Shikha Aleya
Public Interview on Risk and Sexuality
Risk by itself is not a stigmatised subject, but sexuality is, and has been for generations. This has led to closeting, to shutting the door, on many necessary conversations about the risks to rights that millions of vulnerable individuals and many vulnerable communities live with, across the globe.
By Shikha Aleya
October 15, 2020
Prescriptions of Proper
Performance and ‘proper’ go hand in hand because every performance has rules and prescriptions, so you can tell whether it’s a good performance or not, whether it’s skilled or not. Otherwise, it appears, you can’t understand or appreciate performance – or know if you’re doing it right!
By Shikha Aleya
January 4, 2021
Prescriptions of Proper
In a world of prescriptions of performance and perfection, there isn’t truly that much space built in to risk non-performance, not being perfect, or to risk not fitting the prescription.
By Shikha Aleya
September 4, 2018
Place your orders
Food is some sort of extension of our bodies, our identities, and therefore food and sexuality intersect in a myriad ways.
By Shikha Aleya
July 17, 2023
Owning Our Boundaries
The concept of boundaries has become mixed up with the concept of being bound in a this-far-and-no-further way. They have become enclosures, aquariums, cages built for those who inhabit them, but not necessarily built by them.
By Shikha Aleya
April 3, 2017
Of Socks and Sexuality
I grew up with a book cupboard where Paul Gallico’s Love of Seven Dolls rubbed shoulders with Germain Greer’s The…
By Shikha Aleya
November 1, 2015
Of Mobility, Ability and Identity
People make assumptions about both mobility and sexuality and quite often reduce them to a few simple, unidimensional concepts. Sexuality is reduced to sex, marriage and the gender binary. Mobility is reduced to ableist concepts of body and capacity, and access to, or the possession of, a vehicle to get from point A to B.
By Shikha Aleya
August 1, 2019
Of heart image and heart powering
Body image, body shaming, fat shaming. Familiar. Heart image, heart shaming, self-shaming. Expanding the same concept. You know how the…
By Shikha Aleya
May 1, 2020
Of Braille, Fighter Pilots and a Sexuality-Informed Approach to Science
I spent time reading up the basics of gender-neutral design to understand the connect between science, society and gender. Sometimes, some people try to prove that there are ‘scientific’ reasons for inequality and injustice, for depriving one set of people of the same choices and opportunities that another set of people enjoy. This is not true. Times are changing. ‘Biased technologies’ are being altered.
By Shikha Aleya
Not So Impervious: Borders of Migration and Sexuality
The migrant has come to represent threat on many fronts, with sexuality and sexual behaviours storming the front of fronts. This is because sexuality is in itself so threatening to so many; as a word, as a concept, it is untidy, unknown, uncontainable, like that alien substance bubbling out of its pod in the film ‘Prometheus’. Or ‘Alien’.
By Shikha Aleya
September 1, 2016
Multi-bodied Magical Body
Body + a million This article: written, read, edited, uploaded on to the internet, heard using assistive software, converted into…
By Shikha Aleya
June 16, 2023
Mobility and sexuality – Re-writing common perceptions
… the heroine an amputee on a microprocessor controlled prosthetic leg with a hydraulic foot and ankle system raises her…
By Shikha Aleya
November 1, 2014
Listening in today…
In this great repository of the human collective consciousness and exposure lies a wealth of tacit knowledge of COVID-19 that is independent of the subject expert.
By Shikha Aleya
May 16, 2024
Issue in Focus: Women’s Sexuality is a Troubling Thing
… and the Award goes to… … Vasilyev’s wife … … for having birthed the maximum number of children. I…
By Shikha Aleya
March 1, 2015
Issue In Focus: This Thing We Call Freedom
Chandra Deo Singh, a name not necessarily familiar to many of us, spent time in prison in1945 for taking part…
By Shikha Aleya
August 1, 2015