identity
For many people, fashion serves as a vehicle for expressing their unique identities, their political beliefs, and their sexual orientation.
For the last seven years, I have been working on a body of work titled Hotel Rooms themed around fluid male sexuality, mental health, queerness, and challenging deep-rooted societal gender binaries.
Body is born, as a collection of many parts, into the various collections of bodies. Different combinations or collections are projected onto various historical, spatial and temporal dimensions, out of our needs, desires and capabilities.
The misconceptions associated with the varied manifestations of femininity can be exceedingly deleterious and reinforce gender roles, traditional patriarchal ideas, and stereotypes related to bodies, expressions and the way we experience our sexual and romantic relationships.
Fashion is a language that expresses survival, rebellion, freedom, visibility and invisibility, identity, representation and inclusion.
Our bodies become the form and medium through which we present ourselves to the outside world, engage with it, interact with it, perceive it and are perceived by it.
The assumption that everyone experiences love and attraction in a similar manner is deeply alienating and harmful for the a-spec community.
I felt naked in front of everyone when I first came out, and I can’t stress enough how much my male privilege has helped me out here. I don’t even know if people found it serious enough to consider it my identity instead of ‘a mere sexual preference’ or ‘a phase’ (always a classic dismissal).
We are two boys in our early twenties
who can read touch like that, who have broken into
a 200-year-old mansion, without permission,
to see from above where people like them go
after 377 has been read down only for those
who can stay behind closed doors — in the custody
of cheap hotels, or houses that welcome nights
with the sound of latches closing.
As clear as I was about my sexuality, I was just as unclear about how I wanted to look and what felt good.
My identity unfolded slowly during my postgraduate media studies course, where I was exposed to peers from different socio-economic backgrounds.
In a country like India where both mental health and non-binary identities are topics that are neglected despite being essential parts of an individual’s identity, it can be quite challenging to navigate through issues regarding the same. Accessibility to affordable and quality mental health services is a serious difficulty that the queer Indian population faces.