Issue In Focus
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!
…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.
While highlighting safety from, media narratives often dismiss safety to: express oneself, be it through the way we identify and communicate, or through the body. Not only the spaces we access and the time of day we do so but also the way we perform our self-hood.
LGBT struggle must be an anti-caste struggle. This requires us to go beyond thinking of caste and sexuality as merely an intersecting point which may be occupied by some within LGBT identities.
How might we think of sexuality as innovation, before we jump onto producing new technologies? Does the language of innovation, that of newness, invention and change, have anything to offer in rethinking structures of intimacy?
I share an apartment with two friends in a cramped street across from posh, climber-draped bungalows in South Delhi. All…
(Tread gently. This article has some potentially disturbing content) If the first words that come to your mind when someone…
Body image, body shaming, fat shaming. Familiar. Heart image, heart shaming, self-shaming. Expanding the same concept. You know how the…
Fiction is often relegated to a secondary stow because fact-based forms of knowledge are becoming more and more valued. To be informed is to stay with the facts. Yet I think fiction allows us to stay just about as informed.
Saying yes to pleasure is as important as saying no to danger. To focus only on danger and keep it separate from pleasure leads to half-knowledge.
My politics demanded an alignment with my life, and as my personal life choices were almost always against the norms of society, this was the default option. As one moved away and tried to make communities of choice, however, there were newer lessons to be learnt.
There is a deep connect between travel and sexuality that is internalized at gut level. From birth perhaps. Across cultures. The two are almost metaphors for each other, twins, borrowing words from the lexicon of the other, entwining identity.
It may be useful to visualise sexual rights as a large tree with deep roots and a vast canopy of leaves. Or as a giant umbrella. Or a big tent. Whatever tickles your imagination and allows you to see it as a conceptual and practical tool to make claims for any aspect that relates to how we express sexuality.
Spirituality and sexuality (for most people, if they are not asexual or voluntarily celibate, either of which is their right to be) are both about union. And they are both about deeply personal and intimate aspects of oneself.
The inability to correctly identify, express and soothe (all three without exception, and in no particular order) inner vulnerabilities and imperfections is the weakest link between asserting masculinities and being able to properly live their full potential.