Taking sexuality, gender, class, and space as its central concepts, this article looks into ways in which cyberspace and technology affect the cultural and political dimensions of sexualities, identities, and sexual rights activism in contemporary urban Bangladesh. The study focuses on non-normative homosexual groups and individuals using the internet. Using qualitative research methods, it looks into non-normative sexualities as expressed, practiced, and organized through two Bangladesh-based same-sex online networks and groups: one online gay group and one online lesbian group in the year 2009. Findings from this study show how within cyberspace, the public and private overlap, intertwine and make erotic desires and identities deeply unstable, permeable, inexact, and ambiguous. The sexual spatiality of public spaces, especially the relatively new arena of the virtual world, shows the contradictions of conformity and resistance to heteronormativity present in contemporary lives. Gender, class, and age are significant factors in creating hierarchies, discriminations, and exclusionary spaces that are new but influential, especially in sexual politics.
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