Intimate Subjects and Virtual Spaces: Rethinking Sexuality as a Category for Intimate Ethnographies

A note about methodologies

Queer anthropology following Boellstorff (2007) has an unlinear trajectory. Queer digital sites as an ethnographic field of enquiry open up new kinds of potential. Not only is this a form of queer space (one that is imagined and created by our research participants) but it is also a place of opportunities and imagined futures. In attempting to look at the affective forms of communication and subject formation, our research is queery-ing broad domains of intimacy, friendship and a critique of sexuality politics in India. The sites for this research cut across disciplinary boundaries traversing digital culture and media and anthropological ethnography. Digital and virtual spaces as ethnographic sites engage with a kind of queer sensibility. We believe these spaces allow persons to communicate, identify and relate with each other. This is significant as these spaces, which were once situated at the ostensible margins of community making, subvert citizen subject formation. Our methodologies, derived from Gopinath’s (2005: 22) ‘scavenger methodology’ and Mowlabocus’ (2010: 7) ‘magpie methodology’, offer a queer reading of these diverse media texts. Following scholars such as Haritaworn et al. (2014: 5), we too use ‘diverse methodologies… located within and across a range of interdisciplinary formations.’ Whilst studies by Mowlabocus (2010) and Shahani (2008) have studied the queer potential of these sites as a new form of community making, we propose it is the intimacy engendered in these spaces that forms its queer sensibility.

This article is a bricolage, a work created from a variety of methodologies, narratives, personal stories and memories that bring forth the complex and affective nature of digital culture. Gopinath (2005: 22) argues, ‘queerness references an alternative hermeneutic, the particular interpretive strategies that are available to those who are deemed “impossible” within hegemonic nationalist and diasporic discourses’. For Gopinath, the category ‘queer’ names a reading and citational practice which she deploys to read multiple cultural texts. We employ a queer hermeneutics of the multiple posts and memes on FB and PR in order to situate the ways in which virtual intimacies engender potentials for cutting through neoliberal regulations of bodies and pleasures. We analyze the data by using a patchwork of tools appropriating ‘the glittering highlights of theory from a diverse range of disciplines’. Data was collected through lurking (Mowlabocus, 2010: 121), a method by which we would join online groups, FB pages, PR clubs and forums observing and participating in the communications. In addition, data was also collected through informal interactions as well as semi-structured interviews, emails, and instant chat between 2012–2014 with the research participants in Siliguri, Barasat, and Kolkata. Using an ethical framework developed from the Association of Internet Researchers guidelines, we iterate that all names of individuals used in this article are pseudonyms. In addition, we have also provided pseudonyms for all our virtual participants including their usernames and handles. Usernames and handles are generally computer generated and can be edited by the users. They are used in lieu of the user’s ‘real name’. We have assigned names that are closely aligned and reflect the usernames they had chosen themselves. Permission to use memes and communication was explicitly sought and granted to the researchers.

Our research methodology collapses the boundaries between the researcher and the subject of ethnographic research. We acknowledge intimate entanglements and exchanges both with the participants as well as the virtual spaces elaborated in this article.

Virtual intimacies

Internet hook-up sites, social networking sites such as FB, and new media technologies such as Whats-App and Viber are allowing for the creation of virtual platforms connecting people across diverse geographic locales. The screen to body interface creates an intimate loop within which diverse social actors are tethered through the internet. The use of digital technologies in order to communicate innermost details creates virtual intimacies. Intimacy, according to McGlotten (2013: 1),

describes: a feeling of connection or a sense of belonging; embodied and carnal sensuality, that is, sex; and that which is most inward or inmost to one’s personhood. Intimacy is also a vast assemblage of ideologies, institutional sites, and diverse sets of material and semiotic practices that exert normative pressures on large and small bodies, lives, and worlds. (emphases in original)

Giddens’ (1991) writing about the transformation of intimacy explores ‘an intrinsic relation between the globalising tendencies of modernity and localised events in day-to-day life; a complicated, dialectical connection between the “extensional” and the “intensional”’ (p. 123). Giddens argues that romantic love is a product of modernity and has accompanied the process of modernization. It is a form of storytelling wherein the self is narrated. According to Giddens, romantic love is related to the question of intimacy and takes the form of an emotional communication. In this article, we define intimacy as an assemblage of bodies, feelings, and connections mediated through new media technologies. Within the digital landscape, intimacy is generated and the emotional culture, which is generated through such intimate formations, intersects both private and public lives. This view is supported by Giddens who argues that intimacy is part of a democratized process and structurally corresponds to the private sphere. Within the digital sphere, especially aided through social media, the perception of the private and the public is ruptured beyond recognition. It is not that the traditional private and public distinction ceases to exist in cyberspace but rather that they get reformulated.

