The concept of 'coming out' of a 'closet' is an idea that has taken precedence in queer public life, personal narratives, and fictive stories as opposed to stories about queer life, joy and 'normalcy'. This chapter follows the inception and growth of Almaarii, a digital graphic storytelling project I began to explore my own queerness, or the lack of it within popular culture of 'acceptable queerness'. In this essay, I explore the existence of Almaarii as a space that offers comfort, as a space that reveals and conceals, a site of interior exclusion (Urbach, 1996) that shapes the way we experience the digital world as marginalised trans and queer peopleand perhaps moves towards the resnatching of our spaces for ourselves, away from the celebrations of pride months and rainbow capitalism (Roque & Horacio, 2011).Media organizations and safe spaces built for the queer community online and offline have sections of 'coming out stories' to talk about the experience of revealing one's non-normative identity to a society that has learnt to be violent towards any form of 'deviance'. Closets were built and used as a metaphor to speak about what is considered to be a (often dirty) secret; a queer crack in the wall of a heterosexual/normative society (A Room of One's Own, 2018). These are stories I have known as an editor, contributor, and consumer of such spaces; they are some of the most popular (or maybe just necessary) stories when it comes to audience reach and readability-human stories that prove to us that we are not the only queer person in the world, that validate our struggle for acceptance. But what happens when the whole experience of coming out of a closet is based on and comes from a culture that has had the privilege of language to back the experience with words? A cultural hegemony (Gramsci et al., 2007) which has boated these words to other cultures and people who have, on their own, tried to grapple with their identity without words to explain what they feel in every fiber of their being?
F eminist spaces have, for the longest time, maintained a close link with the idea * * *The Space was spontaneously formed to accommodate the growing anger, discomfort, and helplessness in students, academics, and the larger South Asian diasporic community in the UK. They were enraged at the suppression of the protests against the exclusionary citizenship bill proposed (currently, passed) in India, which, for the first time in Indian history, makes religion a criterion
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