What does your body mean?

I have often wondered why itrsquos called the ldquoCustomsrdquo Department Recently Bombay customs decided to clear my doubts when they confiscated some artworks by FN Souza and Akbar Padamsee being brought from London deeming them obscene The paintings had the kind of namesmdash Nude Loversmdashthat give some people conniptions No other word will do but this one which arrives shuddering shivering Shiva Shiva and declaring I must uphold customs and destroy these paintingsQuite like that other customs department controlling the circulation of images not goods social media Community Standards with which I am intimately acquaintedI run a platform called Agents of Ishq It is an artsbased exploration of the worlds of sex and love and we curate an ongoing conversation on sexuality Part of this education for each of us involves understanding multiple meanings and expressions of bodies desires and relationships The role of artpopular or rarified ancient or contemporarymdashin surfacing these many meanings is vital because it allows us to dwell in ambiguity to make many meanings in our own ways without imposing any one meaningSocial media like authorities abhors an ambiguity In the ten years of our existence its restrictions have multiplied At first drawings of naked bodies were acceptable Photographs were not Later drawings of naked bodies could not be promoted because they were seen as ldquosoliciting sexrdquo Then sexeducation posts no bodies involved were allowed as long as they donrsquot ldquopromote pleasurerdquomdashjust lying back and thinking of nation and patriarchy then One day Facebook unilaterally removed a post from my feed deeming it obscene It was an image by the African American artist Nona Faustine who photographs herself naked in historic slavery sites It was a powerful image bubbling with many meanings of the body and politics Meta decided its nudity had only one meaning and that meaning was ldquobadrdquoMost of Metarsquos guidelines are presented as being for womenrsquos safety yaniki itrsquos for your own good Much like the UP Womenrsquos Commission which has sent guidelines to all district magistrates that men should not be hairdressers gym trainers or tailors to womenmdashfor womenrsquos safety While some people may feel safer with service providers of their own gender other mechanisms can provide this choice This is not about womenrsquos safety but categorising intergender touch outside marriage as ldquobad touchrdquoThe Court scolded the Customs department which is always fun But the declaration that art is not obscenity and experts can help decide this leaves the idea of obscenity undisturbed By attributing wrongness to the body we deflect attention from the wrongness of action of the violence of a gaze By making all touch sexual and all sexual touch wrong we obscure the different meanings of touch and the contextual nature of consent I may be ok touched by someone professionally but not sexuallymdashor even the violence of nottouching aka untouchabilityWhat does a body mean and who decides that meaning Who assigns your body as worth injuring dismissing killing Or not worthy of desire healing justice The desiring body the labouring body the hurting body the dead bodyndash the 100 meanings of the body need a hundred ways of understanding meaning Expressions of the bodymdashburlesque art selfies naked protests PDA gender expression and much elsemdashassert this right to interpret onersquos body Without this acknowledgement what safety can we knowParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at paromitavohramiddaycom