Pain, P. (Ed.). (2026). Queer digital lives: LGBTQ realities and resistance under platform capitalism. Routledge.

In an age where social media platforms structure the very conditions of visibility, this book investigates how LGBTQ lives are made, managed, and sometimes erased by algorithmic infrastructures.

Bringing together voices from across the Global South and diasporic communities, this interdisciplinary volume examines how queer and trans individuals navigate digital platforms as spaces of expression, surveillance, resistance, and survival. Spanning geographies from Bangladesh to China, and Pakistan to the Philippines, contributors explore the affective, political, and economic entanglements of platformed queer life. The chapters interrogate how algorithms sort content, how visibility becomes conditional, and how queer resistance emerges not only through representation, but through subversion, invisibility, memory work, and infrastructural reappropriation. Foregrounding intersectionality, decolonial critique, and transnational feminist and queer theory, this collection reframes digital life not as a neutral terrain, but as one where queerness is contested, commodified, and continuously reimagined. This book is both an urgent critique of platform capitalism and a testament to queer world-building amid precarity and constraint.

A timely exploration of the algorithmic, economic, and socio-technical undercurrents that shape queer lives online, this book will be of interest to students, researchers, and academics working in the areas of queer media, global digital culture, critical platform studies, and media and activism. [HERE] 

Pain, P. (Ed.). (2023). Global LGBTQ Activism: Social Media, Digital Technologies, and Protest Mechanisms. Taylor & Francis.

Focused on understanding and analyzing LGBTQ activism and protest globally, this edited collection brings together voices from different parts of the world to examine LGBTQ protests and their impact. Through the lens of media, culture, and sociopolitical structures, this collection highlights how cultural and technical factors like the emergence of social media and other digital platforms have impacted LGBTQ activism. This book draws on studies from countries as varied as Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Hungary, Morocco, China, and the US. The contributions provide important insight into how social media and digital platforms have provided space for self-expression and protest and encouraged advocacy and empowerment for LGBTQ movements. It also examines the diversity and similarities between different national contexts and the various obstacles faced, while spotlighting countries that are traditionally understudied in Western academia, in an important step toward decolonizing research. Each chapter, through the voices of activists and media scholars, moves beyond an oversimplified examination of queer protests to show, in rich detail, the exciting yet complicated terrain of queer protests throughout the globe.

This book is suitable for media, communication, and cultural studies students; researchers; academics; and LGBTQ activists, as well as students and scholars from related academic disciplines. Read more [HERE] 

Pain, P. (Ed.). (2022). LGBTQ digital cultures: A global perspective (Routledge Focus on LGBTQ Studies

Dr. Paromita Pain (Editor): In the process of opening new spaces for discussions of queer sexuality, the internet and digital technologies have facilitated, a process of connectivity that have created important nodes of identification, belonging, and support (Pullen, & Cooper, 2010). Emphasizing a deeply intersectional lens to the study of queer and transgender issues, digital media technologies and centered on efforts that delve into topics such as race, disability, and colonialism as co-assembled with gender and sexuality, this edited collection examines queer cyberculture and presence through the lens of representation and identity politics to explore how digital technologies have made queer cultural productions more expansive and how such technological affordances and platforms enable queer cultural practices to be more transformational. In the process, it grapples with the tensions that arise when visibility, hiddenness, renditions of the self and collective contractions of identity must be negotiated and explores its influences on contemporary political identities. This collection examines how social media and digital technologies are used in the sphere of LGBT activism, empowerment, identity, and self-expression. Read a sample [HERE]

Korin, E., & Pain, P. (Eds.). (2021). When media succumbs to rising authoritarianism: cautionary tales from Venezuela’s recent history. Routledge. 

 This book provides a transversal scholarly exploration of the multiple changes exhibited around Venezuelan media during the Chávez regime. Bringing together a body of original research by key scholars in the field, the book looks at the different processes entailed by Chavismo’s relationship with the media, extending their discussion beyond the boundaries of the specific cases or examples and into the entire articulation of a nearly- perfect communicational hegemony. It explores the wide-ranging transformations in the national mediascape, such as how censorship of journalistic endeavors has impacted news consumption and production in the country to the complexities of Venezuelan filmmaking during Chavismo, from the symbolic postmortem persistence of Chávez to the profound transformations undergone by telenovelas, from the politically induced migration of online audiences to the reinvention of media spaces for cultural journalism as forms of resistance.  Read a sample [HERE]

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