Seekho na naino ki bhasha piya – Learn the language of the eyes
Keh rahi tumse yeh khamoshiyaan – My silence is talking to you
Seekho na lab to na kholungi mein – Learn because I am not going to talk through words
Samjho dil ki boli – You have to understand what my heart says

A song sung by Shubha Mudgal

I often wonder, if desires had a language and if they could speak, what language would they speak in? Is it even possible to express desires loudly or verbally, or are they only to be felt? I have certainly struggled to express my desires because I grew up in a deeply patriarchal society where I was constantly told that ‘good girls’ don’t have desires, and if they do, they certainly do not express them. After all these years, the patriarchal conditioning is still difficult to break free from, even when I am a feminist who knows ‘good girl’ is a trap and that the patriarchal control and politics over our desires in general (and female desires in particular) is a real battle we are fighting as a society. Over the years, I have learnt that desires are quite persistent and can live silently even when they are suppressed, and express themselves in non-verbal language such as gestures, eye contact, and so on.

But what is sexuality and what makes us humans sexual beings? It cannot just be our need to procreate and continue our species, and it is way more than that!

Sexuality is the range of our sexual desires or the lack of them, attractions we may feel, the related thoughts, emotions, and feelings we have, and how we express them. We humans are sexual beings, but society nurtures us to express our sexuality in limited ways or even completely suppress it, depending on our context. However, our desires have myriad ways to express themselves and are not even dependent on spoken languages and words.

One such form of self-expression that evolved due to the human need to communicate including expressing our sexuality and desires is sign language.

“Sign, I was now convinced, was a fundamental language of the brain.”

-Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf

In 2020, when ASAP started to work with the deaf and hard of hearing people, we understood they are no different from other non-deaf people. They have the same needs and a range of feelings, desires or the lack of them (the whole spectrum from being asexual to sexual), and have the innate need to express themselves. Through our work we connected with a sign language interpreter, Saurav. He worked with us on a webinar we co-organised to explore the challenges to access to safe abortions and SRHR services during COVID 19 lockdowns in 2020. Working with him made us realise the huge gaps that still existed, such as often there were no adequate signs for key SRHR concepts like patriarchy or homophobia. We had to invest more time and effort than we had initially anticipated to slow down, discuss and come up with signs to explain a key term properly.

We learnt that sign languages just like spoken languages, had a huge variety. There were over 300 sign languages in the world and they were often very different from each other (just as verbal-written language is vast and diverse.) Some sign languages fell deeply short of discussing SRHR issues, such as, one language had the same sign for both consensual sex and rape – this blurred the idea of consent and made it complex for users to describe pleasure while also making it difficult to report violence.

After the webinar was over, we as a team felt that we needed to go deeper because even after working very hard with the interpreters, we did not have a single deaf and hard of hearing person in the audience! This made us question the way we worked in silos and remained exclusive and inaccessible in our civil society spaces. Saurav agreed with us and supported the idea that we needed to bridge the gap between the SRHR and the deaf and hard of hearing communities. He introduced us to the late Advocate Saudamini Pethe, who was the first deaf lawyer in India and a feminist force of nature who supported our work firmly.

Saudamini was one of our chief guides for this work, and she explained to us the nuances and complexities of working with the deaf and hard of hearing community in India. She explained that communicating and expressing was extremely challenging for a deaf person for various reasons. In our parts of the world with lesser resources, many deaf people are not able to access formal learning spaces and therefore do not learn sign languages but make-do with basic gestures to indicate the most fundamental of needs, such as hunger, the need to use the bathroom, fear/anger, etc… And even when deaf and hard of hearing people learn sign languages, they often do not know how to communicate complex ideas and taboo topics such as sexuality.

We found out through Saudamini and her group that information on gender, sexuality, and SRHR, which is low even among the general population, was even lower among the deaf and hard of hearing community. Girls did not even have basic information about their bodies, such as what menstruation is and how to manage it, leading to forced hysterectomies. Sexual assaults occurred rampantly in silence, and were only found out about when there was a pregnancy that had advanced quite a bit. Unfortunately, as we were building on this work together, Saudamini passed away suddenly in 2023 due to medical complications. However, Saudamini inspired us to remain committed to this work and continue building on it.

