male gaze

Playing ball
School kids going about their day, running, and having fun in groups on the big school playground as witnessed through a net.

The gendered assumption that girls are generally disinterested in sports, could be easily refuted by the fact that the principal’s office shelf was adorned with multiple trophies awarded to the girls’ hockey team for winning championships.”

By Bijayalaxmi Biswal and Karen Coelho
April 21, 2023
Playing ball
Serving Looks: Encounters with the Aesthetics of Tennis
A woman is playing tennis on a court in the distance with her back towards the camera. The shot is captured through the boundary net.

I discovered that tennis is not only about having the privilege to buy a racquet and specialised tennis shoes and access a tennis court. It is also about how one performs and expresses oneself, requiring players to follow a particular aesthetic that enforces gender binaries.

By Chitrangi Kakoti
April 21, 2023
Serving Looks: Encounters with the Aesthetics of Tennis
Shifting the Gaze: How women wish to experience desire
jonathan-wards-2XnW0pdT6lA-unsplash_cropped

This awareness of the status ascribed to women – the status of being the objects of men’s desires – affects every aspect of a woman’s life. Desire then, in particular, becomes an aspect of a woman’s life where navigation becomes tricky.

By Gitanjali G
March 17, 2023
Shifting the Gaze: How women wish to experience desire
So what if I’m my own voyeur? — Connections and Disconnections with Desire(s)
Orange flames rising over a black background

Funnily enough, porn played a massive role in helping me articulate my queerness (I am pansexual) and my even queerer desires.

By Ankita Dhar Karmakar
October 17, 2022
So what if I’m my own voyeur? — Connections and Disconnections with Desire(s)
Obedience, the Greater Good and Self-Exploration
On a peach background is the illustration of a girl who is reaching out backwards towards a heart-shaped mirror with one hand. The other hand rests elegantly on her shoulder. Beside her are flowers in different colors, seemingly growing from the ground.
Years of control and suppression made their presence felt emotionally, mentally, and even physically. I would walk hunched up and was extremely conscious of how I should present myself physically, so as not to displease others. Those were very stressful days.
By Taniya Mondal
September 1, 2022
Obedience, the Greater Good and Self-Exploration
Editorial – Movement and Sexuality
An abstract photo of blurred blue and white vertical lines that are spanning outwards

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.

By TARSHI
May 19, 2022
Editorial – Movement and Sexuality
High Heels and Loose-fitting Clothes: Movement Unfettered
A rack of clothes from where T-shirts of different colours are hanging in a row.
How should I walk, what should my gait be like, what kind of clothes can I wear that will sort of cover me up…? This indecisiveness and the burden of, “What will others think?” are some of the worries, that I carried for a long time while making decisions like: “Is this going to expose too much skin?”, “Is this going to look a certain way that I may not like to present myself as?”
By Taniya Mondal
May 3, 2022
High Heels and Loose-fitting Clothes: Movement Unfettered
The Construction of Women as Spaces
A photograph of the silhouette of a woman with long hair with the horizon of an ocean in the background and a sky at sunset with purple, pink and yellow gradient

This article explores how women are constructed as a ‘space’ manufactured by men to seek comfort, but void of having any active agency or participation in that space itself. I seek to bring this out in this article by drawing a parallel between the nineteenth century ‘Bharat Mata’ (Mother India) and the depiction of the twenty-first century ‘heroine’ in Bollywood movies.

By Tanvi Chattoraj
April 1, 2022
The Construction of Women as Spaces
Refusing the weight in waiting
Multicoloured psychedelic circles of varying sizes with tiny bubbles inside

As a girl, I was made to believe that pleasure was something that existed outside my body, something that I had to seek out, something that was necessarily a product of a partnered experience. I don’t think I was even allowed to want pleasure, especially in its sexual forms.

By Aathira Gopi
March 15, 2022
Refusing the weight in waiting
Tryst With Kink: Brushstrokes Of BDSM On My Sexuality
A yellow background with an illustration of an instant film photo. The illustration depicts a naked person’s lower back and buttocks, and they are handcuffed behind. On the bottom white part of the photo’s illustration, there is a signature.

The responsibilities attached to BDSM are frankly the same as that for any other sex act. But since the submissive partner(s) are placing themselves at a position of vulnerability, these responsibilities mark the difference between sex and abuse. Have fun, but responsibly.

By Feminism in India
December 15, 2021
Tryst With Kink: Brushstrokes Of BDSM On My Sexuality
Probing the Screen: Pleasure in the Virtual World
Wall-art of a face till the bridge of the nose. The face is coloured in peach, grey, and shades of blue. The eyes, green, are lined in black and have spots of yellow, brown, and blue colour around them. Under the left eye, there are yellow dots. The hair is streaked with purple and blue.

The virtual world allows me to challenge the hold of patriarchy on my ‘effeminate’ body; in a sense, it allows me to evade the policing of desire that my body shares with another, its flows and slippages, the messy and the unkempt. While virtual sex offers a window to revisit the sensual, it is also not immune to limitations and insecurities.

By Neel
June 15, 2021
Probing the Screen: Pleasure in the Virtual World
The Legend Of The Invisible Lesbians
An illustration of three women against a blue background with bubbles in white. The three women are looking in different directions and close together. The front-most woman has long purple hair and is wearing a black top. Her face is turned towards the left. The woman behind her has short yellow-blonde hair and her eyes are not visible. She is wearing a black top too. The woman behind both is staring into the camera and has purple eyeshadow. She has short copper hair. On the right-most corner, in white letters, is written "(gaysi)"

Of course, one needs to acknowledge that this word did not magically turn up in the vocabularies of the ‘good girls from good families’ that came to a convent school to learn ‘good things’ everyday. The extensively gendered environment which promised to manufacture highly-marriageable ‘young ladies’, aided by the insistence of middle-aged spiteful teachers to absolutely destroy any kind of existence that does not constantly bow it’s pretty, two-plaited head to the heteronormative male gaze, created a suffocatingly toxic atmosphere.

By Curated Content
June 15, 2021
The Legend Of The Invisible Lesbians
Probing the Screen: Pleasure in the Virtual World

The virtual world allows me to challenge the hold of patriarchy on my ‘effeminate’ body; in a sense, it allows me to evade the policing of desire that my body shares with another, its flows and slippages, the messy and the unkempt.

By Neel
August 14, 2020
Probing the Screen: Pleasure in the Virtual World
Journey from Stigma to Pleasure

For a long time, female bodies were considered similar to male bodies, just shorter, and most research and medical trials focused primarily on the male body with the assumption that the same would work on the female body.

By Pooja Singh and Ramneek Banga
August 14, 2020
Journey from Stigma to Pleasure
Review: What Does Clothing Have to do with Sexuality in the Media?
Still from a banned advertisement 'Yeh to bada toing hai' by Amul Macho innerwear. A young bride is shown washing her husband's underwear

There’s always another way of presenting a look, attire, accessories and bodies; of presenting the way we feel about ourselves and our sexuality, of presenting an acceptance of diversity.

By Shikha Aleya
August 2, 2016
Review: What Does Clothing Have to do with Sexuality in the Media?
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