A digital magazine on sexuality, based in the Global South: We are working towards cultivating safe, inclusive, and self-affirming spaces in which all individuals can express themselves without fear, judgement or shame
In tailoring the way we present ourselves to the world – be it as fashionista, frump or an artful fusion of the two – we think we are the ones making a choice about how we express our gender and sexuality along with other markers of our identity.
Why must others judge her appearance and grace
When true beauty is not confined to a face?
In a world obsessed with the outer shell,
She knows in her heart inner beauty dwells.
While women’s colleges are certainly a step ahead of other institutions in creating spaces of liberation and encouraging freedom of choice, this rare advantage must expand itself onto the landscape of our entire country.
I find that my own clothes are all just pieces of a larger archive I’m slowly constructing: an archive of the women I love, a half-hearted attempt at mimicking what I love.
The idea of a “desirable” body, sewn in my brain from the threads of Instagram reels, weight-loss ads, and the women on this store’s website, stitches the clothes I wear so that they become coloured in every shade of rejection. I wonder if the women I see outside the changing room, admiring themselves in the communal mirrors, seeking validation from their accompanying shoppers, feel the same way as I do inside their cubicle of doom.
I’ve essentially thought of movement as a kind of freedom, but one that has the capacity to destabilise you in some way. My most creative moments are when I’m not moving, when I am in fact rooted and still.
How should I walk, what should my gait be like, what kind of clothes can I wear that will sort of cover me up…? This indecisiveness and the burden of, “What will others think?” are some of the worries, that I carried for a long time while making decisions like: “Is this going to expose too much skin?”, “Is this going to look a certain way that I may not like to present myself as?”
None of these characters is perfect but in their imperfections we can learn more about body positivity, gender sensitivity, privilege, consent, unconscious and implicit bias, sexuality, masculinity, their intersections with class, religion, race, age, and more.