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
Many queer Indians who converse largely in their respective regional languages find it difficult to put a name to their queer identity in their ‘mother tongue’.
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.
How does one negotiate the “delicate and complex” terrain of giving, receiving and respecting consent, and safely and effectively express sexual desire?
In my opinion, Ghosh was in search of a language of cinema which could be adequately expressive of queerness; he was slowly moving towards inventing that language, which would not be alienating to his conformist audiences, yet, would be intelligibly pleasurable to his (informed) queer viewers.
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.
How does one negotiate the “delicate and complex” terrain of giving, receiving and respecting consent, and safely and effectively express sexual desire?
From my experiences, I find that diversity is not an end unto itself. Instead, it is a tool for reflection, a mirror that shows not only who we, and the society we live in, are in the present, but what we aspire to be in the future.
Disabled folks make up the largest “minority” group that includes the most diversity, and anyone can experience or acquire a disability at any point in their life. And yet even in feminist and social justice spaces, ableism persists.
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.