Artist Mithu Sen goes off-script in her new book

What urged you to release the Unmyth now?

Mithu Sen: If not now, then when?

Given your stance on linguistic anarchy, how do you feel about
“feminism” as a term that can divide opinion?

Mithu Sen: My relationship with feminism is… slippery. Not because I deny its histories or urgencies, but because I resist being held by any fixed identity — artist, woman, feminist — even the ones that come dressed as empowerment.

Feminism, when it becomes a category, a club, a singular script, begins to replicate the very binaries it dreams of breaking: woman/man, victim/hero, inside/outside. I prefer to disturb those lines, to speak in tongues, to cut and glitch the narrative. My body, my gestures, my refusals — they question patriarchy, power, gendered violence — but I do not arrive with the correct vocabulary. I arrive uninvited, often unreadable.

When people, including women, don’t identify as feminists, what do you think it says about the complexity of gendered experiences?

Mithu Sen: When someone — especially a woman — says she’s not a feminist, I don’t rush to correct her. Maybe that’s her language of autonomy. Maybe she’s tired of being spoken for. Maybe she’s allergic to the elitism, the Westernness, the academese of it all. I listen to that silence. I hold space for her refusal. Because not saying “feminist” doesn’t mean she hasn’t known violence. Or revolt. Or radical love. I don’t believe gender is a checkbox. It’s a ghost, a code, a wound. A game. A prayer. A scream. I don’t perform feminism — I mis-perform it. If feminism demands a script, I will rewrite it in gibberish. In glossolalia. In glitch.

How do the nuances of intersectionality inform your work?

Mithu Sen: Intersectionality isn’t a theory in my work — it’s the mess I live in. I do not wear it like a badge. I carry it in my fragmented voice, my contradictory forms. I resist essentialism — gender, caste, nation, language — none of these define me. I shapeshift: child, glitch, ghost, animal, lover. I dissolve binaries. I refuse the form you expect. I refuse to explain. I refuse to translate. That too is political — especially when the world keeps asking the brown, femme body to justify, to perform, to represent. My refusal collapses the stage. Who speaks? Who listens? Who archives? Even my acknowledgements — those QR-code echoes—speak of who is remembered, and who erased. Intersectionality lives in the omissions, in the unsaid, in the names that never made it to the label.

I work from the Global South — not as a location, but as a lens. My discomfort is a methodology. My body in an institution is already a performance. Race, class, gender, capital — they are not footnotes in my work. They are the material. They are the rupture. I do not theorize. I live. I play. I unmake. I mis/translate. Intersectionality isn’t a checklist in my work. It’s the terrain I bleed on.

Read next: Nipa Doshi on design, identity and feminism