“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

–Lilla Watson

The concept of ‘inclusivity’ is popular in the human rights and feminist movement spaces, and yet it has been discussed so far more as a theory. Inclusivity is also connected to Kimberly Krenshaw’s concept of ‘intersectionality’. Intersectionality is a lens to analyse the gaps in a movement by taking into account the cross-cutting lived realities of people. Inclusivity takes note of those nuances and explores ways to address them so that the movement is truly a representation of a diverse range of people and their opinions and demands.

At ASAP we are committed towards creating an inclusive, safe abortion rights movement, and we explore work with many different communities. We acknowledge that a single initiative is not enough and the concept of inclusion goes beyond addressing one kind of exclusion. Yet, because we also understand and acknowledge the power of a single step forward, we decided to deep dive into working with sign languages for people who are deaf or hard of hearing and including them in the safe abortion rights dialogues.

Disability, Gender, and the Trajectories of Power, edited by Asha Hans (2015), highlights the gaps and faultiness that the feminist movements across the world must address in order to be more inclusive of disability rights and move towards substantive equality. While equality is the assumption that we should all be treated as inherently on the same level, substantive equality asks us to make provisions for those who are different from us and have greater vulnerabilities.

In the public domain of our ableist societies, the invisibilisation of disabled people happens because our private and public infrastructure and spaces are simply not built to ensure that people living with disabilities can access them or even explore their inner and outer worlds.

There is a need to acknowledge the fault-lines between the safe abortion rights movement and the disability rights movement. Our work on selective abortion also made us acutely aware of the need to advocate for elimination of discrimination against people living with disabilities, while at the same time asserting the right of any pregnant individual to choose to terminate a pregnancy for any reason. Ultimately, it is our right to choose our own destiny that makes it possible to truly live out our desires fearlessly and freely.

Abortion rights must be unconditional and protected for all, and our movements must focus on correcting the structural issues such as capitalistic profit-driven frameworks, lack of accessible infrastructure and resources for care and welfare, patriarchy and its control over our bodies and sexualities.

The goal is to build a world that is rooted in the idea of our individual and collective joy, our right to be free, to seek pleasure, to express our desires without fearing judgment and having access to supportive services such as safe abortions. But how do we achieve our goal when for many groups such as the deaf and hard of hearing people who use sign languages there may not even be the right vocabulary/signs to express themselves, communicate and share these ideas?

“You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.”

–Helen Keller

We took on the challenge of addressing this massive gap of not having enough SRHR resources for deaf and hard of hearing people, and also to build a bridge with the community so they know their rights and can demand these rights in their own lives. Towards this goal, ASAP not only set out to define SRHR concepts for deaf and hard of hearing people in sign language, but it may have pioneered creating new signs to explain these concepts!

ASAP and our Country Advocacy Networks developed primer videos on a few basic SRHR concepts in sign languages (local and international sign), and along with the deaf and hard of hearing community created these videos. These videos and the process enabled us to work towards building deeper solidarities, and using the lens of intersectionality, we were able to initiate a more meaningful inclusion of the community in our movement spaces. To see the SRHR primer videos in sign languages, click here.

The primer videos are a testimony that real inclusivity is done in collaboration, through extensive planning and resourcing, in consultation with the community/ies we are working with and for. The need for these videos is based on the fact that even when our issues are the same (sexuality, desires, and how they play out in our daily lives described under the umbrella term of SRHR), our contexts are often different. These contexts are the nuances of our lived realities and are critical to engage with a community, include them meaningfully and support them to express themselves including their sexuality and desires, and achieve their rights.

To conclude, we acknowledge that sexuality, pleasure, and desires are deeply political and hence controlled by patriarchy. To advance safe abortion rights for all requires us to look into these issues and also address gaps like who is still not being included in our spaces, dialogues, and movements, and work towards addressing these gaps.

As a feminist safe abortion rights advocate I believe that when we give our desires an expression, especially where it is not meant to be expressed, and particularly for a disenfranchised group such as the deaf and hard of hearing community, we are challenging the status quo, changing the world and moving a bit closer to the world we want! A world where our sexuality and desires in all its ranges can be expressed in a myriad ways, verbally and in spoken languages, or gestures and sign languages, joyfully communicating with each other.

Cover image by Oktavia Ningrum on Unsplash