Paper presented at ISSH 2024 at TDTU, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

3rd International Conference on Innovations in the Social Sciences and Humanities ISSH2024
Section: Innovations and social change in the global context
(Subsection: New Communications and Media Anthropology )

Ton Duc Thang University


Transphobic ‘Sharif / Sharifa’ Controversy in Bangladesh :
How local is it when it is online?

How ‘local’ is creative visual content online? And in global context, what innovations we can methodise to keep up with this socio-cultural change? Centred on the still-unfolding transphobic ‘Sharifa’s Story’ controversy in Bangladesh as a case study, this position paper explores various methodologies of assessing ‘locality’ of the related creative visual content online. Platformised Creative Visual content, apparently a fluid, borderless, universal ‘infinity media’ is in reality region-locked, language-tagged, audience-focussed and algorithm-circulated via various platform-dictated localisation parameters. But do user-produced content follow different ‘locality’ parameters despite these plaformised dictats? This highly mediatized and expertly manufactured backlash against the inclusion of a two page short story about a transgender person (‘Sharif / Sharifa’) in a Bangladesh Government-mandated school textbook on sociology is inspiring scores of creative visual content, apparently confined in the geopolitical region of Bangladesh. The disciplinary methodologies of studying new communications and media anthropology focus on the discourse analysis of primarily textual creative content. But in this paper I intend to use the textual content ( from Twitter, Google News) merely as a contextualising offset to the relevant creative visual content (from Facebook) under study and propose that the archaeology of the visual templates, translation studies, genre of humour and Trans-panic narrativization techniques act as far more accurate indicators of the level of localisation of an online visual discourse.

Keywords: Bangladesh, Sharif-Sharifa, Social Media, Textbook, Transgender, Trans-panic

Contact Information:Sourav Roy

Independent Scholar

MA (Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, 2013)
MA (Jawaharlal Nehru University, School of Arts & Aesthetics, New Delhi, 2016)
Mphil (Jawaharlal Nehru University, School of Arts & Aesthetics, New Delhi, 2022)
will.get.back@gmail.com






https://issh2024.tdtu.edu.vn/