Window: Spatializing Occupation

Abstract

In this short intervention, I ask, What is at stake, politically and conceptually, in understanding militarism not as stable and unfolding similarly across geographies, but as deeply contingent on historical and contextual specificities? How might we then unpack the question of home becoming a catalyst of militarism? What constitutes home under saturated state control and occupation where militarism is neither subtle nor benign but enforced through violence? Emplacing the vignette of a window that came up during my ethnographic fieldwork in Srinagar, Kashmir, I reflect on the conditions of gendered vulnerability, fear, violence, and everyday negotiations of survival that become urgent concerns for people surviving a colonial occupation. This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.