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
Digital entanglements transcend bodies, time, geographical borders and boundaries, influencing – and perhaps fundamentally changing – the ways in which we understand, explore and express our sexuality.
This month’s offering of articles, poems and fiction is an eclectic mix that (mostly) reflects what was borne out of the pandemic, and its impact on sexuality, intimacy, relationships, and more.
If we are to reimagine coupledom and sexuality, we need to expand and challenge our ideas about togetherness, romance, love, intimacy, desire, sex, attachment, and so on.
Queering transcends the confines of symmetry and is a way of looking, of breaking established meaning, of making new meaning, and of being and becoming that offers us the promise of fluidity, flux and freedom.
Queering is not about being queer but about doing queer – about going beyond binaries of gender and sexuality, questioning accepted perspectives, and challenging and upending normative ways of being in the world.
Gender and sexuality are like constituent parts of a jigsaw puzzle that keeps morphing in such a way that nothing ever ‘fits’ for long, and the game begins anew each time.
The movie was criticised for its stereotypical portrayal of Debu as a gay man. But, the beauty is that it also highlights the reversal of gender roles. The smiles, and the laughter sounding throughout the house, create a cheery note in the movie.
In the spirit of the Games, I watched the Netflix film Rising Phoenix which documents the history of the Paralympics and its impact on the world in making visible the topic of disability. It also tracks the personal and professional journey of some of the top Paralympic athletes who share their challenges, frustrations and motivations.
No Limits explores several themes – the struggles that athletes go through to reach their goals, the personal and professional risks they take to break records, the compromises they make and the single-minded focus required of them.
My journal has many entries that are speculative and fantastic. Writing about the mundane leads me to question the way the world operates and from there I frog-leap into a world of ideas where I imagine a radically different way of being. In my journal, I imagine a politics of care, community, and compassion. I become grand, valuable, and unstoppable, even in a world where I am sometimes made to feel small.
As a generation X-er I grew up in a world that was challenging sexuality but only encountered the instability of gender as an adult in radical new academic texts which were not then yet part of our everyday narratives. My daughter born between Gen Z and Gen Alpha is growing up in a world of gender fluidity and multiple pronouns.
We must all care for ourselves and be discerning about when and where and with whom we show our cards…but those who can hold our emotional and sexual vulnerability are out there, and we can find them and be all of who we are.
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.
Just as capitalism has learned how to co-opt feminism into its model, it has done the same to ‘wellness’, so much so it has become an industry of its own. Mental wellbeing, no matter how necessary and important it is, remains a luxury with more than half of our country either unaware of available mental health resources or not in a position to even afford therapy.