Gender Archives • In Plainspeak

A poster of the film ‘Chitrangada’ by Rituparno Ghosh. In the poster, the protagonists are caressing each other

Queer Heterosexual, Heterosexual Queer: Two Tales of Queer Love 100 Years Apart

·December 1, 2020
·Mamatha Karollil
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The lovers enact many recognizable hetero-normative romantic tropes – the wronged petulant woman pacified via kisses and caresses, the woman too tired for sex who then tries to placate the sulking male lover.

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A poster of the fiction comic Unwrinkled Saris and Just Another Evening. In the background is a picture of the lower face of a person. The person is holding a red lipstick between their teeth. The lipstick has an inscription that says FAE. The person is wearing gold coloured earrings. A green coloured blouse and saree is also visible

Brushstrokes: Fiction Comic: Unwrinkled Saris And Just Another Evening

·November 2, 2020
·Curated Content
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In a society ruled by heteronormative patriarchal structures, expressing one’s gender or sexuality outside the trimmings of what is socially acceptable is an act of resistance.

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Sign Language, Language, Sexuality and Innovation

·August 14, 2020
·Vani Viswanathan
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In a recent class, I asked Kanika and Tincy, our ISL teachers, how we could sign sexuality, and they asked, “How do you explain sexuality?” I wondered how I could sign ideas like attraction, pleasure, gender, values, and so on, but tried nevertheless, using my limited vocabulary, apologetic about being reductive.

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An open letter to a former friend

·June 15, 2020
·K F
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(Tread gently. This article contains material on sexual assault) Dear A, I don’t know why I’m writing this. Maybe it will help declutter my mind. *** We met in 2013, by chance, at your university campus. Looking back, my first impression of you is in stark contrast to how I think of you today. I…

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COVID-19: Can A Health Crisis Become A Breeding Site For Gender Inequality?

·June 15, 2020
·Feminism in India
·0 Comments

The novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak has become a breeding site of gender inequality with social distancing measures that threaten to relegate women to their gendered roles as caregivers. The state response to the outbreak has been inadequate to address the safety, health, and economic inequalities that would pinch women the hardest. If India is…

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Editorial: Literature and Sexuality

·March 16, 2020
·TARSHI
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As we see through this issue of In Plainspeak, stories have in them the power of exposing brutal truths about society and therefore also bring with them the possibility of reform, change, and hope, and when not possible, temporarily escaping into other worlds.

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The Politics of Sexuality: Through Manto’s License

·March 2, 2020
·Rashmi Gopi
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Manto’s writings reflected both his own context and more. His stories dealt with eternal issues like love, deceit, pain, friendship and materialism. They also dealt with the specificity of national liberation movements, partition and the class-caste-religion matrix influencing human relationships in the particular context of South Asia.

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book cover of 'out' - a book of queer stories

Windows: My Introduction To Sexuality Through Literature

·March 2, 2020
·Asmi
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All these works have made me acutely aware of how gender, sexuality, and religion, are so deeply intertwined in the social fabric. Also, how conditioning can significantly influence one’s understanding of literature, or the lack of it.

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an illustration showing the solar system

Finding Lit’s Political Potentials

·March 2, 2020
·Shweta Krishnan
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Fiction is often relegated to a secondary stow because fact-based forms of knowledge are becoming more and more valued. To be informed is to stay with the facts. Yet I think fiction allows us to stay just about as informed.

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