Sexuality
The Editorial: Communities and Sexuality
To belong or not to belong? Some people define themselves through commonalities. There are some who define themselves through difference and then seek to find others who share that difference. They find commonality in a shared difference. Commonality is what makes for a community. To keep that commonality becomes an unwritten rule. What lets you in? What keeps you out? Every community tries to keep its members together. There are expectations, rules, impositions and, for the dissidents, punishments. Ironically, even communities of people who do not conform to mainstream norms of sexuality or gender have their own norms.
By TARSHI
July 15, 2017
The Editorial: Boundaries and Sexuality
The boundaries are the most interesting bits. No definitions can be identified without them, and yet they themselves remain in a state of flux – neither here nor there, neither this nor that, but both, all, nothing, and so much more. None can stake their claim on the borderland; it is unseizable, enigmatic, most ungraspable. In its ambiguity it has the power to comfort the outlier at its best, and at its worst, leave bereft those who seek refuge in the absolute.
By TARSHI
April 18, 2017
The Editorial: Body Image
Do you love your eyes and hate your knees? Or do you sometimes wish your XXX were different? Replace XXX with any body part of your choice. We have all been there – griping, never satisfied, and never owning our own beauty. How do we perceive and evaluate our own bodies? What do we love? What do we loathe? And why?
By TARSHI
May 1, 2014
The Editorial: Body and Sexuality
In one sense, the body is what I immediately am. In another sense, I am separated from it by the…
By TARSHI
June 17, 2015
The Editorial: Art and Activism
Art has the potential of reaching out to wide and diverse audiences and speaks to them in different ways. Therein…
By TARSHI
July 1, 2014
The Editorial: Accessibility and Sexuality
We can speak of many situations in terms of access or its lack for all kinds of people, and it will always give us insight into the society we live in in two interdependent ways: one, it reveals a polarity between who is given and who is denied access, and two, it determines the big-picture human value given to the commodity that the access is contested for.
By TARSHI
August 16, 2017
The Editorial : Caste and Sexuality
A deeply entrenched issue in Indian society, the monster of caste, as Dr. Ambedkar called it, derides, tramples upon, rips…
By TARSHI
October 16, 2017
The desolation in the desired body-canvas
The first sensations that we experience are related to and derived from our body. It is a site of experience, expression and contemplation. The body is a means of voicing our deepest realisations, but how others visualise it can be a source of intense pain.
By Ria Basu
June 16, 2023
The Conundrum of Choice: Marriage, Family and Sexuality
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” Leo Tolstoy The year 2014 as…
By Pooja Badarinath
The contest of gendered spaces at home
So, even though “home” is supposed to be a place of comfort – a personal space which should allow us to express our gender, sexuality and bodies freely – this notion of home stands defeated in reality, where there are certain unsaid rules which govern the distribution and use of space.
March 5, 2018
The Confidence of a Married Woman
I envy confident women. It could be the way a woman speaks her mind, the way she dresses, or just…
By Surbhi Dewan
February 1, 2016
The Complexities and Necessities of Queer Humour
There’s a difference between ‘laughing with’ and ‘laughing at’. The above instance was obviously of the latter kind. Humour has a complex but integral relationship with queer genders and sexualities, and it has been evolving over time.
By Rupal Rupali
May 17, 2023
The Complex Tapestry of Fashion: Identity, Expression, and Feminism in a Women’s College
While women’s colleges are certainly a step ahead of other institutions in creating spaces of liberation and encouraging freedom of choice, this rare advantage must expand itself onto the landscape of our entire country.
By Devanshi Panda
The Chronicles of the Changing Room: Reclaiming the Cubicle of Doom
I pride myself on being a fast learner. Yet it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that shopping,…
By Sanskriti Bhardwaj
September 19, 2022
The Casteist Charsobeesi[1] of Chachi 420
Kamal Hassan has come to be quite a literal poster boy of all anti-caste memes lately. To reminisce about the…
By Swati Vijaya
October 3, 2017