Visual Corner
Canadian parent Wendy Tsao took her child’s over-sexualised dolls, removed their makeup and changed their overly done-up hair to turn them into role models from real life. By creating from commonly available dolls lookalikes of real-life women of renown, Tsao explores the idea of playthings having an influential impact on the formation of one’s own identity.
“Yo existo. I exist,” asserts Julio Salgado’s self-portrait drawn with wings that give him identity. Salgado was eleven years old when he crossed the border from Mexico to the United States where he remains an undocumented resident. Risking arrest and deportation if detected, Julio makes art about his experiences of being a queer and undocumented person of colour.
DarkMatter is a trans South Asian performance duo from New York. Watch them perform their spoken word poetry and chat about their trans politics, traversing issues of gender, race, desire, migration and more that connects to it.
Now, You Can Go Home is a compilation of photo works created in the past two years and continues to be an open project where each photograph performs a story about explorations of different characters providing glimpses of them in fear, self-acceptance, longing and celebration.
Alok Vaid-Menon is one half of the trans South Asian performance duo from New York, DarkMatter. Vaid-Menon was gender-assigned male at birth, identifies as transfeminine (that is, identifies with femininity to a greater extent than with masculinity) and prefers the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘their’.
Want the perfect bikini body to flaunt? Or do you just want to be able to wear what you want without worrying about whether you can pull it off? Here’s an easy tip anyone can use.
A short documentary on India’s menstruation man, Arunachalam Muruganantham, who wore an artificial uterus, was left by his wife for five years, and was called a pervert by the neighbours – all in his pursuit to create cheap yet effective sanitary napkins for women who cannot afford safe menstrual hygiene products.
A short movie with a twist ending, Belle de Jour (meaning ‘Beauty of the Day’, and this one is not the 1967 film by Luis Buñuel) begins by showing a stereotypical middle-class Indian woman who goes to work after taking care of her household.
This photo feature gives us a glimpse into the lives of women from around the world at their diverse places of work: “Teachers, farmers, businesswomen, politicians, mothers, law enforcers – women and girls contribute every day in many visible and invisible ways.”
While the video’s message of women finding self-worth through beauty can be construed as sexist (our worth can’t be reduced to mere beauty and looks), and it also has the token ‘fat’ woman that one can criticise it for, one also can’t deny that the loving and acceptance of one’s body remains a universal, daily struggle of probably every woman the world over.
In the Chinese province of Yunnan, ‘early marriage’ is a common phenomenon. Dearth of employment opportunities compels parents to marry off their children before leaving for work in bigger cities. The cultural trend favours early marriage, so there is no social stigma attached to it.
Imtiaz Ali’s 5-minute film begins as any trite gangster flick but rapidly flips things around both in narrative and in audience perception.
If there are hordes of reasons for having sex, and all kinds of activities that count as work, why is it that the act of performing sexual services cannot be accepted as legitimate work?
Liz Hilton illustrates the puzzle in a booklet published by Empower Foundation, Thailand.
“‘Dhandewali’s must smoke; paan is a must; a ‘dhandewali’ can never escape her identity; ‘dhandewali’s must dress ‘differently’… Spanning over 6 decades of Bollywood cinema, ‘Zinda Laash’ highlights how very little has changed across the ages when it comes to the industry’s representation of women in prostitution. Humorously drawing attention to stereotypes, while poignantly highlighting myths, ‘Zinda Laash’ is a tribute to every sex worker who is not recognised as a woman or a human being.”
The gang rape and murder of New Delhi’s Jyoti Singh in December 2012 shook up the country’s urban collective conscience. Kavita Krishnan’s erudite feminist leadership emerged from the incident’s aftermath – a powerful voice of outrage against the curtailing of freedom and mobility.