This member story was featured in the 2017 APC Annual Report, as part of our work on a feminist internet.
In August 2017, Point of View launched the publication Skin Stories, which is a weekly essay series of narratives on sexuality, disability and gender. The origins of the publication lie in a nameless blog on Point of View's website sexualityanddisability.org, which only had one writer for a long time, and then two. But over time, the site was able to reach more and more people who lived with either disability or chronic illness, and who wanted to write for it.
The community of writers grew slowly and steadily, and it became clear that there was a need to create a platform that would do justice to their powerful voices, and help them reach the wide audiences they deserve. And so Skin Stories was given its name, its launch, and its current home: pages on Medium and Wordpress that are updated every Tuesday. Together, our essays, articles, reports and illustrations not only reaffirm the premise of Point of View's Sexuality and Disability programme – that people with disabilities are sexual beings, just like anyone else – but also give readers the gift of fresh, urgent, intersectional perspectives by voices they may not otherwise have access to.
Image source: Upasana Agarwal for the story “I'm a Dalit woman, and my mental health matters”.