Conflict, Gendered Borders, and Emotional Mobility: The Case of Kashmiri Women Seeking Legal Justice

How do Kashmiri women, seeking justice for the enforced disappearance and detention of their male relatives, navigate and negotiate with the gendered borders of ‘spaces of legality’? Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with key stakeholders, this article uses spaces of legality, exemplified by courts, police stations, and judicial bodies, as its primary analytical sites to examine the multiple ways Kashmiri women traverse from ‘home’ into a masculine, public space. The theoretical framework argues that pre-existing patriarchal norms, in collusion with militarization and conflict-induced hypermasculinity, engender an intangible gendered border for women in Kashmir. In navigating this border, they engage in what we term ‘emotional mobility’, an infra-political agentic movement that results in renegotiating their roles, both at home and outside.