What is the connection between gender, sex and the Internet?
How important is the Internet for activists in their work of advancing gender rights and sexual rights?
Why is the first step in limiting access to information and communication online regularly linked to regulating pornography?
What are the security and privacy risks that gender rights and sexual rights activists face online, and how can we better defend ourselves and our right to use this space?
EroTICs explores some of the connections and questions raised above.
Short for “Exploratory Research on ICTs and Sexuality”, EroTICs is a multi-phase project of the Association for Progressive Communications. (ICT is spelt TIC in EroTICs as per the Spanish term “tecnología de información y comunicación”.) Point of View is the India partner of EroTICs.
EroTICs India is now in its second phase. The project aims to:
- Build a network of Internet, gender and sexuality rights advocates who are able to share expertise and collaboratively respond to Internet content regulation.
- Create awareness and dissemination of information about sexuality, gender and Internet rights issues.
- Make Internet users, especially women, aware of Internet rights and of the interplay between women’s rights, sexual rights and Internet rights.
The first phase consisted of a survey comprising a quantitative survey and in-depth interviews of women Internet users living in Mumbai, India. The findings of the survey are available here.
The Connect Your Rights meetings aim to bring together activists, NGOs, researchers, media people, policy makers, policy advocates, bloggers, technologists and other stakeholders from the spheres of gender, sexuality and the Internet, and ignite conversations on the intersection of the three topics. Through talks, presentations and discussions, these meetings aim to explore topics such as pornography, privacy, gendered abuse and violence, freedom of speech and expression, online ways of dealing with violence, and so on. The meetings are also aimed at building activists’ individual, organisational, and collective capacities as advocates to respond more effectively to the opportunities and the challenges of working in online spaces.
Through this blog, the first of its kind in India, we are trying to create a discourse on issues pertaining to ICTs, gender and sexuality.
Further details about the EroTICs project here.
Email: contact AT eroticsindia DOT org
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The EroTICs India project is run by Point of View, which was awarded a grant of AUD 19,686 by ISIF (Information Society Innovation Fund) for the year 2013.
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