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Commons Conversations

Digital Hijras: Intersex/ tions of Postcolonial and Queer Digital Humanities

Commons Conversations
22 Jan, 2020

Digital Hijras: Intersex/ tions of Postcolonial and Queer Digital Humanities

with Rahul Gairola
Murdoch University

Co-sponsored by the Color of New Media Working Group.

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The goal of this talk is to historically and critically read hijras’ (M2F transgender women’s) identities on social media platforms of Bombay Dost (BD) – namely the organization’s Facebook group page. I engage in this research as a means for complicating and extending the ways in which digital identities come together in the purview of publications in Digital India. I turn my critical acumen to BD’s social media platform because it reconfigures accessibility on the “all-purpose platform” (Dore) of social media in the twenty-first century. It is on this electronic stage of hyperlinked identities and corresponding data conglomerations that contemporary identities in India are being transformed and made visible to a digitally literate public.

Dr Rahul Krishna Gairola is The Krishna Somers Lecturer Western Australia. He is a co-author of Migration, Gender and Home Economics in Rural North India (Routledge, 2019), author of Homelandings: Postcolonial Diasporas and Transatlantic Belonging (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), and a co-editor of Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, & Politics (Orient Blackswan/ Lexington Books, 2016). He is also co- editor with Roopika Risam of the South Asian Digital Humanities Then and Now special issue of South Asian Review (Taylor & Francis) and co-editor with Martin Roth of the Digital Spatiality special issue of Asiascape: Digital Asia (Brill Publishers). He is, with Dr Bina Fernandez (University of Melbourne), co-editor of the Routledge South Asian book series of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA), and editor of the forthcoming volume Trauma, Memory, and Healing in Asian Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2020) in loving memory of Sharanya Jayawickrama.

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