“HOMO” and Being Gay in Manipur
The Meitei queer’s tussle with sexuality continues to be a struggle jarred with discrimination, negation and moral policing through language.
Review: Risk-averse Bollywood Tackles Taboo Issues
Several recent mainstream Hindi films have dealt with issues of sexuality and gender not usually discussed in the intended audience’s drawing rooms.
Friendship, Sexuality and the Auden Group
Friendship has always remained a thinly coded term for same-sex love within queer discourses, and early writings in favour of homosexuality frequently revisited this trope to historicise and naturalise same-sex desire. In this article I shall recount an interesting story of three friends – three eminent figures in the history of English modernist literature –…
A World Away: HIV in Central Asia
In the spring of 2005, working with a medical NGO, I and five colleagues (two critical care flight paramedics, a registered nurse, a primary care nurse practitioner, and a physician board certified in HIV medicine), spent a month and a half establishing one of the first HIV prevention and primary care treatment programs in Kyrgyzstan,…
DIASPORIC VALUES // Part II
As far as diasporic identity goes, you don’t just have to be raised on foreign land to be confused about what you stand for. Desis bringing up their children in an environment with values at odds with their own also have quite the task at hand, as Superwoman has demonstrated. This heart-warming mother, however, seems to have struck…
Bandar Aur Insaan Reloaded
Last year, I received a research fellowship from the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society (IASSCS) and the Ford Foundation. Through this fellowship, I conducted a yearlong qualitative study of the experiences of queer students during their school life in India. The word ‘queer’ as you may know, includes but is…
Love, Marriage, and the Neoliberal World Order
On June 27, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States of America held, “The Fourteenth Amendment requires a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-State.”[1] Writing on behalf…
Films of Desire/Bodies of Desire
The Church says: the body is a sin Science says: the body is a machine Advertising says: the body is a business The Body says: I am a fiesta - Eduardo Galeano in Walking Words Bodies are central to human beings. And the way we experience our bodies is closely linked to how we experience desire.…