There’s a tale I once told at a storytelling event in Penang, Malaysia, involving pee, Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, and being a ‘ho-jabi.’ The latter, by my definition, is a lady who wears a headscarf but ‘behaves inappropriately’ or really wants to get laid, and this is how I like to tease my past self. Don’t […]

Seeing and talking about differently-abled bodies in the mainstream media—positively—is rare. Even rarer is the portrayal of individuals with romantic and sexual needs and desires. For me, it was Marion Cotillard performance in the film Rust and Bone that struck a chord and I am eagerly awaiting depictions of differently-abled WoC. In today’s piece, Khairani […]

There is a culture of exoticising fruit, the ovaries of plant life, from certain tropical regions of the world. Consider the innumerable clichés and connotations associated with mango in particular, but also with papaya, rambutan, and guava. Or what people think of when they read the word ‘dragonfruit,’ in the same way that the words […]