Voices
When the opportunity to work on a documentary film shoot about mapping Ramleela (a dramatic folk re-enactment of the life of Ram(a), an avatar of Hindu god Vishnu, and his wife Sita, an avatar of goddess Lakshmi) performance traditions across the state of Orissa presented itself, I had three thoughts in my head.
Human beings are not brains in jars, but are fundamentally shaped by their perception of and interaction with the worlds around them, through their physical bodies and their sensory encounters.
Because we also understand and acknowledge the power of a single step forward, we decided to deep dive into working with sign languages for people who are deaf or hard of hearing and including them in the safe abortion rights dialogues.
The language of consent is not neutral. It is rigid where it should be nuanced, malleable where it should be firm. Yes is an all-encompassing spirit, ever-expanding; No is frustratingly constricted, barely visible.
Mobility is undertaken for varied reasons across contemporary global spaces. One emerging reason for travel and mobility is reproduction. ‘Reproductive…
Should it have been a full stop or a question mark that finished the above title? It deeply confused me….
A multitude of views are recorded when couples are interviewed about their sex lives and relationships. It is often found that while women are more concerned about the way they look and how they react to their partners’ moves (including women’s need to fake orgasms), men worry more about things like performance. It is safe to assume that all of us have sexual insecurities.
So, what can be done about insecurity?
While we have come a long way from the singular Freudian focus on sexual energies and reducing most mental health disturbances to sexuality, there is no doubting its significance for an individual’s wellbeing.
Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse that we begin to think of ‘love’ as an idea only when our beloved or the object of desire has departed – either when love has failed, or in the absence of the lover – that is absolutely crucial to any theorisation of love.
Family, immediate and extended, is usually who you turn to. They are the ones who provide stress relief and reduce anxiety by boosting self-confidence and self-esteem and providing a protective shield. There is a sense of belongingness in good times and in bad.
Men perform an identity that they don’t fully understand. The pressure to appear strong while feeling the full range of emotions that they cannot express creates a hollow inside, creates a quiet dissonance, a loneliness that is rarely spoken of but deeply felt.
The Debrief is a girlhood ritual as old as dating itself.
Bare feet, dry brown hair, shabby clothes, a girl not older than 12 years stared out from her terrace at…
Traditional masculinity is not without its problems but to eliminate its component of stoicism is to pull the rug from under a cast of tough and determined characters who make society function.
I can recall my experiences in the washrooms of different gyms that I have been a member of. A men’s washroom is an interesting place in terms of how sexuality manifests itself in its various aspects. It was not unusual to see men of various kinds with strange energies in these washrooms.