“In-Between” Heterotopia and “Other” Spaces: Queer(y)ing Select South Asian Diasporic Poetics on YouTube

This paper examines the digital media platform YouTube as the "other," heterotopic and liminal space that enables the articulation of queer South Asian diasporic subjectivities otherwise marginalized within normative socio-cultural frameworks. Through analyzing select YouTube poems by Alok Vaid-Menon and Fatimah Asghar, the paper situates YouTube digital poetics as alternate spaces of resistance, metaphor of "in-between" and/or "elsewhere" that deconstruct the (hetero)normative narratives of South Asian diasporas, and global queer discourses. Diasporic queer poetry on YouTube exemplifies transnational, transcultural, and transgressive geopolitics as alternative "safe spaces", cultivating networks of queer belonging while simultaneously problematizing essentialist and homogenizing understandings of identity. Drawing on recent scholarships on queer platformization of digital media spaces (YouTube), the paper highlights how YouTube queer poetry resists assimilation/sublation into totalizing meta-narratives, instead reclaiming space for a queer self that thrives on fragmentation and multiplicity. Further, the queer subjectivities embodied in these poems embrace their deterritorialized, and fluid positionalities, reveling in "disorientation", alterity, and (un)belonging. Through deliberately rupturing socio-constructionist notions of authority, these poetic performances engender "alternative hermeneutics" of South Asian diasporic queer subjectivities, transnational connectivities, and resistance, thereby remapping diasporic geopolitics through digital queer poetics.