Unravelling gendered power structures: exploring the agency of young women in a pashmina weaving family in militarised Kashmir

ABSTRACT

This article examines the intricate dynamics of gendered power structures within the context of a Pashmina weaving family in the militarised region of Kashmir. In particular, the focus is on unravelling the agency of two young women who navigate and negotiate their roles within these structures. Historically men have been at the forefront of weaving pashmina shawls in Kashmir. In most traditional pashmina weaving families, women perform the painstaking work of preparing the raw material – from cleaning the goat hair to hand spinning the wool before men take over the weaving. They do not often get paid for their hard work since their labour is seen as a part of their family duty, creating a framework of inequality for women. Using phenomenology of lived experience, agency theory and intersectionality framework, this paper seeks to understand how socio-political factors, such as militarisation, intersect with traditional gender norms to shape the experiences and agency of young women engaged in Pashmina weaving.

KEYWORDS:

• Pashmina
• Kashmir
• India
• feminism
• gendered labour
• patriarchy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Bukhari, Kashmir 2010: The year of Killing Youth.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Anjum, & Varma, Curfewed in Kashmir: Voices from the Valley.

5. Rizvi, Pashmina spinners, weavers, and needleworkers.

6. Acker, Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations.

7. Hutchings, “Choosers or Losers? Feminist Ethical and Political Agency.”

8. Lucas, The Primacy of Narrative Agency.

9. Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex.

10. Hollway, The capacity to care.

11. Butler, “Performative Agency.”

12. hooks, Ain’t I a woman;, hooks, Yearning.

13. Lorde, A New Spelling of My Name.

14. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 157.

15. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 22.

16. Duffy, “The romance of work,” 444.

17. Menon, Seeing Like a Feminist, ix.

18. Menon, Seeing Like a Feminist, vii.

19. Most of the raw pashmina threads are processed by hand. But with the advent of technology, many weavers use machines to spin pashmina threads. In these machines, the traditional raw Pashmina is blended with the synthetic nylon produced in China, which breaks the traditional value of pashmina.

20. Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council or LAHDCK is an Autonomous District Council that administers the Kargil District of Ladakh.

21. From author’s interview, 2013.

22. Digest of Statistics 2016–17. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://ecostatjk.nic.in/digeststat/PDF%20for%20website%202016–17.pdf

23. Ishrat et all. Sustainability Issues in the Traditional Cashmere Supply Chain.

24. Sheikh, Kashmir’s shawl Weavers.

25. http://cdisgr.org/.