Sexuality
General and not so General
The relationship between caste and sexuality has always been a complicated one, one that is performed through socially sanctioned practices,…
By Aiman Khan
October 16, 2017
Veiled Desires
I still remember my early childhood days when we used to get lessons on caste in our day-to-day lives. Coming…
By Prarthana
October 3, 2017
Video Page: The Issue of Trans Victimization – Bittu
Is Brahminical patriarchy present in queer spaces? How can marginalised groups effectively advocate for themselves without relying too heavily on…
By Curated Content
October 3, 2017
Brushstrokes: When Ganja fell in love with Mahua
The Ganja-Mahua Chronicles is an art project that draws attention to the role that marriage plays in upholding India’s caste…
By Curated Content
October 3, 2017
Reproducing Caste: Savarna Eugenics, Then and Now
Today Marie Stopes is better known for her eponymous clinics, which provide contraception and safe abortion services in 37 countries…
By Kristin Francoeur
October 3, 2017
Interview: Manjula Pradeep
Manjula Pradeep is a lawyer and former Executive Director of the Navsarjan Trust, a grassroots organisation working to empower Dalits…
By Sonia Dhawan
October 3, 2017
F*** me, I am Dalit
I read The Failed Radical Possibilities of Queerness in India more than a year ago and it still makes me…
By Akhil Kang
October 3, 2017
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
The Editorial: Fiction and Sexuality
For many of us, it was fiction that fed our souls as children, and now as adults who are still ‘growing up’, it feeds us still. Fiction makes, remakes and unmakes us who walk in worlds of the imagination. It liberates us to dream various versions of ourselves and others into being as the articles in this month’s In Plainspeak eloquently reveal.
By TARSHI
September 15, 2017
Issue in Focus: “Is that Book Feminist?”
Fiction is a realm within which we can imagine the limitlessness of our feminist realities. By censoring fiction itself in an anxiety to perform what we understand as feminism, is to censor our imaginations, its subtle negotiations with reality and its potential in generating desires and dreams we hardly knew of. Does this mean we don’t critique books and movies? Definitely not! Critique is fun. Critique is important. Critique is how we grow. But the judgement needs to stop.
By Shweta Krishnan
September 1, 2017
Queer Women in Aranyani’s A Pleasant Kind of Heavy and Other Stories*
Aranyani’s writing most certainly has a sensory charm and no two people are going to experience her narration the same way. I wish you a happy and gloriously gay reading of this fleshy collection of erotic stories!
By Swati Vijaya
September 1, 2017
Making women out of men: Mystifying queer desires, staging queerness in Siraj’s Māyā Mridanga
Māyā Mridanga infinitely problematises the nature vs. nurture debate that is central to sexuality studies. The novel seems to suggest that a certain kind of male body – feminine, smooth, shapely – is the ideal raw material for making a chhokra out of a biological man. Ustaad Jhaksa, whose life the novel documents[2], repeatedly emphasises on this act of nurturing, moulding and pruning of a feminine male body for which he has fatherly affection as well as a lover’s lust.
By Kaustav Bakshi
I Column : Fiction and Sexuality
What is fiction? Is it born of reality? Or does it birth reality, reflecting it back at me until I see the things I do not see? Until I find the person that is me? Until I dance my horse dance under moon, under stars, in a room full of people who like horse dancing just as much as they like the swirly skirt and the pot-bellied person doing the Bhangra.
By Shikha Aleya
September 1, 2017
Video Page: Sita sings the Blues
Sita Sings the Blues is an animated retelling of the Ramayana, an ancient Indian epic about the Hindu god Rama…
By Curated Content
September 1, 2017
Interview: Shohini Ghosh
Both fiction and non-fiction are capable of great complexity if the making is in the hands of someone capable and complex. I have always held that good films – fiction, non-fiction or hybrid– emerge not from a familiarity with the subject, though that’s essential – but an understanding of the language of cinema.
By Radhika Chandiramani
September 1, 2017