With performances by Dolly, Mari, Haider, Not a Number and others!
We're Here and Queer! Women in Bangalore
Showing posts with label writers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writers. Show all posts
Friday, October 18, 2013
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Queer Reads Bangalore: first meeting: THE PREGNANT KING by Devdutt Pattanaik
QUEER READS BANGALORE is a reading group, open to anyone, everyone, age, gender, race, orientation, class, caste no bar - and we shall focus on novels, shorts, novellas, plays, poems - all that is written, and written in the creative sphere - that are concerned with Queer and Questioning, Unidentified, Intersexed, Lesbian, Transgender and Transsexual, Bisexual, Asexual, Gay and Genderqeer themes, people, communities and issues - no matter the orientation of the person who wrote them. On the other side of the coin, we shall read literature by Queer and Questioning, Unidentified, Intersexed, Lesbian, Transgender and Transsexual, Bisexual, Asexual, Gay and Genderqeer writers irrespective of how non-heteronormative their literature may seem on the surface.
Think QUILTBAG literature. :)
So - we meet on the 4th of November, at 4 pm. I suggest Swabhava for our first meet, and after that we can shift venues to other places we can choose. 4 to 6 pm.
To read:
THE PREGNANT KING is written by Devdutt Pattanaik. You can find it on Flipkart.
We're still feeling our way through this, but come, bring friends. Come if you love the book, HATE the book, didn't understand the book - disagreement is good, complete harmony is good, everything but you not saying anything is good.
From Devdutt Pattanaik's website
"The Hindu epic, Mahabharata, written over 2000 years ago, narrates the tale of one Yuvanashva, a childless king, who accidentally drinks the magic potion meant to make his queens pregnant. The child thus conceived in and delivered from his body grows up to be Mandhata, a ruler of great repute.
What does the son call Yuvanashva? Father or mother? Can mothers be kings? Can kings be mothers? In the ancient epic, and the sacred chronicles known as the Puranas, which hurry through this slip of a tale, nobody raises these uncomfortable questions. They do so in this book.
And so a new narrative emerges: a fiction fashioned out of mythological and imaginary tales where lines are blurred between men and women, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers.
There is Pruthalashva, who must be father because he is a man, and Shilavati, who cannot be king because she is a woman. There is Sthunakarna, a Yaksha, who forsakes his manhood to make Shikhandi a husband and then reclaims it to make Somavat a wife. There is Arjuna, a great warrior with many wives, who is forced to masquerade as a woman after being castrated by a nymph. There is Ileshwar Mahadev, god on full moon days and goddess of new moon nights and Adi-Natha, the teacher of teachers, worshipped as a hermit by Yaja and an enchantress by Upayaja. And finally there is Yuvanashva, the hero, king of Vallabhi, who after marrying three times to three very different women, creates a life within him, as mothers do, and then a life outside him, as fathers do, and wonders if he is either, neither or both.
If biology is destiny, if gender is a cornerstone of dharma, then how does Yuvanashva make room for such disruptions in order? For a good king, who wants to be great, must be fair to all: those here, those there and all those in between."
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Pride Mela details!
We are excited to announce that the 2nd annual Bengaluru Pride Mela is scheduled for Saturday Nov 26th, 2011.
