Boy.Brother.Friend, Issue 10

PLEASE NOTE: Magazine cover varies and particular cover cannot not be specified for order, but you can state your cover preference in the order notes at checkout and, if available, we will send that one.

Boy.Brother.Friend seeks to examine the diaspora and male identities through contemporary art, fashion, and theory.

In this issue:

For our 10th issue, 5th year, we want to talk about Destiny.

Too often Destiny is this thing we are told to manifest. No longer tethered to fate, but reduced to acts of individual will. It’s smooth, spiritual, pre packaged, and circulated as a mantra among wellness, self-help, entrepreneurial discourse. ‘What if you could control your destiny in 6 steps?’. Controlling our destiny has become a fantasy, something we are libidinally invested in, a thing that structures our social reality, an idea that makes life bearable. It is necessary.

In  this issue, alongside artists, theorists and cultural practitioners across South Asia and beyond, we interrogate destiny, not to cynically reject it, but to shift our relationship to it. Our contributors confront themes of resistance in the age of ethnic populism, community among the misunderstood and marginalised, and the quiet power of personal and collective becoming. We unveil Destiny’s inconsistencies, contradic­tions and structural limits – class, caste, race, geopolitical violence, historical contingency – posing the question:

What if destiny is not something we can control nor a fate we must endure, but an ideological struggle that we must perpetually expose in order to act beyond it?