Regularly viewed as creating characters so stylized that they both fall short of and exceed the category of the human, Oscar Wilde’s preoccupation with actual puppets, marionettes, and animated statues spans his career. Like the masks which for Wilde make truth possible by concealing the truth-sayer, these post-human bodies function ironically, providing the non-humanity which is the precondition for human expressivity. Nominally cisgender, male-identified characters seem to mimic modern scholarly dismissal of the puppet as both monstrous and empty in ways which paradoxically open a space for queer nostalgia through posthuman embodiment. From the early poem “The Harlot’s House” (1885) and short story “The Happy Prince” (1888) to mentions in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and De Profundis (1897), Wilde combines what Svetlana Boym has called “reflective nostalgia” with a disruption of the imagination and a queering of bodies that are transformed in Halberstam’s notion of “queer time” through the materiality of death and decay. In “The Decay of Lying,” Wilde explicitly invokes the Russian literary examples, especially Turgenev (whom Wilde translated) and Dostoevsky, that inspired his first play Vera, or the Nihilists (1883). He emphasizes the internal psychological complexity and idealistic nihilism out of which he creates his own artificial avatars. Wilde disrupts time and realistic embodiment so as transmit shared queer memories, given their lack of institutional space, so as to fashion possible imagined futures that exceed current paradigms. Drawing on both religious and socialist visions of utopia, Wilde anticipates Muñoz “dissidentification” with its recycling of a painful past so as to make possible the imagining of queer futures. London sex workers become undead dancing marionettes. A spoiled prince is transformed into a statue which a self-sacrificing swallow dismantles to feed the poor. Henry’s longing for lost beauty, Sybil’s self-destructive sincerity and Dorian’s blackmailing imagination, along with the superfluity of Shakespeare’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, are all metaphorically rendered as puppets. Unlike Wilde’s empty “leading men,” whether Russian czars, Danish princes, or English lords, their queer excessive affect is made possible precisely by their paired-down, fragile, broken, and extra-human bodies.

The university space offers to the students, emerging out of the panopticon schools, a new sense of liberty, and alongwith it opportunities to express and explore themselves. In India, students usually enter the university at the end of puberty, and at the age of majority—having to navigate the newfound space and self, often using new media of communication: the digital social media being prominent among them. The University of Delhi, one of the country’s premier higher educational institutions, is one such diverse and complex space, comprising of students coming from different backgrounds, including those from the sexual and gender minorities. The intersectionality of queerness and the social media when analysed in context of these students assumes a distinct significance.

This paper attempts to explore the multifarious dimensions of queerness, and its expression on the social media by looking at the University of Delhi and its student population, and the extent to which they daily use the digital medium to articulate their queer identity in a campus that remains extremely heteronormative and patriarchal even after the reading down of Section 377. The paper for this purpose shall analyse the social media handles of various societies and queer collectives that function in the various constituent colleges of the University, exploring whether such platforms provide any viable safe space for queer companionship, intimacies and solidarities. It shall also problematize the relationship between queerness and digital space by noting the case of the Hindu College Straight Pride Collective that had surfaced on Instagram spreading queer-phobia online against queer students.

The paper shall seek to understand the processes and the experience of students, who belong to the LGBTQIA+ spectrum and use the digital space, through recorded testimonials (gathered by means of an interview questionnaire created using Google Form and circulated among the students through the social media platforms, following strict norms of maintaining the respondents’ confidentiality). The paper shall develop a nuanced approach, building its arguments on the basis of existing critical studies from that of Michel Foucault to Sam Miles, attempting to understand whether or not a manifestation of queer companionship, resistance and community-building is possible among the student population of an Indian University over social media, looking at ways in which marginal groups interact everyday, negotiate in university spaces dominated by the heteronormative majority, and use digital media platforms in potentially subversive ways.

Nüshu is the only syllabic script in the history of humanity that is designed and used by women only. Meaning “female writing”, nüshu was arguably developed in the 13th century by the peasant women in Jiangyong County in Southern China. In the pre-Liberation patriarchal agrarian community that would deny women education and learn the official Chinese hanzi characters, nüshu became a ‘secret’ mechanism for women to give voice to the experiences and emotions of kelian, the miserable, the oppressed and powerless women of the community. An updated version of my 2022 paper, the present paper situates nüshu vis-à-vis the tradition of woman-words. I used the phrase ‘woman-words’ to designate the languages, language uses and paralanguages that women around the world have formed and used. The title of this paper refers to a comment by one of my students who, in their bid to assert a decolonial stance after my talk on nüshu, said, “so, before écriture féminine there was Nüshu!”. My paper broaches the critical-affective features of that statement in order to explore the tradition of woman-words in the world.

Abstract: Female bodies as sites of contestation and censure have garnered much critical attention. Conditioned to fit into predefined notions of femininity, feminist movements find the systemic control of female bodies an especially challenging territory to manoeuvre. Female autonomy has been at loggerheads with social desire to contain and manipulate women into submission. This study analyses the nuances of this manipulation through an analysis of female appetites and the implicit social fear that necessitates a stringent monitoring of female bodies. The two selected Asian literary texts, foreground the causal trajectory and consequent implications of women’s assertion over their food choice, portion size and consumption pattern. Isabelle Lorey’s theorization of Governmentality through Precarization and Sara Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoys (Affect Aliens) form the methodological lens for situating the role of vulnerability in making bodies governable. To locate the site of the festering wound of female anger and suppressed desire and to contextualise their response to neoliberal suppression of their bodies, the role of Haan (roughly suppressed anger) shall be studied to understand their individual response to collective oppression.