Biography: Vinamarata (Winnie) Kaur is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati studying postcolonial queerness, religion, and digital culture. Her scholarly interests include digital humanities, South Asian studies, 20th and 21st century global environmental literatures, feminist and queer thea/logies, LGBTQIA+ literatures, and film/TV studies. Her research benefits from her fluency in numerous verbal and coding languages. She has published in several scholarly journals and as a journalist. Her recent paper “Exploring the Materiality of Cyborg Eco/Thealogy: Interwebbing Queer Feminism(s) and Eco/Sexualities Through Sikh Cinema” will inform her multiple levels of engagement with the roundtable theme.
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“Films, as performative technologies, open doors for discursive conversations around taboo subjects, such as union of religion and queer sexualities. How could films help queer Sikhs to congregate virtually and validate their diverse sexualities without denouncing their faith? How can non-normative films, through their digital work, antiwork, and postwork help re-visualize queerness among Sikhs? As postmodern subjects, we stray ourselves from universal constructions of any kind. Our spiritual sense of life, or belief in faith, gets transformed to not reflect an assumption of a higher power but to accentuate experience and to realize its varying effects, resulting in a need of production of newer forms of confessional and social technologies, the most potent of which is film since it not only holds the dangerous power to isolate and create a split among us but also holds the ameliorative power to draw us in, engage us in dialogical and meaningful conversations with our communities, and build upon our fantasies that strive for queertopias. This paper performs an interdisciplinary inquiry into three Sikh films—Margarita with a Straw, Searching 4 Sandeep, and Bend It Like Beckham—that I discovered through my digital labor and internet’s “divine” matchmaking power. These films revolve around the concept of cyborg eco-queer subjectivity and explore the complex personhood of three Sikh protagonists and confrontations with their social milieus so as to shatter the taboo of non-heteronormativity to increase queer visibility and acceptance, thereby hoping for liberation through use of confessional, digital technologies such as film and internet.”
materiality, difference, and digital labor 