Sexuality
On a larger scale, my non-normative sexuality is confined to tiny spaces, influenced by fear of impending violence, rejection and revulsion, even when one is privileged enough to live in a metropolitan city.
Time and sexuality, neither is one-dimensional, neither is neat and both have a way of being always in a state of movement, whether we like it or not, flow with it or not.
The simple truth is that my body and I are having an affair. We each obsess about the other, ask questions and desire each other so much, that it often borders on the shameless. My body is more in love with me, I suspect, than the other way around.
Any narrative that we construct, any single word that we use to describe a person, a relationship, an individual is bound to be incomplete.
Who is this person? What does this person want? Is it random cruising? Is money the goal, is it adventure? Why does it make me think of selling strawberries by the dusty roadside? I don’t have a single answer. Sex work is a lurking unknown in the world of sexuality.
Here’s to some quiet time listening in to what people are saying, and consuming, on the Internet, particularly on social media, on the subject of gender and sexuality.
The Sexuality of Migration speaks only to gay men from Mexico. It is reticent on the issues of other non-normative sexualities such…
The pandemic has put us through interesting times, to say the least – of reflecting, learning, realigning, thinking about what really matters, a time to pause and care for ourselves with kindness. At TARSHI, we’re just delighted to have been able to do the same – while also sharing something of what we’ve learnt with you.
I started learning Bharatanatyam in 1988, when I was six years old. Looking back, it feels like beginning to learn…
You see, you are being pushed and pulled in all directions because people around you, whether family, friends or the larger society, expect you to behave in a particular fashion and stick to existing norms. However, your inner voice is telling you to challenge these norms and follow your own path.
You see, you are being pushed and pulled in all directions because people around you, whether family, friends or the larger society, expect you to behave in a particular fashion and stick to existing norms. However, your inner voice is telling you to challenge these norms and follow your own path.
The short-lived thinness had left me before I knew it. I became fat, and thereby undesirable, once again. A chasm appeared in my relationship with my body. Its ways of responding had become strange. My form became unfamiliar to me, and to those around me.
In a country like India where both mental health and non-binary identities are topics that are neglected despite being essential parts of an individual’s identity, it can be quite challenging to navigate through issues regarding the same. Accessibility to affordable and quality mental health services is a serious difficulty that the queer Indian population faces.
Were there more people like my father? Was it legal? I read about sexual diversity and how people of all sexual orientations should have the same rights[1], the LGBT community, and so on, and what the law says about them. Though the picture is not a completely happy one, a lot of work is going on in this area and there is still hope for the future.
… that feels so personal to me as a teenage girl, because it is indeed, “so confusing sometimes to be a girl.”