In the next section, we turn to the FB interactions forged between young men who volunteer for a project seeking to rehabilitate runaway boys in Kolkata. We present two poetic memes posted on FB that express the intimate dimensions of virtual space.

Failed subjects

PDS is a non-governmental organization established in 1997; it operates shelters for runaway children within the major railway stations within Kolkata, as well as major regional railway stations such as Asansol, Malda, Murshidabad, and Siliguri. The staff of PDS (many of whom are young men who have grown up through the shelters at the railway stations and government-run boarding homes for runaway men) build friendships with the runaway boys and young men at the railway stations. Annual reports of PDS and its website suggest that the drop-in shelters and friendships forged in these spaces serve as technologies for reforming the delinquent runaway boys into productive citizen subjects. The PDS website showcases a section titled ‘success stories’ that feature young men who were reformed through informal schooling and technical education. These stories present the young runaway men’s past as bleak and a failure, whereas through their engagements with PDS their present and potential future is framed through narratives of reform and success.

The runaway boys and young men are identified as delinquent youth by the Railway Protection Forces and local police stations (PDS Annual Report, 2012, 2014). The shelters are interstitial spaces between discipline, regulation, and delinquency. PDS initiatives in the shelters aim to reunite the runaway boys and young men with their families and encourage the young men to access government-run saving schemes, health and hygiene programs. PDS utilizes dance movement workshops and theatre as tools for mobilizing homeless young and runaway boys living at railway stations and aims to raise awareness about the plight of runaway children through these events. Dance and theatre movement exercises add a creative dimension to PDS’s reform initiatives, perhaps allowing the runaway boys and young volunteers to rearticulate their life stories. The railway shelters, volunteer and staff training workshops, along with projects geared toward employment readiness training also provide spaces of temporary relief for the runaway boys and young men. Further, PDS has launched advocacy initiatives toward legal reforms related to child protection laws in India. Deep Purkayastha, the executive director of PDS, announces the success of legal reforms in his opening letter to the 2014 Annual Report. According to the letter, the Central Railway Board announced Standing Operating Procedures (SOPs) across India, which would form the basis for all child protection procedures within railway stations. The letter further highlights a decision made by the New Delhi High Court with regard to child protection law. The decision cited the partnership between PDS and the Railway Protection Forces as a model for dealing with runaway children living in railway stations (PDS Annual Report, 2014). Toward the end of his letter, the executive director thanks all the children of PDS mentioning, ‘many of them are now adults and have stayed on to become our colleagues’ (PDS Annual Report, 2014: 2).

Many PDS volunteers maintain FB pages and remain connected to each other through PDS’s FB page. PDS annual reports mention FB as one of the favorite leisure activities of the young men involved with PDS. Two poetic memes posted by the volunteers illustrate the ways in which the young men are articulating ideas about their bodies and pleasures on virtual space. The authors maintain regular communications with PDS volunteers through the FB page and the chat feature provided by FB. The interactions forged by the authors and the young men involved with PDS take virtual shape through images, words, and posts on FB. We present two such collages in order to demonstrate the substance of intimacy forged between the young men (and the authors) on social networking platforms such as FB. ⁵

Sudesh’s post

Suddenly one day I was born

I do not recall that day

Yet in every moment

I keep dying

I keep dying

In the language of Biology I have gone into extinction

I keep taking

I keep taking loud anxious breath

In search of death.

(Sudesh)

Sudesh’s post narrates anxieties about life and death. His life is ordinary, accidental, and perhaps soon to be rendered as extinct. In this post, Sudesh, a young Hindu male volunteer residing in Siliguri (a hill town, and a major railway junction in North Bengal), seeks to express his discomfort with his life. When asked, Sudesh mentions that he sought to express the pain felt by him and many of his friends through this poetic meme. At the time of this post, Sudesh was in conflict with his family. They desired that he should pursue a bachelor’s degree in sciences hoping that such a degree would help him find a lucrative job. Sudesh remains interested in theater and cultural activism. He took up a part-time job with PDS against his parents’ desires and was forced to take a bachelor’s degree in sciences against his will. He resisted through complaining about chronic pain in his body, and eventually quit the degree and migrated to Santiniketan (the creative university set up the Nobel Laureate poet Rabindranth Tagore) in order to pursue a bachelor’s degree in theater. In the poetic meme, Sudesh narrates his pain, sudden birth, and state of dissolution. Images of a rose, water taps, washbasins, what seems like a suction cup, a hand holding an empty bottle, and multiple images of women attempting to cover their breasts inform the collage (see Figure 1). The images along with the poem seek to explain the imminent death of the young male author. The young man suggests breathing to die. His birth is accidental. The piece breathes its momentary life and then fades away into potential extinction as other news feeds creep through our virtual walls. OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Image from Sudesh’s post.

