Section 377
We are two boys in our early twenties
who can read touch like that, who have broken into
a 200-year-old mansion, without permission,
to see from above where people like them go
after 377 has been read down only for those
who can stay behind closed doors — in the custody
of cheap hotels, or houses that welcome nights
with the sound of latches closing.
The war continues as queer collectives, LGBTQ support groups, and college students across the country rally for safer, more inclusive educational institutions.
Post the historic Naz Foundation judgment of the Delhi High Court in July 2009, a prominent English news magazine carried…
In our mid-month issue, Stuti Tripathi considers whether raising the minimum age of marriage for women from 18 to 21years is indeed a one-stop solution to check early marriages. She brings to our attention the many factors, such as family pressure, inaccessible educational and financial resources, traditionally defined roles of women, and gender-based marginalisation that together lead to early marriages and argues that young people need rights not protection.
In an e-mail conversation with TARSHI, Alok Vaid-Menon talks about both performativity and poetic performance.
JG: As a founder member of The Alternative Law Forum (ALF) you have engaged with conventional law and at the…
A photo of Anjali Gopalan, who has short black and gray hair and dark eyes. Anjali is smiling, wearing a light pink dupatta.
Rituparna Borah, a queer feminist activist, and a member of Nirantar, Centre for Gender and Education, India sat down with Jasmine George…
Any desire, not necessarily or narrowly sexual, but perhaps related to sexuality, such as independence, equality, gender role-bending, controlling your own finances, eating the food you’d like to eat as opposed to the food your spouse desires, wearing the clothes you’d like to wear, birth control, choosing to have or not to have children … any of these desires would have only that importance that the individual concerned is able to apportion to it.
When Deepa Mehta’s Fire came out in 1996, violent protests roiled India over the depiction of romance between two female leads. There is no homosexuality in India, demonstrators declared while burning effigies in the Capital. In contrast, when Margarita With A Straw came out in 2014, it received accolades for its sensitive portrayal of queer desire in a woman with disability.
It is the winter of 2013, and my father and I are sitting at an awkward distance from each other on the living room couch, our eyes trained on the television set as a popular prime time news debate discusses a subject we have never before talked to each other about – homosexuality. It is only a few days since Section 377 has been reinstated by the Supreme Court, and the television and print media bombards us with discussion after discussion on ‘alternate’ sexualities and LGBTQ rights.
[slideshow_deploy id=’1125′] Global Day of Rage Against Section 377. December 15, 2013. New Delhi, India. What: Section 377 of Indian Penal…