Ultra Violet is a place for Indian feminists. It’s a place for sharing stories and views and questions. It’s a place for exploration, opinion and information. It’s a place where we can come together to understand what other feminists around the country–or around the world–are saying. If you want to write for UV, please read this. More about UV here.

We’re Talking About…

May 13, 2010

Hyper Links

IN OPEN SPACE, Nandini Rao on The Neurosis of Being Perfect:

Over the years, worldwide, there has been an attempt at “homogenising” notions of beauty. A global standard of age, height, weight and colour seems to have been drawn up, not connected in any way to race or natural laws of body type differences. For a [...]

July 10, 2008

Scavengers As Models: Exploitation Chic or Empowering?

I FOUND this news story about Indian “sanitation workers” (scavengers, if we avoid the euphemism) modelling in New York pretty bizarre. I do hope you’ll read the article before proceeding to comment, but in a nutshell: 36 Indian sanitation workers were invited to a conference as part of the UN’s International Year of Sanitation. In [...]

December 10, 2007

The Fair and the Lovely

THE STEREOTYPES: homemaker, femme fatale, bold and beautiful, supermom, sex bomb. The creators: television, cinema, advertisements, magazines. All depict women who can be beautiful only if they are white-skinned, reed-thin and look like Barbie dolls. Take mainstream Indian cinema. What is common across most of it is the depiction of women, who can never look [...]