Shikha Aleya
“I feel that connection is the survival language of the LGBTQIA+ community. The sense of a common struggle makes way for developing quick yet lasting connections among the community…”
The larger question is, who gets to bring all of themselves to the workplace, and who is either not allowed, or feels scared, or is bullied for doing so?
I think that the level of power that law makers, opinion builders and stakeholders wield over the more vulnerable and younger people in society is enormous. Yet, these actors have chosen to focus only on building a policy regime of sexual violence, even to the extent of allowing juvenile offenders to be treated as adult accused – without any corresponding effort to build a sex positive culture within which they may exercise agency.
Lived experience cannot be overlooked. It is the ultimate teacher.
I feel that parents, teachers and CSE can make room for these disparate realities of adolescents by first acknowledging the limits of formal sexuality education, that the curriculum imparted formally fails in providing the kind of learning that happens through other sources.
Deena Mohamed, Egyptian artist, illustrator and designer, speaks to us about her art and her perspective on politics, patriarchy, feminism, and gender and sexuality.
Queering to me is thinking, being, living and loving outside societal norms.
What is fiction? Is it born of reality? Or does it birth reality, reflecting it back at me until I see the things I do not see? Until I find the person that is me? Until I dance my horse dance under moon, under stars, in a room full of people who like horse dancing just as much as they like the swirly skirt and the pot-bellied person doing the Bhangra.
Her eyes are open now, she looks at him. There is sadness there. “What my love? What happened?” he asks….
As soon as you add sexuality to a piece about money, the first instinct generally is to reduce it all to sex, leaving the “-uality” like a little invisible tail feather that flutters away into the unknown.
No matter how many optional ways I’ve considered for starting this piece, I keep returning to ‘hot’ and ‘masala’. I’ve…
Look sharp. Consent is tricky, hiding secrets behind the empowerment toolkit and all our good intentions. Why? Because we activate this value-loaded word in a world where many, or most things, are still about the first-mover advantage. A world that holds typically narrow views of capacity, ability and success.
Fashion is a language that expresses survival, rebellion, freedom, visibility and invisibility, identity, representation and inclusion.
I keep on hold the colours and prints to wrap you in gentle delicate flowers or little cartoon lions and boys with fists that say Bam and Super / until I know what lies between your legs the cigar or the smile of consolation if you’re the first