Rage. Horror. Grief. Despair. These are just a few of the strong emotions that are swirling around with hurricane intensity after news broke of the rape and murder of a doctor in the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata earlier this month. Yet again, a starkly gruesome reminder, not that we need one, of how cruel and uncaring we are as a society. An extreme reminder of how closely sexuality and the workplace are related and that a safe and healthy working environment is a fundamental human right.
Do workplaces take our needs into account? What might those needs be and how do they connect to sexuality? Shikha Aleya gently but firmly pulls on some skeins of this tangled ball of yarn to unravel it enough for each of us to see where the knots are and how we might begin to loosen them, if only a little. ‘Gender equality at the workplace’ sounds like a tired joke as Gitanjali identifies ‘boys’ clubs’ as yet another impediment to women rising in their careers while Silpi Bhaumik offers an innovative example of how the presence of queer AFAB (Assigned Female at Birth) persons in a professional kitchen changes heteronormative narratives. Meenu Vadera tells us of how she has taken the hard knocks she received during her professional career to transmute them into integrating a feminist politics and praxis into what she is doing now.
In Hindi, we bring you three translations: an article about how working from home led Siddhi Pandey to make peace with her singlehood, Moulshri Mohan’s review of Tales of the Night Fairies on the power of collective organising and contemporary debates about sex work, and an interview with Maya Sharma about sexuality, labour and social and economic justice.
Justice. What does it mean when it is taken out of the law books and policy papers and put into practice? Will we ever really know it in this country where not a day goes by without violations of people’s minds, bodies and spirits, where news outlets scream rape and murder and the “conscience of the nation is stirred” strongly every now and again only to go back into a stupor? But no, we cannot give in to despair. We have to start somewhere. Maybe with our selves and our own workplaces…
