Fierce, Free and Fluid: Gender and LGBTQ

The fight for gender parity has been going on for decades now. Society has always seen women as housewives with domestic and family related responsibilities. However, women have pushed against such stereotypes and carved out a place for themselves in male-dominated places, and they continue to do so even today.

History is a testimonial to the chronicles of female subservience, female struggle and female rage manifested into protests and movements. Women have been at the forefront of unabated movements not just for themselves but for the welfare of the society. Their movements are not just political, they have struggled for the conservation of the environment, social rights, cultural equality, economic equality and every other need of the hour has found women standing by the side. Read the article and find out more about various women led movements with diverse modalities of expression and assertion.

According to me, the meaning of Pride itself is to be proud—you’re proud to be yourself...you need to be yourself, you cannot be a hypocrite: hypocrisy is not going to survive for long. You need to be true to yourself and true to others. That is the best way to live whether you’re straight, gay, bi, or whatever. Pride means the freedom to express yourself, to demonstrate yourself, to tell the world that “yes [I] exist, and [I] need to be treated with respect and dignity

While the liminal is being brought to limelight, there are still discourses that are discounted within that marginal. Asexuality is a spectrum within the larger spectrum of sexuality that demands research and conversation. This article is an attempt to uncover the various tenets of the term; not exhaustive but at least an entryway.

Language and identity are closely related, so much so, that one perhaps cannot exist without another. However, language is defined by the epoch of usage. In such a rapidly evolving and dynamic world where definitions keep shifting and slipping, it is interesting to note how identities are uncovered and accepted in terms old and new.

We have seen that across nations and cultures, society has both accepted and not accepted members of the LGBTQ+ community in the armed forces. Though many countries are moving in a positive direction regarding the matter, there are others that continue to maintain a non-inclusive stance. Where does India stand amidst all this?

The patriarchal cobweb of social organisation dictates to keep everyone under the thumb of the male figure. If there is a mandate to conduct one self in accordance with the gender role, men are not entirely unshackled from the norms despite the privilege of their sex.

Chugtai, true to her writing style, lays bare the conflict between law and language. While the law is definite and objective, language is fluid, and through the streams of analogies and metaphors, manages to reach those arenas which the law prohibits, which here are the codes laid down by men to suppress female sexuality. Lihaaf was put to trial because of expected gender norms of female sexuality that it subverted and consequently attempted to challenge the status quo.

The performance of a gender identity on the stage, the fictive experience as a woman or a man, is not looked upon as absurdity or chaotic. Rather, it is embraced by the audience, and by virtue, the audience reinforces the performance of the gender of a woman by men and rewards it, too. This performance undermines the binary oppositions set up for gender roles that are imitations of an idealized fantasy of superficial normative gender roles.

Tokenism can be defined as the practice of making only a symbolic effort to give the appearance that people are being treated fairly at the workplace. Simply put, it’s a façade of diversity and inclusion for the sole purpose of preventing criticism. To counter under-representation of women in top leadership positions, several steps have been taken, but the results have been illusory at the very least.