Gender
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.
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.
Someone called me a policy animal a few years back and I grudgingly agreed that indeed I’m one of those people who does get excited by the idea of influencing policy negotiations and policymaking
As renowned queer scholar Judith Butler said, “For those who are still looking to become possible, possibility is a necessity.” This is essential but also easier said than done.
It may be useful to visualise sexual rights as a large tree with deep roots and a vast canopy of leaves. Or as a giant umbrella. Or a big tent. Whatever tickles your imagination and allows you to see it as a conceptual and practical tool to make claims for any aspect that relates to how we express sexuality.
If feminism is about fighting for equality, then how can we ensure that our feminism is truly inclusive and equal? Does it feature only a certain kind of voice or experience, and not take into account the multiple axes of oppression that another group of people may face?
As a young woman, I feel powerless to do much more than get disturbed by this issue, write about it and talk about it with as many people as I can, with the hope that more of us will get disturbed by it and become more accepting of diverse expressions of gender and sexuality.
Sounds of Abida Parveen and Falguni Pathak’s force move me to other frames, that foreground unforgiven settlements. They provide me with what Jacqui Alexander has so beautifully called “pedagogies of the sacred.”
Masculinity once upon a time was just a word we studied in school, whose sole purpose was to differentiate binary gender in the society. Now masculinity is a criteria of a certain job that a person has to perceive to be called or termed as one.
Is a moustache synonymous with the socially established understanding of what makes a ‘man’, is it what marks the degree of manliness, or rather, the degree of male privilege, and is it something that defines the kind of relationships men share with each other?
In a society that restricts one’s expression of sexuality and perpetuates patriarchal gender norms, there is little room offered for open exploration. With no Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) in schools and no conversation about sexuality with parents, children are ill-equipped to navigate their puberty as adolescents, and dating and relationships as young adults.
For intersex people, privacy or the ‘freedom from unauthorised intrusion’ is constantly violated in which many a times knowledge about their bodies and the interventions carried out on their bodies are not made known to them.
Marking the genitalia as ‘private’ is somehow expected of parents who want to make sure that their kids don’t allow predators in. However, this duty should be followed at the right time with a conversation about sex, which will open the door to speaking about sexuality
In our mid-month issue, Mahika Banerji describing herself as being ‘massively function-less’ and as having ‘no mobility’, takes us into her world, not a world of sob stories but one that holds promise of fulfillment…
On a larger scale, my non-normative sexuality is confined to tiny spaces, influenced by fear of impending violence, rejection and revulsion, even when one is privileged enough to live in a metropolitan city.