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We can speak of many situations in terms of access or its lack for all kinds of people, and it will always give us insight into the society we live in in two interdependent ways: one, it reveals a polarity between who is given and who is denied access, and two, it determines the big-picture human value given to the commodity that the access is contested for.
A deeply entrenched issue in Indian society, the monster of caste, as Dr. Ambedkar called it, derides, tramples upon, rips…
The Dirty Picture, directed by Milan Luthria (2011) has ushered in various debates around sexuality through its representation of sexuality…
The first sensations that we experience are related to and derived from our body. It is a site of experience, expression and contemplation. The body is a means of voicing our deepest realisations, but how others visualise it can be a source of intense pain.
Eudaimonia, ever the kind soul, made every effort to befriend her cousins who initially treated her as a pest. Maybe it was out of spite for the love Eudaimonia received from the elders in the house and that too which she often left in her wake, but before long her cousins turned their attention to her in ways so cruel, the light in Eudaimonia’s eyes began to wane and it would be a very long time before it shone through them again.
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” Leo Tolstoy The year 2014 as…
So, even though “home” is supposed to be a place of comfort – a personal space which should allow us to express our gender, sexuality and bodies freely – this notion of home stands defeated in reality, where there are certain unsaid rules which govern the distribution and use of space.
This article explores how women are constructed as a ‘space’ manufactured by men to seek comfort, but void of having any active agency or participation in that space itself. I seek to bring this out in this article by drawing a parallel between the nineteenth century ‘Bharat Mata’ (Mother India) and the depiction of the twenty-first century ‘heroine’ in Bollywood movies.
I envy confident women. It could be the way a woman speaks her mind, the way she dresses, or just…
There’s a difference between ‘laughing with’ and ‘laughing at’. The above instance was obviously of the latter kind. Humour has a complex but integral relationship with queer genders and sexualities, and it has been evolving over time.
I pride myself on being a fast learner. Yet it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that shopping,…
The general attitude towards sexual fantasy, and the reflection of such fantasies in popular imagery, erotica and erotic porn is constructed on assumptions of ableism. There are other fantasies though, that reflect or are born of the sexuality of their creators and consumers, persons who do not fit into the accepted age, body or sexual identity.
Kamal Hassan has come to be quite a literal poster boy of all anti-caste memes lately. To reminisce about the…
LGBT struggle must be an anti-caste struggle. This requires us to go beyond thinking of caste and sexuality as merely an intersecting point which may be occupied by some within LGBT identities.
The social value of the platonic relationship needs to be restated: Too many boys today grow up with the idea that their relations with women (who are not their mothers and/or sisters) are confined to an oversexualised romantic bubble.