{"id":8879,"date":"2016-05-16T11:05:29","date_gmt":"2016-05-16T05:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak?p=8879"},"modified":"2018-08-22T15:06:30","modified_gmt":"2018-08-22T09:36:30","slug":"the-editorial-relationships-and-sexuality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/the-editorial-relationships-and-sexuality\/","title":{"rendered":"The Editorial: Relationships and Sexuality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Finally, in a low whisper, he said, \u201cI think I might be a terrible person.\u201d For a split second, I believed him. I thought he was about to confess a crime, maybe a murder. Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people, but we only reveal this before asking someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2013 Miranda July, ‘<\/em>The First Bad Man’<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Our February issue this year was on Love and Sexuality, and to conceive of an issue on Relationships and Sexuality that would be distinct from the particularities of the former got us thinking. Is there a relationship at all that cannot be defined by love? And, if we were to begin talking of relationships other than romantic love, how would we speak of sexuality? Upon this deliberation, we realised that our Love and Sexuality issue seemed to revolve around romantic love and sex. The departure this issue on Relationships and Sexuality makes is to try and incorporate forms of relationships that might not be about romantic love but have their own kind of romance, and facets of sexuality that might not be about sex per se<\/em> but will place its interest in alternate relationships to it.<\/p>\n

The Issue in Focus sets the tone, with Radhika Chandiramani questioning the undue pressure<\/a> we and the world around us create on personal fulfilment through coupledom. What does \u2018in a relationship\u2019 mean when in reality we are all \u2018in\u2019 so many thriving relationships constantly evolving in various degrees of usefulness and fulfilment in our lives?<\/p>\n

Siddharth Narrain carries the idea into the question of legitimacy as he makes a case for the legal recognition<\/a> of alternative living partnerships. Live-in relationships, living with friends, living in communes, etc are becoming common in urban India, and it\u2019s about time the legal system caught up with accommodating these specificities.<\/p>\n

Shikha Aleya seeks to look at family history through a different lens<\/a>: that of sexuality. How would our genealogies read if we were to study the lives of our ancestors as being influenced by aspects of sexuality? In her turn, Surbhi Dewan undertakes a philosophical musing<\/a> as she recalls her mother telling the little her about moh<\/em> (Punjabi word meaning love of and attachment to worldly things) and moksha<\/em> (in Hindu philosophy, moksha<\/em> refers to the emancipation or release from the cycle of rebirth). Ajay Maherchandani uses the metaphor of the cage to describe the life of a gay man in his heartfelt piece on freedom from societal shackles<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Gayatri Mohan calls out<\/a> the adult figures of authority in her life for insulting her intelligence and agency in their sexist expectations of youngsters, and has a thing or two to say to her peers as well. Dr Mahinder Watsa, possibly India’s most famous sexologist, is his wry and pithy self<\/a> in his quickie interview with us on relationships and sexuality.<\/p>\n

Giving \u2018relationship\u2019 an interesting spin are Kristin Francoeur and Surabhi Srivastava as they investigate how men in different countries across the world relate to abortion<\/a>, and how it affects their relationships with their partners.<\/p>\n

In the Visual Corner, Brushstrokes features Married Young<\/a><\/em>, a series of photographs by Muyi Xiao that portrays very young Chinese couples married for various social and economic reasons. In the Video Page is Find Your Beautiful<\/a><\/em>, a rousing appeal to be kinder and more accepting in one\u2019s relationship with oneself, starring Radhika Apte.<\/p>\n

The Hindi section has a stirring poem<\/a> by Asmi on \u2018coming out\u2019, republished from our January 2014 issue, and a translation of Shivani Gupta\u2019s piece on \u2018odd\u2019 couples<\/a> that was published in English in our May 2015 issue.<\/p>\n

The Corners this month are both personal narrations of contemporary conundrums around relationships and sexuality: one is a feel-good love story (with a twist<\/a>) of a small-city girl voiced in a refreshingly local tongue, and the other is a set of illustrated tales<\/a> of Indian Tinder matches.<\/p>\n

For the mid-month issue, we have four\u00a0Voices pieces: one by Namrata Chatterjee, where she expresses her opinions around issues of relationships and sexuality as a young person<\/a>, one by Sig from the Kinky Collective where he talks about finding\u00a0friendship in the kink community<\/a>, one by Moulshri that revolves around her interviews with people<\/a> talking about how ‘romantic love’ can or cannot be found in the context of feminism and two \u00a0poems<\/a> by Nilesh.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The issue also features one of our older articles republished in the Hindi section<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this month\u2019s Blogroll, we have\u00a0Why I Am Addicted to Friendship Affairs, And Why it Has Nothing to Do With My Marriage<\/span><\/a><\/em>, and also one of our older<\/span> articles<\/span><\/a>, republished.<\/span><\/p>\n

We return in June with two fortnightly issues on Work and Sexuality.<\/p>\n

Until then, happy reading!<\/span><\/p>\n

The TARSHI Team<\/p>\n

Image from <\/em>In Pieces by Marion Fayolle<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is there a relationship at all that cannot be defined by love? And, if we were to begin talking of relationships other than romantic love, how would we speak of sexuality? Upon this deliberation, we realised that our Love and Sexuality issue seemed to revolve around romantic love and sex. The departure this issue on Relationships and Sexuality makes is to try and incorporate forms of relationships that might not be about romantic love but have their own kind of romance, and facets of sexuality that might not be about sex per se but will place its interest in alternate relationships to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8882,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,65,671],"tags":[99,25],"class_list":{"0":"post-8879","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-categories","8":"category-editorial","9":"category-relationships-and-sexuality","10":"tag-relationships","11":"tag-sexualities"},"menu_order":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8879"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14910,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8879\/revisions\/14910"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}