Image of Thrice Invisible in its Visibility: Queerness and user generated ‘Kand’ videos

Gender and Sexuality

Thrice Invisible in its Visibility: Queerness and user generated ‘Kand’ videos

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Welcome to the world of Masti and Kand videos (referred henceforth as Kand videos), where the video described here is more a rule rather than an exception. Masti, the Hindi word for ‘fun’ and Kand, which can be translated as ‘scandal’ or ‘prank’ have been conflated where the line between scandal and fun (also referring to the blurring line between consent and abuse on the digital space) is blurred and used to define a subgenre of user generated videos on popular video streaming websites like YouTube. Kand videos include a wide range of user generated pornography between consenting adults, spycams that capture surreptitious encounters, sting operations that seek to provide testimonies of promiscuity, anonymous cameras that insinuate themselves into private spaces, exposing and leaking the people in it, self-recorded videos of performing to popular Bollywood tunes, and groups of young men and women (generally gender separated) having ‘a bit of fun’ in shared living spaces. In all these types, sexual activity and the body are central to defining the core of the Kand videos. While they also share a similar aesthetic of hand-held, jerky, choppy, largely un-edited amateur videos that seem to be the emerging aesthetic of web video, what unites them is the focus on the bodies of the people in it.

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: Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology.,
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English
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Queer
Kand videos
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Article
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