We are looking for:
PERFORMANCESSkits, magic, dance (Bollywood, Tollywood, Kollywood, Hip hop, Classical, Latin American, Contemporary), drama, stand up comedy, poetry, etc. All performance styles are welcome!Performances should be under 10 minutes long. Please email your name / the name of your group, along with a sentence description of the performance to Kareem: kareem.khubchandani@gmail.com.Submission deadline is Nov 10th. STALLSWe welcome NGOs and other LGBT friendly organizations, bookstores, arts and crafts, henna artists, tattoo artists, food and drink vendors, florists, gift vendors etc.If you are interested in setting up a stall, please contact Rohini: romavenkat@gmail.com for further information. Submission deadline is the 10th of November.PICTURESWe are hosting a photography competition as part of the pride celebrations. LGBTQ oriented photos that fit the theme “IN PUBLIC,” are invited for submission. Interpretation of the theme is open to the photographer. The winning photographs will be published in India’s queer magazines: Fun, and Pink Pages.Please email your submissions to Prithvi: prithvijho@gmail.com. Submissions should include a high-quality digital photograph, photographer’s name and contact info, and a title or one line description of the photo. Submission deadline is Nov 10th.VOLUNTEERSThe mela is a big event and we need help making it run smoothly. If you would like to help out, please email Krishna: krishnapatil22@gmail.com.Please do not hesitate to contact any of us for further information about the Mela!Krishna, Kumar, Kareem, Rohini, Prithvi, and Sam
Monday, August 1, 2011
WHaQ! meeting: 31th July 2011
Short summary of what we discussed:
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- A few OBLs ago, we used to screen movies rather more regularly than we do now - something to actively think about doing again? This is a good opportunity to remind those of us who missed it about Deliver Me - D's first movie. We watched it as a group back in June. More of the same? Not every week, since sometimes we do have other agendas - agendae? - but it would be nice.
- At least one of the people at the meeting is an avid photographer, so there was some technical and thematic discussion along those lines. We didn't discuss this at the meeting, but Gaysi is running a Queer Photo Contest: Queer Tasveer, looking for the best pictures of gaysi love. Click the link to check it out!
- We talked about lesbian stereotypes - in India, the lesbian stereotype is in fact that she is invisible. Women are traditionally supposed not to have sex drives, and when they are traditionally represented as sexy they are either vamps or they're mother goddesses. If a woman's sexuality is placed at the feet of her man, how on earth is a woman supposed to have a sex drive, a libido, if there is no man there but simply another woman? The simple answer to "Who is the Indian dyke?" is "Whatever we want it to be!" because that stereotypical invisibility works to our advantage here.
- Following on from the last point, we talked about being in the closet in straight spaces, and staying in the closet in queer spaces because sometimes other queer women, men, could not be trusted to respect that you might not be out in your professional and other social spheres. If we have the freedom to be whatever we want to be, we have the freedom to be utterly human, and therefore the freedom to be Not Nice as well.
- Menopause: The Musical. Just take a look, yo.
- Is Simi Garewal homophobic? In other new, Karan Johar is a bitch, and we like it.
- Lesbian weddings! Savita and Beena, whose families declared yesterday that they were willing to reconcile with their lesbian daughters. “Savita's parents as well as mine have accepted our relationship and forgiven us. It was Savita's parents who had agreed initially. Now, my parents too have fallen in line after several media reports. However, my uncle Satbir Singh still has a problem with our marriage and has threatened to shoot both of us," Well, okay. I'm not sure they should leave their fifteen day protection. But okay. We spent some time yesterday wondering about the legality of the marriage, but really so long as it is not challenged in the courts - especially now that the marriage is acknowledged in a Gurgaon Sessions Court - it may not make much practical difference. We'll find out, I guess.
- We talked about a few other lesbian weddings, specifically Baljit Kaur and Rajwant Kaur. The marriage was melodramatic and troubled - Rajwant left Baljit and Baljit slit her wrists in court. No. Really. The reporting style has changed a great deal in the four years between Baljit and Rajwant's marriage and Savita and Beena's.
- Mangalsutras. The round ones, with little dots in the middle. They're breasts. No, don't argue, they are well-shaped boobies with perky nipples. The husband ties it around the wife's neck. He is giving her her sexuality. Okay? Which is tied into her feeding motherhood.
- I found a new minion to write on this blog! We are pleased.
Then we left, acknowledging that the garage door was indeed an obstacle the defeat of which should be rewarded with cookies. We went to Matteo's, where there was nice coffee, and a yummy gossip session.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
"Writing our own history - Finally!"
So this wound its way onto the WHaQ mailing list, and it seems like a good idea to pass it around as much as possible. Gurl in the World has already blogged this, but please, take a look, pass it on: Children have been separated from their mother, kept captive in a foreign country. Their mum has legal custody, their dad kidnapped them anyway. Sign this petition, please? Help reunite a mother with her children.Hello Queer People!A recent chat, actually let’s say a recent comment thread on Facebook
led Udayan Dhar and I to a realisation that we’re sure most of you
would agree with — something that should have happened by now, but
hasn’t! So we took it upon ourselves to get this idea into action and
here’s why you’ve received this mail.It’s been a good, super-happy and challenging 2 years since the law
‘came out of the closet’. Yes, we’re legally gay and how! But what
seems to have been missed in all this celebration or the lack of it,
are the wonderful stories of people who were involved in or affected
by the movement — personal narrations of varied individuals who were
most actively involved or affected by the high court ruling that week.
