relationships
Digital entanglements transcend bodies, time, geographical borders and boundaries, influencing – and perhaps fundamentally changing – the ways in which we understand, explore and express our sexuality.
To remind us of what spaces that are safe, inclusive and self-affirming for each person could look like, we have curated a selection of articles from the last five years of In Plainspeak for this anthology – our gift to wish you a wonderful 2026.
This month’s offering of articles, poems and fiction is an eclectic mix that (mostly) reflects what was borne out of the pandemic, and its impact on sexuality, intimacy, relationships, and more.
If we are to reimagine coupledom and sexuality, we need to expand and challenge our ideas about togetherness, romance, love, intimacy, desire, sex, attachment, and so on.
Queering transcends the confines of symmetry and is a way of looking, of breaking established meaning, of making new meaning, and of being and becoming that offers us the promise of fluidity, flux and freedom.
Queering is not about being queer but about doing queer – about going beyond binaries of gender and sexuality, questioning accepted perspectives, and challenging and upending normative ways of being in the world.
Each time a child or adolescent asks a question that may be (even indirectly) related to sexuality, many parents and teachers get squirmy and nervous. This may be because they themselves do not have the information required, but in most cases, it has more to do with the ‘hush-hush’ that surrounds sexuality.
The glorious heights of self-actualisation to which some words beckon us, the promises lying within others, it’s all language.
Gender and sexuality are like constituent parts of a jigsaw puzzle that keeps morphing in such a way that nothing ever ‘fits’ for long, and the game begins anew each time.
Looking down upon the earth from many miles up in the sky, the divisions between land masses and water bodies…
Today I told him that rain wasn’t from evaporation or condensation. I said clouds cried because they missed water so much.
The movie was criticised for its stereotypical portrayal of Debu as a gay man. But, the beauty is that it also highlights the reversal of gender roles. The smiles, and the laughter sounding throughout the house, create a cheery note in the movie.
What gets silenced today isn’t just what’s obscene – it’s what’s inconvenient. What doesn’t sell. What asks us to take sex seriously or differently.
In the spirit of the Games, I watched the Netflix film Rising Phoenix which documents the history of the Paralympics and its impact on the world in making visible the topic of disability. It also tracks the personal and professional journey of some of the top Paralympic athletes who share their challenges, frustrations and motivations.
Sexuality Education is not only about Sexual and Reproductive Health, but ideally also aims to address the question of adolescent…