Sexuate Agency and Relationality in Witnessing Kashmir Violence

Abstract

This essays deals with the difficulty of negotiating feminist solidarity across difference especially when the identities in performance are across lines of state violence and political/military occupation as in the case of Kashmir. We work through categories of insider and outsider even as we attempted to negotiate our own feminist relationality. It also reflects an interdisciplinary dialogue across the practices and scholarship from within performance studies and political theory and the way that bodily vulnerability of the performer and activist may speak through violence registers. We look at insider-outsider experiences and representations of the Kashmir conflict through case studies examining women’s agency as well as through artistic interventions against a specific articulation of Kashmir’s political history.

‘To have seen what I have seen, see what I see.’

Ophelia, Hamlet Act 1 Scene 3 ¹ .

(quoted in Kashmir’s Ophelia).