Women in Isolation: A Feminist Reading of Manjula Padmanabhan’s Astro-Nuts

Abstract

This paper examines the representation of gender, exclusion, and isolation in Manjula Padmanabhan’s science fiction satire Astro-Nuts: An Intergalactic Comedy. Rather than treating isolation only as a private emotional experience, the paper reads it as a political condition produced when individuals are present within institutions but denied meaningful influence. The play’s imagined Galactic Union provides a satirical setting in which human delegates must account for the environmental and ethical failures of Earth. Their inability to cooperate exposes the limitations of political systems organised around national pride, status, and competition. Within this collective failure, the marginalisation of women’s voices offers a productive point of entry for feminist analysis. The paper draws on Simone de Beauvoir’s account of woman as the socially constituted “Other,” Judith Butler’s analysis of gender as performative, Virginia Woolf’s argument for women’s material and intellectual space, and Donna Haraway’s account of the entanglement of technology and power. Using qualitative close reading and contextual interpretation, the study considers the play’s speculative setting, comic form, institutional space, gendered speech, and environmental satire. It argues that Astro-Nuts presents isolation as both a symptom of unequal structures and a means of exposing their contradictions. The play does not offer a simple opposition between women and men; instead, its wider humanist critique shows how domination, rivalry, and refusal of responsibility weaken collective life. A feminist reading therefore reveals that meaningful inclusion requires more than physical presence or technological advancement: it requires changes in the distribution of authority, the practice of listening, and the ethical relationship between humanity and its environment