Women’s Agency

Peace Angels or Warriors? In armed conflicts, women are still often assigned the role of victims of violence. However, the polarizing view of women as either victims or perpetrators overlooks the nuances: In violent contexts, women often assume less straightforward, intermediary, yet equally relevant roles. Examining their role in armed resistance in Kashmir illustrates how they inscribe their concerns and identities as Muslim women into the history of resistance, all without fundamentally breaking away from patriarchally shaped roles - as explained by Amya Agarwal.

The entire text is available here (german).  

In a dedicated episode, Amya Agarwal talks about her book "Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir" on the podcast "New Books in South Asian Studies". There she explores the politics of competing and sometimes overlapping masculinities represented by the state armed forces and the non-state actors in the Kashmir valley. In addition, the book broadens the understanding of women’s agency through its engagement with the construction, performance, and interplay of masculinities in the conflict.

Combining existing elements of both feminist research and critical scholarship on men and masculinities, the book highlights the significance of foregrounding the interplay of men’s identities in conflicts to understand agency in a meaningful way. Through the focus on the simultaneous play of multiple masculinities, the book also questions the oversimplified and monolithic usage of masculinity being associated only with violence in conflicts.

The podcast episode is available here, for example, on platforms like Spotify.