Sexuality
The body is our tangible hacker of the world. It experiences the world and the world experiences it. I do…
For them there is always a smile, and for them time has stood through. Memories are edged in the season of those years in which I met them.
When representing sexuality, these stories went beyond dramatic and one-dimensional representations of sex and sexual orientation.
Funnily enough, porn played a massive role in helping me articulate my queerness (I am pansexual) and my even queerer desires.
Funnily enough, porn played a massive role in helping me articulate my queerness (I am pansexual) and my even queerer desires.
As an organized political movement the Indian LGBT movement is still quite young, having taken its first steps only in the early 1990s. However, it is not as if the movement started overnight. Rather it was a result of several visible and invisible developments taking place over the years in the world and Indian contexts.
“’Slut’ attacks a woman’s right to say yes. ‘Friend zone’ attacks a woman’s right to say no. And ‘bitch’ attacks her…
Rama and Sita are no longer placeholders for chastity and virtue, but are human and they make excessive demands on each other, they are callous and take each other for granted all the time.
“For every incarnation of Rama, there is a Ramayana”, says AK Ramanujam in his essay ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’. So, too, there…
Like some perverted Pavlovian desire,
the wafting smell of fresh soap
that fills up the air in the bath
has my pupils dilate when walking out.
My experience of school, as I remember it, was quite conflicted. As a child I lacked the vocabulary to describe…
In a recent class, I asked Kanika and Tincy, our ISL teachers, how we could sign sexuality, and they asked, “How do you explain sexuality?” I wondered how I could sign ideas like attraction, pleasure, gender, values, and so on, but tried nevertheless, using my limited vocabulary, apologetic about being reductive.
The movie Shubh Mangal Saavdhan was a commentary about perversions in our society – the denial of the truth about sexuality, that sex is normal, that sex could be just another physical need, that sometimes sex can be boring, that sometimes sex can frustrate.
We live in a world where resilience is celebrated and given priority over attempting to resolve factors that force one to be resilient. Campuses shouldn’t aim to merely be inclusive of diverse individuals – they must strive to not only affirm them but also celebrate them.
Our sexuality is often in flux – being manoeuvred (sometimes in ways we cannot control) by the crashing waves of societal expectations, circumstances, and our own choices and experiences. But the world continues to uphold a fixed, rigid idea of sexuality, and continues to confine us within this idea, and therein lies the conflict.