Radhika Gajjala

Queer Blogging in Indian Digital Diasporas A Dialogic Encounter

Queering and transgendering practices have been visible across the Internet since the time of multiuser domains (MUDs), MUD object oriented domains (MOOs), e-mail lists, and Web bulletins. This article maps some themes of queering in the Indian digital diaspora through an intergenerational lens, produced in the acts of online and offline coauthoring, weblogging, and reading of instances of such online queering relationally. By way of a dialogic encounter on their own blogs and employing performative writing that simulates the blogsphere, the authors look at the interplay of codes of identity through the employment of themes, language, symbols, and cultural influences in their writing. Examining the themes emerging from the specific blogs they study, the authors ask how power is shifted and relayered in these articulations and what the inviting interactional features of their writer-audience communities are that allow for certain kinds of self-expression while also shaping their performance of sexuality in these spaces.

Lexicons of women's empowerment online: Appropriating the other.

In this essay, we examine discourses of womens emancipation online. We examine some nuances of how these lexicons of empowerment play out. One discursive formation examined is websites around female genital mutilation (FGM) in online activism while a second is the Americans for United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) website. The third case is based in work offline trying to develop strategies for online marketing. This case discusses the (im)possibility of sustaining handloom and craft communities through online marketing of such products, arguing that online marketing of such products often tends to be subsumed by the logic of charity towards oppressed women. We try to show how lexicons of womens empowerment online are situated in an ideological framing that ends up being counterproductive over the long run. In each of the cases described, the possibilities for articulation are constrained by the same discourse that claims to empower.

Terrorists or cowards: negative portrayals of male Syrian refugees in social media

the (white, afrikaans) pharmacist waves the wealthy young customers through. in their mockery of the impotent guard we see the intense disjuncture between this “new” black masculinity—signified by slang, expensive cars, disposable income, branded clothing, consumable materials like drugs and alcohol, anglophone accents, and fashionable ennui—and “old” black masculinity, reminiscent of an apartheid-era imaginary—traditional, respectful, hard-working, low status, less proficient in english, a guard at a shop rather than a purchaser of expensive goods. the first film uncritically lauds the depiction of the black south african man as both consumer and consumable object while the second laments the affective consequences of apathetic middle class adolescent modernity. Both construct versions of blackness that are largely shorn of any agency but the personal and that are divorced from a sense of the political. Collectively they suggest the development of a new polysemy in south african popular cultural representations of black masculinity that may move beyond historical hegemonic injunctions.

Microfinance in online space: a visual analysis of kiva.org

Microfinance practices were originally developed in offline contexts. Modern microfinance practices were based on development models for the financial and social empowerment of the poorest of poor in developing countries. Several of these practices drew from existing traditions of money lending within local communities that were reformed to be in sync with rural development and the empowerment of the underprivileged individual. In present ‘postmodern’ times, microfinance providers are using online tools in the hopes of broadening the reach and extending the advantages provided by such a model of micro-lending and micro-borrowing. In this article, we examine an online peer-to-peer lending and borrowing website, Kiva.org, which uses online social networking tools in microfinance. The study is thus a close look at the actual content of the website with a view to understanding the representational practices of online space through Internet mediated microfinance.

Home of Hope: Voicings, Whiteness, and the Technological Gaze

This article is an attempt to explore the issues of online representations of orphans in China and India in the intersection of power, voice, and placement. Textual and visual representations of orphans at www.homeofhopeindia.org and www.homeofhope.org are analyzed using the theoretical frameworks of voicings, Whiteness, and the colonial (technological) gaze. We examine how online networks are spaces for discursive reproduction of existing offline hegemonies. We pay particular attention to the reproduction and representation of the so-called voiceless Other in online settings.

Snapshots from sari trails: cyborgs old and new

In this paper, the author draws upon an examination of two apparently opposed cyborg locations and technologies to show how, in specific instances, globalization, technology, economics, culture and diasporas intersect. Such intersections produce very specific, situated contexts for productive labor forces to emerge at the interface of technologies ‘old’ and ‘new’. These situated contexts place the individual in relation to market forces and community production logics through which labor and affect are placed in hierarchies of digital globalization. The author does this by looking at how the ‘sari’ is produced, marketed and worn in two ‘cyborg’ contexts. One of the cyborg locations this article explores is online, the other is offline. By juxtaposing these ‘old’ and ‘new’ contexts of production and marketing a sari the author hopes to allow for issues to be raised that otherwise would be invisible.

Racing and Queering the Interface Producing Global/Local Cyberselves

This essay is concerned with social and cultural problems of producing, consuming, and using technology. Based on epistemologies of doing, we race and queer the interface while doing technologies as they are located in specific contexts and moments. Our multi-vocal cyberethnographic engagement explores the production of selves at the intersection of online/offline activities. Our narratives shed light on how power works in multiply mediated contexts and reveals how ideology, discourse, and material practice interweave in the production of global/local cyberselves. Situated in her own specific socio-cultural personal context, each one of us attempts to understand the processes of identity production at the computer interface and to capture the (in)visible code that serves as the framework for the interaction.

When Your Seams Get Undone, Do You Learn to Sew or to Kill Monsters?

New domesticity—which is a return to a lifestyle that centers domesticity “in the service of environmentalism, DIY culture, and personal fulfillment”—is taking shape in mostly Westernized DIY spaces. New domesticity exists in a neoliberal and digital DIY ontology that distinguishes itself from the domesticity of previous generations while also making claims to a “return.” This essay lays out some key issues that need to be taken into account regarding this emerging form of Wi-Fi gadget facilitated public engagement through domestic space while noting how the issue of unwaged labor resurfaces in the context of digital labor by women.

Digital Media, Race, Gender, Affect, and Labor: Introduction to Special Section

This essay provides a brief introduction to how the special section of Television & New Media came about and discusses the concepts of race, gender, affect, and labor in relation to digital media as it is manifested in the present decade of public availability of the Internets.

Feminist alternatives to massive open online courses (MOOCs): The inception of the distributed open collaborative course (DOCC)

“To all the inquisitive, informal, nontraditional, and educationally disadvantaged learners around the world who can benefit from innovative learning alternatives and options. May this book help open a few new doors and windows for you.”