Issue In Focus
The discursive power vested in audio-visual media can prove to be emancipatory if it seeks to re-write the scripts of love, to expand it to include various subjectivities, disturb the patriarchal gendered dynamics that it is based on by introducing a story that allows the audience to imagine it in various different ways.
While sex sometimes can be fun, and at other times complicated and frustrating –is always love, lust or desire: which one you are signing up for and which one did you want to actually explore?
Should we train it to think well, all these minds would see reason in similar things and they would come up with the same absolute reality – a universal Truth. That Truth would be a reflection of the Natural order for all humankind. That Truth alone would be beautiful.
To think of sexuality as performative disrupts the need for stable categories and identities, instead suggesting that we all reinforce and disrupt normative formations as we attempt to inhabit the world in messy ways.
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.
Since all women do not share a common history, agency cannot and need not be located for all in an emancipatory discourse and in the recourse to resistance and subversion. For some, feminist agency and the realisation of one’s potential as gendered actors in the world can come from submitting to a discourse that others deem repressive.
Is seeking wellbeing selfish and individualistic? Does it imply placing one’s own interests above those of others? In the context of sexuality, does it mean prioritising one’s pursuit and attainment of pleasure above all else?
A methodological approach to the study of memory and sexuality helps delineate interesting connections between the two: memory as a methodological tool for the study of sexualities, memory as an object of study, and the role of personal memory in the formation of individual sexualities.
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.
“Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how…
As I sit to write this piece, somehow the song Aap Ki Yaad Aati Rahi Raat Bhar from the 1978…
What do you think of when you put the words freedom and sexuality together? Orgies? Polyamory? Sex with no unwanted…
It is not entirely impossible to imagine that classical Indian dance is timeless or that the stories narrated in these…
Today Marie Stopes is better known for her eponymous clinics, which provide contraception and safe abortion services in 37 countries…
Fiction is a realm within which we can imagine the limitlessness of our feminist realities. By censoring fiction itself in an anxiety to perform what we understand as feminism, is to censor our imaginations, its subtle negotiations with reality and its potential in generating desires and dreams we hardly knew of. Does this mean we don’t critique books and movies? Definitely not! Critique is fun. Critique is important. Critique is how we grow. But the judgement needs to stop.