Posted by Jasmine Lovely George
With more and more attention to violence on the streets, suddenly cities are becoming inaccessible to women. The more violence gets screamed off, the more surveillance and security measures get talked about. We, at Hidden Pockets, have been asked so many times, if not CCTV what else would you want? Everyone also seemed to be looking for the perfect answer.
Hidden Pockets conducts walks in cities and have been asking people to walk and explore their cities. In our walks, we have been asking people of different genders to explore their cities and at the same time discuss some of political settings around their own city.
Through one of these walks, we discovered women tend to associate safety with certain factors and they were pretty sure about these factors. But when we asked them to define pleasure in public places, some of them took time to answer that aspect. Over conversation we realised that women tend to define pleasure in their own subjective way, like any other word and that is where the idea of “pleasure pockets” came into picture. We wanted to map spots in cities where women associated pleasure with public place. We asked them various reasons and tried understanding how do women come out in public places and engage with these spaces.
#IWillGoOut will bring together thousands of women across cities on a specific time, in a way taking over the streets and spaces. Let people come out and enjoy their cities and figure out places that has been kept away from them, or places they simply have not been aware about.
Also read: Why Women In India Are Marching On January 21? #IWillGoOut
Jasmine Lovely George is a feminist activist and independent researcher working on issues of sexuality and law in India. She is also the founder of Hidden Pockets, a mapping project on sexuality and spaces.
