Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (6 page)

THEORETICAL DOMAINS

This book is situated at the intersection of Internet or cyberculture studies, gay and lesbian studies and globalization studies. All these theoretical domains are relatively new—gay and lesbian studies has been in existence for about 30 years, Internet or cyberculture studies is just over a decade old and globalization or global studies is an emergent field that is only now being articulated academically. Moreover, each of these domains is within itself constituted of several interdisciplinary and often overlapping sub-areas of study. The newness, connected-ness and complexity of my domains means that there is no fixed path to take while navigating them—I have to figure out for myself, what it is in each of these domains that is relevant to this book and what can be left out or kept aside, to be used on some other occasion.

Cyberculture Studies

Cyberculture studies, also called new media, Internet and digital culture studies (Silver, 2004)52 has over the past decade blossomed into a distinct and legitimate academic discipline, with online and offline centres of study, regular conferences, established academic journals, degree granting educational institutions and a canon of thinkers and theory builders53

(Silver, 2000). The term
cyberspace
was coined by William Gibson in 1984

Introduction
41

in his sci-fi novel
Neuromancer
and refers to ‘a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators…. A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity’.54 The term caught on quickly and soon academic work began to evolve around cyberculture or the culture of cyberspace, especially from the early 1990s onwards, as the Internet began to make its presence more and more felt and online space began to be equated with cyberspace.55 One can very broadly outline three stages of Internet studies56 or critical cyberculture studies.57

The first stage was about euphoric utopian versus dystopian visions about the new technology and its effect on society at large;58 about magazines like
Wired
(1993–date) and
Mondo 2000
(1989–1998) and Al Gore’s evangelizing; about the optimism of John Perry Barlow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (‘the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire’)59… tempered by the negativity of Hightower (‘all this razzle-dazzle… disconnects us from each other’);60 about ambitiously titled books like
The Road Ahead, Being Digital
and
City of Bits: Space, Place, and
the Infobahn
(by Internet prophets like Bill Gates, Nicholas Negroponte and William Mitchell respectively), sitting along shelves with titles like
Flame Wars,
Data Trash
and
Cyberspace Divide
.61

The second stage was about online
versus
offline identities and communities, between the ‘virtual’
versus
the ‘real’, ‘the net’
versus
‘the self ’

(Castells, 1996).62 Classics from this time, include cyber guru Howard Rheingold’s
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
(1994), Sherry Turkle’s
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
(1995) and Julian Dibbell’s account of
A Rape in Cyberspace
(1993).63 Most of these early works are set in MUDs or MOOs64—and deal with the Internet, as it existed more than a decade ago.65 This stage witnessed the publication of a slew of cyberculture related anthologies, by authors like Steve Jones (
Virtual Culture
, 1997;
Cybersociety 2.0
, 1998), Mark Smith and Peter Kollock (
Communities in Cyberspace
, 1998), David Bell (
The
Cybercultures Reader
, 2000 [with Barbara Kennedy];
Introduction to
Cyberculture
, 2001) and David Trend (
Reading Digital Culture
, 2001). Most of these included pieces by the writers of the aforementioned classics, as well as other staples like Allucquère Rosanne (Sandy) Stone66 and Lisa Nakamura.67 This was also the age of large-scale Internet user surveys
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like the Pew Internet and American Life Project68 and the World Internet Project69 that ‘counted the number of Internet users, compared demographic differences and learned what basic things people have been doing on the Internet’ (Wellman, 2004).70

The third stage, or what Silver (2000) has calls
critical
cyberculture studies [emphasis mine], is all about the intertwining between the online
and
the offline; context and interaction; social networks, and cultural specificity; where ‘cyberculture is best comprehended as a series of negotiations that take place both online and offline’.71 A good example of a work from this stage is
The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach
(2000) where the authors study the Internet and its impact on Trinidad via a combination of online and offline methods. Their ethnographic methodology includes interviews, participant observation and website research; they conduct house-to-house surveys and visits cybercafés; they explore the meaning of Trini identity not just among individuals located in Trinidad but also among the international diaspora and they contextualize all of this with a study of the political economy of the Internet in Trinidad and an examination of how business is done there. Within an Asian context,
Asia.com: Asia Encounters the Internet
(2003) is an anthology that attempts a similar grand sweep.

In my case, although I am working with relatively antiquated mailing lists and websites in this book, I believe that my work is extremely contemporary due to its scope and methodology employed, as well as the online-offline audience it studies and positions itself within this third stage.

I must stress that these three stages are meant to be understood as loose categories, which overlap and co-exist with each other. Thus we find that utopian (Katz and Aspden, 1997)72 and dystopian visions of the technology (Kraut et al., 1998)73 continue to persist; MUDs and MOOs are still being studied (Schaap, 2002); as early as 1997, there is a diversity of methodological approaches adopted by academics writing in this space, such as ‘content analysis, Foucauldian discourse…communication history…online interviews…’ (Silver, 2004)74 and even in 1999, writers like Wellman and Gulia are already placing the Internet into a larger framework of ‘transportation and communication connectivity, such as the telegraph, railroad, telephone, automobile and airplane’ and Introduction
43

examining how ‘intertwined offline relationships were with online relationships’.75 New spaces like weblogs continue to emerge out of earlier Internet and non-Internet spaces like magazines, Internet forums and letters.76

Researchers like Christine Hine (2000) have coined the term
virtual ethnography
for ethnographic research carried out in cyberspace. I hesitate to use the term to describe my work—first, because I carry out my research both in cyberspace as well as in the physical world and second, because like Campbell (2004), I am uncomfortable with the qualifier

‘virtual’—it seems to suggest that online interviews are less real (and less important) than those conducted in the physical world.77 My position is endorsed by Wilson and Peterson when they write that ‘the distinction of real and imagined or virtual community is not a useful one’,78 and further, that an anthropological approach (such as mine) is well-suited to ‘investigate the continuum of communities, identities and networks that exist—from the most cohesive to the most diffused—regardless of the way in which community members interact’.79 I prefer to use the less judgmental sobriquets
online
and
offline
or
physical
instead to mark the distinction between the different environments I work in.

