Priyam Collective focuses on queer and feminist approaches to expand our understandings of the body, bodily integrities, sexuality, and the question of sex and gender. While doing this, we nurture a critical perspective to question the limitations and privileges, including our own. We believe that these processes help build and strengthen a strong collective with a profound sense of community. This also helps to collaborate with persons from various backgrounds and forms of marginalisation within, between, and outside communities. As a collective, we contribute to ongoing discussions on social and legal reforms and policy recommendations.
Priyam Collective hopes that every fellow traveller will share friendship, love, responsibility, and opportunities and come together to work towards imagined possibilities and desired changes. We question hierarchical organisational structures and socio-hierarchical relationships within groups and collectives that lead to invisible power imbalances. Hence, we promote conscious and responsible fluidity and flexibility in the collective. However, we constantly find innovative ways and means to ensure accountability and transparency.
Collective care, celebrate diversity and inclusivity with a profound sense of self and community, non-violent communication and actions, right based thinking and questioning, maintaining confidentiality, exploring non-hierarchical ways that promote collaborative work, and community building/strengthening through collaborative work are some approaches that we adopt with a deep sense of commitment.
We believe in collective journeys driven by ideologies and aspirations of a range of feminist thinking – those shaped locally and not necessarily based on Western liberal thinking – and would continue to evolve. Our politics emerges from particular historical contexts of the global South, with an awareness of how to aspire, critique, imagine, reimagine, and inspire actions beyond the limitations forced upon us by dominant norms and practices. Our approaches to feminisms and queer politics are grounded in how they were/are shaped in the history and context of social activism for and by various marginalised groups/communities in Sri Lanka. We hope that these would strengthen the politics of Priyam Collective and continue to evolve and shape what it embodies.