An anecdote that my family still loves to tell others is that, as a child, I was always reading: during meals, when I was supposed to be doing something else, even on the toilet. Because I knew my childhood home like the back of my hand, I could walk around with my nose buried in the pages of a book. “There she goes, lost in her own world,” my family would say. “তাইহে জানে তাই কি কথাত হাঁহিছে, অকলে-অকলে। ” Only she knows what she’s laughing at, all by herself.”
They were right: I was often elsewhere. For a restless, overly imaginative and curious child, reading was a portal to other worlds. The mythopoeic worlds of Middle-earth, Narnia and Wonderland, along with the parallel worlds of His Dark Materials, fascinated me. So did the stories of ghosts, spirits, witches, of peat bogs and swamps and other wetlands, of mythical wilful creatures made of twigs and bones, who could walk backwards. I was drawn to all that was strange and enchanting, anything that seemed more than (or beyond) what our senses can perceive.
This fascination may have come from Ma’s stories about ghost encounters and hauntings, or perhaps from falling asleep to my Aitama (my maternal grandmother) reading to me from Lakshminath Bezbaruah’s বুঢ়ী আইৰ সাধু (Burhi Aair Xadhu, or Grandmother’s Tales). Whatever its source, it opened worlds for me where I could wander and wonder to my heart’s content. It allowed me to dwell in possibilities beyond the gendered socialisation of a small-town girl who was taught to sit still, to stop fidgeting and dancing around, to stop playing in the streets with “the boys” (never mind that one of these boys was my younger brother), to talk less, and to make myself smaller and take up less space in the world. At the time, I did not yet have the language of feminism or queer politics to make sense of how suffocated I felt by these rules. As my imagination expanded through reading, I gradually began to realise that I did not want to, or have to, abide by these gendered norms.
Retrospectively, I can understand that these instructions were preparing me for a future in which being a particular kind of “respectable” woman would require specific ways of moving my body and occupying space. Even as I was often getting lost in imaginary worlds, I had to constantly bring myself back to this world and make myself fit into its stifling expectations. Reading did not remove these expectations, but it definitely made it difficult to accept them as the only possible way to live.
Moreover, the fantasy novels I was reading were not free of the gender hierarchies and heteronormative power relations that shaped my everyday life. Many of the Anglophone fantasy (and sci-fi) books that were available to me at the time centred boys and men in heroic narratives: boys who set out on quests, defeated the Evil One, and saved their worlds. Female characters, meanwhile, were often relegated to the roles of love interest, the damsel in distress, the witch or the siren, each with their gendered connotations. These were characters to be desired, feared, or rescued by the male protagonist and his (usually all male) “crew.”
I began to seek out stories in which girls and women could have adventures of their own, rather than be in service to the male hero. As I entered young adulthood, I became more interested in fantasy worlds that unsettled social categories and expectations. I wanted to imagine intimacy beyond expectations about whom I should desire and where those desires should lead. This is how I stumbled across Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin and other feminist and queer speculative fiction authors. While these authors did not give me answers to the questions that I was beginning to ask, they offered me ways of imagining my future differently.
I also read a lot of romantic fantasy, or romantasy, where I found pleasure in exploring desires and encounters, some that I had no wish to pursue in real life, and others that I enjoyed fantasising for myself. I was extremely scandalised by Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy series (2001-2008), where Phèdre, the protagonist of the first trilogy, works as a spy and a courtesan and experiences pain and pleasure as a unified sensation. How could there be pleasure in pain? And yet, I was curious how desires that unsettled me could be erotic for another person. Then there was Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone series (2011-2014) that drew me into an intense and otherworldly attraction. Immersed in its world, I found immense pleasure in imagining similar encounters in my humdrum life. In Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree (2019), the slowly unfolding intimacy between Queen Sabran and Ead, the mage secretly protecting her, made me sigh wistfully. I read these books (and more, but I don’t want this to become an even longer catalogue of books) as I was coming of age, and they gave me space to be curious about sexuality beyond what I had been socialised into finding acceptable or appropriate. Desire, danger, pleasure, tenderness, and strangeness were entwined in these stories, which made me realise that people could experience and understand sexuality quite diversely.
Other stories have stayed with me for the possibilities of intimacy and kinship they made imaginable to me. Take Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) and Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (2015), for instance. In The Dispossessed enduring partnerships exist outside marriage. The relationship between its protagonist, Shevek, and his partner, Takver, is a commitment they choose rather than a status conferred by the institution of marriage. In The Fifth Season, Jemisin explores the possibilities of intimacy under conditions of coercion. Two characters, Syenite and Alabaster, are compelled to reproduce by the Fulcrum, an institution that controls their bodies and ability to manipulate the earth’s movements. Later, they form a relationship with another character, Innon, and raise their child together, creating a family outside the heterosexual nuclear family. It delighted me that these relationships departed from conventional models of kinship and showed how commitment could be meaningful outside marriage. The contrast between coerced reproduction and chosen intimacy also made me think about how people may make room for choice under oppressive conditions.
These stories helped me to begin questioning why marriage and motherhood were presented to me (as they are to many girls) as my inevitable future. Together with a generous dose of feminist theory and activism, fantasy novels led me to think about what it would mean to live in a utopian world. This is a question that I am still thinking through, but imagining feminist and queer futures, for me, begins with refusal: refusing to follow society’s heteronormative gendered and sexual scripts, refusing to surrender to the despair of living in a capitalist world, and refusing to accept that the world, as it is, exhausts what is possible. As feminist writer Sara Ahmed writes, “A refusal can be an opening.” Refusal can have violent consequences, and it does not guarantee a better future. Yet, there is hope to be found in that opening that refusal creates, which is not necessarily the blueprint for a utopic future but at least the possibility of making room for other ways of living.
Feminist and queer fantasy, as a genre, has given me the space to explore what those other ways of living might involve. What might intimacy look like if it were not measured through conventions of respectability, or if commitment did not have to follow the prescribed path of marriage and parenthood? What forms of care and kinship would allow us to make decisions about our bodies, pleasures and sexuality without coercion or shame? Imagining alternative futures is not the same as making them liveable, but it gives us somewhere to begin, forcing us to ask what kind of relationships, infrastructures, care and collective effort would be required to build such futures.
It might do us all good to become lost, at least for a while, in magical and strange worlds that make our own feel less hopeless and restrictive.
Image credit: John Anster Fitzgerald (1819 -1906) The Fairy’s Lake, Wikimedia Commons
