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<h1 class="centre">This collection of profiles covers four women in distinct fields, who have been the architects of women’s liberation. This could mean being firmly situated in collective action, political justice, and legal wins, or in the quieter spaces of self and sex. We talk loosely about ‘women’s movements’ and ‘the patriarchy’ as if they are as vast and unpinnable as air. But these women have found particularities from which they are fighting to breathe afresh. The work is vertiginous, and the path is fraught. Of course it is. This collection asks what it means to sustain a career fighting against gravity for freedom. It asks how cultural, political, economic, and sexual injustices can be met with somatic bravery, intellectual hard work, and joy as much as resilience. Looking to fight the good fight? This is what (some) resistance looks like.</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">"Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it." - Simone de Beauvoir</h1>

<h1 class="centre">We live in the empire of images. Screens, stories, and ‘shoulds’ have erected not-so-moving pictures of sex, desire, and bodies. Psychotherapist Neha Bhat has seen the impact of images on culture, particularly in the Indian context: “I kind of began in Bollywood, and I was like, what is this industry?” Disconcerted by its unkind gaze, she left to become a teacher of children with special needs. There, she saw how non-verbal cues from children engaging in recreation revealed information and emotional states that verbal communication did not. Bhat was fascinated by these invisible experiences, reactions, and the remembering and forgetting that was possible behind (or beneath) the visible, which was embedded in the eyes. Far from the psychobabble and therapy-speak that isolates, moralises, and prevents movement, Bhat’s polysemic and multi-directional approach to therapy has focussed on liberation, play, and taking the unseen seriously.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">This impulse took her from classrooms to prisons, from Mumbai to Chicago, from painting canvases to decoding the psychic scars that trauma leaves behind. Today, Bhat is a licensed sex and trauma psychotherapist, practising between India and the U.S. She works at the intersection of decolonial healing and psychoanalysis, bringing a self-avowedly Indian context to a field that has, for too long, been shaped by Western frameworks. Bhat is intent on reclaiming an approach that speaks to the unique wounds of South Asian subjects — shame, the afterlives of colonialism, and the ways in which community is both saviour and captor.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">Carceral, Cardinal</h1>

<h1 class="left">Bhat spent seven years working in Mumbai’s prison system. Her work, structured by the principles of transformative justice, refuses the binaries of victim and perpetrator, good and evil. Instead, she asks: what happens after harm? What does repair look like? With a stringent benchmarking of who to support in the reparative process, (“just being sorry is not enough,” Bhat notes) she has worked with people who have committed acts of sexual violence —“We are all capable of harm,” she says, “and if the survivor is saying they don’t want to go to the police, then what is the way to do informal, alternative justice?” She runs perpetrator support groups, sixteen-week processes designed to move people through the slow, often painful work of accountability. It is a stance that has invited criticism from other therapists, who argue that resources should be directed at survivors, not those who have caused harm. “But survivors live in that same world,” she reminds. “They live in the world with people who have done terrible things. What happens then?”</h1>

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<h1 class="centre">They Should Invent a Body That Doesn’t Keep The Score</h1>

<h1 class="centre">In India, where visible crises are overwhelming — poverty, healthcare, sanitation, the lack of basic infrastructure — the invisible is often dismissed. “We don’t have the capacity to look at the invisible because the visible itself is not looked at.” But emotional wounds, if left unattended, harden. She sees this constantly in her clients. The woman who keeps finding herself in the same kind of relationship. The man who does not understand why he cannot be present in sex. “You end up in the same pattern,” she says. “You externalise it and say, ‘I just keep meeting narcissists.’ But what is it that you are contributing to that pattern?”</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Bhat’s framework is deeply somatic. She speaks of play, of pleasure, of the erotic as an essential site of healing. “Children who experience trauma process it non-verbally,” she says. “Through play. Through the body.” Sex, for her, is an extension of that principle — a space where trauma can be metabolised, and thereby rewritten. “My retreats are designed for this,” she explains. “We have to reprogram the brain to be able to play, because the brain is used to victimisation. It’s used to not trusting.” Her retreats bring together people who have done the hard work of therapy but need to move into something else — something lighter, and something more expansive. Art and sex offer this immersive potential. “If you’re very traumatised, you need a guide,” she says. “But if you’ve stabilised, then you have to move forward. You have to make money, have sex, and dress the way you like. You have to get out of victimisation and into post-traumatic growth.”</h1>

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<h1 class="left">Sex as Performance, Sex as Play</h1>

<h1 class="left">Bhat’s practice takes flight from a faith that sex is a cultural language, and therefore a negotiation of emotion, power, and exposure. “People don’t realise how deeply images shape their desires,” she says. She has worked with men who first encountered sex through violent porn, whose earliest understandings of pleasure were steeped in coercion and control. She has worked with women whose desires feel like a betrayal, and who do not understand why they want the things they want. “There’s a reason why rape fantasy is common,” she says with corrective urgency. “It’s not about wanting to be raped. It’s about wanting to be taken over by someone you trust completely. It’s about wanting to let go.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">This, she argues, is the fundamental problem with how sex is talked about in India. “We have either hyper-sexualization or demonisation,” she says. “Nothing in between.” The result of these frozen discourses is a dearth of nuance; there is no space to interrogate sex that is consensual, and yet just bad or awkward. Men tell her they do not know how to be safe partners anymore, and people are left with fear for their desires. “There is so much grey area,” she says. “But we do not know how to talk about it.”</h1>

<h1 class="left">For Bhat, the answer lies in presence. “Sex is play,” she says. “And play requires presence.” But presence is not easy. “If you’ve had multiple rapes, childhood trauma, you cannot just do this alone. You need a guide.” Therapy, she says, is the work of looking backwards to plumb at understanding. But her perspective on true, self-actualised growth? That is about moving forward. It is about touching the world again. “You cannot just live in healing mode,” she says. “At some point, you have to live.”</h1>

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<h1 class="left">Credits:</h1>

<h1 class="left">Editor-in-Chief: Kshitij Kankaria</h1>

<h1 class="left">Words by: Sanjana Sheth</h1>

<h1 class="left">Digital Editor: Shriya Zamindar</h1>

<h1 class="left">Managing Editor: Anurag Sharma</h1>

<h1 class="left">Art Director: Tia Chinai</h1>

<h1 class="left">Graphic Designer: Rishika Sikder</h1>

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<h1 class="left">G Ode Team:</h1>

<h1 class="left">Creative Direction: Nimi Raja</h1>

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