Body Politics

In a powerful experiment, a collaborative initiative in Karnataka brought together sex workers, gender and sexual minorities, Dalit, Muslim, and women with disability to reclaim solidarity through shared stories and collective action.

A personal comic-essay mapping ways to build realms of care, and reclaim one’s body in the midst of navigating sexual violence, medical dismissal and isolation.

A proof of identification is necessary for all individuals. But asking trangender persons to undergo medical certification as proof of existence violates their right to privacy.

This article follows the journey of transgender individuals who have made Bangalore their home, migrating from the hinterland, and a neighbouring state, and how they have come into their own agency. Their struggle to be heard, and how they have integrated the voices of others and now made significant space for the transgenders in South India, negotiating and working with the authorities and society for their entitlements, gives a picture of the course of their path within the larger queer body politics and intersection of their work with other movements like that of sex workers and the disabled.

Reclaiming our data bodies from the matrix of capital requires us to move beyond a narrow focus on the protection of sensitive personal data towards a feminist data sovereignty approach

 Life account of Manipuri indigenous transgender Shamans. Podcast by Santa Khurai.

Increase in domestic violence, lay-offs, care responsibilities, restrictions on domestic and international movement, economic insecurities, psychological burdens - these are just a few of the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic in Asia in the last two years. The gendered nature of COVID-19 impacts is obvious and has sparked large feminist responses in the region.

References of trans masculine identities in Indian traditional and mythological stories, though not as recurrent compared with trans feminine identities, did exist