It is barely imaginable that an almost middle aged independent woman will act like a teenager , hiding from their parents and family the rare sexual and romantic escapades and the late night surreptious phone-calls, or even that their partners of choice are persons from the same gender, but this is exactly what many of us ‘single’ unmarried women have experienced when we moved back to our home-towns, often permanently, immediately before or during the pandemic induced lockdown, from bigger metropolitan spaces that afforded us greater freedom and greater anonymity.
The paper proposes to explore the nuances, complexities and difficulties of exploring and maintaining non-traditional sexualities,non-traditional sexual relationships, or even exploring one’s sexuality at the most basic level for ‘single’ unmarried women in small-town India- who end up as solitary caregivers of aging parental figures in a largely traditional patriarchal society that severely discourages any form of sexuality outside of the marriage system.
The paper hopes to initiate a dialogue on singledom, caregiving of elderly and single women, sexuality, loneliness and mental health of such women forced to inhabit an often sex-less space in the ‘Sanskari’ Indian family structure, where the very word ‘sex’ itself is a taboo.
