#indian womanhood

[its-poojagupta-shree]

As women, we embark on a remarkable journey through life, filled with unique experiences, challenges, and triumphs. Our path is often shaped by a multitude of roles we play - as daughters, sisters, mothers, friends, and professionals. At SHREE, we celebrate the beauty of this journey and the strength that each woman carries within herself. In this blog, we explore the various facets of womanhood and offer insights on empowerment, self-care, style, and more.

[beyondwenet]

womanhood, my dearest

[g0j0s]

it’s funny how women are shamed for the things that have kept them alive for centuries like gossiping.

home bound, she would toil amidst smoke and clay pots, yearning. then came dawn. she spins with delight placing her copper pot on a hip and leaving. however, she walked briskly, as if another task might find her if she didn’t hurry. at the end of the alley her friends waited. dressed in their usual glee, they welcomed her lovingly. along the way they shared the details of their houses. someone’s mother in law had brought a new piece of gossip.

they discuss the village politics commenting on the laziness of the village chief and his inadequacies. affairs of other men and women float in the air like the wind warning the other sakhis. many would speak about the criminals breeding in their own houses, collecting advice on dealing with such a calamity.

they shared anecdotes and memories so that they could know the ways of other villages. antidotes and practices for the poison brewing in their hearts for their relatives. and remedies and melodies to soak in when the day gets too tiring.

by the well thrived their relationships, reverberating in the water, infusing it with bliss. then they promised to see each other in the evening to share their days and open their hearts so that their wounds could heal quickly.

[insanegirlontheinternet]

Forget the old me. This new version of me is completely captivated by you

[theoffingmag]

Anoushka Mirchandani, Summer Sisters, 2024, Oil and Oil Pastel on Canvas.

Regardless of the scale of the paintings, my work is a study of  intimacy. The work is personal and autobiographical, and thus deeply vulnerable. I am always trying to invite you to inhabit an intimate space within my work.

You Carry Everyone Who Came Before You: An Interview with Anoushka Mirchandani

[chaitalinath]

And when a woman's heart is in anguish, it blames another woman, not the man.

Chaitali Nath

[kalavathiraj]

[ambagelbraindump]

not to continue genderposting on main but I started the next book for book club and it’s very good but it’s reminding me that I am very bad at being “””girl”””

I talk about whole 1/4 of a girl thing a lot but I never really mention much of the other 3/4 and while I have absolutely no desire to change that I do get a little…sad? weird? thinking about all the rituals I never participated in bc I fuckin hated them

[c-you-never]

[communistkenobi]

I believe it was the work of legal scholar Florence Ashley where I first encountered this term (it might have also been Serano), but I’m becoming more and more committed to saying “degender” as opposed to “misgender.” like I think the term ‘misgender’ fails to properly identify the mechanism behind the process it describes: misgendering is not an act of attributing the wrong gender characteristics to a trans person, it is an act of dehumanisation. I think the term ‘misgender’ especially gives people much easier rhetorical cover to argue that trans women are hurt by misandry by being ‘mislabeled as men,’ or that they are in fact ‘actually men’ and benefit from male privilege, because the (incorrect) assumption underlying this is that when trans women are ‘misgendered’ they are being treated like men - to follow this line of thinking to its natural conclusion, this denies the existence of transmisogyny altogether, because any ‘misgendering’ of trans women is done only with the intent, conscious or otherwise, to inscribe the social position (and the privileges this position affords) of men onto them, as opposed to stripping them of their womanhood (and thus, their humanity).

The term degendering, however, I think more accurately describes this dehumanising process. Pulling from the work of both Judith Butler and Maria Lugones, gender mediates access to personhood - Lugones says in the Coloniality of Gender that in the colonial imaginary, animals have no gender, they only have (a) sex, and so who gets ‘sexed’ and who gets ‘gendered’ is a matter of who counts as human. She describes this gendering process as fundamentally colonial and emerging as a colonial technology of power - who is gendered is who gets to be considered human, and so the construction of binary sex is a way of ‘speciating’ or rendering non-human the Indigenous and African people of colonized America, justifying and systematising the brutal use of their land and/or their labour until their death by equating them to animals. Sylvia Wynter likewise describes in 1492: A New World View that a popular term used by Spanish colonizers to describe the indigenous people was “heads of Indian men and women,” as in heads of cattle. By the same token, white men are granted the high status of human, worthy of governance, wealth, and knowledge production, and white women are afforded the subordinate though still very high responsibility of reproducing these men by raising and educating children. Appeals to a person’s sex as something more real, more obvious, or ‘poorly concealed’ by their gender is to deny them their gender outright, and therefore is a mechanism to render them non-human. Likewise, for Butler, gender produces the human subject - to be outside gender is to be considered “unthinkable” as a human being, a being in “unliveable” space.