Rafiqul’s post

I am living with hope

Perhaps one day you will return

My heart is filled with joy

I am anticipating the return of old days

I do not know if the days from my past will ever return!

I sit here with hope, with a heart filled with joy

I hope that my past shall return.

(Rafiqul)

Another post involves a black and white image of a young man (Figure 2). The poetic rendition narrates the author awaiting someone’s return. He is unsure, melancholic and hopeful at the same time. The young man’s gaze gestures nostalgic return to some imagined time and place. His hope for the return of his beloved, along with nostalgia for the past creates a perverse sense of time, one that is perpetually hanging in space, much like his poetic meme. The young volunteers’ sense of time does not match the developmental time of PDS. While PDS is invested in presenting a view of the lives of young men it works with as characterized by an anomic past and a reformed future on its website and through its annual reports, the virtual exchanges gesture a melancholic yearning for the past, a sense of failure and imminent death among the young men themselves. The young men articulate a sense of failure, which haunts their life (and death). Rafiqul is a young Muslim man living close to PDS’s office in the New Alipur area of Kolkata. He works as a camera technician on movie sets, and has irregular income; his poem suggests a melancholic yearning for lost days (and a lost object of love). The melancholia signifies Rafiqul as an impossible subject, one who refuses to be assimilated within PDS’s reformatory politics. While PDS seeks to discipline the bodies of the runaway boys into productive subjects, their affective exchanges on FB gesture that such subjectivation remains incomplete. The intimacies forged through mainstream virtual spaces among men across religious identity, class, and territorial location allow for the creation of an affective dimension in excess of PDS’s political advocacy initiatives. Virtual loops formed through screen–body intimate interactions (yet viewed by the public) potentially twist the public dimensions of cyberspace, and in doing so open up the bodies of young men marked as failed subjects toward multiple inflections. The substance of intimacy is carved out of posts narrating desire for physical proximities with friends and lovers, imagined pasts and potential futures. A yearning for different possibilities rings through the posts. PDS remains invested in reintroducing the otherwise delinquent young men within the normative folds of Indian society. The young men involved with PDS create a sense of belonging on virtual space affected through sharing of intimate details. The intimate virtual exchanges remain in excess to the reformatory politics of PDS, the virtual signaling potentially different futures that are not bound within notions of success and legal reforms. OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Image from Rafiqul’s post.

Queer bonds: Sumit’s story

Sumit is a 35-year-old man, living in Kolkata. He works for a cultural organization in the city and is fairly open about his sexuality (to his co-workers, friends and cousins). We met Sumit on a FB group that catered for queer people in Kolkata. He informed us that some of the best friends and lovers (he added under air quotes) he has had have been through social networking sites. Sumit is quite involved with the queer scene in Kolkata and regularly uses the internet to ‘hook up’ or meet other people. Like many other queer men, he was searching for intimacy and companionship and hoped the internet would provide him with potential intimate connections:

I met Rohan on PR two years go. We met on a forum thread where we were discussing what kind of queer films should be made. We hit it off instantly. At that point there was no romantic connection but other people chatted about us on the thread. Even we had begun to talk privately. Ultimately it led to us going out for a date followed by a year-long relationship. (22 June 2013)

The first time Sumit wrote about his relationship ending, he was chastised by a few people on the thread for ‘baring his personal life on a public platform’ but there were an equal number of sympathetic responses:

Go_2: This is the story of our life. Cheating boyfriends and hostile city.

Rajind: My sympathies. You are strong and will recover

Kulfi: I am not sure why you would share these details here but if it helps I am in a similar situation.

