Issue In Focus
Issue In Focus: Is ‘Dhanda’ (Sex Business) Work? – II
Is business work? Can business that involves providing sexual services be understood as work? If work is any mental or physical activity performed for a result, then for the individual performing the activity sex work is work. If work is any activity performed as a means of survival, then sex work is work.
By Meena Saraswathi Seshu and Aarthi Pai
April 18, 2016
Issue In Focus: Is ‘Dhanda’ (Sex Business) Work? – I
Sex work is adult consensual provision of sexual services for money. What part of this definition challenges the notion of work? A service provided for money? A service provided by adults for money? A service provided consensually by adults for money? None of the above.
By Meena Saraswathi Seshu and Aarthi Pai
April 5, 2016
Issue in Focus: Hackers and High Heels
Adeanna Cooke:
International model, featured in Playboy,
Established hacker and amateur computer programmer.
By Shikha Aleya
June 5, 2016
Issue In Focus: Food, Drink and Sexuality
I met Lamai[1] at a spa in Bangkok. She was eager to talk, and told me about her village eight…
By Shweta Krishnan
October 1, 2015
Issue In Focus: Fantasies – Our Pleasure, Our Business, Our Right
Sexual fantasies allow us to conjure up worlds that we want to play with, but in reality, we may not really want. A fantasy is different from a wish. So people may have sexual fantasies about things that they may never act out – like having sex in front of a multitude of onlookers, or with a zebra, or a famous film star or the neighbour next door. And it’s all safe.
By Radhika Chandiramani
November 3, 2016
Issue in Focus: Desire and the Discourse on Difference
Diversity, I think, can be a deceptive word. On the surface it carries the promise of plurality and multiple possibilities. Yet, it is deployed in ways that simply reinscribe normative two-gender stereotypes and heteronormativity.
By Shweta Krishnan
Issue In Focus: Dealing With HIV—Has India Missed the Bus?
HIV remains exceptional in that it carries the seemingly immutable burden of being synonymous with immoral behaviour. Open and safe…
By Mona Mishra
December 1, 2015
Issue in Focus: Colouring Within the Lines
When colours spill across, when a little bit of the red house-paint spills into the blue sky, or the brown door seems to meld in with the green grass, we see ‘errors’ that must be corrected in another attempt to preserve the perfect order of that emergent world.
By Shweta Krishnan
April 3, 2017
Issue in Focus: Coital Collisions With Censorship and Cinema
The notion of censorship of cinema has been highly debated, the repercussions of which have been evidenced in film form as well as spectatorship practices – censorship has defined our relationship with cinema, both in the making and the viewing of it.
By Ishani Dey
January 5, 2017
Issue In Focus: Challenging Neo-liberal ‘Equality’ in Consent
In an ideal world, this article would read at Tweet-length: “Enthusiastic sexual consent is sexy, and necessary for negotiating unequal…
By Kristin Francoeur
November 1, 2015
Issue In Focus: Body Image is a Mind Thing
This is not a cautionary fable about censorship and its excesses, but an exploratory essay on body image, using breasts as a starting point.
By Bishakha Datta
May 1, 2014
Issue in Focus: Beyond Ramps and Restrictions
Accessibility begins with access, enabled or denied, to concepts and ideas. At the core, beyond the architecture of the real and virtual worlds, it is about the architecture of the ways in which this access is broadened, to not only accommodate, but to nurture, the myriad expressions of human minds and bodies.
By Shikha Aleya
August 3, 2017
Issue In Focus: Baboochamuffins and Other Musings
Why are certain privileges only afforded to couples? Why can we not share them with others outside of a romantic or sexual paradigm? Why is intimacy seen as being the purview of lovers? In actual fact, we may often share a greater intimacy with our friends than we do with our lovers.
By Radhika Chandiramani
Issue In Focus: A Travelling Sexuality
Travel and sexuality throws up different thoughts and feelings for us all. For me, it threw up the term travelling sexuality. I like it. Travelling sexuality. It sounds exotic or intellectual, adventurous, dangerous, depending on who you are and how you live life. A travelling sexuality could describe the way we evolve as sexual beings, shifting and changing identities.
By Shikha Aleya
March 1, 2016
Issue in Focus: A Travelling Sexuality
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.
By Shikha Aleya
January 2, 2020