A digital magazine on sexuality, based in the Global South: We are working towards cultivating safe, inclusive, and self-affirming spaces in which all individuals can express themselves without fear, judgement or shame
Deena Mohamed, Egyptian artist, illustrator and designer, speaks to us about her art and her perspective on politics, patriarchy, feminism, and gender and sexuality.
Richa Kaul Padte, in her own words, is “a writer and editor interested in gender, sex, tech, popular culture and illness.” Shikha Aleya interviews Richa about porn, pleasure and pussycats.
Kripa Joshi, an Illustrator and Comic Artist from Nepal, is the creator of Miss Moti, a character who defies stereotypical notions of how a person should look, feel and be. Kripa’s own experiences growing up as a plump person and her struggles with weight, have informed and inspired Miss Moti.
In a world of prescriptions of performance and perfection, there isn’t truly that much space built in to risk non-performance, not being perfect, or to risk not fitting the prescription.
Any desire, not necessarily or narrowly sexual, but perhaps related to sexuality, such as independence, equality, gender role-bending, controlling your own finances, eating the food you’d like to eat as opposed to the food your spouse desires, wearing the clothes you’d like to wear, birth control, choosing to have or not to have children … any of these desires would have only that importance that the individual concerned is able to apportion to it.
I think that the level of power that law makers, opinion builders and stakeholders wield over the more vulnerable and younger people in society is enormous. Yet, these actors have chosen to focus only on building a policy regime of sexual violence, even to the extent of allowing juvenile offenders to be treated as adult accused – without any corresponding effort to build a sex positive culture within which they may exercise agency.
In this issue of In Plainspeak, we interview Madhu Mehra, lawyer and feminist activist. She is a founding member and the Executive Director of Partners for Law in Development (PLD), a legal resource group on women’s rights.
See, whenever people speak about sexuality, they speak of violence; that seems to be the only recognised form of sexuality in the lives of people with mental health conditions. But there are so many happy, sexy, lovely, delicious stories in there.
Feminist, activist, writer, counsellor and trainer, Nandini Rao, focuses on issues of gender-based violence and discrimination, sexuality and disability and on incest and child sexual abuse.
Satya Rai Nagpaul, award winning cinematographer and FTII graduate, trans man, and trans rights activist, speaks about the influence and role of memory in his own life.
As an integral aspect of the self, sexuality is at the core of home in the ways in which that home designs space for sexual being, an evolving sexual self, sexual experience and sexual expression, or does not do so, or does so for some members of the home but not for others.