ABSTRACT
Whom we love and how many children (if any) we would like to bear are among the most intimate choices we make. Simultaneously, these decisions determine demographic trends and thus shape territories. This chapter explores how geopolitical conflicts co-opt women’s bodies and their intimate choices as instruments of territory making in Leh District of Jammu and Kashmir. The gendered potential of women’s bodies, embedded in their capacity to give birth to citizens, soldiers and voters, and the ways that this capacity is discursively deployed, render women’s bodies a contested territory and provide the potential for both dissent and resistance, as well as the risk of violence. Hence, the author suggests that the practice of gender is profoundly affected by territorial concerns and questions about how we might explore intimacy and reproduction as spaces and sites of geopolitical practice by engaging with the body and body space as instruments of territory making.
