For us to arrive at a whole edition on sexuality — when the thought that charges The Third Eye’s lifeforce is that gender and sexuality are implicit in anything it does — is because we, frankly, don’t know where the discourse on sexuality now rests.
Is it in the same bed it once made in fire and tempest? Has the passion been subsumed, and is now doomscrolling its way through the alphabet?
Does it wake up with a bedhead?
For Nirantar, as a feminist organisation, interested in teaching and learning, in grassroots processes, in the sweet spot where theory meets praxis, in the hot spot when the field challenges – and even discards – theory, in our continuous jujitsu with getting sexuality to talk to gender, it became imperative for us to ask: after 20 years of work in the field, where have we landed?
There was a time when lesbians weren’t invited to be a part of March 8 celebrations. You can read more about it in the edition. There was also a time when child rights activists, public health experts, women’s groups and queer collectives walked together. 377 was read down. 377 went back up. Queer parties went from fringe to mainstream to neo-liberal happy hours. Gay people made homes, families. Many died in their 30s and 40s. Some killed themselves. Trans lives appeared on reels and reality shows. But the Transgender Bill declared that their entire life now rests on a medical certificate. Netflix can barely drop a show without one queer character, one gay kiss, one lesbian romance, one trans tragedy. But in real life, there are no jobs on the rainbow. Everyone wants to get married. Madras High Court said that chosen families are a perfectly valid way of making a family. But everyone still wants to get married, to get away from natal families who can’t stop the violence. There are Pride Thursdays in a very expensive bar and fewer and fewer people in the Pride March. People are poorer but pink money is a thing. We make pacts about marrying our best friend at 40 to escape eternal singledom. And then we come home and ask ChatGPT to draft texts to an ex we ghosted years ago. Grief has found new addendums — queer grief, pandemic grief, being-left-on-seen grief, he-removed-me-from-my-close-friends-story grief. We can now Blinkit our way into ‘safe sex and pleasure’ by ordering condoms and sex toys within minutes, but sex surveys are spelling doom. Everyone is vulnerable, but no one is falling in love.
What is the sexuality discourse today? What are we fighting? Where do we want to go? What are we doing with our broken, bleeding hearts that no longer feel othered, but still very alone? So many battles won; so why does it all feel like we lost the war?
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This edition is guest edited by Jaya Sharma, who is a feminist, queer, kinky activist and writer. She has offered us a framing, which over time has turned into an unusual opportunity for us not only in the editorial room, but also in the gender and sexuality training room.
This edition looks at the human experience — especially as it intersects with desire, sexuality, sex, body, age, violence, hunger and thirst — through the lens of the psyche.
Perhaps this edition should be called Pleasure-Danger. The “and” between the two doesn’t capture just how mixed-up Pleasure and Danger are. Or, perhaps, it should be called the “Yummy-Yucky” edition, Jaya’s terminology to help us enter our own bewilderment. Although not ‘respectable’ enough as the title, Yummy-Yucky describes well what this edition is about — inner conundrums and outer manifestations. Love and hate. Desire and disgust.
The articles, podcasts and videos in this edition have one thing in common. They stay close to the messiness of desire in our lives. This is important, because messiness busts the myth that we are driven by reason alone; and because understanding messiness is political too, and the political is nothing if not messy.
Messiness as the stuff of life needs no evidence as such, but as feminists we confronted our own messy ways during Elephant in the Room, a Nirantar study on violence published in 2014, which brought to the fore how our discomfort plays into our own bias and blindness. We discovered that gender-based violence (GBV) interventions are designed for women who meet the norms (married, straight), but there was no recourse for sex workers, queer women or single women.
We discovered that feminists are as taken by the ‘good woman’ performance as anyone else. Which usually showed up as interventions ill-equipped to deal with violence in non-normative relationships: relationships that were not straight, heterosexual, or monogamous. For example, in the baseline forms and the participatory rural appraisal (PRA), it was seen that 8 to 10 per cent of the women who come for counselling or support are the lover/second wife, but were turned away for ‘breaking the sacred institution of marriage’.
When Nirantar interviewed Amba* (a woman whose husband had filed for divorce after finding out about her ‘adultery’), she cried her heart out and said that she wanted to go back to her husband. Not happy with the divorce, she said she would have rather laid in a corner of his home and gotten beat up. There would at least be sex, she exclaimed. How would she have sex outside of marriage?
