Call for Submissions Issue 16 · Winter ’27 · Laughter Who gets to laugh, and who pays for it.

Feminists, we are told, have no sense of humour. What we do have is a very good sense of what a joke does, and who gets to laugh at it.

Draupadi laughed at Duryodhana when he fell in the hall of illusions. She was not the only one who laughed, but she was the one dragged into court and publicly disrobed. In 1978, Mahasweta Devi picked up that laugh and gave it to Dopdi, gang-raped by the state, who walks towards her captor naked at dawn and laughs in his face. Cixous, three years earlier and a continent away, insisted that Medusa was never deadly, that she was laughing. In pre-independence Lahore, Ismat Chughtai, on trial for obscenity, could not stop laughing.

So this issue asks what laughter does, and to whom. Who is allowed to be funny, and who is made to pay for it? What does satire cost its author? What can a meme carry that an essay cannot? What does a forwarded joke do inside an extended family WhatsApp group that no news report can manage?

And then, not every laugh has a target.

There is the baby’s gurgle that arrives before language; the dog’s cross-eyed begging at the table; the private joke between lovers. There is nervous laughter, contagious laughter, the laugh that escapes at precisely the wrong moment, the kind that leaves you with a bellyache, tears in your eyes and no breath left to speak, and laughter as medicine.

What interests us most is laughter as weapon and refuge, complicity and rebellion, cruelty and intimacy; laughter that speaks when language fails, and laughter that exists before language altogether. Be warned: laughter before language may be the hardest thing of all to write.

We welcome poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translation, author/activist interviews, comics and visual work, written in English or translated into English from any language.

Note: The theme is intended as a provocation, and not a constraint with the intent to exclude.

Send us your writings. Laugh.

A Visual Narrative is a story told primarily through a sequence of images, with text that adds context or illuminates another layer of story. The images could be photographs, illustrations, collages, or any kind of human-made art. We are keen on showcasing work that is original and honest. We are also eager to see intentional arrangements — something more than a collection or portfolio. If the text stands without the images, or vice-versa, it’s probably not a good fit.

We encourage you to peruse our previous issues and subscribe to our monthly newsletter to gain insight into our editorial preferences.

Thank you for adhering to our submission guidelines. We eagerly anticipate reviewing your work.

For any queries write to editor@usawa.in