From the high spirited celebrations of the multi-city pride, news
stories of which, still elicit a tear in anyone involved in the
struggle in the smallest of ways, to the country erupting in joy over
the final high court order — we hope to capture and re-live those
moments, those nail-biting hours and those euphoria filled festivals
from the mouths of the very people who made it happen.We’re looking for 15-20 stories and 15-20 nominations of people who
you think should make it to the book... and then we shall contact
these people and get them to share their story.As they say, “Only when it is written, will it be known to have
happened”, and hence, this is our very own, small yet much-required
step towards writing our own History.Please send us nominations and broad areas in which you think your
nominees can represent that wonderful week.For example: Someone who worked on the legal front could be nominated
to write his/her experience with a legal perspective — personal, yet
legal all the same.Get in touch with either of us, before the 23rd of July.
Udayan Dhar — udayan@pink-pages.co.in
L Romal M Singh — elromal@gmail.comLooking forward to hearing from you.P.S. Please mail us all your nominees. Comments on the social network
service will not be accepted — only to avoid confusion.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday, June 27, 2011
Minal Hajratwala at Swabhava
photo credit Bob Hsiang
Minal Hajratwala is in Bangalore for a few weeks – we mostly know her as the editor for Queer Ink‘s forthcoming 2012 Queer Ink Anthology (also here). I cannot currently remember who took dreadful advantage of whom, but Vinay (the guy who runs-manages-GrandViziersSwabhava/Good As You ) spread the word and a bunch of us gathered to meet her today (actually, by the time this gets posted, yesterday) at the Swabhava office.
Hajratwala’s Leaving India: My Family’s Journey From Five Villages To Five Continents explores her family’s
Excerpts from *Leaving India*
multigenerational movement across the world, contextualising her self against this century of transplantation and settlement. It’s won at least four awards (one of them a Lammy!). Hajratwala is currently in India for research for her next novel and for her poetry – more on those later.
It rained quite spitefully on the latecomers today, but we began (mostly) on time. Hajratwala read out an excerpt from Leaving India, a section pertaining to herself and her early adulthood – Feminism, Queerness (“Feminism is the theory, lesbianism the practice.”) and the like. She’s not my favourite sort of reader – her tone remains too even – but she has a clear and soft voice. All in all, very pleasant.
- Hajratwala spent eight years (instead of the projected two) researching and writing this book. Her extended, very close-knit family is spread out over nine countries. She has thirty-five first cousins, and knows all their names – an impressive feat in and of itself. The book, in some senses, is her way of understanding the sheer scale of diaspora and finding a place for herself within it.
- Writing the novel changed her; it rebuilt her relationships with the family, allowed her time, conversation, communication with an older generation that would not necessarily spend time taking a young woman and her questions seriously. Diasporic narratives and histories have to encompass an extraordinary amount of movement: “It is the central trauma of our lives.” In some ways, it is the role of the queer family member, to have that displacement away and reconciliation back to the traditional family home – it gives the writer a dual, insider/outsider perspective.
- The section in Leaving India which is about herself was written first, and partly as a response to the “naked honesty” she was getting from the people she talked to. She came out to her extended family on a case by case basis, and for the most part all is well. (She did remind us that it’s easier to be proud of a “famous lesbian” in the family rather than a boring old “regular lesbian”.)
- Blogs! She likes blogs. (Who doesn’t?) They give you a personal space to write anything you choose, without an editor overseeing the process. You can control who sees your words and who doesn’t. It can be a space to have your private, intimate voice “connect to some bigger thing out there”. (She had contact with the damascusgaygirl hoaxer: See this and this.)
