A digital magazine on sexuality, based in the Global South: We are working towards cultivating safe, inclusive, and self-affirming spaces in which all individuals can express themselves without fear, judgement or shame
Someone like me, who was always vocal about sexuality, would feel invalidated speaking frankly about sex. Most doctors themselves weren’t comfortable discussing anything remotely pertaining to be a challenge in the sexual wellness area.
No matter how much I wanted to be a part of the rainbow, it felt like the rainbow wanted no part of me. It was an elite space for the exuberant über cool gays, with access, privilege and a vocabulary filled with jargon. I couldn’t even decide if I was ‘gay enough’, let alone deconstruct my experiences, having being brought up in a heteronormative culture.
Any conversation on sexuality cannot exclude engagement with the myriad ways in which taboos around sexuality, the privileging of heteronormative ideals, the violence and marginalisation faced by people deviating from norms of sexuality and gender affect our mental health and well-being.
This issue of In Plainspeak while inviting us to embrace the joys and pleasure in movement, also questions the ways in which movements are facilitated or obstructed, visibilised or invisibilised, and the spaces that we must envision to find freedom in/to movement.
Expanding contexts give the word ‘movement’ different meanings and value. Physical, conceptual, technological, relationship, emotional, mental, power, knowledge, ability, access, may be amongst the contexts immediately identified.
I’ve essentially thought of movement as a kind of freedom, but one that has the capacity to destabilise you in some way. My most creative moments are when I’m not moving, when I am in fact rooted and still.
We live in a world where resilience is celebrated and given priority over attempting to resolve factors that force one to be resilient. Campuses shouldn’t aim to merely be inclusive of diverse individuals – they must strive to not only affirm them but also celebrate them.
But what has been amazing to witness is how quickly young women in particular, took to the ideas of Why Loiter? and pushed them even further, creating new movements to expand women’s rights to the public, including the right to be out late at night, to stretch the curfew at women’s hostels, to demand extended access to women’s toilets, to public transport etc.
In theory, the concept of the app is a great one – it provides women, queer people, and people belonging to oppressed castes the tea-stall, cigarette-shop type of public spaces for conversation that are available to upper-caste cis het men. The relative anonymity acts like a safe cover, and the app affords a certain autonomy and agency to marginalised people to regulate the kind of conversation that goes on in rooms moderated by them.
I would say that growing up in a small village would make it difficult to find love or companionship, but I have since moved to a city and found that it was difficult to find love there, too. It did not stop me from trying, though.
The In Plainspeak team decided to time travel and re-discover previously published articles that explore the multiple ways in which people find joy and pleasure in their sexualities.
Every part of life, the world too, is storied. Stories are the thread that hold histories and truths together. Stories are at the core of myth-making. Everything that we know is part of multiple crisscrossing relational storylines that we raise and those that we have no power in raising.
Nathicharami takes sexuality and sexual desire away from upper-class, Gucci-clad women and makes its viewers acknowledge its existence in the lives of women (middle-class wives and widows, in the case of this film) who are invisibilised, both in the society they live in and as subjects of popular content.
Marriage also feels complicated when one approaches it through the lens of feminism. Marriage throws in two people and often their families into a system designed to perpetuate patriarchy, subjugate women, and bind men and women (in heteronormative marriage) into strict roles in the marriage.