Meet Shivangi Garg, a Mumkin changemaker fellow.
An Essay by Shivangi Garg on queering digital spaces
Two years back, as a 19-year-old queer, I had been banned on Tinder. The reason the platform provided was that I had violated community guidelines. It had left me distraught.
I felt saddened by my abrupt departure as I had lost access to a community that had given me a space to explore my sexuality. I was left alone in predominantly heteronormative spaces having difficult conversations about sexuality. While pursuing my undergraduate degree at the University of Delhi, I was faced with a crisis in my sexual identity. Given the space and the freedom to experiment, sent me on a quest to find a label that defines me, I turned to dating platforms that claimed to be queer affirmative. Soon enough, I found ways to express myself in a queer digital space through expressive bio and masculine-presenting pictures. I faced, yet again, a crisis when my profile was taken down.
The string for the search for my identity bleeds into my work as an artist. As a digital artist, my artworks demonstrate how life extends beyond its subjective limits and often tell a story about the complexity of ambiguity. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, therefore, the identity. For over five years, by merging the physical and digital, I constantly aim to emphasise, question, and reinterpret this liminality between these two realms and find a synergy between them. With a background in design, paired with critical thinking and a strong calling for research, I looked for a field that would support my interests. I stumbled upon a unique discipline with human-centered digital design backed with data and policy studies.
Driven by interdisciplinary interests, my master’s in Digital Society at IIITB helped me understand the existing gap between a technologically dominated society and the social sciences. I have enjoyed an interdisciplinary approach in my history undergraduate and became fascinated by the clash between social interests, especially marginalised communities and technology.
Over the years, I grasped a strong social component to technology as it is about changing people’s perceptions. My understanding gave me an opportunity to explore the realm of self-presentation on queer dating apps. As a part of a course deliverable, Advanced Human-Computer Interaction, that turned into a six-month thesis under the supervision of Prof. Preeti Mudliar, will help me explore the idea of how the design of existing dating prevalent platforms act as barriers that prevent queers from claiming the internet dating space as their own.
To study intersectionality, user experience research provides us with a lens to look through from a global South perspective.
We have been brought up in the same system, and some of us are consciously trying to unlearn it, and some of us are trying to use it as a privilege. Therefore, my motivations stem from the idea that we can design a safe space for self-expression for queers. In a utopia, there will not be limits to self-expression. The queers will have the autonomy to post content expressed through bios and pictures with absolute extents to self-presentation—a utopian digital space where stringent community guidelines don’t hinder self-presentation.
Amid unaccepting and invalidating exchanges about sexuality and queerness, an ideal digital space will encourage dialogue along the lines of what queerness means and the degree of self-presentation. ‘Queer’ has historically been used as an epithet/slur to describe those whose gender, gender expression, and/or sexuality do not adhere to prevailing notions. In response to assimilation, people have reclaimed the term “queer” and self-identify (based on “Queering the Field*”). Therefore, conformity should be challenged as stigmatization affects multiple intersectional identities held by members of our community. My idea is to make the existing interfaces queer-affirmative, where the community members can reclaim other queer spaces with no limits to self-expression.
We need guidelines that help break down and stop the replication of problematic power structures in the offline and online world.
Let’s live in utopian queer spaces with no restraints to self-expression.
Suggested Reading
- Barz, G., & Cheng, W. (Eds.). (2019). Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology. Oxford University Press
About the author
Shivangi Garg, is a digital artist and UX Researcher.
Shivangi Garg’s project with @Mumkinapp is a continuation of her MSc research project. Advanced Human-Computer Interaction course at IIITB, studying dating applications in the Global South.
In her own words: ‘Our study is unique as it focuses on the lives of queers in the Global South, and aims to address the gap in research. The objective is to point out the pattern of discrimination against the community, i.e.censorship in the dating sphere for the LGBTQIA+ community, and how predominantly heteronormative spaces as Tinder, Bumble, etc., limit self-expression, and eventually to find out how they negotiate with these concerns while using the said platforms.
This study aims to shine a light on the prevalent discrimination, and ultimately help in de-biasing technology to make dating platforms more inclusive for the LGBTQIA+ community.’
