Viral Assemblages in Extraordinary Times: Queer Belonging and Precarity in India

The Department of Communication and Media Studies invites you for a talk and reception featuring Rohit K. Dasgupta, Ph.D., senior lecturer in cultural industries, from the University of Glasgow. Dasgupta will discuss the “queer patchworks” queer and trans communities in India that developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to navigate survival during these nonnormative times. Queer people in India live within different forms of marginality and precarity, homophobia, caste violence, unemployment, and homelessness, and this research highlights and analyzes the ways digital media was used by individuals and organizations as a form of witness, belonging, intimacy, and care. It involves ethnographic accounting of patchworks of WhatsApp texts, broken Zoom conversations, cooking gossip, and addas on the banks of river Hooghly as a nod to these new realities, which are reshaping queer identities and offering new ways to also acknowledge, accommodate, and “queer” what counts as knowledge.