The "madwoman" has long functioned in literary and cultural criticism as a catch-all diagnosis for emotions a patriarchal order refuses to name: rage, grief, desire, refusal. Since Gilbert and Gubar's foundational reading of the trope, Western feminist scholarship has extensively explored how female subjugation gets pathologized as madness. What remains underexamined, particularly in South Asian literary and cinematic studies, is the other half of that diagnosis: the sites where "madness" is not simply the residue of subjugation but the form taken by female rage and protest when no other vocabulary is sanctioned.

This session treats "madwoman" not as a fixed clinical category but as a label applied whenever a woman's response to structural violence exceeds what family, state, or genre convention can absorb. Across South Asian fiction, film, television, and web series, this excess surfaces as murderous revenge, as withdrawal from the world, as muted grief, or as a negation of domestic duty misread as failure rather than as maternal ambivalence. The session asks what is gained by reading these figures as protest rather than victimhood — and what is risked, since rage mistaken too quickly for agency can erase the structural conditions that produced it.

At the same time, the session resists collapsing "madwoman" into one explanatory key. Szasz's argument that mental illness functions as a myth, Chesler's account of psychiatric diagnosis deployed against women, and Foucault's mapping of the power structures underlying madness together show the category is never neutral. Ngai's work on ugly feelings offers a contemporary version of this suspicion, attending to unauthorized emotions that don't fit sanctioned shapes of feeling. But treating the madwoman purely as a symptom of diagnostic power risks its own reduction: as a label, "madwoman" oversimplifies a phenomenon with immensely complicated emotional, spiritual, intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic rudiments.

Accordingly, this session pairs socio-political critique with a poetics of madness, asking not only how a woman gets called mad, but how that madness is given form on the page or screen and what narrative modes (the fantastic, the gothic, the folkloric, social realism) enable or foreclose female interiority in South Asian narratives.

Papers are invited that engage with, but need not be limited to:

1. Male gaze and the limits of female agency (ugly feelings as madness)
2. Madness as displaced protest (the failure of a sanctioned vocabulary for female grief)
3. The fantastic and the monstrous feminine (refusal of domestication)
4. The madwoman as alibi (masculine collapse in disguise)
5. Silence and muteness as the limits of narrative vocabulary
6. Comparative and diasporic readings of female insanity
7. The poetics of madness