Voices
TOGETHER, ALONE
It wasn’t that she had never heard of homosexuality; but, in her imagination, gay men and women were an exotic species, not real people who could, perchance, be fellow passengers on a bus, fellow shoppers at a mall, or a fellow beginner in a meditation class.
By Kaustav Bakshi
November 2, 2020
The Risks and Gains of Coming In
I had risked so much already, not just by loving another woman, but by acting on my desires. By allowing myself to feel intimacy and connection with another queer person. Despite feeling guilt and shame, this risk had become increasingly vital to take.
By Sweta
October 15, 2020
Marriage as Risk
So, what are the risks in a marriage? Well, the first and the most obvious one is that you don’t know if the partner you’ve chosen or has been chosen for you will make you happy. In the Indian context, even if they do make you happy, the family might not be too thrilled about the match.
By Sadaf Vidha
October 5, 2020
CATAMITE
On the other hand, in Abhay’s newly discovered wonderland, everything seemed to be awfully right. Soon, he began receiving proposals for sex-dates. Initially such proposals shocked him; for it took him a few months to get used to the fact that sex with men was only a click away.
By Kaustav Bakshi
October 5, 2020
Age of Marriage: Rights not Protection
It is necessary to recognize and address the key role that sexuality plays when it comes to our efforts against EFM. What we need to remember is that EFM “doesn’t just lead to a set of restricted choices; it reflects and reinforces a set of restricted choices that already exist.”
By Stuti Tripathi
September 15, 2020
Is POCSO Failing Adolescent Sexuality?
Age of consent deems sexual activity with persons below the set age as statutory rape, which POCSO has set at 18 years. However, the law in practice faces some unintended consequences, in relation to who it prosecutes and their ages.
By Mrinalini and Udita
September 1, 2020
Queer Women and Law: Desire and Betrayal
Law is often violent – it incarcerates, shames our so-called deviance, and classifies who is worthy and not worthy of gaining access to rights and what kind of rights can be ceded at a particular moment. Yet, we believe we can change the law, make it sensitive to our existence
By Aishwarya Singh
September 1, 2020
Canon Law and Queer Believers
I am going to share a personal queer reading to help put forth what I mean. One day, while I was reading the gospel of John for my family, the final words of Jesus, made me wonder whether Jesus could have been gay.
By Roshan Roy
September 1, 2020
PDA: Slippery Slope from Law to Moral Policing
Sexuality is taboo in our context, and expressions of it publicly or even in the home setting outside the bedroom, especially by those who are not in ‘legitimate’ relationships ‘alarm the modesty’ and are generally considered anti-culture or simply categorised as Western concepts.
By Yoshita Srivastava
September 1, 2020
Please Touch: Tactile Art as a Medium of Exploration
Most of us, during childhood, internalised the lesson that sex or pleasure is ‘dirty’ and ‘bad’. Artists around the world are increasingly using ‘tactile art’ to challenge the shame and embarrassment that people feel when they look at their bodies.
By Isha Vajpeyi
August 14, 2020
Probing the Screen: Pleasure in the Virtual World
The virtual world allows me to challenge the hold of patriarchy on my ‘effeminate’ body; in a sense, it allows me to evade the policing of desire that my body shares with another, its flows and slippages, the messy and the unkempt.
By Neel
August 14, 2020
Sign Language, Language, Sexuality and Innovation
In a recent class, I asked Kanika and Tincy, our ISL teachers, how we could sign sexuality, and they asked, “How do you explain sexuality?” I wondered how I could sign ideas like attraction, pleasure, gender, values, and so on, but tried nevertheless, using my limited vocabulary, apologetic about being reductive.
By Vani Viswanathan
August 14, 2020
I May Have Called You Baby But It Doesn’t Mean I Want One!
Some nights I worry that if birth control for men is indeed released, clinical trials of which were suspended in 2016 as its side effects, incidentally the same as what women have been dealing with for ages, were just not worth it, it would be named Fuckboi.
By Anjali
August 14, 2020
Journey from Stigma to Pleasure
For a long time, female bodies were considered similar to male bodies, just shorter, and most research and medical trials focused primarily on the male body with the assumption that the same would work on the female body.
By Pooja Singh and Ramneek Banga
August 14, 2020
The Mask of Age
As advocates of safe, inclusive and sexuality-affirming spaces, we can explore different ways to ensure that the people we are interacting with on dating platforms are legal adults and are not merely wearing a mask of adulthood.
By Andy Stephen Silveira
August 3, 2020