Skin Stories, a publication on sexuality, disability and gender housed at Mumbai-based APC member organisation Point of View, is back for a second season with all-new essays, reportage and perspectives from a South Asian context.
Launched in 2017, Skin Stories has been known for publishing first-person narratives by people with disabilities, "to bust harmful myths and tell complex stories about disability based on lived experiences," explains managing editor Shreya Ila Anasuya.
This new season of Skin Stories features a special series called #DisabilityIn, which examines ableism and the representation of disability in various spaces. In the first essay in the series, Anasuya looks at disability in the mainstream, English-language news media in India. You can read the piece here.
The second offering is an important personal essay by Dr. Nandini Murali, who writes about the painful aftermath of her husband's death by suicide. Dr. Murali advocates to build compassionate alternatives to current conversations about suicide and suicide loss, that are filled with stigma and judgment. You can read her essay here.
"Children’s literature in India has to do a better job of telling stories about disability" is the third installment in the new series. The author of the essay, Payal Dhar, tells writers, "So send them on a perilous journey, throw them a juicy mystery to solve, make their significant others dump them, have carnivorous plants eat their parents, make aliens attack their planet… Not every story has to be about their so-called differences, it can be about so many other things instead." Read the essay here.
For more from Skin Stories, click here.