TARSHI
“There is no sexuality without knowledge.” -Slavoj Žižek, Agitating the Frame Philospher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek writes and talks…
Is Law restrictive and limiting or can it be liberating and provide people a sense of agency when it comes…
“Humour is a rubber sword – it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.” Mary Hirsch, humourist Here’s…
On World AIDS Day, we published the first issue of this month’s In Plainspeak with the theme HIV and Sexuality. Global funding…
“Beauty should be edible, or not at all.” ― Salvador Dalí A Google search with the keywords “food sexuality India”…
The arts hold great sway on how sexuality is viewed, represented, and understood. Does art imitate life, or life, art? Or can it be tossed away as an inscrutable mix of the two influencing each other?
For many of us, it was fiction that fed our souls as children, and now as adults who are still ‘growing up’, it feeds us still. Fiction makes, remakes and unmakes us who walk in worlds of the imagination. It liberates us to dream various versions of ourselves and others into being as the articles in this month’s In Plainspeak eloquently reveal.
“Ab dil karta hai haule haule se Main toh khud ko gale lagaun Kisi aur ki mujhko zaroorat kya Main…
Fantasy is make-believe. We make something up and then we believe it in order to make it exist. However, in some contexts, the make-believe is relegated to the realm of mere ‘play’ (as opposed to the ‘real’), but there’s no denying that make-believing is a crux of human civilisation – children naturally play make-believe games that steer them in their growth, adults use the hypothetical in their thought to make everyday decisions, and both children and adults rely on fantastical stories and myths to construct a common meaning that contributes to creating the world as we know it.
The trouble with the of the origin of families is that no one knows – Kathleen Gough In her 1971…
What can persons with disability do and not do? Can they have sex? Should they have sex? However well-intentioned they…
Felicitations to us at TARSHI! As we turn 18 this month, the currently legal age of consent for sexual activity…
Remember the ‘first time’? And probably, you, like many of us, were plagued by fears of ‘What if…?’ But instead…
To belong or not to belong? Some people define themselves through commonalities. There are some who define themselves through difference and then seek to find others who share that difference. They find commonality in a shared difference. Commonality is what makes for a community. To keep that commonality becomes an unwritten rule. What lets you in? What keeps you out? Every community tries to keep its members together. There are expectations, rules, impositions and, for the dissidents, punishments. Ironically, even communities of people who do not conform to mainstream norms of sexuality or gender have their own norms.
The boundaries are the most interesting bits. No definitions can be identified without them, and yet they themselves remain in a state of flux – neither here nor there, neither this nor that, but both, all, nothing, and so much more. None can stake their claim on the borderland; it is unseizable, enigmatic, most ungraspable. In its ambiguity it has the power to comfort the outlier at its best, and at its worst, leave bereft those who seek refuge in the absolute.