Platformed Intimacy: Queer Visibility, Infrastructural Governance, and the Political Economy of Indian OTT Media

This article examines how queer visibility on Indian over-the-top (OTT) platforms is produced, structured,and governed through platform infrastructures rather than simply expanded through representational freedom.While streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are often celebrated for enablinggreater narrative openness around sexuality and gender, this article argues that queer visibility operates asa form of conditional inclusion shaped by algorithmic recommendation systems, subscription economies,linguistic hierarchies, and anticipatory regulatory practices. Drawing on platform studies, queer theory, andIndian media scholarship, the analysis demonstrates how queer intimacy is aestheticised through restraint,emotional legibility, and narrative containment. Forms of queerness aligned with cosmopolitan, middleclass, and English-speaking subjectivities circulate more easily, while queer lives shaped by caste, region,vernacular language, or economic precarity remain structurally marginal. Rather than framing OTT platformsas liberatory alternatives to censorship regimes, the article conceptualises them as infrastructures ofgovernance that modulate desire, risk, and circulation. Queerness thus functions as a diagnostic site forunderstanding how platform capitalism manages cultural difference in contemporary India