Performing Humanity: Gendered Resistance, Public Grieving, and Legacies of Embodied Knowledge in Occupied Kashmir
Abstract: This paper, "Performing Humanity: Gendered Resistance, Public Grieving, and Legacies of Embodied Knowledge in Occupied Kashmir," examines the (re)construction of Kashmiri humanity through protest tactics in Indian-occupied Kashmir. My analysis centers on the resistance efforts of women in the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) who engage gendered performance as a methodology of resistance, hope, and grief. I argue that Kashmiri women utilize gendered resistance strategies to construct a counterhegemonic, performative ideal of Kashmiri humanity that fundamentally undermines the colonial logics of Indian occupation. Throughout my analysis, I evaluate the APDP's approach to anti-colonial resistance through mundane acts of survival, habitual gestures to conjure the disappeared, and protest tactics that undermine the colonial violence of derealization. Kashmiri women routinely invoke their feminine domestic obligation and vulnerability to state violence as manifestations of humanity. Their tradition of public grieving is a process of reclaiming visibility, embodying the disappeared, and enacting the possibility of ongoing Kashmiri life. Kashmiri women engage with hope as a methodology of resistance, utilizing protest to assert Kashmiri life in contrast to the official deadness of the disappeared. The cultural legacy of protest in Kashmir facilitates the women's transmission of embodied knowledge and their enactment of countermemory through traditions of gendered performance. I evaluate hope as a framework for Kashmiri resistance, combating colonial domination through what José Muñoz imagines as a structuring and educated mode of desiring beyond the present. I interrogate the spectral presence of the disappeared in Kashmiri social life, introducing Judith Butler's theory of mourning to consider Kashmiri women’s grief as a process of replacement from individual loss to a community of liberatory prefiguration. The APDP's activism engages hope both as a tactic of survival and as political praxis in the context of colonial domination predicated on the eradication of Kashmiri humanity.Selection for the Hope in/from the Global South Working Session, Performance Studies in/from the Global South Working Group, 2023 American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) Conference
Adapted from a term paper for WGSS L77 4154: Decolonization to Globalization: How to End an Empire, Spring 2023
Professor Shefali Chandra
Washington University in St. Louis