AI Image Generators Grapple with Transness
Trans and non-binary people regularly face obstacles to mobility and migration, making experiences of travel and border-crossing challenging and even sometimes impossible. These challenges can include increased identity verification due to mismatches between gender presentation and sex/gender markers or photos in legal documents as well as interrogation upon passing through biometric checkpoints […]
Machine Yearning
“When it comes to sex, are there any new stories?” -Are We All Technosexuals Now? The quoted article begins with a promise, almost like a fairy tale. Your dream companion awaits. Writer Allie Rowbottom’s creation of an A.I. girlfriend may be akin to that of a little girl creating a character in […]
Emergent Intimacies in Posthuman Fiction
In Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019), the sex bots that Ron Lord manufactures cater to heteronormative desires. So the bots possess a ‘20-inch waist and 40-inch boobs [legs] slightly longer than they would be if she was human’ (91). Lord admits this is a ‘fantasy’ (37). In Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), thanks […]
Digitally Queer
It is difficult to write how I think technology has changed queerness, because my only experience of queerness has been through the technoscape. I know no before, only now. I can provide no contrasting lenses or a temporal depiction of how queerness has transformed with the help of technology over the years, […]
Glass Acts: The Queer Cybernetic Heartbeat of Modern Touch
In our relentless pursuit to theorize contemporary desire, we repeatedly encounter a peculiar paradox: never have human bodies been simultaneously more connected and more isolated than in our current moment of digital intimacy. This paradox demands new theoretical frameworks that move beyond traditional binaries of presence/absence, touch/separation, real/virtual. The haptic interface […]
Seeing and Being Seen: Scrolling, Desire and Brain Fog
A raucous voice blasts from the phone screen as a hot pink kurta obfuscates the speaker—a tiny yet fiery woman behind it. She announces to her audience the features of the product on display—silk blend, anarkali, zari embroidery, perfect for an evening party. My mother, hooked onto the screen, listens […]
Desire, Shame, and Hunger: Confronting Primal and Taboo Intimacies in Bhaskar Hazarika’s Aamis (2019)
To love is to feast. To desire is to hunger. Were you born with this hunger, or was it borne of your circumstances? What came before it? What will be left after? These are the many questions that Bhaskar Hazarika’s 2019 Assamese feature film Aamis, alternatively titled Ravening, compels its characters and viewers to reckon […]
Heeramandi: Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Vision Of The Tragic Tawaif
In South Asian cinema, the depiction of tawaifs (courtesans) is a powerful mirror reflecting and reshaping societal desires and norms. The tawaif, historically, was a highly skilled and educated courtesan in Indian society, trained in music, dance, literature, politics, social etiquette, and erotic stimulation (Dewan, 2). Despite their agency and the ability to choose their […]
Care, Language, and the Limits of Discipline in Khamoshi (1969)
The notion of care, perhaps one that demands more anthropological elaboration, retains its importance outside the medico-historical questions of health, disease, sickness, and healing to which it has often been limited. Important political considerations and implications are mobilised by our understanding of what care is. What, really, do we know about it? If […]
On Nazar: Legitimising Femininity and the Anxieties of Nationhood
The word ‘nazar’ (‘look’ or ‘glance’), imported from Arabic and Persian… is applied to the eye contact of lovers, especially the first sight that arouses passion. It also connotes, in the context of a culture that idealized (and sometimes practiced) the veiling of respectable women, an illicit glimpse that can give rise to intense ‘love […]
