Social media’s queer politics: possibilities, limitations, and negotiations of community-building in India

This thesis offers an empirical contribution to studies of queer digital cultures by focusing on the experiences of queer and trans women in India. It also expands theorisations of queer digital cultures through a political economy analysis that examines how digital authoritarianism and content moderation practices constrain the articulation of a radical queer politics of liberation on social media platforms. In this thesis, I explore the affordances and limitations of social media platforms for queer and trans women in India to build community. I investigate how the spatial, temporal, and communicative affordances offered by social media platforms are leveraged by queer and trans women’s community groups and individual users in India to build community. At the same time, I explore how the nexus of state and corporate policing and surveillance on such platforms limits and curtails their affordances. I thus explore what user negotiations begin to emerge, in response. This thesis centres a radical and expansive queer politics, that is not limited to questions of only gender and sexuality, but that deals seriously with issues of caste, religion, and Hindu nationalism. Methodologically, it is grounded in qualitative, queer, feminist, and decolonial approaches, drawing on in-depth interviews and digital ethnographic methods. I offer three major conclusions in this project. First, I argue that social media platforms offer new opportunities for queer and trans women in India to engage in forms of queer invention, by enabling a space for community-building, trans genderplay, identity expression, and gender validation. Second, I argue that caste-oppressed and Muslim queer and trans women are leveraging these affordances of social media platforms to build anti-caste and Muslim queer and trans online counterpublics and communities. Third, I argue that the political economy of social media platforms, involving the confluence of global laws, Indian laws, and systems of algorithmic content moderation, constrain these affordances, through the deplatforming of sex, the criminalisation of dissent, and the opacity and rigidity of content moderation practices. As a result, I explore the negotiations that emerge for queer and trans women users in their attempts to subvert such limiting forces.