Can we talk about danger if we can’t talk about pleasure?
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10 years later, the stories of Pleasure-Danger in this edition, locate sexuality not at a safe distance, but firmly within the rest of life as we experience it. It tries to look at pleasurable dangers and dangerous pleasures, and help us map the unconscious forces that shape our engagement with each other.
For far too long we’ve lived with the fantasy that reason alone matters and we can rationalise ourselves into equity and justice. But why do we enjoy bringing other people down? Why do we compulsively share videos in which someone is getting humiliated? Why do we all love secrets? Why do we stay in violent relationships? Why are we addicted to crime and scandal? What is with us and Big Boss? What is it that is turning us on?
We are bewildered because we assume that reality is something we can feel, sense, and know. The truth is that there is much in our individual and collective lives that we can feel and sense, and not make ‘sense’ of, but which continues to wield a powerful influence on everything that we do and the ‘choices’ we make.
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The psyche lens has generated discomfort in our editorial room and training rooms. It has faced resistance, verbal and non-verbal. And the discomfort is where we feel this edition lies.
There is an argument that a focus on the psyche denies ‘more important’ social and economic dimensions of our reality, our struggles, and our work. It can be seen as a highly individualised and elite preoccupation, where we endlessly engage with the interiorities of ourselves. It feels like a pat response to the neoliberal dream of capitalising on our sufferings. It can seem counter to our efforts to change the world and empower others in collective ways.
But, as feminists, we have said that the personal is political. At this moment in time, when the personal is commodified relentlessly, could we re-engage with our individual histories to push the boundaries of our collective, feminist histories?
Could the psyche lens give us a chance to look at our own ugliness in the face, and not turn away?
There is also an argument, that by recognising dangerous pleasures, we shall be condoning harm and violence. And, in a tech era when gender-based violence is finding newer digital manifestations, should we be speaking of pleasure and danger in the same breath? How do we talk about desire and messiness, when women are being gaslit into believing that they consented to being exploited? But, this edition has reminded us that playing with power does not mean abusing it. Although the distinction is stark, it is not always easy to make, especially in a world where it seems like the only ones who are using the right words are the wrong people. A clear identification of harm, not confused by unconscious anxieties, is necessary for the pursuit of justice, including erotic justice.
And so, here we are, and we have walked through our own muck to get here. And this is why we are opening the psyche lens to all those who work with communities, who practice alternative (as well as mainstream) psychological practices, who believe in working with people’s inner and outer worlds to see the new that may emerge, and people who care deeply about the choices we make.
There are teachers in this edition, as well as psychoanalysts, writers of fantasy as well as people who have just learnt how to write, social workers and students, homemakers and fathers, trainers and karyakartas. They are reflecting on the danger of ignoring pleasure and the pleasures of danger. They speak of what we have learnt because we ignored that the two are interlinked.
We are launching this edition in a world we can increasingly make little sense of. The hope that animates this edition is that less bewilderment will lessen the danger of judging ourselves and others. At the other end of judgment lies insight. You never know what we may find at the other end of the rainbow.
INDEX:
- Lies and Truce in the English Classroom by Vijeta Kumar: An essay on caste, friendship and joy of teaching to transgress as part of her regular column Throwing Chalk
- The Psyche Series by Jaya Sharma: Background and Chapter I: Essays explaining key psychoanalytic concepts and offering pedagogical possibilities while working on sexuality
- Lessons in Thrill with Cola and Coleman by Egg Curry: An essay on childhood memories and discovering the perfect formula to turn all happiness into thrill
- I Know My Own Animal Heart by RT Samuel: An essay by the editor of an anti-caste speculative fiction anthology on growing up with Ambedkar and Ursula Le Guin
- Melonhead by Nabi H. Ali: An excerpted short story from ‘The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF’ — an anthology of fantastic, supernatural, Dalit futurist fiction
- Rapture and Distress: Unpacking Women’s Sexuality in India with Psychoanalyst Amrita Narayanan as part of our video series Back Story.
- Obey Me Gently— What Submission Tells Us About Sexual Freedom: A podcast interview with SIG, a male submissive kink practitioner as part of our regular audio series The F-Rated Interview.