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
Our bodies are the vessels through which we feel, emote, work or navigate our societies and the world at large. Our bodies are the real, live archive of everything we have experienced and they have borne the consequences of our social conditioning and decisions.
The short-lived thinness had left me before I knew it. I became fat, and thereby undesirable, once again. A chasm appeared in my relationship with my body. Its ways of responding had become strange. My form became unfamiliar to me, and to those around me.
The first sensations that we experience are related to and derived from our body. It is a site of experience, expression and contemplation. The body is a means of voicing our deepest realisations, but how others visualise it can be a source of intense pain.
मैं 9वीं कक्षा में थी, जब लोग मेरे शरीर के बारे में जो कहते थे वह मेरे अंदर उतरने लगा। मैंने पहली बार रुककर ध्यान दिया कि दूसरों की नज़र में मैं कैसी दिखती थी। यह अपने बारे में सचेत होने की शुरुआत थी, और ख़ुद से असहज होने की भी।
वक़्त के साथ मैं समझने लगी कि सिर्फ़ शोषण नहीं, उससे उभरने की प्रक्रिया के साथ मेरा रिश्ता भी मेरा ‘औरत’ होना तय करता है। सदियों से ‘भारतीय नारी’ को हाशिए पर रखा गया है और उसे स्नेह और स्वीकृति सिर्फ़ तब तक दी जाती है जब तक वो अपनी ‘औक़ात’ के बाहर न निकले।
For the last seven years, I have been working on a body of work titled Hotel Rooms themed around fluid male sexuality, mental health, queerness, and challenging deep-rooted societal gender binaries.
The simple truth is that my body and I are having an affair. We each obsess about the other, ask questions and desire each other so much, that it often borders on the shameless. My body is more in love with me, I suspect, than the other way around.
For me, pregnancy was a strange state of being so present and so aware of my body, while at the same time being separate from it. This experience really did a number on me during those nine months and during the postpartum period.
Our bodies become the form and medium through which we present ourselves to the outside world, engage with it, interact with it, perceive it and are perceived by it.