THE ONLINE SILENCE OF SEXUAL CITIZENS OF BANGLADESH IN ‘GOLDEN JULY’: DIGITAL IS SOCIAL?

Can a Gen–Z Student–People’s Uprising, the first in the Asian Spring under the banner of ‘Anti–Discrimination’, be a lens for the GSM (Gender and Sexual Minorities) digitality of Bangladesh? Can the ‘Digital’ signify the Sociology of Gender? And What would be the methodologies to map this signification? In the bloodied last week of July 2024 marching towards the two–day One–point Gen–Z Movement in Bangladesh that toppled the incumbent government, a Facebook post of Muhin Hashmi (pseud.), a popular Bangladeshi gay satire content creator was deleted. Posted in Bengali, it read: the impossible task of uniting all of Bangladesh can only be done around anti–GSM hatred. The unified backlash from all quarters of Bangladeshi gender and political spectrum followed, silencing the voluminous Bengali language and Bengali culture–specific Gender Variant Content (GVC) production from Bangladesh on Facebook for almost a month till the end of August 2024. What does this month–long silence of Gen–Z GVC content makers among the huge content surge about the ongoing Student–People Uprising tell us? Instead of the relevant ‘controversy mapping’ online (Munk, Meunier, Venturini 2019) before and after, can we research the forced ‘radio silence’ triggered by the ‘Anti–Discrimination’ ideologies instead? ‘Depending on the research question, it may be most fruitful not to predefine the variables and values but, (...) capture the specific issue language of various actors and sources as they resonate online. (...) this approach aspires to follow the actors in their own words.’ (Niederer and Colombo, Visual Methods for Digital Research, Polity Press 2024, p 53). The GVC content might have developed new kinds of ‘codes of silence’ in the tumultuous times and that might be the key to understanding an aspect of the GSM (Gender and Sexual Minorities) digitality of Bangladesh.