Performing Radical Care: Muslim Grandmothers of Shaheen Bagh

My paper will study the 2019 Anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protest of the Muslim grandmothers of Shaheen Bagh through the lens of care ethics and performance. Based largely on my participation and “co-performative witnessing” of the movement, I argue that care and protest are coarticulated in the context of Shaheen Bagh.[i] While speaking of care as a protest performance might seem a curious conflation, my ethnographic research revealed that the elderly women at Shaheen Bagh did not only advance a novel narrative of careful political resistance, but also offered lessons in governance for the State that was largely uncaring towards its disenfranchised population. I bring scholarship on political performance into conversation with feminist care studies to analyze the practice of domestic care in the public sphere by the grandmothers of Shaheen Bagh as a radical performance. This intervention not only contests the prevailing notion that carework is relevant solely within the domestic sphere but also significantly broadens the discourse on political performances by arguing that care can be reimagined as an alternative form of radical practice. By refusing the distinction between public protest and domestic care, the protesters, the elderly dadis opened up new conceptualizations of performance. Their quotidian actions of care —nurturing, cooking, bathing and worrying for their children—were performed in the public as the primary (re)source of their politics.

[i] D. Soyini Madison, “Co-Performative Witnessing,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 6 (2007): 826–31.