A digital magazine on sexuality, based in the Global South: We are working towards cultivating safe, inclusive, and self-affirming spaces in which all individuals can express themselves without fear, judgement or shame
Many disabled people in India live with their parents and any expression of sexuality is suppressed as a rule within the confines of their homes. Sexual desires of persons with disabilities are seldom a priority issue for families or civil society. More is said through silence than words. Be grateful that you are alive. Isn’t that enough?
From today’s vantage point I see that I missed an opportunity to use PT and sports in school as a way to get to know and move my body. This in turn held me back from viewing myself as a sexual being.
From the outside, the world of kink can look like a place where a smile would be a rare occurrence. But come closer if you dare. Let go of your inhibitions, your fears, your judgements, and biases, and take a real, long look..
There’s a difference between ‘laughing with’ and ‘laughing at’. The above instance was obviously of the latter kind. Humour has a complex but integral relationship with queer genders and sexualities, and it has been evolving over time.
Since we get to see hundreds of thousands of faces over the course of our lives, we know that facial features can take all kinds of shapes and colours and textures and combinations. We don’t see people’s genitals nearly as often.
For transgender persons the body is a very critical juncture where a lot of trans politics happens, given the fact that a lot of our identities in terms of gender do not match how we see our bodies.
Body is born, as a collection of many parts, into the various collections of bodies. Different combinations or collections are projected onto various historical, spatial and temporal dimensions, out of our needs, desires and capabilities.
Our bodies become the form and medium through which we present ourselves to the outside world, engage with it, interact with it, perceive it and are perceived by it.
For me, pregnancy was a strange state of being so present and so aware of my body, while at the same time being separate from it. This experience really did a number on me during those nine months and during the postpartum period.
The simple truth is that my body and I are having an affair. We each obsess about the other, ask questions and desire each other so much, that it often borders on the shameless. My body is more in love with me, I suspect, than the other way around.
For the last seven years, I have been working on a body of work titled Hotel Rooms themed around fluid male sexuality, mental health, queerness, and challenging deep-rooted societal gender binaries.