Voices
Meanings and Meaninglessness
Gender has perplexed me throughout life. I never quite understood femininity or masculinity much – I mostly lived in what other people thought I was. One thing I did know always is that I never, ever, want to be seen as a man. But can I still hold masculinity?
By Sudipta Das
May 19, 2025
Meanings and Meaninglessness
Gender has perplexed me throughout life. I never quite understood femininity or masculinity much – I mostly lived in what other people thought I was. One thing I did know always is that I never, ever, want to be seen as a man. But can I still hold masculinity?
By Sudipta Das
January 16, 2026
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
Male Gaze? What About Some Disco Balls?
I recently attended a talk titled ‘Streeshakti’ at the Jaipur Literature Festival. One of the speakers Lata Sharma, a Rajasthani…
March 1, 2015
Making Space for Queerness in the Lives of Children
Queerness is a free-flowing identity that embraces anyone, including young children, who step off the assigned binary path.
By Riya Parikh
June 18, 2024
Making Sex-Ed for Parents Accessible: Let’s Start With Our Bookstores
Looking for birthday gifts for nieces and nephews in a favourite, well-curated bookshop in Delhi, we were dismayed that we couldn’t find any books that told the kinds of stories that we would like for kids today to read and hear.
By Kristin Francoeur and Surabhi Srivastava
Love, Marriage, and the Neoliberal World Order
On June 27, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States of America held, “The Fourteenth Amendment requires a state…
By Debanuj DasGupta
August 1, 2015
Love, Lust and PDA
Six years later (and out of such an abusive relationship), as I sit in a Gender Studies classroom discussing public and private spheres, being introduced to the feminist ideology of the personal being political, I reflect back and see my experiences as emerging from a complex discursive pattern. The peculiar way in which heterosexual romantic relationships are envisaged and the potentiality of them being disruptive of traditional arrangements of companionship requires them to be manifested outside of the four walls of home and family. Yet, one faces a situation of a pathetic lack of safe spaces within the public sphere and the traditional discourse of love being private and contained within the private sphere…
By Anannya Chatterjee
April 1, 2019
Love, Lust and PDA
I extend my support and solidarity to people, across the spectrum of gender and sexuality, who want to break closed doors and walls to establish safe spaces where one can love freely, without inhibitions; people who seek to re-define love and intimacy in their own independent, non-patriarchal terms.
By Anannya Chatterjee
January 2, 2020
May 16, 2016
Love Letter to the Body Project
TO MY BODY: I would have addressed you as ‘Dear’ but perhaps we both know how complicated that would be.
By Yamini Deenadayalan
May 1, 2014
Love Has No Disability
After five months I received a call from Natasha telling me about the content of a WhatsApp chat that Raajveer was having with one of his male teachers. “He is missing his Sir and crying. He is very confused. He sent him roses on chat and reassuring messages saying that he will always be there with his Sir and will never leave him. We are very worried. My husband is not aware of this, and neither do I want to tell him about it. Please help him”, said Natasha over the phone.
By Prachi Srivastava
February 1, 2019
Love and Sex in the Time of the POCSO Act, 2012
The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO Act), defines a ‘child’ to mean ‘any person below the…
By Swagata Raha
June 1, 2014
Loitering towards desire
We had gathered to [discuss] digital self-determination for people with disabilities… focusing on its core component: the self. How can I be myself in digital spaces? What gives me more of a sense of self in these spaces? How can design, technology and policy contribute to helping me determine myself in digital spaces?
By Bishakha Datta
February 16, 2023
Loitering Online: Conditions of Possibility
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.
By Shilpa Phadke
April 15, 2019