Digital Queer: Tracing the Digital Discourse around Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code

Social Media and Digital Activism, in the context of the Global South, have continued to redefine identities and transform traditional notions of citizenship, nationhood, and belonging. With the power of digital technologies to bring public and private issues to light, digital cultures have enabled the shaping of contemporary faces of entire nations in the South. The most potent example of how digital activism and new age digital cultures have helped chisel a South Asian queer identity in India and beyond is Section 377, an archaic, colonial law, established in the country by the British Raj, and that until August 2018, criminalized homosexuality as “carnal intercourse” or an “unnatural sexual act.” Although not applicable specifically to homosexuals, it is widely perceived as an anti-queer law in the country; cloaked in colonial textual ambiguity, it directs the colonial desire for sexual control towards colonial societies. This research focuses on an exploration of Indian queer dissident subaltern counterpublics, and how these communities (both members and non-members) congregate on Twitter to combat postcolonial and Victorian structures through new media as a decolonizing and transnational space. Therefore, the hashtags surrounding this event perform and decolonize Indian cyberspaces. The study equally investigates how the new wave of digital activism post reading down of the Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code has fortified identities of the marginalized and the non-marginalized alike and transformed the notion of the “self” and the “other.” Given this premise, this paper employs Twitter Search API to collect and filter tweets that explore the private and public discourses of a digital movement that has proved instrumental in the creation of digital spaces for the marginalized “other.” This body of work contributes to the pool of research that is focused on the understanding of South Asian digital identities and the creation of their digital spaces as a solution for social, legal, and political discrimination.


Introduction
The existence and establishment of contemporary and advanced networks of communication continue to redefine identities of people. Digital spaces have become a "powerful place for the circulation of ideas, and the construction of I examine the Indian digital queer revolution surrounding the reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, that has paved the way forward for the construction of safe spaces online for the queer subaltern; in the form of dissident queer counter-publics (Fraser 1990). Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was an archaic colonial law, that until a recent momentous verdict by the Supreme Court in August 2018, criminalized homosexuality. The digital wave that called for the reading down of the law created pockets of 'postcolonial unrest,' in favour of acknowledging queer desire and identity in traditional India. Similarly, the movement has successfully forged a virtual community of transnational empathy and support. The Indian queer movement has grown into a political mobilization for marginalized communities online and has engendered greater political participation among the nation's youth.

Section 377
Section 377 was introduced by the British Raj in 1861 as a reflection of statesanctioned homophobia of the Victorian British empire. It was modelled after The Buggery Act of 1533, which was England's first civil sodomy law that prohibited anal sex, bestiality and homosexuality. It read: Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine (Section 377 IPC Unnatural Offenses). (Dasgupta 2018, 183) The 1861 Offenses Against the Person Act relating to the offences against a person, was unified under a single Act, without variation in its text, and for purposes of maintaining simplicity in colonial laws across it colonies. As a display of blatant colonial imperialism and Victorian values, the British Raj reduced and relabeled queer sexual desires as criminal acts and classified same-sex along with child sexual abuse and bestiality. Thus, British colonialism targeted queer rights in its colonial societies (Han battle to amend Section 377; to liberate it from deeper colonial ambiguities of sexual categorization, and to decriminalize homosexuality by according a right to privacy, equality, dignity, and non-discrimination to consenting adults.

Digital activism
Traditionally, face-to-face interactions engender disguised engagement wherein identity claims cannot go further than the limits set by embodiment (Garcia-Gomez 2010). The advent of the internet as a tool has transformed identity production, consumption, and perception. Distant from physical offline presence, "online discussion forums give rise to opportunities for queer youth to engage in different kinds and means of virtual intimacies, friendships and sexual relations" (Dasgupta 2018, 933).
The internet, in this sense, becomes what Steven G. Jones contends as a "community free of the constraints of space and time so as to engage with humans irrespective of geographic proximity and the clock (1998,10)." Building on Anderson's (1991, 49) idea of an "imagined community," Rheingold cites Marc Smith, "virtual communities require an act of imagination to use…and what must be imagined is the idea of the community itself" (1993, 54). Anderson's communities are constructed purely on the style of imagination rather than in their falsity or genuineness; an imagination that gives particular political and cultural shape to the queer movement in India that has begun modes of inquiry on the self and the ' other.' Digital activism surrounding the ' queer problem,' in short, has enabled and encouraged the shattering of boundaries between the real and the virtual in the Global South. Nancy Fraser (1990) argues for the existence of various counterpublics that resist the hegemonic and dominant public sphere that categorically excludes women and queer communities. Her subaltern counterpublics explicate ways in which these marginalized communities can discursively create their own alternative public spheres. Cyberculture and the 21st century public sphere "denote a present homonormativity that defies the heteronormative construct of society" (Fraser 1993, 57).
The Indian queer congregate on the internet as subaltern counterpublics through their prevalence on social media websites such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter that add more dimensions to discussions on queer identity instead of just existing on primarily queer websites (Dasgupta 2018, 6). These sites have become an acceptance that could occur through online congregation and activism. At this juncture, queerness has come to redefine presence and the politics of visibility in the public sphere. Since queer cultures are not simply created through normative publics, (Dasgupta and DasGupta 2018) they necessitate creation of new spaces that will subvert and question official spaces. I emphasize the pertinence of dissident queer publics in the Indian context. As queerness becomes a political struggle, it translates directly into an act of colonial resistance, and marks the digital as a space for decolonization through discourses.

