Paper short abstract:

I propose rereading the gender relationship in Kashmir. Three factors define gender in Kashmir: British colonialism and coloniality of gender, Indian colonial rule, and the kinship patriarchy. On the other hand, Kashmiri women make their own meaning by resisting and negotiating with them.

Paper long abstract:

Kashmiri women’s activism is defined by the complexities of multiple oppressions. The paper redefines gender in Kashmir by locating the coloniality of gender in defining the hierarchies within. Kashmir is a traditionally patriarchal society, but colonialism deepens patriarchy through the coloniality of gender. The paper locates the coloniality of gender in Kashmir through the direct and indirect transfer of the British colonial strategies and the implementation of the Indian colonial strategies informed by the Brahmanical system. Like the former colonial power considered white European, Christian, heterosexual men as superior, Indian colonialism applies the idea that Brahmin heterosexual men are pure and superior and Brahmin women are their subordinates. Applying the colonial saviour approach in Kashmir, India takes it upon itself to save Kashmiri women from their ‘oppressive men’.

Between multiple oppressors, Kashmiri women form multiple subjectivities by meaning-making of their actions beyond the colonial and patriarchal definition of women’s roles. Women’s movements like the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) do not fit into roles defined by the colonial state or kinship patriarchy. They publicly resist the oppressive state apparatus by protesting the disappearance of their relatives while putting a familial image like wives of the disappeared. These women also negotiate with the kinship patriarchy by asking for their rights. While looking at the roles of APDP’s women activists within the society, they follow Saba Mahmood’s definition of agency by not going against the patriarchy but doing politics within the spaces of their oppression.

Paper short abstract:

This paper situates the political action of Dalit-Bahujan patient activists living with sickle cell disease to ask if caste can be understood in a mode of repair rather than as pathologised presence in solidarity projects, thus offering a conceptual re-thinking of caste(ist) livingness in India.

Paper long abstract:

How are health politics and caste politics related in contemporary India? In this contribution, I speculate if political action led by patient activists from Dalit-Bahujan communities can be read as extending, contesting and reconfiguring decades of caste struggle to perform reparative futures for the self and community. Historically etched as a ‘Black’ ‘Caribbean’ and ‘tribal’ disease, sickle cell anemia and its biopolitical regimes of control bring together racialised histories of human differentiation as well as (shared) genetic histories of migration and colonisation. Through my ethnographic engagement with sickle cell patients and activists in the state of Maharashtra, I argue that attending to the cultural, medical and civic repertoire they invoke in their political action to works against the grain of predominantly White, Western scholarship on biosociality. Given the contested yet undeniable relation between caste, genetics and health in India, I situate Dalit-Bahujan patients’ navigation of unwell worlds by building on solidarity relations of caste and overturning its pathologisation in biopolitical regimes. Taking inspiration from McKrittick (2020) on how black life comes to be known through asymmetrically connected knowledge systems, I speculate if attending to sickle cell science and activism can be a way of knowing Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi lives in India, quite apart from overdetermined narratives of social structure.

Paper short abstract:

I explore the creation of an Indigenous / Afro collaborative performance as a form of speculative anti-dystopian practice, one where the encounter between subaltern trajectories shapes a path to gradual decolonization.

Paper long abstract:

What if an Afro and an Indigenous woman met in the early morning as electric technicians hired by a small city in Argentina's Buenos Aires province in a dystopian future to install street sensors that measure viruses in the atmosphere? What if, during this work, the women narrated their life stories and, through that act, decided to take the Argentine state to trial? This is the scenario that the script by Alejandra Egido, an Afro-Latin American theatre director, builds in a recent play. The result of a collaborative ethnography we initiated between the Afro theatre of Egido and the Mapuche theatre of Miriam Alvarez and Lorena Cañuqueo, the play speculates on Afro-Indigenous encounters. Currently, these relationships have been widely overlooked (with important exceptions Wade 2005, Hooker 2020, Lethabo King 2019). Following Saidiya Hartman (2020), speculation becomes a path of reconstructing relationalities, of exploring the subversive potential of its conjoining. Speculation becomes a form of intervention over a dystopian outcome of environmental and health crisis, which as Zoe Todd identified, is for colonised peoples a form of describing the past and existence in the present (Davis and Todd 2017). In this encounter Afro and Mapuche women are already survivors. They are already building an anti-dystopian world that challenges colonisation, not by a decolonial inversion, but by every means of techno-scientific re-appropriation, taking the state to trial and re-shaping intimacy.