Soham Patel’s The Daughter Industry is at once an imagined performance, hauntological confession, and polyvocal chorus. The cast of “players” includes Sasmita (“limber, gender-fluid, jesterlike”), Sajani (a “venerated femme mother”), and Sarah (“likely a heavenly Pisces”), all living, breathing, and bickering in the interstices of language and culture. Their conversations and soliloquies span wedding markets, yoga studios, and ultrasound rooms, collapsing all of those into a charged, often surreal meditation on how gender is produced, performed, and policed.
“The daughter is at once at risk and always arriving,” Patel reflects in our conversation below. We also discuss the collection’s many poetic modes, its “genre-queer” sensibility, and the challenge of crafting a collection “full of fight (the good fight) and love.”
—Dante Silva
Dante Silva: The title sets the stakes here. How did you arrive at The Daughter Industry: A Hauntological Confession, Alternative History, Speculative Autopoetics in Three Acts with Seven Players?
Soham Patel: This book’s got a lot going on and I had to signal that to the reader from go so figured the title would be as good a place as any to start. Is it a poetry collection? A ghost story? Now we’re doing yoga?! Is this a play? Yes! The stakes are high here and that’s why this subtitle has to become, to lean on Kazim’s coined term, genre-queer as it tackles the total bummer that is gender violence while also evincing queer joy full of fight (the good fight) and love.
Dante Silva: What’s your working definition of the “daughter industry”?
Soham Patel: The daughter industry spans generations and is generative. The Daughter Industry is a generative text about generations. The daughter industry is reproduction and production within the realm of cultural materialism’s emic and etic—working from within a society and culture while also observing it. This industry is always building, can collapse, and requires so much machinery and human involvement, and the daughter is at once at risk and always arriving. The Daughter Industry engages all this through language and through gesture, expression, voice and interaction, the daughter industry makes way for change and can become a text or conversation generated by readers of The Daughter Industry. In both the daughter industry and The Daughter Industry, the word “daughter” makes it about family and daughter is also a clause in a contract that in one context allows for securing human offspring funds for future entertainment, employment, and insurance, while in other contexts the daughter clause is something much darker.
Dante Silva: How did the cast come to be?
Soham Patel: The cast is based on people I know or have encountered IRL, or read in books, seen in movies and on TV. Their star chart speculations give them personality traits as well as mythic and animal like qualities so players can have character directions. The cast all know each other well yet they’ve never or only just met. They learn about each other quickly and understand they’ll change as they come together. All seven are also supernatural since they’re ghosts.
Dante Silva: The forms here are as expansive, playful, and politically charged as the players themselves. How did you work in and around different forms (lyric, musical, multimodal)?
Soham Patel: The forms help me understand ways to frame the book’s bleak and disruptive subjects or at least place them in a container long enough to examine for a bit. The lyric allows for imagination to run, the music gives tonal variance and rhythm, and the multimodal is a chance to do the prismatic meditation.
Dante Silva: I’m curious about the historical work that you’re doing, as you confront the different political and economic forces that disappear women and femmes. You reference demographic data, sanative care methodologies, financial records, and more. What research went into the collection?
Soham Patel: Oh so much and it’s so scattered! Mixed methods, field research and folkloristics, behavioral sciences and census data study. I read medical textbooks and scanned a bunch of evolutionary biology and gender studies texts, texts about bioethics, public health, and economics. Some research included practicing yoga, learning to dance, and looking at art.
Dante Silva: Will we see other iterations of The Daughter Industry?
Soham Patel: Family elders gifted me seven sarongs from Amazon some years ago. I got one for every color of the rainbow. These’ve become props for the players. This afternoon our son and I are going outside because the weather is finally nice and we will shoot some footage with the cloths as fodder for future iterations. A college theatre department is adapting the text to block as part of their curriculum. One of my brothers is formulating a concept for a Roblox game. A site specific staged ghost reading at the Bol Coop community space and bookstore in Washington DC is getting set up for April 25, 2026 at 4PM.