Voices
As Sontag points out, camp is a mode of enjoyment, not judgment. It is intrinsically generous, and is a form of love for human nature, it relishes the awkward intensities of character. Central to camp is a tenderness of feeling and love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles.
I was speaking with my friend, Priya[1], about her health issues. She is fifty, unhappily married with an uninspiring sex…
Our body is home. We exercise, we eat right. We adorn it with jewels and tattoos. We live well and breathe easier if our home (our body) is clean, fed and rested. Come home to yourself. Masturbation is one of the easiest ways home.
And that is sadly the case with so many women. Speak of exercise and nutrition as a path to wellbeing and self-care, sure. They will read Prevention and Health type of magazines, employ a personal trainer, go to a yoga class, or follow a dietician’s advice. But speak to them of yoni eggs, masturbation and self-pleasure, and you are suddenly not speaking a language they understand!
Cinnamon Gardens, looking back on the early twentieth century, reveals the trauma of queer lives, in a country where queerness, family and the state are still irreconcilable with each other.
However elusive the combination of safety and adventure, it’s a framework I find terribly useful. It helps me understand much of life, including spirituality and sexuality, and what the two might have in common.
However elusive the combination of safety and adventure, it’s a framework I find terribly useful. It helps me understand much of life, including spirituality and sexuality, and what the two might have in common.
I want it, I got it. Right? Except, what I often get is some approximation of erotic pleasure, which has more to do with my own conditioning about what good sex looks like, and little to do with my body’s erotic mechanisms. This very peculiar condition is often lumped under ‘sexual frustration’, when it should really be addressed under safety.
Sounds of Abida Parveen and Falguni Pathak’s force move me to other frames, that foreground unforgiven settlements. They provide me with what Jacqui Alexander has so beautifully called “pedagogies of the sacred.”
It’s sad that we think we own our bodies: the bodies we love, the bodies we hate, the bodies we…
The fight for an end to discrimination and violence against sex workers in Cambodia, as in many other parts of the world, has a long way to go.
Employing a direct line of questioning in a booming voice, a tall drag queen shining in a blood red sequinned gown, strides to our table and shoots the question at us. I am not entirely sure how to respond and neither is my friend.
As a girl, I was made to believe that pleasure was something that existed outside my body, something that I had to seek out, something that was necessarily a product of a partnered experience. I don’t think I was even allowed to want pleasure, especially in its sexual forms.
Often when we speak of families and family history, we talk genetics, traditions and inheritance of all kinds. Somehow our relationship by blood or otherwise to a clan is supposed to help us identify our place in the universe. So there’s family medical history, family culture, family traditions of food and career. But sexuality? A family history that focuses on sexuality? What would that even mean?
I thought of myself as a feminist activist much before I formally entered the development sector space. I participated in…