By Indu Harikumar
Online conversations about consent tend to follow a set script which rarely is what happens in real life. People navigate consent in deeply personal ways and each remarkably different from the other. Some conversations will go in the direction one hopes and some unfortunately won’t. Some conversations will involve words but many won’t. How are we navigating this tricky topic then? Indu wishes to document people's lived experiences through comics and illustrated stories, on her Instagram account @induviduality. In her engagement with the online community, she hopes to explore both what consent and the violation of consent looks like by looking at both stories and one liner submissions.
She has an audience of 16,400+ followers on Instagram, who engage with her on various issues around sex and gender. She hopes to gather submissions with a call for stories on her Instagram, giving people a combination of options to engage with the questions. For example, she will run stickers asking readers to share examples of coercion- when a person has pressured, pestered, threatened, guilt tripped, blackmailed, intimidated, bullied, or harassed someone and forced them to engage in sexual activity. Other stickers will be questions that will encourage them to share how they ask for permission, what lines do they use, what gestures accompany these conversations, what are the words they use to describe consensual acts.