Building on Liu Xin’s “new materialist intersectionality approaches” (2025, 111), which emphasize the entanglement of materiality, power, and identity in feminist analysis, scholars in this panel reexamine the often-overlooked role of objects in shaping women’s agency. Their research reveals how physical objects contribute to women’s identity and agency across cultures and time periods—both as passive symbols and as active agents in negotiating power structures, gender norms, economic systems, medical discourses, and literary traditions. This panel fosters a comparative dialogue on how material objects shape gendered experiences, challenging the separation of subjectivity and materiality in feminist studies.
Wanming Wang investigates the dialogue between physical and biological characteristics of certain flowers and women’s agency in women’s poetry in Hongloumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber), a seventeenth-century masterpiece novel. In Chinese poetry on objects, the characteristics of flowers serve as symbols of various moral and emotional traits of the personas, contributing to the formation of repertoires of historical allusions and established poetic tropes. Women’s writing in Houloumeng exemplifies this poetic approach. Like male literati, women poets crafted gender-neutral poetic personas shaped by floral imagery and historical allusions rather than attributing gendered emotions or experiences to their subjects. In doing so, they simultaneously navigate two opposing forces. They adhere to the physical and moral boundaries prescribed by Confucian gender ideology by framing their poetry writing as an ordinary genteel women’s pastime rather than a professional pursuit. They also demonstrate a deep command of classical poetic legacy, display their literary ambitions by introducing fresh ideas and techniques, and affirm their legitimacy as successors of the classical Chinese poetic tradition. Flowers thus enable women to strike a delicate balance between their aspirations as Confucian gentlewomen and as accomplished writers, revealing both the tensions and points of compatibility between Confucian gender ideals and women’s agency.
Komal Nazir examines how chili powder, traditionally viewed as a passive commodity, becomes a force of resistance in Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala (1987), a key film in Indian parallel cinema. Adopting a new materialist perspective, she reconceptualizes resistance as a transcorporeal alliance between human and nonhuman entities. Drawing on Stacy Alaimo’s transcorporeality and Deleuze and Guattari’s affective assemblages, Nazir argues that the film enacts distributed agency, where “vibrant matter” participates in feminist refusal. Chili powder’s vibrant color, pungency, and transformative materiality go beyond symbolism to engage the senses, blind patriarchal authority, and enable collective defiance. In this way, it becomes a co-conspirator in resistance, foregrounding nonhuman agency. The spice factory, where the climactic act of resistance occurs, operates as a body-territory, disrupting colonial and patriarchal spatial orders and enabling a transcorporeal alliance between women and nonhuman matter. By narrating feminist refusal through vibrant matter and affective forces, Mirch Masala advances posthumanist politics, reconceptualizing agency, subjectivity, and resistance.
Kuhelika Ghosh examines women’s seed guardianship and sovereignty in the Caribbean through literary texts, visual culture, and agricultural practices. From plantation slavery to the postcolonial present, seed sovereignty has been vital for Caribbean women cultivators, emphasizing farmers' rights to save, use, exchange, and sell their seeds amid corporate domination. Ghosh engages with global food justice movements to trace the stories of 'unruly seeds' resisting capitalist control, exploring their migration alongside Caribbean women’s diasporic movements in Melania Luisa Marte’s poetry collection, Plantains and Our Becoming, and Veronica Ryan’s 2021 installation, Drift Seeds, from her 2021 exhibition, Along a Spectrum. By foregrounding the drifting and wandering of seeds and their more-than-human carriers, Ghosh reveals women’s revolutionary acts of seed sovereignty and food justice, often hidden in everyday domestic objects associated with mobility, such as blankets and suitcases.
These papers share a common exploration of how women engage with physical objects and reimagine them as active participants in shaping women’s agency and identities. Each paper examines how objects serve as catalysts for resistance, identity formation, and empowerment. In doing so, they challenge traditional notions of agency as solely subjective, emphasizing the role of materiality in women's lives. The diversity in the texts accentuates the panel’s purpose in promoting cross-cultural, cross-genre, and interdisciplinary feminist literary studies. Ultimately, they reveal how objects not only reflect but also urge women to rethink and reshape their roles within patriarchal and colonial systems.