Shifting Borders of Crip/Queer Belonging: Disability, Sexuality, and Diaspora in Margarita with a Straw

This chapter analyses Shonali Bose’s Margarita with a Straw (2014) as a critical text that reimagines the shifting borders of disability, sexuality, and diasporic belonging in South Asian cinema. It argues that the film, through its depiction of Laila – a young Indian woman with cerebral palsy – renders visible forms of border-crossing that are at once bodily, affective, and geopolitical. The chapter brings crip theory, queer diaspora studies, and South Asian feminist scholarship into dialogue to show how disability operates not as a private condition but as a relational and political category shaped by caste, class, kinship, and neoliberal inclusion regimes. Through close formal analysis, it demonstrates how the film contests normative scripts of family, embodiment, and national belonging, while generating queer/crip temporalities that resist the linear progress narratives of able-bodied and heteronormative modernity. In doing so, the chapter highlights how crisis becomes a generative force for alternative intimacies and futures. By situating Margarita with a Straw within transnational queer/crip and postcolonial frameworks, this chapter not only amplifies an emerging voice from South Asia but also demonstrates how cultural narratives articulate new identities, resist exclusions, and imagine alternative futures across shifting borders.