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This paper draws on new thinking I’m doing as I finish my first book on histories of domesticity and women’s colleges in Southern India, as well as on a forthcoming paper on femme histories and archives. It asks how femme as an analytic and a way of doing historical work might undo the disciplining work of gender in the archive, and open modes of historical thinking that are less tethered in liberal teleology and colonial epistemic frameworks. The paper tells the story of Elizabeth George’s lungs - George (she went by her last name; if you were her friend, you called her Georgie) was the first Indian Principal of Women’s Christian College in erstwhile Madras (now Chennai). In the 1950s (it’s not clear when), she died of the silent asthma that slowly suffocated her beginning in the 1930s. George was, by all accounts, a butch dyke - she had relationships with other women, and a complicated understanding of her own gender. When she resigned her principalship in 1948, the College appointed Eleanor Mason to succeed her. Mason, a Boston physiologist, was best known for her experiments on the spirometer - George at 19 was one of her subjects - and her conclusion that Indian women not only had on average smaller lungs, but also that this made us less intelligent. Reading across George’s archive and the history of lung experiments in South India, this paper asks what attention to excess, to refusals of gendering, and to playful failures to register in the colonial archive might tell us about a history of race-making and gender-making in the colony. Locating this approach within a present political moment, I ask how histories in this register might be key to crafting an intellectual dissent to ongoing fascist reifications of biological binarism.

Dr Sneha Krishnan is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford (Brasenose College). She is currently a British Academy - Wolfson Fellow, and an Editor of Gender, Place, and Culture. Sneha researches and teaches on how geographies of caste and colonialism shape experiences of girlhood. Her initial research – on pleasure and danger in contemporary Chennai – has been published in Antipode, Social and Cultural Geography, Gender, Place, and Culture, and other academic journals.

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Last updated: Thursday, 8 May 2025