Therefore the process of trans women going from women -> “male” is not “being gendered as a man,” it is being positioned as non-human. when people deny the gender of trans women, most especially trans women of colour, they invariably do this through reference to their genitals, to their ‘sex,’ as something inescapable, incapable of being concealed - again, this is not a process of rendering them as men, it is the exact opposite: it is a process of rendering them as non-human. there is not a misidentification process happening, they are not being “misgendered as men,” there is a de-identification of them as human beings. Hence, they are not misgendered, they are degendered, stripped of gender, stripped of their humanity

[poetryfoundation-potd]

We Play Charades

By Uma Menon

My first instinct is to translate

the word. Make it easier to understand

without saying the word itself.

I feel guilt for this mistake—

for changing languages instead

of describing. Isn’t this an easy way out?

My mother and I are playing charades

alone. We make this mistake over &

over, our tongues

too quick to learn. After all,

isn’t this what we are used to?

When one language fails,

we try the next & the next

until someone understands.

A syllable escapes like a captured cricket,

singing for its love of freedom. It is too late

to go back now, to jar the language

we first learned. We do not want to,

either, so in this game, we swallow first.

Card, swallow, describe, flip.

Card, swallow, describe, flip.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/159484/we-play-charades

No Audio Included

[its-poojagupta-shree]

Central to this cultural heritage is the celebration of Indian womanhood, which exemplifies the resilience, strength, and grace of women across the country. Throughout history, Indian women have played pivotal roles in shaping their families, communities, and society at large, contributing significantly to art, literature, politics, and every sphere of life. In this blog, we will delve into the cultural heritage of India and explore how it intertwines with the celebration of Indian womanhood, highlighting the crucial role of women in preserving and enriching this heritage.

[gatheringbones]

[“When I asked focus group participants again about body hair and their desires for women, Adam responded:

That’s what makes the woman different, her body, I don’t mind uh having hair in certain specific parts on her body um . . . in general I . . . like woman to be clean. Just in certain areas. But like I said, down in the genital, like it’s okay for me.

Hair, for Adam, Musiteli, and other participants, served as the visual representation of the differentiation between “men” and “women.” Further, Adam referred to a woman being hairless not only as “proper” but “cleanly,” as well.

Often, when I asked participants specifically about genital hair, the response was that they did not prefer hair due to cleanliness, hygiene, and other such myths surrounding body hair. The idea that hairlessness is cleanly is reflected in colloquial discourse (e.g., “clean shaven”). Ryan, an Indian American, cis-het man, explained to me his distaste for a “bush” or a large amount of hair genitally:

I just think like it's better to sometimes, maybe, fully shave it, like coordinate with your partner if you're going to do that, because then it could help but like, yeah, if like two people both have bushes then like you don't know what's going on. And, also, it's just like, cleaner. Like in terms of like keeping it clean. It's easier when you have less hair in those areas.

When I asked Liz, a cis-lesbian, Latina woman, whether she cares if a woman shaves her armpits and genitals or not, she similarly responded, “Yes (laughs). Yes definitely. It’s just . . . um . . . how should I call it? Hygiene. Hygiene.”

In Ryan, Liz, and Adam’s discourse, pubic hair is conceptualized as unclean, non-hygienic, and obtrusive. Such ideas, again, are not mere individual preference but are instead shaped by cultural and generational understandings of hair. Herzig highlights that “the normalization of smooth skin in dominant U.S. culture is not even a century old,” with such ideas arising during the same years as the Cold War with individuals in the United States describing “visible body hair on women as evidence of a filth, ‘foreign’ lack of hygiene.” Porn and the framing of sexually explicit material have also shaped cultural understandings of pubic hair. While pubic hair removal for women went out of vogue after the nineteenth century, it became popular once again in the 1980s, in part, due to pornographic depictions largely including hairless vulvas, and more recently, hairless bodies for men, as well. Cultural discourse surrounding pubic and body hair is, thus, shaped by racialized, gendered, and xenophobic understandings of the body and hair. The fact that these ideas are shared by immigrant participants/participants of color does not deny the racialized and xenophobic roots of such discourse, so much as it highlights the internalization of racism and xenophobia by immigrants and/or people of color, as an adaptive response to the racism of society.

