ABSTRACT
Margarita with a Straw is a feature film from 2014, directed by Shonali Bose and starring Kalki Koechlin, a popular Bollywood and indie star, writer and theatre actor. In Margarita, Koechlin plays Laila, a young woman with cerebral palsy who likewise travels from India (Delhi) abroad (to New York) to attend New York University, where, among other experiences, she falls in love with a blind woman. Transforming the legacy of phenomenology for thinking queer disability seems particularly exciting and insistent, as two quick examples, from the queer phenomenologist Sara Ahmed and the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, will indicate. The story offered by Malini Chib establishes just how difficult it is to define disability in general terms, especially through an ontology of visible embodiment, types of impairments, illnesses and their symptoms and the assumptions that accompany the encounter with difference.
