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

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Photo of a smartphone screen displaying the logos of Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Clubhouse.

A ‘Room’ of One’s Own – Sexuality, Self-expression, and Safe Spaces on Clubhouse

In theory, the concept of the app is a great one – it provides women, queer people, and people belonging to oppressed castes the tea-stall, cigarette-shop type of public spaces for conversation that are available to upper-caste cis het men. The relative anonymity acts like a safe cover, and the app affords a certain autonomy and agency to marginalised people to regulate the kind of conversation that goes on in rooms moderated by them.
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The Construction of Women as Spaces

This article explores how women are constructed as a ‘space’ manufactured by men to seek comfort, but void of having any active agency or participation in that space itself. I seek to bring this out in this article by drawing a parallel between the nineteenth century ‘Bharat Mata’ (Mother India) and the depiction of the twenty-first century ‘heroine’ in Bollywood movies.
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A colourful background with “100 % sexuality” written in blue with pink shadow around the text.

Editorial – Celebrating Sexuality

100 issues, 8 years! Thank you, dear readers and contributors! As we planned for this issue to put on our party hats and sing and dance, we also asked, is celebrating sexuality easier for some than for others? What makes it so and what do we need to make celebrating sexuality possible, safe and inclusive…
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Interview – This is what you bring to the table!

In this write up, we'd like to share a sense of what emerges from a compilation of these responses. This is based on the thoughts and feelings that come through for those of us here at In Plainspeak who have had the joy of reading the original responses as they came in to us. (Some of the quotations that follow have been slightly edited for flow and to help connect themes.) We know that most things in the realm of art, information and ideas lend themselves to a wide range of inferences and insights depending on the individuals making the inferences.
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Desirability and Caste

When the pressure started to mount on Surekha, from all corners, to get married, she thought of reconsidering Kishore’s proposal which was made a year or two before. She had not accepted the proposal at the time as she was in her early twenties and she felt she was too young to be getting married.…
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