Abstract

This paper explores how Queer South Asians are both desiring and desired, challenging how algorithmic bias, colonial legacies, and racialised beauty standards shape queer intimacy in digital spaces. Rooted in community-led research and refusal, it centres a critical resistance to extractivist academia and Eurocentric queer narratives. By sharing creative and collaborative methodologies — including manifesto-building, focus groups, and a wedding-inspired video outcome — this session offers an alternative approach to research: one that prioritises joy, consent, and the right to withhold. Education can be a space for radical care, not just knowledge dissemination.

Session and activities

This session will present Queerifying the Dulhan, a creative research project developed as part of my MA in Internet Equalities at the Creative Computing Institute (UAL). The project investigates how Queer South Asians are represented and positioned within digital and physical spaces of desire, particularly dating apps, which often replicate white supremacist, patriarchal, and caste-based biases. Drawing on autoethnographic writing, a closed focus group, and a 1990s-style South Asian wedding video, the project reclaims agency by reimagining queer South Asian intimacy on our own terms.

The session will begin with a short contextual overview of the project’s themes: desire politics, queer temporality, refusal as resistance, and the limitations of academic institutions in safeguarding marginalised communities. I will discuss my decision to limit access to the video project and frame this as an act of digital triage — choosing who gets to witness queer South Asian joy and who is instead offered reflection and reading.

The core of the session will be a 15-minute presentation, including a short snippet of the video shown with care and consent protocols in place. This will be followed by a discussion inviting reflections on access, representation, and ethics in educational and institutional spaces.

Rather than claiming to offer “best practices,” this session will share tensions, lessons, and unresolved questions. It is designed for educators, artists, researchers, and students interested in alternative pedagogies, decolonial practice, and critical tech studies — and aims to open space for honest conversation around complicity, community, and creative refusal.