programming language.