Family
The Indian family is changing. There’s no ‘ideal family’ defined by children or lineage. It comes in different shapes and sizes.
My sexual desires may not be what certain people called ‘normal’ and I could not share this with my so called friends as I thought they would consider me weird. Surprisingly a woman in my hometown introduced me to the world of Kink. She was a regular housewife and with her for the first time I got to know what I actually needed and wanted and it went on for a good amount of time till I moved out of that place for many reasons.
Watching K3G with my students brings forward new ways of understanding how concepts like socioeconomic class, gender, sexuality, and diasporic imaginaries are embedded with subtle messages of morality and longing and how these messages are ingrained in our Bollywood viewing experiences.
Chandra Deo Singh, a name not necessarily familiar to many of us, spent time in prison in1945 for taking part…
I met Lamai[1] at a spa in Bangkok. She was eager to talk, and told me about her village eight…
Companions take many forms. Using the word very loosely here, a companion is anyone the self is connected to, anywhere, at any point in time, from a family member, to a stranger on a train.
There may already be another organisation in the community to share resources with but for community-led initiatives, a shared perspective on Safe, Inclusive, Sexuality-Affirming (SISA) spaces is also important. Sometimes when the shared perspective is not there, that becomes a challenge.
Jeeja Ghosh is a disability rights researcher and activist, feminist, parent, writer, scholar and trainer. Her lived experience of disability, and of standing up against discrimination and injustice, is at the core of her work and insights. Shikha Aleya interviews Jeeja about mobility across divides other than the physical.
As a queer person, it’s hard not to think right away of chosen family. A term that has become relatively well-known by now, but not always understood I find. One of the primary support systems I personally, like many queer folx, depend on, are ones that we develop and nurture over time.
In the middle of this pandemic, can one seek sexual support in the form of a hook up with one’s best friend, ‘just because’? Is it redefining boundaries, is it sympathy sex, is it simple indulgence, or is it something that one or both might later resent?
I wish my elders had told me about more than just bleeding when they talked about menstruation. I wish they…
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.
Before I was introduced to theatre and the arts in the 11th standard, the future I saw for myself was…
Connection is essential for our survival – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. We connect with people, form networks of care and support, and in a sense weave webs of safety and comfort that we can turn to when stressed or simply want to infuse a dose of joy into our day.
We are, all of us, trying to hold steady, and to hold space for each other and for ourselves. And so, instead of trying to put together a collection of ‘all new’ articles, this time we are republishing some ‘ever fresh’ ones on the theme of Sexuality and Representation.