Review

Breaking new ground: Maja Ma’s portrayal of queerness in a traditional Indian family
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This reconciliation between Pallavi’s public (seemingly) heterosexual and closeted lesbian identities points to a distinctly Indian way of avoiding polarities through a new social arrangement where both identities are allowed the space to flourish.

By Juhi Sidharth and Chaitanya Ravi
March 1, 2023
Breaking new ground: Maja Ma’s portrayal of queerness in a traditional Indian family
Love matters – A review of Atypical (Season 1)
A poster of the Netflix show, Atypical. The main character, his parents, and his sister are in the four corners with the title in the very centre.

Sam is an 18-year-old boy who believes that he is ready to have a girlfriend. He is on the autistic…

By Elsa Marie D'Silva
February 16, 2023
Love matters – A review of Atypical (Season 1)
Cinema’s Unintentional Counter-Narrative on Marriage
Review: Cinema’s Unintentional Counter-narrative on Marriage

Reviewing three films (or the subplots of three films) to see how subplots show that marriage isn’t a destination or a single story that begins and ends in the ‘happily ever after’.

By Shweta Krishnan
January 3, 2023
Cinema’s Unintentional Counter-Narrative on Marriage
The Promise of Queer Failure as a Way of Life
A copy of the book The Queer Art of Failure being held up against a colourful backdrop that has the words 'Resistance and Resilience'. The book is being held up and the image shows the hand of the person holding it. The thumb is painted purple.

In a world where queerness is looked at as failure, The Queer Art of Failure allows for many possibilities to make sense of these failures.

By Rajeev Anand Kushwah
December 12, 2022
The Promise of Queer Failure as a Way of Life
Why Settle For Good When You Can Have Great? 
poster of the half of it with the red Netflix logo on the top left corner. a woman in a dress stands with folded arms looking at a tall man. hidden behind him is a woman in glasses handing him a note.

The Half of It is beautiful because it brings out the insecurities of teenagers who want to fit in with the world around them and are confused about their feelings which might be the diametrical opposite of what is socially expected.

By Elsa Marie D'Silva
December 12, 2022
Why Settle For Good When You Can Have Great? 
Happily Ever After: Review of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
Daryl McCormack and Emma Thompson in Good Luck To You, Leo Grande - a movie about an older woman's sexual exploration

This film reminds us of the power of connections in finding pleasure, joy, confidence and healing.

By Elsa Marie D'Silva
October 17, 2022
Happily Ever After: Review of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
“Darlings”: Two Women, One Story
A poster of the movie Darlings. Alia Bhatt is blowing a kiss to a miniature Vijay Varma who is depicted hanging on the top of a syringe.
Darlings, with the narratives of Badru (Alia Bhatt) and her mother, Shamshu (Shefali Shah), illustrates the story of ordinary women in India who are struggling to change their discourse, deconstruct their reality, and imagine miracles.
By Anuja Das
September 19, 2022
“Darlings”: Two Women, One Story
Masculinity, queer representation, and the motifs of movement in ‘Dedh Ishqiya’
A shot from the film featuring the two female leads, one is preparing a paan with the other’s face resting on her shoulder. Both the women are smiling.

The film has all the makings and trimmings of a commercial thriller – a dynamic story, song and dance, an action-packed climax – and at the same time, it is a cinephile’s film.

By Srishti Gupta
May 3, 2022
Masculinity, queer representation, and the motifs of movement in ‘Dedh Ishqiya’
Locating the ‘Nagar’ in ‘Nagarkirtan’: Identifying the feeling of socio-sexual rootlessness in the Transgender community
Poster of the movie Nagarkirtan. A woman with short hair is leaning her chin on the shoulders of a man who is playing a flute. The name of the movie is written in Bengali, followed by its translation in English that reads “The Eunuch and The Flute Player”. Below it is the text that reads, “A Film by Kaushik Ganguly”, following which is a list of awards won by the movie at the 2018 National Awards.

