Queer
Queering and Transing (as) Failure
I am out. A postcard from a stranger that I imagine to be queer or trans*[1] or both tells me…
By Cat D
July 22, 2024
Queer Stories for Queer People
The relationships that are portrayed in queer media also often transcend all attempts at categorisation, but are still undeniably queer – as are the characters whose inescapable push-and-pull, to their audience, often becomes the plot itself.
By Malavika Krishna Kumar
March 18, 2024
Queer Heterosexual, Heterosexual Queer: Two Tales of Queer Love 100 Years Apart
The lovers enact many recognizable hetero-normative romantic tropes – the wronged petulant woman pacified via kisses and caresses, the woman too tired for sex who then tries to placate the sulking male lover.
By Mamatha Karollil
Queer Be(long)ing in Digital India
What does belonging, then, look like in urban India for people from different social, economic and political backgrounds?
By Vanshika Gupta and Niv
November 19, 2024
Queer and Quarantine
How did isolation work for those of us who are already quarantined in perpetuity by the cis-heteronormative gaze?
By Raju Behara
June 18, 2024
Poems by Nhylar
1. A Certain Type of Life since the age of 16 I idealised a certain type of life involving certain…
By Nhylar
July 1, 2020
Playing With Love
I’m a sucker for love. And I don’t want to be a party pooper either. There is lots I have…
By Jaya Sharma
February 1, 2016
On the Sustainability of (Non) Romance
Contemporary and predominant imaginations of intimacy focus primarily on a sex-centric (romance-centric?) model which assumes that sexual desire exists and holds the same value for every person and every relationship regardless of their subjective positions. Sexual intent and desire are often the cruces of how relational aspects such as intimacy are socially constructed.
By Fariha Sameen
February 15, 2022
On Sexuality, Representation, and Being a Lonely Brown Girl
I long for much more than a greater representation of brown women. I long for a complete overhaul of the racial, gendered, and economic systems that structure our suffering.
But I also long for representation of all people, including brown women, who are in love, who are loveable, and who are — in the absence of love — lonely.
By Curated Content
On Mental Health and Being a Transman
I did everything to change my gender expression from masculine to feminine. I started wearing feminine clothes, started growing my hair, and I even had a boyfriend. But the more I pushed myself to be feminine, the more depressed I became.
By Jamal Siddiqui
February 3, 2017
On Being Gay and Muslim
My entire life has been a struggle of confused identities. I stood at the intersection of gay, Muslim and economic privilege.
By Aersh
July 15, 2017
Nishit Saran: The Pioneering Indian Queer Filmmaker The World Forgot
While Nishit Saran’s iconoclasm loomed large in his lifetime, his oeuvre as a pioneering queer filmmaker and activist seems to have been largely obliterated.
By Parth Pant
February 15, 2024
Meanings, Naughty and Potent!
Lots of things, people, and moments have possibilities for stirring the erotic within us. The bible, the dictionary or the stories on nifty.org may become pre-texts to something new within ourselves and others.
By Andy Stephen Silveira
July 15, 2019
Masculinity, queer representation, and the motifs of movement in ‘Dedh Ishqiya’
The film has all the makings and trimmings of a commercial thriller – a dynamic story, song and dance, an action-packed climax – and at the same time, it is a cinephile’s film.
By Srishti Gupta
Making women out of men: Mystifying queer desires, staging queerness in Siraj’s Māyā Mridanga
Māyā Mridanga infinitely problematises the nature vs. nurture debate that is central to sexuality studies. The novel seems to suggest that a certain kind of male body – feminine, smooth, shapely – is the ideal raw material for making a chhokra out of a biological man. Ustaad Jhaksa, whose life the novel documents[2], repeatedly emphasises on this act of nurturing, moulding and pruning of a feminine male body for which he has fatherly affection as well as a lover’s lust.
By Kaustav Bakshi