Gender and South Asian Visual Cultures in the Twentieth Century

This panel aims to explore the relationships between women and visual culture in twentieth century South Asia, challenging the oppressive structures that inform postcolonial subjectivities and engaging with practices that inaugurate new visual grammars. Scholarship on visual cultures of South Asia is dominated by discussions of coloniality; while an epistemic asymmetry towards the Global North shapes critical discussions on art and feminism.

Engaging with diverse cultures of visuality, we hope to foreground vernacular, subversive and dissident practices that contend with the limits and possibilities of feminisms in the Global South. The intersections of gender and identity with religion, caste, class and ethnicity produce layered narratives that challenge claims to ethnonationalist supremacy across South Asian communities (Mohanty, 1984; Rambukwella, 2018). Bringing into focus archives that disrupt hegemonic epistemologies, we intend to highlight repositories that are personal, fragmented, and affective, engaging with aspects of witnessing, autobiography, collective memory and oral histories.

We would like to invite 20-minute papers on South Asian women as artists, activists, custodians and subjects of visual cultures. The panel seeks to understand feminist methodologies at work including expanded and radical archival practices, accounts of memory, representation and autoethnography, feminist worldmaking and the reimagination of the public and postcolony. Consequently, we hope to posit new ways of thinking about South Asian visual cultures through the interventions of women as authors of counter-histories.

We use the term “women” as inclusive of all persons identifying as women and welcome submissions on transgender rights and representation, and sexually marginalised communities in South Asia.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Arushi Vats, University of Cambridge, av661@cam.ac.uk

Imaan Markar, University of Cambridge, i m533@cam.ac.uk