male gaze
Shifting the Gaze: How women wish to experience desire
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
January 13, 2025
So what if I’m my own voyeur? — Connections and Disconnections with Desire(s)
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
Playing ball
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
Serving Looks: Encounters with the Aesthetics of Tennis
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
Shifting the Gaze: How women wish to experience desire
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
March 17, 2023
So what if I’m my own voyeur? — Connections and Disconnections with Desire(s)
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
Obedience, the Greater Good and Self-Exploration
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
Editorial – Movement and Sexuality
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
High Heels and Loose-fitting Clothes: Movement Unfettered
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
The Construction of Women as Spaces
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
Refusing the weight in waiting
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
Tryst With Kink: Brushstrokes Of BDSM On My Sexuality
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
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. While virtual sex offers a window to revisit the sensual, it is also not immune to limitations and insecurities.
By Neel
June 15, 2021
The Legend Of The Invisible Lesbians
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
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