Researchers At Work

A critical queerness as Judith Halberstram describes it, in In a Queer Time and Place (New York: NYU Press, 2005), is one that is a mixture of “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules and eccentric economic practices.” In the work of queer theorists in the West, rather than a string of identities, it becomes a perspective or a conceptual grid through which to theorize structures of normativity and identification. Through the course of our project we seek to draw on queer theory to destabilise this reference to identity alone to include an understanding of queerness as practice, techne and experience, and also, importantly, to locate a culturally specific place for such queerness) and the Internet and address the question of technology (We start with the Heideggerian premise that the essense of technology is not technological but cultural. This view of course is rendered dominant in the case of Internet, where the discourse surrounding it is as much about engendering and sustaining cultures as much as it is about futurity and technological instrumentality) within the field of concerns it has come to generate in the Indian context, on how has the idea of the technological shift, perceived or real, changed the ways in which queer practices and identities are understood, explained or experienced and contribute to a better understanding of the question of technology being asked and answered when it comes to queer experience, practice and knowledge.