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
Ute Pauline Wiemer, along with her partner Balaji, founded Lovetreats in Bangalore in 2015. Lovetreats is an online retail space and discussion forum for people to buy intimate sexual wellness and health products as well as exchange ideas and learn about topics such as sexuality and intimacy.
This family is proud of their initiative to prepare for a gay wedding, though their refusal to perceive their own misconceptions keeps getting in the way!
In the middle of such tightness around who can marry whom, where and how one can marry, and what kind of marriages are given social and legal sanction, we came across the story of Madhuri Sarode, a transwoman, transgender rights activist and classical dancer, and Jay Sharma, a machine operator in a steel goods manufacturing unit, who married each other in December last year.
Delhi-based queer feminist activists Rituparna Borah and Jaya Sharma recorded a conversation they had about their views around marriage. While both women maintain their stances of critique towards the institution of marriage, what they agree upon and investigate as their chat progresses is that marriage has a pull that even its staunchest opponents will have to acknowledge and attempt to understand.
In 1994, Delhi boy Nishit Saran left home to study filmmaking at Harvard University. By 1999 he had made the searing Summer in My Veins, capturing on camera his own trepidation at coming out to his mother. It is an important, lovely and poignant film.
इसके अलावा एक और बात यह है कि सुंदरता के बारे में एक आम धारणा और दृष्टिकोण, जो कि मुझे पसंद नहीं आता, यह है कि किसी के सुंदर या आकर्षक होने या न होने का फैसला करने का अधिकार, या फिर कि क्या सुंदर है और क्या नहीं, ये फैसला करने का अधिकार पुरुषों को ही क्यों दिया जाता है।
Therapy is a space to heal and grow. It helped me to accept my identity as an anxious, cisgender, South Asian, bisexual woman. Moreover, I have come up with the perfect response next time someone asks me, “But why do you think you are bisexual?”
It is rather edifying to find information that one can relate to through a solitary rectangular box. Over time, this solitary box somehow stuck around while everything around it changed as the world moved even further into a digital era.
As advocates of safe, inclusive and sexuality-affirming spaces, we can explore different ways to ensure that the people we are interacting with on dating platforms are legal adults and are not merely wearing a mask of adulthood.
Facebook. Google. Apple. Microsoft. Amazon. As the white male-dominated Big Five in Silicon Valley monopolise most platforms that guide online interactions almost everywhere outside China, any aspiration towards a feminist revolution has become capitalised.
Cyberspace has given the queer woman a chance to problematize the existing gender and sexual identities which, like any identity, is not static. It allows her to create and occupy spaces which will give her freedom and power in a way that the misogynistic physical world cannot provide.