Siddharth Narrain is an Assistant Professor (Law), at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, and Faculty Director, Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA). Siddharth’s main focus is on public law, law and media, human rights law, and gender and sexuality related law. He has worked previously as a Lecturer at the Adelaide Law School, Australia; Assistant Professor (Visiting fulltime) at the School of Law, Governance & Citizenship, Ambedkar University Delhi; as a Research Associate with the Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi; as a lawyer with the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore. He has also worked as a journalist with The Hindu newspaper and Frontline magazine in Delhi.
Shikha Aleya (SA): Hi Siddharth, we’re happy to interview you for this In Plainspeak issue on Information and Sexuality! A year ago, you’d written an article for us on the theme of Language and Sexuality; you spoke of language as being central “to our understanding of the world” as it “constitutes the limits and possibilities of our experiences and identities”. Isn’t this true of information as well? How does information connect or disconnect with language? What key issues emerge in this context when you consider matters of sexuality?
Siddharth Narrain (SN): Language helps us makes sense of the world – and yes, language sets the limits of human experience – language is intrinsically tied to human communication and culture. Our relationship to language is mediated through family and community and now increasingly by technology. Information, on the other hand, not necessarily tied to communication – information helps us makes sense of what is going on around us, and can be manipulated, controlled and channeled through technological platforms. For us to make sense of information, we need to be able to trust a reliable source, and then parse through this to makes sense of it. Information may not always make sense of the world or allow for human communication in the way that language does. I see information as being more raw and unmediated by human experience and culture. We have plenty of information (and misinformation) today – a glut of sensory information that speaks to issues of sexuality but it does not necessarily mean that we have the language to understand, communicate and reflect on what this information means. We may for instance have information at our fingertips through Chat GPT, Claude or Google Gemini, that tells us about the proliferation of sexual orientations and gender identities or a challenge to such fixed identities – but what does this mean for us? How did this come about our context? How do we understand this through the experience of those around us and how does this connect to the experience of our communities, families and immediate surroundings? We may not have the language to understand or communicate this if we rely only on information shorn of language which is formed through human experience.
SA: Thank you for bringing those strands together. As individuals, we are swimming in sexuality-related information from birth. This comes to us first from family, community and interactions in the daily life spaces we occupy. What are your observations of how, and if, the quality and extent of this has changed across current living generations?
SN: My sense is that the information that we are swimming in is becoming harder to make sense of as we process information on sexuality which begins not just at home and in our communities, but, in fact, is highly mediated through technology. Our first serious encounter with sexuality is more likely to be online – through the vast reaches and potential of the World Wide Web, websites of organisations, television series, video games, and eventually dating sites, porn sites, chat groups. For those of us living through the technological changes today this can be overwhelming – how does one pare through such information, make sense of it – what do we rely on, and trust, and not? What of this can we have conversations about with family members and even friends? It is no wonder that starting from Australia, national and regional governments across the world (including the government of Karnataka where I live) are contemplating restrictions and bans on access to social media for younger people.
SA: Taking that in a slightly different but relevant direction – to talk about different types of AI. This is with specific reference to technologies like Generative AI and Large Language Models or LLMs, or even conversational AI and chat bots, what are some of the concerns or themes you’d flag regarding information and sexuality? Including for example, the information that is fed in to train these technologies?
SN: This goes to the matter of trust. If our understanding of the world is increasingly mediated by LLMs which we are turning to for routine questions and tasks, then what does this do to our sense and lens of the world around us. So yes, these LLMs are processing information based on what is available to them, and even as they get more scarily accurate, they do reflect certain biases and worldviews. In fact some of these may not even match – what Grok tells you about a question on sexuality may be very different from what Claude does. We are now reading of AI models that are so human-like in their responses they are beginning to function and stand in for human companionship and friendship. The questions that are arising from LLMs are not limited to sexuality of course – these are broader questions that we are all grappling with as educators, students, professionals, consumers of media, journalists etc.
