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
This issue of In Plainspeak while inviting us to embrace the joys and pleasure in movement, also questions the ways in which movements are facilitated or obstructed, visibilised or invisibilised, and the spaces that we must envision to find freedom in/to movement.
Humour makes us feel good, relaxes us, lubricates social interactions, and often allows us to see things in new ways. Who doesn’t love a good belly laugh? However, what tickles your funny bone may be very different from what tickles mine.
Food unites, but as we are sadly witnessing, it also divides. What people eat and how they eat it is related in many ways to class, caste, purchasing power, and other factors of social currency and control.
In tailoring the way we present ourselves to the world – be it as fashionista, frump or an artful fusion of the two – we think we are the ones making a choice about how we express our gender and sexuality along with other markers of our identity.
Digital entanglements transcend bodies, time, geographical borders and boundaries, influencing – and perhaps fundamentally changing – the ways in which we understand, explore and express our sexuality.
Questions, questions and inevitably more questions! That seems to be the human condition when it comes to connections, especially our connections with other people. It’s complicated, right?
While there is an oversaturation of information on sexuality, accurate, inclusive and affirming information is few and far between. Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) offers us multiple pathways to address these dilemmas.
This month’s offering of articles, poems and fiction is an eclectic mix that (mostly) reflects what was borne out of the pandemic, and its impact on sexuality, intimacy, relationships, and more.
A space can make us feel constricted or liberated, and sometimes even both at the same and at varying times. The combination of spaces that we may be occupying in the moment, as well as those we have in the past, predisposes us to act, feel and experience our sexuality in different ways.
We envision SISA spaces as non-judgmental, inclusive, rights-based and affirming spaces wherein people’s sexuality, their identities, wellbeing, choices, desires and pleasure are respected.
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.
Queering transcends the confines of symmetry and is a way of looking, of breaking established meaning, of making new meaning, and of being and becoming that offers us the promise of fluidity, flux and freedom.
Queering is not about being queer but about doing queer – about going beyond binaries of gender and sexuality, questioning accepted perspectives, and challenging and upending normative ways of being in the world.