Stories with horns and tails

This paper traces how femme circulates in (post)colonial geographies of interiority, to mark loci of excess: places where the archive oozes, failing containment. Drawing on ethnography, historical research, ghost stories, personal experience, and family memory, this essay thinks across geographies of homemaking and girlhood to locate femme in the affects of clinging, desperation, refusal: attachments to futures that have to be left behind for the making of colonial modernity. Femme, I argue, undermines caste-colonial-nationalist formations of authority in its stubbornness, in its insistence on the excessive stories of unreliable narrators.