Methodology
I analyze tweets that discuss public discourses around court proceedings, particularly following the Supreme Court's decision to reconsider the law in January 2018, in an attempt to locate the "Victorian prudishness" (Gairola 2018, 86) of Section 377 that is laid bare on social media. I engage textually with tweets on the reading down Nanditha: Digital Queer Art. 5, page 8 of 19 of the law where the hashtag movement operates as a digital statement for queer desire in postcolonial India. I investigate hashtags pertaining to the event such as #377quitindia, #article377, #homosexuality, #ipc377, #lgbtqia, #respectforlgbtq, #strikedown377, #lgbtqazadi, #respectforlgbtq, #criminalize+homosexuality, #decriminalize+homosexuality, #equal+rights, #queer+identity and #queer+pride.
Tweets that were publicly available were filtered and collected using Twitter Search

Tweets
The first argument I make is that digital affordances create a political statement in the attempt at rejection of colonial power structures and policies surrounding the law; a rejection that I argue emerges as a form of repudiation and an attempt at destabilization of postcolonial and colonial authority and aspect of nation building. This is to argue that participants are tweeting to defend a New Constitution towards a process of building new ideologies which subvert postcolonial hegemonic heteronormativity that both colonial and the postcolonial institutions have advocated for.

Victorian law as a dystopic vision for colonized societies was meant to preserve
Christian values, and to police acceptable desire. For the British, normative and normalized conducts in love signified a heteronormative encounter, while the rest were labelled 'unnatural.' Queering the society was therefore an essential step towards questioning assumptions of a single and dominant system of knowledge.

