Skype Keynote: Networked Intimacies: Gender & Sexuality in the face of #MeToo : Nishant Shah

The digital interrupts our conversations of intimacy in social movements. The conversations about networked technologies and affect often take up predictable routes: we talk about the reorganization of intensities and intensification of connections in the distributed networks. And also of the granular alienation and distributed disaffection that arises out of the weak links. Especially in the wake of the #MeToo movements, the role of digital networks and their presence in our humanist movements have often been under scrutiny. In this lecture I propose that in the dominant response to digital networks, the networked technicity and the affective ideological are often positioned as separate and discrete. Drawing from personal experiences of queerness, and of the debates that grew in India in the #MeToo movements, I want to show another register of thinking through the intimacies of our movements as shaped and contained by the networked technologies, to think of more effective and affective tactics.