Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the potentiality of dissonance, especially as it engaged with feminist theory to raise familiar yet pertinent questions about undertaking research in contexts riven with political and epistemic violence. Drawing on the ethnographic fieldwork in the Kashmir valley, the author tracks the work dissonance does in shaping the research questions we ask, the methodological choices we make and its insistence on embodying a critical politics of location. The author then goes on to trace how dissonance variously emerged in the field and its theoretical implications in explaining the complex processes of military occupation in the Kashmir valley and how it takes hold in everyday life. That is, everyday sense of dissonance as explicated by interviewees brings to light the functions of military occupation but more importantly, it remains imbued with possibilities that contest, challenge and refuse to normalise militarised forms of state-led oppression. Overall, this paper makes the case for remaining with dissonance as a disruptive feminist possibility with epistemic and political potential. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on ethnographically informed fieldwork located in feminist approaches to doing qualitative research. Findings The author argues for engaging with experiences of dissonance during research process as productive affects that can yield politically and epistemically useful forms of analysis that contest dominant forms of thinking and knowing. Originality/value This paper builds on existing feminist thinking on dissonance to contribute to peace research and the urgent need to centre locational politics and power inequalities as we contest dominant knowledge.

In this article, I trace ‘re-membering’ as a feminist practice in the context of gendered activism under military occupation in Kashmir. Drawing on its anticolonial feminist roots, I conceptualise re-membering as practices that do not simply put together what has been severed or dismembered by coloniality but they also, in doing so, propose different frames of looking. I think through re-membering by focusing on two intertwining sites of gendered and feminist activism in Kashmir: protests that re-member the disappeared and activist representation under military occupation. A feminist analysis of these activist strategies grounded in anticolonial thinking suggests that re-membering in the specificity of its emergence under conditions of heightened control does multivalent work: it contests dominant claims and the coloniality of the Indian state, thereby exposing the continuum of violence including its carceral, psychic, discursive forms that co-constitute and perpetuate the occupation of Kashmir. As such, it insists on accounting for historical and contextual specificities as necessary conditions for imagining an expressly anticolonial feminist politics that can open possibilities of epistemic and political transformation towards knowing Kashmir and people’s struggles differently. It is here that the epistemic potential of re-membering lies: in overturning the terms of conversation as decolonial feminist scholarship has long insisted.

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.