Sexuality
Dancing around each other: Conversations with a Tween
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.
By Shilpa Phadke
March 15, 2022
Refusing the weight in waiting
As a girl, I was made to believe that pleasure was something that existed outside my body, something that I had to seek out, something that was necessarily a product of a partnered experience. I don’t think I was even allowed to want pleasure, especially in its sexual forms.
By Aathira Gopi
March 15, 2022
The Time Machine – 5 In Plainspeak Articles that Celebrate Sexuality in its Diverse Forms!
The In Plainspeak team decided to time travel and re-discover previously published articles that explore the multiple ways in which people find joy and pleasure in their sexualities.
By TARSHI
How We Reimagine and Redefine Freedoms
Every part of life, the world too, is storied. Stories are the thread that hold histories and truths together. Stories are at the core of myth-making. Everything that we know is part of multiple crisscrossing relational storylines that we raise and those that we have no power in raising.
By Curated Content
March 15, 2022
Interview – This is what you bring to the table!
In this write up, we’d like to share a sense of what emerges from a compilation of these responses. This is based on the thoughts and feelings that come through for those of us here at In Plainspeak who have had the joy of reading the original responses as they came in to us. (Some of the quotations that follow have been slightly edited for flow and to help connect themes.) We know that most things in the realm of art, information and ideas lend themselves to a wide range of inferences and insights depending on the individuals making the inferences.
By Shikha Aleya
March 1, 2022
‘A Promise to Stand By’: The quiet feminism of Nathicharami
Nathicharami takes sexuality and sexual desire away from upper-class, Gucci-clad women and makes its viewers acknowledge its existence in the lives of women (middle-class wives and widows, in the case of this film) who are invisibilised, both in the society they live in and as subjects of popular content.
By Srishti Gupta
Of filter coffee, marriage and mixed celebrations of sexuality
Marriage also feels complicated when one approaches it through the lens of feminism. Marriage throws in two people and often their families into a system designed to perpetuate patriarchy, subjugate women, and bind men and women (in heteronormative marriage) into strict roles in the marriage.
By Vani Viswanathan
Negotiating Expression
I am still coming to terms with my own femininity, as with new learnings I find myself regaining many facets of my personality which were lost while trying to ‘act like a man’ and ‘act tough’.
By Ambica Naithani
March 1, 2022
Brushstrokes – Scribbles
Scribbles: an Escape From the Mundane is a product of my thoughts and emotions when I was struggling to understand my sexuality and grappling with the idea of identifying with the spectrum of gender and sexuality outside the binary, but not being able to put a label on it.
By Nishita Kamdar
March 1, 2022
Brushstrokes – Celebrating Sexuality
Taboos in relation to female desire, sexuality and the body are often addressed in my work. My recent artistic interest focuses on rituals that are primarily centred on agricultural communities in Bengal that involve the veneration of fertility symbols and celebration of feminine sexuality.
By Mitali Das
March 1, 2022
Video: “Un Sacré Mariage!”
What can celebrating sexuality look like? Un Sacré Mariage!, an animated short by Francis Papillon and Gregory Verreault shows us with aplomb, jest and buoyancy that one of the ways to do it could be by moving away from conventions and rituals.
By Curated Content
March 1, 2022
Editorial – Sexuality and Coupledom
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.
By TARSHI
February 15, 2022
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
The Falsity of ‘Happily-Ever-Afters’: Examining Coupledom in ‘Lust Stories’
The anthology’s pull rests in its sincere and frank portrayal of male and female desires cutting across the divides of age, sexuality, and socioeconomic position. In terms of romance, the idealistic, till-death-do-us-part fantasy peddled by our movies and mainstream literature has been replaced by a realistic portrayal of modern relationships.
By Srishti Gupta
On Looking for Love
I wanted to be one of those people who decide to never date again and actually follow through. Indeed, I decided that a lot. A resolution that was broken so many times that it became a running joke in my head.
By Wesley D'Souza
February 1, 2022