Rohit Dasgupta and Debanuj DasGupta (2018) assert in Queering India that queerness
is "considered as a form of questioning dominant knowledge formations that work to (de)construct normative ideas of gender, reproduction and the family" (1). Public discourse "dictates the need for repudiation of a heteronormative homophobic idea of a nation" (2). Collective virtual identities re-assert queering with dominant power structures that digital discourses reject. This rejection is directed towards the colonial as much as towards the post-colonial aspect of nation building. Ironically, the Supreme The second argument I make is that online gendered collectivities employ hashtags in the construction of transnational and globalized identity making; in the empathetic support and building of safe spaces that the online platform has provided for queerness to thrive. Even within a sexually conservative country like India, with sexually minoritized groups challenging the public and private boundaries and the authority of the state to make laws that discriminate their rights and desires, social media platforms have revealed a certain 'newfound collective sexual awakening.' Here, the community can perform queering as a gesture of dismissal that works against the discourse of power and truth around human sexuality (Foucault 1978).
My argument posits in this depiction, a level of mutuality and collective empathetic understanding for and among South Asian communities whose attempt at asserting power demonstrates itself through a queering togetherness. For example, participants of the common Indian Queer platform on Twitter wrote: India Culture Lab (@queer_azaadi RT @IndiaCultureLab): "Sometimes we need to get out of our own comfort zone and invite people inside" (2018, 5 January, 12:54 p.m.).
India Culture Lab (@IndiaCultureLab): "We have to make sure that in guise of creating these safe spaces, we do not bring our own biases into play within these spaces. We need to form alliances with the straight community." (2018, January 5, 6:29 p.m.) Indian Culture Lab (@IndiaCultureLab): "Apart from focusing on our identities, we need to also look at commonalities, other sections of society that have the same set of problems and create a network of solidarity -#SachinJain #GHAR #LGBTQNow #377QuitIndia @queer_azaadi." (2018, January 5, 6:40 p.m.) These tweets highlight the intention and inclination to ' create a network of solidarity'; a space for the queer community to flourish where participants do not necessarily identify as members of the group. The queer and the non-queer strive to ' come-together' to shape an environment of queer collectivity that understands the self through the other. I wish to clarify that my intention is not to drown in the binaries of the self and the other. Instead I intend to demonstrate the evolution and development of a collective sharing of queer spaces on social media platforms. These collective queer spaces act not merely as an exchange between counter publics and the non-queer, but also as zones of empathy, support and desire for togetherness within the community. For example, Parihar and Bhattacharya (2018)  Bhattacharya (@KokilaB): "I am a heterosexual woman identifying as an LGBTQIA person. Problem?" (2018, January 11, 10:11 p.m.) Both Rushva and Bhattacharya exist in what I call ' queer empathy zones' where the queer and the non-queer not merely function together, but where the non-queer work in tandem for queer support. I contend that hashtags, in this context, have successfully created a performative aspect on digital social spaces. What I mean here by performance can be perceived by the possible non-queer participants that accompany the political queer discourse. Their voices echo together on the digital platform as one queer voice. Simply put, to empathize with the queer struggle means to perform digital queerness; to be involved enthusiastically in a decolonizing gesture of subaltern counter public digital space. Performance, therefore, in this context engenders what Altman describes as "global queering" wherein "queerness is now global" (Altman 1996). Whether in "advertising, film, performance art, the Internet, or the political discourses of human rights in emerging democracies, images of queer sexualities and cultures circulating around the globe" (Cruz-Malavë and Manalansan 2002, 1), queerness associates with a globalism that differentiates itself from Western definitions of modernity and progress, that characterizes itself simply in solidarity. The final point of contention in the categorization of community building is the Indian diasporic engagement in identity construction. Diasporic engagement, however minimal, has enriched the Indian Queer movement; has given it a voice of support that the movement needs.
It is a globalized voice; a carryover of human rights from within the homeland.
However, the queer movement plays a dual role in diasporic engagement. Sengupta (2018) from Toronto wrote: Sengupta (@HindolSengupta): "Logically, sensibly, culturally, civilizationally, in every way #Article377 is a blot on Indian." (January 9, 17:24 p.m.) The diaspora supports the movement, and in turn, is blessed with a similar cultural uplift that the urban Indian acquires. Their identity is fractured, hybrid and fluid, and therefore, easily incorporates the idea of nationhood and sexuality of the homeland.
However, the diaspora also plays an emergent role of movement sponsorship from the West that enables the blossoming and spreading of the 'Indian brand of queerness'.

Conclusion
Community building exists online in various formats. In this era of globalization and digitization, it is imperative to understand how virtual communities function and conduct themselves, not merely for the purpose of activism but also for new means of citizenship that are slowly beginning to emerge through digital affordances.
Fraser's subaltern 'sphericules' dominate the online public sphere in fractions, and successfully lend voice to the subaltern with access to technology; to various movements that enable the construction of separate, safe and empathetic spaces for the presence of the marginalized.
I locate queerness here, as a massive force of resistance (Ruberg, Boyd, and Howe 2018) that has decisively rewritten imperialist heteronormative notions of sexuality and opposed traditional structures of postcolonial patriarchy and toxic masculinity through social media. The Indian movement demonstrates queer world building across national borders and showcases queerness as alternate way of life; a desire to understand life "otherwise" (Halberstam 2011, 2). The term, queer, therefore, functions as a particular way of thinking for the Indian youth that defies all traditional expectations; a term that in Halberstam's words, never ceases in self-construction and self-critique; that is in a spiral of constant motion and meaning making. Queerness becomes, in this context, an act of destabilization of unequal lines of power, and evokes an all-inclusiveness that characterizes the digital era. Discourses of queer identity forge digital spaces for interaction and dialogue as a means of support for a transnational movement of queering (Roy 2003).
The Indian Queer movement has undeniably been at the forefront of fight in the Global South in the quest for meaning, awareness, and an epistemological understanding of the term 'queer.' It continues to fight for basic acceptance in the foundational definition of queerness, for decolonization of Victorian institutions, even after the decriminalization of the law. Although the fight has taken different