Issue In Focus
(Tread gently. This article has some potentially disturbing content) If the first words that come to your mind when someone…
While we moved one step forward towards sexual rights by striking down Article 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and decriminalising homosexuality, we still have a long way to go in changing and challenging the popular psyche and the political and legal narratives around homosexuality and queer families.
In the last two decades the use of reproductive technologies[1] (RTs) has become an inevitable and often indispensable part of…
Today Marie Stopes is better known for her eponymous clinics, which provide contraception and safe abortion services in 37 countries…
If you’ve got a body, in which you’re going to negotiate this life, you have to know how it works.
The relationships that are portrayed in queer media also often transcend all attempts at categorisation, but are still undeniably queer – as are the characters whose inescapable push-and-pull, to their audience, often becomes the plot itself.
Performance and ‘proper’ go hand in hand because every performance has rules and prescriptions, so you can tell whether it’s a good performance or not, whether it’s skilled or not. Otherwise, it appears, you can’t understand or appreciate performance – or know if you’re doing it right!
Academic scholarship, popular culture and media-generated sex surveys are only beginning to understand ‘pre-marital’ sex among young people in India….
Food is some sort of extension of our bodies, our identities, and therefore food and sexuality intersect in a myriad ways.
The fans invest emotional energy, and time, knowing very well that the players may never know of their existence or reciprocate the same emotions. That, however, does not deter them from feeling and living those emotions.
While some of these questions seem old, they continue to be renewed in public debate on competing claims to public spaces. Ideas about public and private spaces also speak to the ways in which caste and class shape ideas about respectability, thus marking some places as ‘safe’ and others as ‘risky’.
I share an apartment with two friends in a cramped street across from posh, climber-draped bungalows in South Delhi. All…
People make assumptions about both mobility and sexuality and quite often reduce them to a few simple, unidimensional concepts. Sexuality is reduced to sex, marriage and the gender binary. Mobility is reduced to ableist concepts of body and capacity, and access to, or the possession of, a vehicle to get from point A to B.
Body image, body shaming, fat shaming. Familiar. Heart image, heart shaming, self-shaming. Expanding the same concept. You know how the…
…even if people have little in common, once they enter these spaces of solidarity, they are connected to a larger community. These spaces become wellsprings of an unspoken sense of safety and mutual support between individuals of communities that share a sense of having been othered.