As participants conceptualized hair as animal-like, masculine, and/or filthy, they also conceptualized of it as excess or surplus to the human (woman’s) body. Pubic hair shaped their idea of what it means to do womanhood and to be a woman. As such, participant discourse not only was shaped by racist, sexist, and xenophobic conceptualizations of hair that have proliferated in the United States but also cissexist concepts of manhood and womanhood as opposite, different, and biologically based. That which is “improper to manhood/womanhood within White schemas of a gender binary are unnatural, unclean, and undesirable.”]

alithia zamantakis, from thinking cis: cisgender heterosexual men, and queer women’s roles in anti-trans violence, 2023

[lesb0]

What do you think about 4b movement? Do you think this could also work in the US under Trump?

I think that South Korean feminism is the result of women in a totally homogenous culture that moves together as a social class who have been pushed to their absolute breaking point in heartbreakingly horrible ways and they are no longer able to hold up the veil of civility towards men.

the difference between them and American women is that American hyperindividualism has completely fractured women here as a collective. In Korean standards, it's good manners to try to look the same and fit in. America trains women to believe we are completely isolated and unique and separate from other women, even the feminist slogan that goes "women are not a monolith"

A feminist who I really respect grew up in the 70s and cant manage to wrap her head around the fact that there really IS one single unifying woman's experience. She's still caught on this idea that no aspect of womanhood can possibly ever be universal, "the Scandinavian woman from 1957 and the Indian woman from 386 bce have nothing in common" yeah they do, sociological oppression because of their sex.

I don't think american women can ever understand that we are only one group and damning one kind of woman will effect literally all of us. in South Korea, women say "If it happened to her, then I'm next tomorrow" while American woman say "But what was she wearing/drinking?"

[insanegirlontheinternet]

I hate my self and love my self at the same time

[songoftrillium]

Meet The Art Team

Hello Kinfolks!

I've been really looking forward to this post for a while, and it's now time to unveil the art team I've assembled to put this project together! They're some heavy hitters that y'all ought to recognize, so without further ado let's meet them!

Mx. Morgan (They/Them)

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Mx. Morgan G Robles (they/them) is a freelance artist and illustrator based in Seattle, Washington. Their work is best known for its use of macabre themes, animals, and nature. They use these themes to explore mental illness, gender identity, or simply to make neat skulls.

They're known for producing book covers for several major publishers, and they've been brought in to design our book covers as well. In addition, they've developed a number of inside pieces as well!

Dogblud She/Her (Dogblud is no longer a part of this team)

Dogblud (she/her), is a Midwestern cryptid working as a freelance artist and writer. Her work is near-exclusively sapphic, centering primarily around werewolves, werebeasts, and their strong thematic ties - horrific or otherwise - to all forms of womanhood.

A long-time fan of Werewolf: the Apocalypse, she's joined our team to produce all of the tribe artwork for the book, in addition to a number of other contributory pieces!

Meka (Any Pronouns)

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Meka is a Scottish comic artist with a flair for the dark and extremely bloody and a long-standing love of monsters and what they let us all explore-- for better and worse. Vehemently underground, they build stories about horror, grief, depersonalisation, and the isolation that comes with being just a little too weird and too angry to swallow whole. Art and catharsis go hand in hand, as far as she’s concerned.

In a throwback to the original game series, Meka has joined to produce a 22-page fully illustrated comic for the series entitled Cracking the Bone. A postgraduate in traditional comic artistry, we're extremely fortunate to have them on the team.

M.WolfhideWinter (He/Him)

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He is a part-time freelance illustrator from Scotland. His work is heavily inspired by the rugged terrain (and rain) of Scotland with a focus on werewolves inhabiting the wild landscapes both past and present. He explores themes of mental illness, societal stigma, dark folklore, and sad werewolves in the rain.

WolfhideWinter has joined our team as our monster-maker, dedicating their time towards depicting our primary antagonists of the garou: The Black Spiral Dancers, and the Wyrm's brood! We can hardly think of a body horror artist more fitting for the role.

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As a final addendum, we have an additional writer that's joined the team at the last minute.

J.F. Sambrano (They/He)

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J. F. Sambrano is an author of horror and (urban/dark/depressing?) fantasy and an advocate for indigenous rights. He lives in Washington (the state) and is originally from Los Angeles (the city); the differences are staggering but the ocean and the I-5 are the same. He is Chiricahua Apache (Ndeh) and Cora Indian (Náayarite). He may or may not be a believer/practitioner of real world magic. If he were, he would not be interested in your hippy-dippy, crystal swinging, dream-catcher slinging garbage. But magic is real, let’s not fuck around.

Beloved Indigenous World of Darkness author J.F. Sambrano is joining our team to depict the Bastet in the Dawn Tribes! A friend and frequent topic of discussion on this blog, we are honored to have him on the team to bring the Werewolf: the Apocalypse he's long-felt the world deserves to life!