Special Session Title: Spectral Kinships—The Churail as Gothic Double in South Asian Literature and Film

MLA 2026 Annual Convention, Toronto, Canada, January 8-11, 2026

The churail, Pichhal Peri, and Pishachini—figures of spectral femininity in South Asian folklore, literature, and cinema—are often depicted as monstrous doubles of normative womanhood, haunting the boundaries of kinship, inheritance, and belonging. As spectral remnants of women who died in childbirth, were abandoned, or suffered violent deaths, these figures return as uncanny distortions of familial structures, refusing erasure and haunting the patriarchal order. Rather than understanding the churail merely as a figure of horror, this panel examines her as a gothic double, a site where gendered anxieties, historical violence, and alternative genealogies of power intersect.

This special session considers how the churail functions as a gothic double within South Asian narratives, disrupting patriarchal constructions of kinship while offering a spectral counter-memory of those excluded from historical and familial legibility. How do South Asian literary and cinematic traditions reimagine the churail as a transgressive, resistant figure? In what ways does her spectrality engage with feminist, postcolonial, and gothic discourses? How might we understand the churail’s resemblance to other gothic doubles across global traditions, and how does she produce a distinctly South Asian mode of gothic inheritance?

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• The churail as a spectral double of patriarchal violence and familial exclusion
• Uncanny kinship: monstrous motherhood, spectral inheritance, and feminist hauntings
• Desolate spaces and the churail’s disruption of gendered spatiality
• Partition hauntings: churails, spectral memory, and postcolonial trauma
• The churail in South Asian national, arthouse, and experimental cinemas
• The churail in children/YA literature
• The churail and the abject
• Eroticism and monstrosity: the churail’s ambiguous sexuality and its implications
• Folkloric transformations: the churail in oral traditions and contemporary literary reimaginings
• Ecogothic/Folk Gothic resonances: the churail, haunted landscapes, and ecological disruption
• Global gothic and family resemblances: comparative perspectives on the churail and the doppelgänger

This special session invites papers that engage with a range of South Asian literary, cinematic, and folkloric traditions. Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief bio by March 15 to knazir@okstate.edu.