In fact, even on very personal applications such as Grindr – we now see Bots with profiles (and by that I don’t mean bottoms) I am talking about bots that will engage with you in real time in relatively complex conversations. There is still a staccato in the nature of the conversation which gives these bots away, but I am sure that as these get more sophisticated it will get more difficult to parse these from human profiles. Some of these bots may be designed to defraud users, but some may just be created and let loose with no particular purpose. They play on human need and loneliness and you’d be surprised how convincing these can sound to someone just looking for a decent conversation or connection online.
SA: In the larger socio-political, as well as legal context, we have information overload, and consumption with little thought to the veracity, origin, or purpose of that information. You have written about new culture wars as a global thematic change, and of “the interconnectedness of sexuality politics”. So when it comes to critical subjects, such as sexuality, inclusion, and rights, how may the ordinary person even begin to critique the information they access or disseminate on popular internet platforms? And how may legal frameworks obstruct or support such critiquing?
SN: There is no straightforward answer to this question. Part of the answer may lie in understanding the historical context of developments around sexuality and queer identity, which have really changed dramatically, especially in the Indian context. In relation to these, initiatives such as the Queer Archive for Memory Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) housed at the National Law School of India University where I teach assume great significance. As things around us including social understanding of sexual identity and community change rapidly, it is crucial that we preserve these histories and memories. These histories and memories are needed for the current and future generation to understand the scale of change that has occurred and the history of social and legal struggle and organisation that has taken place and continues to do so. It is important that we are connected to community and have access to spaces where these conversations around sexuality are taking place – and not necessarily always technologically mediated conversations. One can’t begin to emphasise the importance of physical community spaces in today’s world where it is very easy to get disconnected from community even as we are highly connected online.
Besides finding these spaces, and perhaps through these spaces, one has to begin to identify websites, sources of information, podcasts, discussion groups, news sites, sub stack pages etc. where there are critical and considered conversations that are being engaged in – which are not only reactive and blunt in their approach (which is sometimes the need of the hour for activism) but have the space for reflection, dialogue and critical engagement. I myself cannot claim to have found an ideal set of these sources and very often I ask friends, colleagues and students about where they are getting their information from, and what spaces of dialogue they are part of. It is a process of constant learning.
Increasingly, legal frameworks in India are designed to monitor online sources of news and information that are critical of state power. Given that sexuality is a space where the nature of the conversation and its relationship to state power may not be obvious, there is still plenty of room for engagement, dialogue and debate. However, as we have seen in the realm of judicial decisions, there seems to be a conservative view of sexuality that is being articulated by legal officials representing the Central Government. This was clear in the two recent examples of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act 2026 and the arguments made by the Solicitor General Tushar Mehta in the Sabarimala case hearings where he questioned the basis of all judicial decisions that relied on constitutional morality. Both these instances are situations where the state – the Central Government and ruling party to be specific, are articulating a specific and more conservative and limited view of sexuality and gender identity based on their conception of an “Indian” or “indigenous or non-western” idea of sexuality that poses a threat to many of the gains made by the sexuality rights movement so far. So we may see in the near future the law becoming a more central site for the struggle over sexuality discourse where the state is pushing its own view of sexuality rights.
SA: A last question, and this approaches the basics today. What are some of the personal and existing infrastructural resources that we access, or can build on, to achieve a responsible relationship with information as it relates to sexuality? What would you call positive direction, going forward from here?
SN: We need to be in constant conversation with our peers, community, friendship networks to better understand how these resources are evolving. I’m trying to keep up on this front. But I do try to keep track of eclectic sources from events, discussions, edited book collections, online essays and conversations with journalists, writers and those engaged in the tech space. The challenge of course is the need for greater time, and space for reflection and inner dialogue, even as we are exposed to more information and dialogue externally. The challenge is to find a balance between this external stimulus and engagement and the space for inward reflection to be able to understand, process and digest all of this information. And to be able to genuinely engage with these developments at a level that is beyond just surface level engagement with byte-sized news and quotes and reels.
Image credit: Siddharth Narrain
