Curated Content
Good Girls Marry Doctors: Brave Voices On Daughterhood In South Asian American Families
To all the American daughters of South Asian immigrants: Have you ever felt that you just can’t be a Good Girl? Your parents and South Asian community have likely tried drilling in you that Good Girls follow the path of academic excellence, a well-paying job (doctor, lawyer, or engineer), marriage to a well-paid Desi man (preferably a doctor), and then a happy house with kids. Obedience to parents, no dating (at least not while a student), and virginity until marriage are absolutes.
By Curated Content
What Made South Asians Lose Their Sexuality?
The British went to South Asia with their preconceived notions of sexual normalcy stemming from enlightenment and Christian ideals. If anything, it was the British who were the prudes and sexually repressed venturing into India, rather than the sexually liberated souls they claim to be today.
By Curated Content
September 15, 2016
Brushstrokes: Queer, Undocumented Migrant Artist Uses His Art for Activism
“Yo existo. I exist,” asserts Julio Salgado’s self-portrait drawn with wings that give him identity. Salgado was eleven years old when he crossed the border from Mexico to the United States where he remains an undocumented resident. Risking arrest and deportation if detected, Julio makes art about his experiences of being a queer and undocumented person of colour.
By Curated Content
September 15, 2016
Video Page: DarkMatter’s Poetry and Trans Politics
DarkMatter is a trans South Asian performance duo from New York. Watch them perform their spoken word poetry and chat about their trans politics, traversing issues of gender, race, desire, migration and more that connects to it.
By Curated Content
September 1, 2016
Brushstrokes: This Visual Artist Stirs Up Reality with His Personal Portraits
Now, You Can Go Home is a compilation of photo works created in the past two years and continues to be an open project where each photograph performs a story about explorations of different characters providing glimpses of them in fear, self-acceptance, longing and celebration.
By Curated Content
Why Did Men Stop Wearing High Heels?
It was the beginning of what has been called the Great Male Renunciation, which would see men abandon the wearing of jewellery, bright colours and ostentatious fabrics in favour of a dark, more sober, and homogeneous look. Men’s clothing no longer operated so clearly as a signifier of social class, but while these boundaries were being blurred, the differences between the sexes became more pronounced.
By Curated Content
August 16, 2016
From Horses to Headgear, Everything the ‘Mohenjo Daro’ Trailer Has Got Wrong
Bollywood’s period dramas have a history of misrepresenting the past. From Mughal-e-Azam (1960), where the story of Salim’s rebellion is wrongly attributed to love, to Bajirao Mastani (2015) portraying Balaji Bajirao as a Marathi superman, Bollywood cannot seem to get the history right in historical fiction. The trailer and posters of Ashutosh Gowariker’s Mohenjo Daro indicate that this tradition will be perpetuated.
By Curated Content
Brushstrokes: Alok Vaid-Menon’s Stunning Trans Attire
Alok Vaid-Menon is one half of the trans South Asian performance duo from New York, DarkMatter. Vaid-Menon was gender-assigned male at birth, identifies as transfeminine (that is, identifies with femininity to a greater extent than with masculinity) and prefers the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘their’.
By Curated Content
August 2, 2016
Video Page: How to Get the Perfect Bikini Body (Hint: It’s Easy!)
Want the perfect bikini body to flaunt? Or do you just want to be able to wear what you want without worrying about whether you can pull it off? Here’s an easy tip anyone can use.
By Curated Content
Santhi Soundarajan And The Flawed Science Of Sex
According to the communiqué released by the games authorities, she did not possess the sexual characteristics of a woman. She had therefore been disqualified, and would be stripped of her medal. Hearing this, Santhi fell into a state of utter disbelief.
By Curated Content
July 15, 2016
The Indian Girl’s Guide to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math
The scientific establishment’s inability to attract enough women and keep them in the workforce is a large enough problem for it to feature in interactions between nation’s governments.
By Curated Content
Video Page: Arunachalam Muruganantham: India’s Menstruation Man
A short documentary on India’s menstruation man, Arunachalam Muruganantham, who wore an artificial uterus, was left by his wife for five years, and was called a pervert by the neighbours – all in his pursuit to create cheap yet effective sanitary napkins for women who cannot afford safe menstrual hygiene products.
By Curated Content
What Happened to the Women Who Graduated from IITs in the ’90s?
Several hundreds of women have presumably enrolled at India’s other IITs in the past 20 years, although none of these schools keep records of the gender of their students. Where did all these women go ‒ and why aren’t they leaders in Indian industry today?
By Curated Content
“Everything needed to be changed. Fortunately, we have already started”
The feminist classic sex work vs prostitution debate was played out in this context in a way that was different from what happens in cis feminist spaces. In the eyes of this narrator, cis feminists who have never engaged in sex work have a lot to learn from travestis and trans women. First of all: the respect.
By Curated Content
Marked Women, Unmarked Men
If a woman’s clothing is tight or revealing (in other words, sexy), it sends a message — an intended one of wanting to be attractive, but also a possibly unintended one of availability. If her clothes are not sexy, that too sends a message, lent meaning by the knowledge that they could have been. There are thousands of cosmetic products from which women can choose and myriad ways of applying them. Yet no makeup at all is anything but unmarked. Some men see it as a hostile refusal to please them.
By Curated Content
June 17, 2016