Re-membering: tracing epistemic implications of feminist and gendered politics under military occupation

Pandit, Niharika (2023) Re-membering: tracing epistemic implications of feminist and gendered politics under military occupation. Feminist Theory, 24 (1). 102 - 122. ISSN 1464-7001

Text (Pandit_re-membering-tracing-epistemic-implications--published) - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (1MB)

• Author

Abstract

In this article, I trace ‘re-membering’ as a feminist practice in the context of gendered activism under military occupation in Kashmir. Drawing on its anticolonial feminist roots, I conceptualise re-membering as practices that do not simply put together what has been severed or dismembered by coloniality but they also, in doing so, propose different frames of looking. I think through re-membering by focusing on two intertwining sites of gendered and feminist activism in Kashmir: protests that re-member the disappeared and activist representation under military occupation. A feminist analysis of these activist strategies grounded in anticolonial thinking suggests that re-membering in the specificity of its emergence under conditions of heightened control does multivalent work: it contests dominant claims and the coloniality of the Indian state, thereby exposing the continuum of violence including its carceral, psychic, discursive forms that co-constitute and perpetuate the occupation of Kashmir. As such, it insists on accounting for historical and contextual specificities as necessary conditions for imagining an expressly anticolonial feminist politics that can open possibilities of epistemic and political transformation towards knowing Kashmir and people’s struggles differently. It is here that the epistemic potential of re-membering lies: in overturning the terms of conversation as decolonial feminist scholarship has long insisted.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://journals.sagepub.com/home/fty
Additional Information:	© 2022 The Author
Divisions:	Gender Studies
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform D History General and Old World > DS Asia
Date Deposited:	22 Feb 2022 00:10
Last Modified:	18 Nov 2024 07:42
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/113788

Actions (login required)

View Item