Working it out.
The fight for rights and self-determination for Queer communities in the sub-continent has come through a big milestone with the Queer Azaadi March 2008, as well as various gay pride parades all over the country.
India’s draconian and dated Section 377 which criminalises non-procreative(‘unnatural’) sexual behaviour has to give way to a more aware, sex-positive and rights based approach to sexuality law.
Only when you take a good long glance at the margins, you come to understand different ways of being.
I have had a long history of brawls with my latent homophobia.It is’nt that I’m regressive by choice, just wary.
While I’m not that interested in homosexuality as a way of life and don’t think that choices are always unilateral, between this and that or either and or…I have come to understand the binary as a mode of recognition.My work on affirmative stances with respect to identity is about espousing the real struggle which makes you what you are.And freedom is a vital need.
In a group discussion by ‘Cinelabia’, the cinematic wing of ‘Labia’, a support group for Bisexual and Lesbian women that holds film screenings every fourth weekend of the month at Majlis, the need for new languages rang clear.The endeavor, made clear through a film called ‘Working it Out’ was clearly drawing from queer theory but finding utterance to the real freedoms that we seek.The real problems that we have with patriarchal society and it’s termite-eaten woodwork.
Let’s concretise.
The body needs to freed from morose sexual slavery, be it female or male.And sexual violence that patriarchy’ engenders upon it’s inhabitants as modicum of compliance needs to be, the use Bush’s words , smoked out of murky corners.After all, it’s about the joy of life and love that sexuality should be.
Baatcheet