In general, I am skeptical of extreme positions. With the spurt in scholarship on online ethnography, there are diverse opinions as to what constitutes
real
research online and what does not. I do not agree with those that state that one can only conduct authentic research if it is conducted both online and offline (Turkle, 1995; Miller and Slater, 2000; Hakken, 1999)—I think it is perfectly valid if research is carried out online by itself (Markham, 1998; Dibbel, 1998; Schaap, 2002; Campbell, 2004) if the phenomena that are being studied exist only online. I am in agreement with Des Chene that ‘to continue to valorize the face-to-face encounter will impoverish [ethnographic] accounts’ and that ‘it will be far more useful to attend to the relation between our research questions and the possible sources that will illuminate them, and to follow these wherever they may lead us and in whatever medium they may turn out to exist’ (Des Chene, 1997).80 The reason why my book consists of ‘variously routed fieldworks’ (Clifford, 1997)81 situated online and offline, is that the community I am studying exists both online and offline—to do otherwise would be, in my opinion, doing my research injustice.

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Gay and Lesbian Studies

Though there has been some questioning,82 the still predominant belief in (Western) academia today is that ‘prior to the late 19th century European sexologists’ and psychologists’ invention of labelled identity categories such as
invert, homosexual, lesbian
and
heterosexual
, inchoate sexualities and sexual behaviours existed but were not perceived or named as defining individuals, groups, or relationships’83 (Vanita, 2002). Even the terms
homosexual
and
heterosexual
are quite modern (the Swiss doctor Karoly Maria Benkert [Kertbeny] coined
homosexual
in 1869 and
heterosexual
a few years after). Before the 19th century,
sodomy
(referring to a wide range of practices involving non-procreational, or
unnatural
sex, including anal intercourse) was considered sinful in the Western world but it was something that
anyone
could commit. Punishment for deviance was severe—in Britain, for example, until the 1880s, the punishment for

‘The Abominable Vice of Buggery’ was death (Sullivan, 2003).84 From the 19th century onward, homosexuality was medicalized and brought under legal purview and a whole new discourse was created to describe sexual behaviours, which evolved new concepts of sexual identities. As Michael Foucault (1976) famously framed it—

The nineteenth century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality…. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature…. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.85

Western society continued to persecute this
species
well into the 20th century; only the angle had changed—from a sin committer and a pervert who had to be imprisoned, the homosexual became a patient suffering from a medical condition that had to be cured. For gay and lesbian individuals living during that time, ‘a kind of social contract emerged in the West. It had four elements. There was legal and social condemnation of homosexuality. Condemnation was offset by the closet trilogy of blindness…taboo…and secrecy’86 (Sanders, 2004). There
were
social networks of gays and lesbians in existence in the US in the 1950s such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, but they were Introduction
45

well below the radar. From the late 19th to the mid 20th century, there were several shifts in the medical and legal discourse surrounding homosexuality. The newly emergent fields of psychiatry and sexology played a significant role in its social construction, especially the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havellock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfield, Edward Carpenter, Sigmund Freud and Alfred Kinsey.

There was a rupture in the late 1960s, which is when the modern gay and lesbian movement exploded (with ‘the May 1968 events in Paris, the Binnehof protest in Holland and the Stonewall rebellion in New York’)87

as a component of the larger ‘
liberation
movements—“New Left, anti-Vietnam War, counterculture, black and feminist”’88—of the time. Stonewall was especially significant. The fight by lesbian and gay street people and drag queens against the police at the Stonewall Tavern in New York City in 1969 became the catalyst of the gay liberation movement in the West and its most iconographic moment. The event marked ‘the demand for a new social contract’89—and visible changes began occurring rapidly after that as part of an overall attempt to create ‘a clear
social
identity organized around sexuality’90—symbolized by rainbow flags, pink triangles and parades. Around the same time, gay and lesbian studies began to develop within the academy (predominantly in Europe, North America, and Australia) as a field of theoretical discourse.

One can trace the origins of gay and lesbian studies to the work by British anthropologist Mary McIntosh on ‘the homosexual role’ in the 1960s91—the first wave of writing in the field included works like Jonathan Ned Katz’s
Gay American History
(1975), Jeffrey Weeks’
Coming
Out: Homosexual Politics in Great Britain
(1977) and John D’Emilio’s
Sexual
Politics, Sexual Communities
(1983).92 Most of these early works ‘narrated the formation of a collective lesbian and gay identity with its attendant processes of culture making, institution building and political activism and argued that this identity was crucial to the struggle of gays and lesbians to gain political legitimacy’ (Corber and Valocchi, 2003).93

By this time, the gay community was experiencing a wide scale devastation due to the HIV and AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, which was pointedly ignored, especially by the governments of the US and the UK

and accompanied by very strong societal homophobia. As a response to these multiple layers of discrimination, the movement began to cluster
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