On July 9th, 2024 Tarshi conducted a webinar “Queering as a way of life” as a part of their In Plainspeak Webinar series. Srinidhi Raghavan from Rising Flame was one of the speakers.
Tarshi is an organisation that works at the intersection of sexual and reproductive health and human rights through information dissemination, knowledge and perspective building. In Plainspeak is their digital magazine on sexuality in the Global South.
Srinidhi opened the conversation with a quote from bell hooks, “queer not as being about who you’re having sex with; but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live”. She spoke about her experiences as a person who lives with chronic illness, an invisible disability and her relationship with her partner S.
Disabled people often need support while having sex, and frequently this is construed as “ruining the mood”, she suggested how assistance during the act can be a way to be intimate and playful with your partner. Stereotypes enshrined in movies have gone a long way in informing how disabled people approach relationships. She recounted an example from a workshop in Varanasi where a young girl with disability spoke about how she didn’t want to get married because she didn’t want to be carried around the fire. After all, this is what she had seen in the movie Mann. This led her to talk about how we needed more disability and queer representation, citing examples from the works of Andrew Gurza and Richa Kaul Padte.
She read a few lines from her interview with In Plainspeak which was about a variety of issues ranging from relationships, sexuality, and the erasure of disabled people. She mentions how now thanks to social media there are a lot of disabled Indians speaking about their experiences, but also questions which disabilities, languages, and the accessibility of these narratives. She spoke about how more awareness and work is being done in many parts of the country but also calls for us to question who is responding to this work. Is it more people with invisible disabilities, or is it the non-disabled as well? She ended the conversation by talking about the increase in the number of spaces where people can speak, how these are super valuable and that she is glad to have them. She didn’t have them growing up and the stigma of speaking up is still too much.
You can read her interview here.