Human beings are in a way much like the computers they have created, that operate in a binary domain. Nature does not operate like that. Life is a celebration of the diverse variations in nature. Like the colours of a rainbow that blend from one wavelength to another to create a spectrum that when fused together, forms the fabric of life. Brought up in this binary world, I have always tried to compartmentalise gender like everything else until a few years back I chanced upon an event called the Kolkata Rainbow Pride Walk that opened my mind to a whole new world that I had never experienced through my binary goggles.
The most important aspect of a person’s life is ‘self expression’ to be precise the way the person wants to see the self and communicate it to others. Sexuality is one’s basic right for living a healthy and happy life and for mobilising the human mind to disapprove the concepts of what is “natural and normal” and to disrupt the heteronormative systems of sex, gender, and sexuality providing greater opportunities for individual liberty and social understanding. The ‘queer movement’ breaks gender stereotypes and opens not only a range of gender identities but a range of bodies or transbodies, thereby challenging biological stereotypes. This photo-essay tries to capture the fluidity of gender, the breakdown of body essentialism and draws a rainbow of polymorphous bodies, genders and desires…..and opens up multiple ways to construct and reconstruct one’s gender and therefore one’s sex.
