CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Kakoti, Chitrangi |
|---|---|
| Title | Violent Sacrifices: Rewriting Women's Resistance in Early 2000's Manipur, India |
| Summary | This thesis analyses modes of self-sacrificial resistance mobilized by gendered insurgent subjects at India’s borderlands through the study of two women-led protests against militarism that occurred in the early 2000s in the state of Manipur in Northeast India – Irom Sharmila’s hunger strike from 2000 to 2016, and the Meira Paibis’ naked protest on 15 July 2004. The author makes a departure from the dominant reading of these protests within Indian feminist scholarship as non-violent modes of gendered resistance against a militaristic state. Through critical analysis discourse of news and reportage in three major English-language newspapers in India, the author argues that violent material conditions at ‘exceptional territories’ necessitate the production of gendered subjectivities that weaponize their lives to reclaim control over life, death, and violence from a patriarchal and colonial state. Through the weaponisation of their lives, the gendered insurgent subject becomes a site of ‘counterconduct’ to the sovereign’s violence. The author further argues that in both protests, the women negotiated agency by conforming to but also rewriting patriarchal scripts that attach meanings of sacrifice, honour, shame, and purity to women’s bodies. Thus, the aim of the thesis is to engage with how the gendered insurgent subject operates as both object and subject of the sovereign’s violent control and thereby, disrupt and destabilize the Indian state’s biopolitical regime at its borders through violent sacrifice.This thesis analyses modes of self-sacrificial resistance mobilized by gendered insurgent subjects at India’s borderlands through the study of two women-led protests against militarism that occurred in the early 2000s in the state of Manipur in Northeast India – Irom Sharmila’s hunger strike from 2000 to 2016, and the Meira Paibis’ naked protest on 15 July 2004. The author makes a departure from the dominant reading of these protests within Indian feminist scholarship as non-violent modes of gendered resistance against a militaristic state. Through critical analysis discourse of news and reportage in three major English-language newspapers in India, the author argues that violent material conditions at ‘exceptional territories’ necessitate the production of gendered subjectivities that weaponize their lives to reclaim control over life, death, and violence from a patriarchal and colonial state. Through the weaponisation of their lives, the gendered insurgent subject becomes a site of ‘counterconduct’ to the sovereign’s violence. The author further argues that in both protests, the women negotiated agency by conforming to but also rewriting patriarchal scripts that attach meanings of sacrifice, honour, shame, and purity to women’s bodies. Thus, the aim of the thesis is to engage with how the gendered insurgent subject operates as both object and subject of the sovereign’s violent control and thereby, disrupt and destabilize the Indian state’s biopolitical regime at its borders through violent sacrifice. |
| Supervisor | Yoon, Hyaesin |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/kakoti_chitrangi.pdf |
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