Kleist’s queer marionettes (1810), Haraway’s anti-identitarian cyborgs (1985), and Murakami’s wind-up bird (1994) offer us instances of post-human glitches that resist normalizations despite their embodied precarities. Hardt and Negri’s “new post-human bodies (Empire 2013) and Latour’s confrontation of “the time of the Anthropocene” (2014) demand a remapping of the human as conventionally traced, in order to recognize it as an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). The Comparative Gender Studies Research Committee invites presentations on both earlier and contemporary materials related to the congress theme “Technology and Comparative Literature.” We particularly encourage submissions from scholars, writers, and activists that investigate how expressive artists represent, challenge, and reflect the lived experiences of those with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and/or mental health conditions when considered in relation to gender and sexuality. We seek papers reflecting the diverse experiences and narratives of marginalized groups, especially those from 2SLGBTQI+ and BIPOC communities We will attend to technology in both our potentially posthuman virtuality as well as earlier moments of simulacra through interrogating all 6 terms: precarious, mediation, queer, body, virtual, and space. Mindful that a session on precarity offered in the privileged context of an international congress needs to adopt a position of allyship and avow its positionality, this session will recognize those who for various reasons are unable to be present. Papers might consider precarious labor, contrareproductivity, queer temporality, homonationalism, queer counterpublics, queering technological affordances, cooptation and fragility, queering conventional technologies, transmediation, queer play and gaming, fanfiction and queer networks, affect and ambivalence, technologies of identity, queer(ing) AI.

As the war in Ukraine moves into its third year, interrogations of its effects on the lives of those directly involved with the conflict offer outside observers poignant, often painful, glimpses into how human process and emerge from the trauma of war. This paper examines two Ukrainian cultural projects that offer two distinct approaches and perspectives on responding to the aftermaths of war: the film «Східний фронт» [Eastern Front] (2023), Manskij and Titarenko, dirs., and current performances of “Cultural Forces,” a musical ensemble of active-duty Ukrainian soldiers. Each of these provocative texts offers a distinctive approach to how its Ukrainian actors have been affected by the war during its first two years. Eastern Front uses the documentary film genre to portray the human cost of the war through depictions of the treatment to animal “victims” caught in the conflict. The group “Cultural Forces” uses a narrative concert format for its soldier/musicians to perform their trauma in front of its audiences. Questioning anthropocentric methodology (Callicott 2002) as hegemonic in favor instead of critical pluralism, or a “studying up” perspective (Plumwood 2002), which encourages self-reflection and contemplation of the human condition, the paper considers how each of these texts succeeds in relating the posthuman in its own vernacular. It considers the place of the human and nonhuman animals in conveying and processing the trauma of war and how disparate posthuman approaches to trauma can succeed in creating spaces for critical pluralism in their performances.

In this paper I trace the queer negotiations of love, loneliness, queerness, and disability in two speculative fiction novels: Kazuo Ishiguro's 2021 science fiction novel Klara and the Sun and Ottessa Moshfegh's 2022 dark fantasy novel Lapvona. Specifically, I argue that both novels deploy their respective SF generic conventions to queer and render ambivalent the desire for interpersonal intimacy and love through a process whereby an object otherwise understood as interior-such as selfhood or love-is offloaded onto a setting, plot, or set of narrative circumstances that are other than the logics of the so-called real world. Both Klara and Lapvona, I argue, have a unique investment in speculatively externalizing love through an unrequited love for an Other of cosmic scale: Klara, the robot narrator of Ishiguro's novel, loves the Sun and Marek, the deformed boy at the center of Lapvona, desperately seeks the love of God. In both novels, I read love as being arrived at through a counterintuitive, complete elimination of the self, and such elimination of the self in turn being mediated by the speculative contexts for each novel's narrative. Klara's nature as a robot renders her outside the central love story she has been programmed to support as an "artificial friend" and the sociopolitical structure of Marek's medieval fiefdom corrodes the possibility of connection between people. However, I finally present such externalization as intimately intertwined with a queer and disabled mode of being and suggest that speculative externalization has much to contribute to queer theory and disability studies, with Klara and Marek experiencing disability and impairment as well as engaging in queer attachments to other characters, to their cosmic Others, and to themselves. Of special interest to this end are Ahmed's queer critique of happiness, Halberstam's queer failure, and Kafer's and Muñoz's respective figurations of futurity, both crip and queer. It is through the disruption of normative emotional and physical movement through the world-from Klara's malfunctioning and her distant interpretation of, but fierce investment in, human affect, to Marek's belief that physical pain and cruelty are themselves signifiers of loving connection—that Ishiguro and Moshfegh present modes of intimacy, loving, and connection that are uniquely speculative, queer, and crip.

The finite dimensions of the relationship between man and woman have been prescribed by man and not by woman. Modern woman prefers to exercise- her choice and break away from her traumatic experiences. Women are now portrayed as more assertive, more liberated in their view and more articulate in their expression than the women of the past. Instead of suffering at the hands of her husbands or other males, she has started asserting her identity. Whether it is Devi of Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night, Sarita of Shashi Deshpande's The Dark Holds No Terrors, Lucy of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Chantal of Milan Kundera's Identity, the women have established a coherent class structure- one of assertion of identity and defiance of male supremacy and protest at being subordinated by man.

Devi, the protagonist of Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night, is unable to stand her husband's non-recognition of her abilities. She is married to a Regional Manager of a multinational company and she is to him just a woman – a woman to be tried down to house hold chores, a woman who has no right to aspire to become anybody other than a full time housewife. Devi leaves Mahesh, unable to cope up with his attitudes; she runs away from home to Gopal, her neighbour's brother. But here, too she finds herself suffocated. And ultimately she defies and leaves him too to live in her own home by the sea.

Margaret Atwood is one of the pioneer of contemporary Canadian women fiction in English. Her The Edible Woman became the epoch making voice owing to her abiding commitment for women's identity, the layers and levels of consciousness in a male – chauvinistic society and the myriad meanings of men-women encounter. It is considered to be a manifesto of postcolonial women sensibility and sensitivity where states of marginality and 'otherness' are seen as sources of energies for potential change and progress. Atwood explores the themes like victimization and survival, the question of female identity, the politics of gender alienation of women in a male dominated society, the narrow delimiting definition of a woman and her function in society and man's attempt to destroy the self-hood of women. It is through the character of Marian, the writer has exhibited that a woman will be consumed if she projects herself as an 'edible' object.

The paper intends to present a comparative stance of the two novels – Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night and Atwood's The Edible Woman. On the one hand Hariharan depicts the male domination, the male unwillingness to identify Devi's individuality, while on the other Atwood has talked about the emergences of 'new woman', not as a consumer product but as a woman transforming the marginal experiences into a creative force. The paper will also analyse comparatively the perspectives of both the writers - Githa Hariharan and Margaret Atwood, the one from the Indian viewpoint and the other from the Canadian angle.