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
यहाँ लड़कियों के लिए सेक्स करना सामजिक रूप से बहिष्कृत हो जाने जैसा अनैतिक काम है या कहिये कि यह गैर-कानूनी ही है, हालांकि कानूनन इसे गैर-कानूनी घोषित नहीं किया गया है।
एक अलग जेंडर के शरीर के लिए मेरी इच्छा निरंतर और बेदर्द नहीं थी। ये तेज लहर सी होती और हमेशा मुझे उस शरीर के साथ काफ़ी संतुष्ट छोड़ जाती जो मेरे पास था। बृहन्नला का अवतार उस प्रकार की अस्थायी और पलटने योग्य संभावना के लिए एक संदर्भ बिंदु या आदर्श रूप बन गया।
Each time I would look into the mirror, I would see the love handles bulging through my shirt and cringe inwardly. Mills and Boon had convinced me that my body was not loveable like that of the thin, beautiful protagonists, and thus, there would no knights coming for me on horses, now or later.
In fact, once when I referred to Sheriff Callie (a cartoon character) as a man, I was sternly told she is a woman. Doc McStuffins, another of their favourite cartoon characters, is a smart girl who can fix anything. She inspires my nieces to think boldly.
Using silent actions and secret fulfillment of what society considers as sin and the law condemns as illegal, the text offers an example of the silence of resistance.
Fanfiction was more than just writing your own stories about the characters or the setting of your favourite book or TV show; it was a questioning of the dominant mainstream pop culture narrative as a whole.
When Deepa Mehta’s Fire came out in 1996, violent protests roiled India over the depiction of romance between two female leads. There is no homosexuality in India, demonstrators declared while burning effigies in the Capital. In contrast, when Margarita With A Straw came out in 2014, it received accolades for its sensitive portrayal of queer desire in a woman with disability.
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.
BDSM has been existent in discussion all the way from the time of the Marquis de Sade. However, the only thing that ’Fifty Shades of Grey’ seems to have done is shine the spotlight on a lifestyle that has existed and been judged for quite some time now.
Deena Mohamed, Egyptian artist, illustrator and designer, speaks to us about her art and her perspective on politics, patriarchy, feminism, and gender and sexuality.