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
Despite the lack of a formal Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) curriculum in place in India, there has been a growing interest in providing CSE programmes in schools.
Time and time again, Galbaldon asks us, through the character of Claire, to remember that we are travelers, we move and are moved by the interactions and environments around us.
In the debates around the need to expand the rights that accrue through marriage to same-sex couples, what is often lost are the forms of legal recognition of relationships not in the nature of marriage or blood. As the nature of traditional relationships changes across India, with more people opting to live singly or with friends, we really need to begin thinking seriously about new forms of legal recognition.
The new proposal to ban commercial surrogacy is essentially a rehash of a bill that was proposed three years ago — the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016 — which lapsed when Parliament adjourned without taking the measure for a vote. The Indian minister for health has called the 2019 bill a “need of the hour,” citing a rough estimate that between 2,000 and 3,000 unregulated clinics currently operate in the country.
Dear Parents-of-the-Young-Woman-Picked-Up-By-Moral-Mumbai-Police, I write this as a citizen, outraged by the actions of the Mumbai Police in picking up consenting…
The fans invest emotional energy, and time, knowing very well that the players may never know of their existence or reciprocate the same emotions. That, however, does not deter them from feeling and living those emotions.
But TikTok is giving young people – particularly women – in South Asia a new avenue to showcase their talents. While for the majority of women using the app their fame is exclusive to TikTok, an increasing number are able to use it to get paid work. And for many, the platform represents a scarce opportunity for bodily autonomy, and a chance to carve out space as a performer in the face of film and fashion industries that shut them out.
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.
While some of these questions seem old, they continue to be renewed in public debate on competing claims to public spaces. Ideas about public and private spaces also speak to the ways in which caste and class shape ideas about respectability, thus marking some places as ‘safe’ and others as ‘risky’.