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Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Blog communication has established itself as one of the most significant alternative media in Bangladesh, one that often challenges mainstream and popular media production and raises questions around hegemonic discourses upheld by institutions of political and religious power. It is one of the primary platforms for digital resistance and community organizing in the country and has played crucial activist roles in most of the socio-political and human-rights movements over the last decade. However, despite historically functioning as a medium of confrontation with oppressive political establishments and religious ideologies with ostensibly a pro-nationalist, pro-democratic, and secular approach, the Bangladeshi blogosphere remains selectively unconcerned at the contemporary vitriolic persecution and brutal treatment of queer subjects all over the nation-state, particularly from the year 2014, when the LGBTQ+ community officially announced it's coming out in public. This paper analyzes the formation of the Bangladeshi blogosphere and the heteropatriarchal logics that undergird the construction of blog-publics to examine how the progressive and secular narratives fall apart when it comes to the question of demanding justice for queer subjects within the country. The paper also exemplifies the tactical presence of alternate queer blogs and archives such as Mondro which functions as a digital counter-space to not only ensure ‘queer curation’ and promote solidarity and communication between queer subjects and their allies but also to operate as both reminder of and resistance to the dominant cissexism and heteronormative ideology rampant in traditional blogging communities in Bangladesh.
Keywords: Community blogging, Bangladeshi Queer Subjects, Networked Resistance, Queer Curation, Publics, and counter-publics.
From Community Blogs to Queer Counter-spaces: The formation of blog-publics and Mondro's tactical resistance in Bangladesh
Blog communication has established itself as one of the most significant alternative media in Bangladesh, one that often challenges mainstream and popular media production and raises questions around hegemonic discourses upheld by institutions of political and religious power. It is one of the primary platforms for digital resistance and community organizing in the country and has played crucial activist roles in most of the socio-political and human-rights movements over the last decade. However, despite historically functioning as a medium of confrontation with oppressive political establishments and religious ideologies with ostensibly a pro-nationalist, pro-democratic, and secular approach, the Bangladeshi blogosphere remains selectively unconcerned at the contemporary vitriolic persecution and brutal treatment of queer subjects all over the nation-state, particularly from the year 2014, when the LGBTQ+ community officially announced it's coming out in public. This paper analyzes the formation of the Bangladeshi blogosphere and the heteropatriarchal logics that undergird the construction of blog-publics to examine how the progressive and secular narratives fall apart when it comes to the question of demanding justice for queer subjects within the country. The paper also exemplifies the tactical presence of alternate queer blogs and archives such as Mondro which functions as a digital counter-space to not only ensure ‘queer curation’ and promote solidarity and communication between queer subjects and their allies but also to operate as both reminder of and resistance to the dominant cissexism and heteronormative ideology rampant in traditional blogging communities in Bangladesh.
Keywords: Community blogging, Bangladeshi Queer Subjects, Networked Resistance, Queer Curation, Publics, and counter-publics.
Bio
Mohammed Mizanur Rashid (he/him) is a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at The University of Texas at Dallas. His dissertation titled Mediated Sexualities: Online Queer-bashing, Networked Resistance, and the Conditions of a Bengali Queer Utopia mobilizes the study of networked affect and counter-public formation to imagine conditions of South-Asian queer futurities. He presented his research at conferences such as NAMLE, SCMS, WSCA, Digital Frontiers, HASTAC, and the Queer Asia as Method Roundtable. He is also the recipient of the HASTAC Scholars Award, 2019.