Not Your Ex/Rotic: HIV/AIDS PSA features gay South Asian couples and messages of responsibility

Monday 18 June 2012

HIV/AIDS PSA features gay South Asian couples and messages of responsibility

The Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention in Canada has recently released a PSA video on YouTube with the message of HIV/AIDS prevention being a joint responsibility - in much the same way as respecting partners' last wishes, keeping them safe from harm, or even making sure their dinner doesn't boil over. Befitting the organisation, almost all the actors in the video are South Asian:

Responsibility and care-taking are strong tenets of South Asian relationships and families; from my experience, sometimes even more so than attraction or sexual compatibility. It's interesting to see this in a queer context, especially with men: there are some social stereotypes of the women in the family being responsible for people's well-being, but also a strong responsibility on the men to be the caretakers and safekeepers.

Thanks Queerty for the mention.

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about

This documents the project process, ideas, and work by Creatrix Tiara for the MFA in Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco.

Not Your Ex/Rotic started as a presentation at the Erotic Screen and Sound conference at Griffith University, Brisbane in early 2011. Much of the content of the presentation - and eventually this MFA - is based on the experiences and politics of Creatrix Tiara as a queer female migrant minority being involved in burlesque and other forms of sexually-charged creative expression.

The project title comes from a 2009 burlesque performance staged by Tiara (as Tiara the Merch Girl) in response to the racism and cultural appropriation experienced in the local burlesque scene: at the end of the performance Tiara performs an adaptation of Not Your Exotic by American-Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad, which ends with the line "Not your erotic, not your exotic".

Tiara aims to explore the challenges and needs of fellow queer minorities (especially South Asians like Tiara) and other multiple minorities in expressing and exploring their sexuality creatively, dealing with the multiple blows of stigma and shame from home cultures, and prejudice & bigotry from the outside. "I wish I could do what you do, but my parents would kill me" - how do we make it possible for those who tell Tiara this to do what they want to do without harm or retribution?

At the same time she wants to reexplore San Francisco, a city that captured her heart last year when she was there for an artist residency at CELLspace for 3 months, and wishes to pick up where she left off.