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
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.
By and large, society expects a woman to marry. Often people in one’s circle judge a woman if she doesn’t marry, inquiring about what could be wrong but most never assuming that it could be out of choice
Often, we take certain things for granted, forgetting that there are certain privileges and power dynamics which we benefit from even if we don’t realise it. Though, sometimes, there are other benefits that aren’t available to us, social or cultural factors that do hinder us in some ways, we may still have areas in which we’re more advantaged than others
In unpacking class as a social category through the lens of young people accessing SRHR content via an infoline it is possible to conclude that broader reach of sexuality content does enable those who are otherwise limited by material and structural constraints to develop a more expansive and informed worldview about sexuality
Choices about life, relationships and desires are all defined based on socio-economic background, caste, class, gender and sexuality. When these young girls found a comfortable and safe space, they openly talked about their desires and experiences and how they negotiated their existing environments in order to pursue their desires.
After the underwear slips off, does the underwear brand really matter? The underwear may mean different things for different people. It may evoke desire or may hinder access.
In our mid-month issue, Amit Timilsina writes about the role class plays in the decisions that young people make, and what he himself, as a young person and a youth leader, had to do to gain access to resources and to professional acceptance.
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.
If a community is suffering such severe challenges that are impacting them mentally over generations, over hundreds of years; if the ways of mentally exploiting them are so easy and accessible to all, this means that it is not they who are experiencing mental imbalance but society that is attacking their mental justice and stability.
In the course of this interview with Shikha Aleya, Chayanika Shah points out, “While decisions around gender and sexuality are very private and apparently made by each person for themselves, the material connections of community and family make this choice very contextual, and contingent on the whole social structure.”
Companions take many forms. Using the word very loosely here, a companion is anyone the self is connected to, anywhere, at any point in time, from a family member, to a stranger on a train.
Accessibility begins with access, enabled or denied, to concepts and ideas. At the core, beyond the architecture of the real and virtual worlds, it is about the architecture of the ways in which this access is broadened, to not only accommodate, but to nurture, the myriad expressions of human minds and bodies.
A methodological approach to the study of memory and sexuality helps delineate interesting connections between the two: memory as a methodological tool for the study of sexualities, memory as an object of study, and the role of personal memory in the formation of individual sexualities.