The I Column
Youngsters are bombarded every day with messages related to sexuality, sex and relationships from various sources. And we also know that not all the information they encounter prepares them well to make choices.
Where did my body go? This is a question I have asked myself repeatedly over the last two years. My…
I wish my elders had told me about more than just bleeding when they talked about menstruation. I wish they…
We don’t have an original I-Column this month. Instead we feature the voices of two women, Deepika Padukone and Reshma…
At 13, I could (correctly!) explain the reproductive system of a plant. I’d been rather intimate with the anatomy of…
Of course, I knew I wasn’t the only person in the world writing about Sherlock Holmes. I, however, thought I was the only one in the world writing about them like that. You know.
Romantically.
Of course, I knew I wasn’t the only person in the world writing about Sherlock Holmes. I, however, thought I was the only one in the world writing about them like that. You know.
Romantically.
It is this camaraderie with sexualness that made my mother uncomfortable about my comfort with lipsticks. Stains become metonyms for the woman herself, and her sexuality. It is possible that this stain might stay on someone’s mind as they encounter a stained cup. It is possible that even if they never have seen the person, they would now be compelled to imagine them.
The lip colour then enters into a rather queer state of existence as it refuses to stand by the label it is expected to conform to. It moves and escapes categorisation. In its queerness, it renders itself as a paradox. At the heart of paradoxes is the understanding that something is what it is also not. Similarly, the colour of this lipstick is nude, but it is also not. It is possible that it is because of this slippery nature of the paradox that my sexuality as my identity too remains slippery, in motion and fluid.
This is a good enough place to begin. From inside your own skin. Before we could speak, we moved. We…
“Mamma, look, that’s a boy giraffe, I can see his penis,” exclaims my four-year-old daughter in delight at her discovery as we stand watching the stately animals at the fabulous Mysore Zoo. Far from cringing at the over-loud tones of my daughter, I beam at her, “That is clever of you.”
“Mamma, look, that’s a boy giraffe, I can see his penis,” exclaims my four-year-old daughter in delight at her discovery as we stand watching the stately animals at the fabulous Mysore Zoo. Far from cringing at the over-loud tones of my daughter, I beam at her, “That is clever of you.”
Before I was introduced to theatre and the arts in the 11th standard, the future I saw for myself was…
In my adulthood, I have experienced God outside of how I was taught to experience Him. I have discovered that I am a sexual being with infinite ways of experiencing pleasure. Almost all of these ways are outside of the tame abstinence-penetrative sex to get pregnant-abstinence cycle prescribed by the Catholic Church
I read The Failed Radical Possibilities of Queerness in India more than a year ago and it still makes me…