Another concept that this episode makes us consider is the role of public mourning and intimacy. Judith Butler (2004: 19) argues that our vulnerability to loss and the mourning that follows creates a condition through which a basis for community can be found. Mourning and public display of loss serves a two-fold purpose – on the one hand, it is the acknowledgement that something has changed forever and, at the same time, it is also an acceptance of the transformation that is about to follow. By moving from a privatized zone to a public display, Sumit’s grief transforms mourning since it does not remain a solitary situation anymore. By making his grief public and sharing it with others he is creating a sense of relationality. Sumit’s experience makes it clear the exposure to grief on new media sites where memory remains intact far longer thwarts any effort to foreclose that vulnerability, but at the same time the public mourning that is elicited from these digital memories offers possibilities for forming new kinds of kinship networks. Queer kinship as proposed by Weston (1993) is forged through networks, connectivities and shared values that create kinship networks amongst queer identified people. We argue that such queer kinship networks exist in parallel to the consanguine relationality of heterosexual families, one that is marked by class, caste and location. The experiences of Sumit, Sudesh, and Rafiqul chart the role played by new media technologies through which radically different forms of sociality are forged. We argue that such relations provide online spaces for articulating a different kind of intimate subjectivity, one that is forged through sharing stories of failure to achieve romantic intimacy (as in the case of Sumit), or pain and melancholia (as in the cases of Sudesh and Rafiqul). Anthropological discussions on queer kinship need to consider virtual intimacies and digital platforms as spaces for forging newer kinds of affective bonds.

Intimacy, after all, ‘is a sign of past and future connection’ (McGlotten, 2007: 126) – one that is constituted by memories but also holds the intimation of a future. Sumit’s way of coping with his past and forging connections with his compassionate readers is a sign of the importance of virtual intimacy with respect to suffering and emotion. Similarly, Sudesh and Rafiqul post memes and poems about longing for a different world, loss of the beloved, or suffering pain. Their virtual exchanges are in excess to PDS’s reform initiatives and gesture newer kinds of virtual intimate relationalities. Mediated by digital technology, the discourse of intimacy has not just been transformed but has undergone a redefinition. Issues such as grief, companionship, relationships and hook-ups on digital platforms remain central to understanding virtual intimacies.

Sumit, Sudesh, and Rafiqul occupy striated spatial arrangements within Indian neoliberalism. While, Sudesh and Rafiqul are articulating a sense of failure to become a successful (entrepreneurial) citizen, and utilize digital platforms to voice their pain and longings, Sumit articulates his inability to form romantic love on PR. Sumit’s failure to achieve romantic love, and the adhering of a gay male identified community around this injury on PR, present a different kind of queer male subject from the one articulated by Vikram Seth’s poem. Earlier, we discussed Seth’s poem in order to highlight the re-representation of the gay male identified subject, as a subject deserving legal recognition of (his) love. Such love perhaps never appears, rather a virtual bond is forged around the inability to achieve romantic companion-hood. Sumit, Rafiqul, and Sudesh’s stories attend to this affective nature of entanglement that digital platforms afford.

Coda

There has been a significant shift in how intimacy is played in the public domain through public postings, chatting on threads and blogs. Interactions have led to reciprocity, which is an important example of a way in which intimacy is performed on the digital screen.

Virtual intimacies potentially help in resisting normative codes of what intimacy means. The vignettes presented in this article demonstrate the importance of virtual exchanges, often indexing a whole range of saturated meaning accessible only to those who remain entangled in the virtual intimate networks. These stories reflect the ways in which young men in India are using digital platforms to ‘be together’, form intimate networks, and contest normative relationship structures. Throughout this article we have attempted to sketch diagrams of the ways in which young men are using digital technologies to redefine their bodies and relationships. As Kuntsman (2012: 6) has argued, ‘digital culture in itself can be a site of investment of feelings.’ The investment of feelings allows for the formation of intimate chains of words, emoticons, screen–body interactions. They exemplify the promise of digital culture in creating and reinstating a textual/visual language of intimacy, one that holds potentials to cut through notions of romantic love and entrepreneurial success both of which serve as hallmarks of neoliberal modernity. We have shown through the vignettes how a sense of self is being articulated within a specific cultural and social context. These vignettes such as the FB memes and PR communications have received little consideration within South Asian scholarship. Our research has created a new rubric of inquiry with regard to affect and new media technologies. We have argued, utilizing queer hermeneutics of digital exchanges, that conducting ethnography through researcher and participant virtual friendships allows for the production of queer anthropological knowledge, providing insights into new forms of affective bonds forged by young men, who otherwise are being regulated into normative neoliberal subjects.