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 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.
Home. Be it a real home or an aspirational one, the very word evokes longing and a sense of comfort, safety, and belongingness. As this month’s articles show us, when it comes to home and sexuality, sometimes the real and the aspirational meet and sometimes they do not. Our homes may house us but they may or may not have room for our sexual expression and desires.
Coming back to finding a utopic home within the narratives from The Night Train at Deoli, the book wasn’t necessarily an escape from what constituted the material home, but rather an assurance that love can have plural possibilities, and so can what comes to be ‘home’.
Over time, I realised that ‘home’ meant not just the physical and emotional space occupied by my parents, but also a set of practices or strictures, mostly dictated by parents, related to gender roles, religion, sex, marriage, friendships and ‘appropriate’ behaviour.