This session explores how women's bodies function as contested archives of trauma, sites of testimony that dominant social, legal and political structures have often silenced or delegitimised. Drawing on feminist trauma theory, postcolonial critique and affect studies, it examines bodily memory as a form of somatic knowledge that exceeds conventional language and probes the tension between trauma's structural unspeakability and the ethical urgency of testimony and witnessing.

The session invites work attentive to how race, caste, class, sexuality, coloniality and disability shape whose pain is heard and whose is erased. Relevant material includes autobiographical writing, testimonial literature, oral histories, visual and performance culture and collective protest/memorial practices with particular interest in South Asian Partition narratives and women's life writing as archives of embodied suffering and resistance. Theoretically grounded in scholars such as Judith Herman, Sara Ahmed, Veena Das, Shoshana Felman, Urvashi Butalia, Kamla Bhasin, Krishna Menon, and Dori Laub, the session also welcomes non-Western and vernacular frameworks that challenge Eurocentric trauma paradigms. Papers connecting individual testimony to systemic gendered violence, and theorising survival and creative expression as political resistance, are especially encouraged. The session calls for a feminist ethics of listening that honors women's embodied experience across geographies, resists pathologising traumatic memory and recognises speech from a wounded body as an act of defiance.

Submissions: 250–300 word abstracts with a brief bio, from literary studies, history, sociology, gender studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, Dalit studies and allied fields.