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
In this issue of In Plainspeak, we interview Madhu Mehra, lawyer and feminist activist. She is a founding member and the Executive Director of Partners for Law in Development (PLD), a legal resource group on women’s rights.
In a culture where masculinity is often considered to be synonymous with power, how are the daily lives, experiences and ideologies of men influenced by this norm?
Photographer Roshni Kumar’s photo-series, Pussy and Patron, seeks to challenge this, drawing inspiration from “retro erotica” to capture photos of the nude female form expressing desire and sexual agency in empowered ways.
The circulation of our bodily energies potentially ushers queer futurities. A future that is yet to come, a future in which our bodies will not be imprinted with fear. A future in which newer creative economies of desire, love, and pleasure surround us like the blue waters of the Indian Ocean. I write this brief reflection in hopes of such futures.
In the mid-month issue on Wellbeing and Sexuality, we bring you an article by Jai Ranjan Ram sharing what he learned in his psychiatric practice from a self-identified pansexual homoflexible adolescent.
As if the challenges of parents bringing up adolescents in a world dominated by social media is not enough, the addition of teaching these parents to accept different sexual orientations and the fluidity of gender in a gender-binary world can be daunting.
Is seeking wellbeing selfish and individualistic? Does it imply placing one’s own interests above those of others? In the context of sexuality, does it mean prioritising one’s pursuit and attainment of pleasure above all else?
In the mid-month issue we have articles about the power of language to name, shame, and wound as well as articles about the subversive potential of language to turn the established order on its head and sing and dance around it.Here we mean language, as in not-just-English.
It’s an entire genre of poetry known as rekhti, which was characterised by a female speaker and preoccupation with women’s everyday lives.It is counter posed to rekhta, the “literature narrated in the masculine voice”.
Feminist, activist, writer, counsellor and trainer, Nandini Rao, focuses on issues of gender-based violence and discrimination, sexuality and disability and on incest and child sexual abuse.
In our mid-month issue we have an interesting medley of articles many of which talk about the memory of and in the body. Rashi Kapoor presents a therapist’s perspective on body memory and healing, Debanuj Das Gupta offers us a deeply personal and political insight into AIDS, melancholia and queer memory…
If not for these memories, my exploration of sexuality would perhaps have stopped a few years ago, when I was single for a long time and didn’t know if I could find someone like me.