The plot of the movie narrates the tale of the love that grows between two people who are struggling to survive in a world of rootlessness and are continuing to make a cosy home for themselves. The love between Madhu, who works as a food delivery boy, and Puti, who survives by singing at traffic signals, blossoms while they cross paths everyday at the traffic signal and the look that they exchange appears to us as if each of them is trying to find a home in the other.

By Ria Basu
April 18, 2022
Locating the ‘Nagar’ in ‘Nagarkirtan’: Identifying the feeling of socio-sexual rootlessness in the Transgender community
A ‘Room’ of One’s Own – Sexuality, Self-expression, and Safe Spaces on Clubhouse
Photo of a smartphone screen displaying the logos of Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Clubhouse.

In theory, the concept of the app is a great one – it provides women, queer people, and people belonging to oppressed castes the tea-stall, cigarette-shop type of public spaces for conversation that are available to upper-caste cis het men. The relative anonymity acts like a safe cover, and the app affords a certain autonomy and agency to marginalised people to regulate the kind of conversation that goes on in rooms moderated by them.

By Srishti Gupta
April 1, 2022
A ‘Room’ of One’s Own – Sexuality, Self-expression, and Safe Spaces on Clubhouse
‘A Promise to Stand By’: The quiet feminism of Nathicharami
Nathicharami

Nathicharami takes sexuality and sexual desire away from upper-class, Gucci-clad women and makes its viewers acknowledge its existence in the lives of women (middle-class wives and widows, in the case of this film) who are invisibilised, both in the society they live in and as subjects of popular content.

By Srishti Gupta
March 1, 2022
‘A Promise to Stand By’: The quiet feminism of Nathicharami
The Falsity of ‘Happily-Ever-Afters’: Examining Coupledom in ‘Lust Stories’
A poster of the anthology which depicts a night time illustration of a car, with its headlights making an illuminated circle with ‘Lust Stories’ written inside it. There are buildings with lighted windows in the background

The anthology’s pull rests in its sincere and frank portrayal of male and female desires cutting across the divides of age, sexuality, and socioeconomic position. In terms of romance, the idealistic, till-death-do-us-part fantasy peddled by our movies and mainstream literature has been replaced by a realistic portrayal of modern relationships.

By Srishti Gupta
February 1, 2022
The Falsity of ‘Happily-Ever-Afters’: Examining Coupledom in ‘Lust Stories’
Hot Girls Wanted – Keeping up with the times
A section of the poster for the Netflix Original Documentary series Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On. Against a black background, there is an illustration of the waist of a human body, seemingly female, in solid pale pink. On the body, text in capitalised letters and black font reads, “ A NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY SERIES”. In the next line, the text says, “HOT GIRLS WANTED: TURNED ON”. Below the title of the series is the logo for the Sundance Film Festival and the text reads, “OFFICIAL SELECTION SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2017”.

The film Hot Girls Wanted followed the journey of five young women aged 18-25 years as they joined the pornography industry and also looked more broadly at at women in this age group and their motivation to join.

By Elsa Marie D'Silva
January 3, 2022
Hot Girls Wanted – Keeping up with the times
Book Review: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows
Book cover for Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal. The cover depicts two women dressed in traditional salwar kameez standing on either side of a series of magenta buildings, enveloped by a silhouetted dome shape of a gurudwara with a deep bluish-purple backdrop. The margins are a dense criss-cross pattern in golden. Two short review extracts are aligned to the top left and top right corners

The story is so well told and is written with such a light, deft hand that it is almost easy to miss what makes it so quietly radical. To review it within the scope of exploring the coming together of literature and sexuality we must begin with its central cast of characters – the widows.

By Sheena D'Lima
January 3, 2022
Book Review: Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows
Of “unapologetically flawed” women and feminism-lite: A review of Four More Shots Please!
The poster of Four More Shots Please, featuring four women in Western clothing, posing, laughing, dancing and having fun.

Four More Shots Please! moves in the right direction when it comes to women (of a particular social stratum), their lives, and feminism at large – even if it takes small, stumbling, baby steps towards it.

By Srishti Gupta
December 1, 2021
Of “unapologetically flawed” women and feminism-lite: A review of Four More Shots Please!
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