- The Queer Ink Anthology! Queer Ink is going to be one of the first queer publishing houses in South Asia, and this anthology is going to give us stories that haven’t been heard before. About ten percent of the submissions were in vernacular languages. (Queer Ink is looking for people interested in editing, design, writing, the like. Contact them! Say you want in!)
After, there were cookies. After after, we went to Koshy’s. Life was good.
(originally posted at my reading blog)
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
A shout-out to queer writers -
I'm supposed to be blogging about babies, but all I've got so far is "I don't want 'em," which is not as verbose as I would like. Here is baby clipart, which as almost as good as a post about babies and the people who do want 'em:
Innit precious.
Anyway, while I was procrastinating instead of talking/writing/thinking about babies (I don't want 'em!) I found this on my email and Facebook both, somehow ignored until Not Working led me to it. It is, in essence, a call for submissions for an (so far unnamed) anthology of Queer Erotica by South Asian writers. Tranquebar Press (the same people who published The Electric Feather last year) will publish the collection sometime in 2012. I'm copy/pasting the text here:
Call for submissions: Anthology Of South Asian Queer Erotica [title forthcoming]
Pass the word around!To be published by Tranquebar Press in 2012
The spaces for expressing queer concerns have increased across South Asia in the last decade. Much is being written about sexuality, rights and queer lives. Yet, in all of this, sex itself doesn't get written about very much and there is a dearth of queer erotica from South Asia. Contemporary queer erotica with a South Asian focus would make these queer lives apparent in newer and compelling ways. This anthology is an attempt to present queer, sexual, regional literature that pleasures and satisfies. It is about queer sex lives, erotic experiences and passions. Queer in this anthology represents non-normative genders, sexualities, lives and perspectives. It aims to bring out voices that have been limited to smaller groups or never heard before.
What we want:
We want stories of queer love, lust and craving. Sex, however you may define it, should be a big part of the story. We want gender play, auto-eroticism, dark fantasies, monogamous and non-monogamous sex, stories of bondage, domination, sadism and masochism. We are looking for stories of deep passions, stories that complicate sex. We want stories of desire, fulfilled and unfulfilled. Stories that defy the gender binary. Stories of how you sexed up your aids and appliances. Stories on masturbation or the pleasures of paid sex. Stories of how you steamed up a bus ride, ended a clandestine affair or fucked with sex toys. Share with us stories that confront, redefine, dispute and reclaim what sex is. Let your stories queer erotica itself.
We invite you to write short stories with South Asian themes, characters and places reflected in them. We are looking for a wide expression of experiences across age, region, class, ability, gender and sexual identities. Stories can be fictional, semi-fictional and non-fiction, but we are not looking for academic or solely autobiographical writing on sexuality. Your stories will shatter the silences around queer erotic lives and encompass their diversities, so let us have them.
Who can write:
We want to foreground the queer voices of people living in or originally from South Asia. Queer includes but is not restricted to identities like lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, intersex, hijra, kothi, questioning, genderqueer, genderfluid and pansexual. Authors do not necessarily have to identify with one or more of these identities but the stories they submit should reflect non-normative genders, sexualities, lives and perspectives.
How to submit:
We are looking for short stories with a word limit of no less than 3000 words. We regret that we are unable to include poetry.
All submissions should be in English. Translations from other languages are allowed as long as the author owns the rights to the translation as well.
Please submit the story as an email attachment on a word document. Please include a title and word count.
Do not include your name or any other identifiers in the word document. As we are using a blind submissions process, we will have to reject submissions that indicate the author’s identity in the body of the story.
Authors will be informed whether their work is selected by mid-October. At that time, we will request you to provide a name under which you wish to be published and a short bio.
All selected authors will receive a one-time payment. The copyright of the story will remain with the author.
The deadline for submission is 15th September 2011.
Send your stories to queerotic.stories@gmail.com
Now get writing about the kind of sex you have wanted to read about. And get us swooning!
About the editors:
Meenu is a queer feminist activist. She has been involved with issues of gender and sexuality through women’s rights organisations and autonomous collectives for the last six years. She lives in Delhi and is an avid reader of erotica.
Shruti is currently based in Bombay. In the last eight years, she has actively engaged with the women’s and queer movements in the country. Over the years, she has worked as a researcher, social worker and counsellor.
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