agency
For this March issue, we decided to interview many people, not just one, and over 350 people responded! Here are the results of a ‘public interview’ that took the form of a survey, and two polls with two questions each, on Facebook and Instagram.
मनुष्यों के बीच के किसी भी तरह के आपसी सम्बन्धों में सहमति का होना, इन सम्बन्धों की मज़बूत नींव की तरह होना चाहिए। हमारे समाज में हम इस ‘सहमति’ देने या ‘ना’ कह पाने के अधिकार पर प्रतिक्रिया के रूप में नयी तरह की हिंसा को देख पा रहे हैं। अधिकारों को प्रयोग करने की इस प्रक्रिया को केवल किसी व्यक्ति द्वारा अपने अधिकारों के प्रयोग के रूप में न देखकर इसे सभी के लिए सामूहिक रूप से किए जा रहे अधिकारों के प्रयोग के रूप में देखा और समझा जाना चाहिए।
Choices about life, relationships and desires are all defined based on socio-economic background, caste, class, gender and sexuality. When these young girls found a comfortable and safe space, they openly talked about their desires and experiences and how they negotiated their existing environments in order to pursue their desires.
Since all women do not share a common history, agency cannot and need not be located for all in an emancipatory discourse and in the recourse to resistance and subversion. For some, feminist agency and the realisation of one’s potential as gendered actors in the world can come from submitting to a discourse that others deem repressive.
As an integral aspect of the self, sexuality is at the core of home in the ways in which that home designs space for sexual being, an evolving sexual self, sexual experience and sexual expression, or does not do so, or does so for some members of the home but not for others.