Complicating ideas of the political: Examining subaltern performativity as gendered resistance

Abstract

This article attempts to wrest away the notion of popular political resistance and performativity from the realm of visibility in the ‘public’ sphere/space and place them within the unperformed acts that remain optically invisible. Taking the example of India-controlled Kashmir, where public spaces remain militarized and performative assemblies criminalized, the article focuses on how popular resistance to Indian rule is regularly embodied within what we call subaltern performativity. Furthermore, the gendered nature of this subaltern performativity is also underlined through ethnographic fieldwork.