Queer
Emma Watson spoke to British Vogue about the incredible amounts of stress and anxiety that follows, “…if you have not built a home, if you do not have a husband, if you do not have a baby, and you are turning 30, and you’re not in some incredibly secure, stable place in your career, or you’re still figuring things out…”
The relationship with my body is so fragmented that there’s not a primary “real” me, and that’s also how I locate queerness within disability.
If you’ve got a body, in which you’re going to negotiate this life, you have to know how it works.
For so long, private has meant a place that I was forced to create, claim and carve out to hide away from the public violence. And if I’ve been allowed to further wallow in it then I don’t want to – thank you very much.
Despite the progress made, Hindi cinema still faces challenges in accurately representing the diversity of LGBTQ+ experiences. Critiques have been raised regarding the tendency to prioritize cisgender, upper-class narratives.
I am out. A postcard from a stranger that I imagine to be queer or trans*[1] or both tells me…
The relationships that are portrayed in queer media also often transcend all attempts at categorisation, but are still undeniably queer – as are the characters whose inescapable push-and-pull, to their audience, often becomes the plot itself.
The lovers enact many recognizable hetero-normative romantic tropes – the wronged petulant woman pacified via kisses and caresses, the woman too tired for sex who then tries to placate the sulking male lover.
What does belonging, then, look like in urban India for people from different social, economic and political backgrounds?
How did isolation work for those of us who are already quarantined in perpetuity by the cis-heteronormative gaze?
1. A Certain Type of Life since the age of 16 I idealised a certain type of life involving certain…
I’m a sucker for love. And I don’t want to be a party pooper either. There is lots I have…
Contemporary and predominant imaginations of intimacy focus primarily on a sex-centric (romance-centric?) model which assumes that sexual desire exists and holds the same value for every person and every relationship regardless of their subjective positions. Sexual intent and desire are often the cruces of how relational aspects such as intimacy are socially constructed.
I long for much more than a greater representation of brown women. I long for a complete overhaul of the racial, gendered, and economic systems that structure our suffering.
But I also long for representation of all people, including brown women, who are in love, who are loveable, and who are — in the absence of love — lonely.
I did everything to change my gender expression from masculine to feminine. I started wearing feminine clothes, started growing my hair, and I even had a boyfriend. But the more I pushed myself to be feminine, the more depressed I became.