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
Members of a fandom are not just passive consumers but active co-creators who imagine and build new worlds around their objects of adoration. Fandom communities offer fans the freedom of being able to imagine, create and share all sorts of scenarios, including romantic, erotic and sexual ones.
Both sexuality and disability are complex terrains, offering a realm of possibilities that are often made unnecessarily complicated and unattainable by the mental maps we draw of them and the artificial barriers we erect.
Sexual desire is a potent force – it can and has led to all kinds of mayhem, but at the same time it can be a powerfully liberating and transformative force.
Happy New Year! As 2021 begins and we are filled with a sense of hope and desire for better times, we resolve to find ways of sustaining ourselves while caring for others. And so, in this anthology issue we republish articles about wellbeing.
Ageing is often associated with a loss, a lack of ability and strength. When combined with sexuality, in the popular imagination, fed especially by market forces, youth is to be lauded and ageing regarded as the impending horror that must be evaded for as long as possible.
Coupled with the tendency to approach sexuality with seriousness, play often remains absent in discussions of sexuality. Sexuality shares the elements of fun, pleasure and spontaneity that are found in play.
Stories hold power. They shape how we understand the world, and if they are stories of distorted facts and falsehoods, they spread unease, discord and hatred. But stories also allow us to imagine other possibilities; they give us hope that we can overcome oppression and injustice.
This issue of In Plainspeak while inviting us to embrace the joys and pleasure in movement, also questions the ways in which movements are facilitated or obstructed, visibilised or invisibilised, and the spaces that we must envision to find freedom in/to movement.
Food unites, but as we are sadly witnessing, it also divides. What people eat and how they eat it is related in many ways to class, caste, purchasing power, and other factors of social currency and control.
Digital entanglements transcend bodies, time, geographical borders and boundaries, influencing – and perhaps fundamentally changing – the ways in which we understand, explore and express our sexuality.
We envision SISA spaces as non-judgmental, inclusive, rights-based and affirming spaces wherein people’s sexuality, their identities, wellbeing, choices, desires and pleasure are respected.
If we are to reimagine coupledom and sexuality, we need to expand and challenge our ideas about togetherness, romance, love, intimacy, desire, sex, attachment, and so on.
Queering transcends the confines of symmetry and is a way of looking, of breaking established meaning, of making new meaning, and of being and becoming that offers us the promise of fluidity, flux and freedom.
Our most powerful, sexy, responsive and attractive sexual organ may be the mind, but it is through the body that we express and experience our sexuality. Our body is our first and primary home; whether we truly feel at home in it is another matter.