5/18 Roy

            The article “Virtual Webs of Real People” by Sandip Roy is about the age of internet and how it has influenced the cultural philosophy, practices, and shape of lgbt groups in Indian. The pros of developing and using these websites and chats are that people can mingle in new ways, build new relationships, obtain information and counseling anonymously, host gatherings and community building events, and push for political agendas. However, the opponents of these developments argue that the so-called “keyboard activism” took away the hard-fought victories and real-effort commitments that real life gatherings would have; it made people feel less accountable for their actions due to anonymity, and created a demographical divide that only middle class or higher status individuals have access to the services. Thus, the spread of online gay movements was compared with the spread of viruses. One of the issues that especially came up was the political movement of “common activist agenda” by the lgbt-India group; opponents of this movement included lesbian women, and queer women who argued that such movement would assume a coalition of similar struggles that does not properly reflect the history that each group has been through. This is relevant to the concept of sit-point theory where it, being an extension of standpoint theory, examines how disabled people are unable to physically stand, thus they needed a term that specifically accounted for them. Another analysis of the argument that these women made can relate to how the Pan-Asian Idol show, from Long Bui’s excerpt, did not properly represent Asian countries. Specifically, the modernization process of the country was measured by the way each model changes over time did not represent how other women’s lives had to change by adopting export-oriented jobs and dirty labor in order to modernize; this is relevant to how common activist agendas assumed that each gender group would have had similar experiences, and neglected the specific oppressions from epistemic authorities. Thus, Bui and Roy would agree that homogenization is neglecting and non-beneficial.