Work

Stories with horns and tails

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: This paper traces how femme circulates in (post)colonial geographies of interiority, to mark loci of excess: places where the archive oozes, failing containment. Drawing on ethnography, historical research, ghost stories, personal experience, and family memory, this essay thinks across geographies of homemaking and girlhood to locate femme in the affects of clinging, desperation, refusal: attachments to futures that have to be left behind for the making of colonial modernity. Femme, I argue, undermines caste-colonial-nationalist formations of authority in its stubbornness, in its insistence on the excessive stories of unreliable narrators.

Source: Environment and Planning D Society and Space

DOI: 10.1177/02637758251398688

Author: Sneha Krishnan

Institution: University of Oxford

Language: English

Topic: Feminism, Gender, and Intersectionality

Subfield: Sociology and Political Science

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Gender equality

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,900