Digital Intimacy: Young Women, Gendered Modernities and Aspirations in Inter-Asia
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:15 pm
- Venue
- SOAS, University of London
- Room
- Wolfson Lecture Theatre
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
What does digital intimacy look like in Asia's most dynamic cities? Drawing on multi-sited research across Bangalore, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Singapore, this book explores how young women navigate technology, desire, and modern life without defaulting to Western frameworks.
How do young women navigate intimacy in an age of digital ubiquity? This inter-Asia study adopts a qualitative approach to understand young women’s engagements with digital technologies in four major Asian metropolitan sites with accompanying discussions of media representations and policy documents relating to digital use. The four sites, Bangalore, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Singapore are important nodes within criss-crossing local, national, regional (Asian) and global configurations and circulations of culture, economy and technology. Our collaborative multi-sited research in Asia enables analysis of how such circulations of technology intersect with the lived experiences of young women situated within local/national contexts and histories without making the ‘West’ the default reference point. The book reveals how digital intimacy practices intersect with histories of gendered modernities and neoliberal transformations in these globalizing ‘aspirational’ cities.
About the Speaker
Tejaswini Niranjana is Director, Centre for Asian Studies, GITAM University, India, and Adjunct Professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Her books include Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious (2020), both published by Duke University Press. Recently, she edited Music, Modernity and Publicness in India (Oxford UP, 2020). She is the co-producer of three documentary films related to music, and the curator of Saath-Saath, the India-China music collaboration project (http://saathsaathmusic.com).
Her book, Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (University of California Press, 1992), has impacted a wide range of fields from anthropology and history to post-colonial studies. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently awarded with the National Translation Prize for Fiction by the American Literary Translators’ Association. She was Chair of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society from 2015-2019.
Image credit: Anish Mathew Jose via unsplash
