ABSTRACT
How and to what extent can love and desire be managed as factors in geopolitical strategy? This research expands the subject matter of geopolitical analysis and uses feminist tactics to highlight the contingent and embodied practices through which geopolitical strategies materialize in seemingly unlikely venues. In the Leh District of India’s Jammu and Kashmir State, political conflict between Buddhists and Muslims has been articulated in part through women’s bodies. Buddhists and Muslims are producing an embodied religious boundary through the prevention of inter-religious marriages. While in this case love has the potential to challenge political narratives, any transgressive force is blunted by the separation of intermarrying couples or their expulsion from the territory of Leh District. Drawing on interviews, survey data and participatory oral histories in Leh District, this article seeks to destabilize and complicate the global geopolitical gaze by bringing the corporeal, desiring and desired body to the center of analysis with an examination of how women cope with, resist or actively participate in embodied geopolitical strategy.
