Voices
There is a direct correlation between mobility and sexuality. Women’s mobility does get hampered because of both social as well as economic reasons, leading to this contradictory fall in female LFPR despite a growing economy.
The patriarchal system strictly enforces gender roles and social norms that privilege men over women. This sense of male entitlement over women and girls’ bodies have insured their confinement to spaces where they are stripped of power, threatened by harassment and discrimination, and extremely vulnerable so that men get to play the role of protectors.
Lots of things, people, and moments have possibilities for stirring the erotic within us. The bible, the dictionary or the stories on nifty.org may become pre-texts to something new within ourselves and others.
In a society where queer sexuality had been demonised in not just mainstream fiction but also mainstream culture, the erotic fanfiction that emerged out of kinkfests became an important source of queer sex-positivity.
Erotica, which according to statistics is largely a women dominated genre, often creates a platform where women across space and time can connect and don’t feel alienated in their sexual needs when they find a heroine with the same desire, or when they read about a plot situation which resonates with their own.
Class is a very important factor if you want to associate with “smart” company. Your looks, your fashion sense, your taste in music, your knowledge about international issues and celebrity gossip become very important to belong to “that” bunch of people.
This stigma of caste, class and sexuality is a pervasive amalgamation of socio-cultural mindsets that take root and function in myriad complex ways, and paint working women in broad, sweeping, agency-less brush strokes.
Honestly, there weren’t any specific rules for the game,
Consent basics, a little humour, but no stigma, no shame.
Watching K3G with my students brings forward new ways of understanding how concepts like socioeconomic class, gender, sexuality, and diasporic imaginaries are embedded with subtle messages of morality and longing and how these messages are ingrained in our Bollywood viewing experiences.
There is no singular way of being queer or performing queerness. We are all products of converging and diverging histories and our queerness is shaped by forces tangible and intangible in the everyday.
Feminine energy is supposed to be yin, receptive, gentle, intuitive,and fulfilling. Masculine energy is supposed to be yang, active, fast, fierce, emptying, goal-oriented and focused.
From my experiences, I find that diversity is not an end unto itself. Instead, it is a tool for reflection, a mirror that shows not only who we, and the society we live in, are in the present, but what we aspire to be in the future.
To claim the public then in arbitrary, messy and oppositional ways, whether on the streets or online is to challenge the neoliberal impulse which is located in the creation of order. To create place, to stake claim, thwarts the desires for the sanitised neoliberal city and is a politics.
As renowned queer scholar Judith Butler said, “For those who are still looking to become possible, possibility is a necessity.” This is essential but also easier said than done.