April Theme: The Pandemic and Sexuality
The global COVID-19 pandemic, beginning early 2020, has transformed the way we live and our connections with ourselves and others. While mask mandates, quarantines, and lockdowns may now be things of the past, they still remain vivid in memory and the complications from Long COVID as well as the variants of the virus continue. The pandemic brought health and wellbeing to the forefront of everyone’s concerns and increased already present societal inequalities, especially when it came to healthcare access and rights, including sexual and reproductive health and rights. It also highlighted disparities in the digital world and online spaces for human interaction. How did we navigate and understand gender and sexuality during the lockdowns? How did the pandemic affect the domestic space vis-à-vis gender roles and invisible labour? Physical distancing and isolation posed multiple challenges when it came to friendships, dating and other relationships. Did the pandemic lead to a reinvention of desire, intimacy and pleasure, bringing in alternate modes of connection? What did we learn about self-care and collective care, in the light of people work and hybrid workplaces? In this issue of In Plainspeak, we seek to highlight what we have learned about resilience and the human spirit from the pandemic and its many after-effects, especially around sexuality, SRHR and wellbeing.
Email your ideas and drafts here: https://linktr.ee/tarshi
Deadline: March 24th, 2024.
