Mothers’ grief and love in war and resistance: visuals, aesthetics and storytelling

Following Roland Bleiker’s ((2009) Aesthetics and world politics, Palgrave Macmillan, London) excellent suggestion to embrace an aesthetic engagement with international politics (as opposed to mimetic approaches), this paper analyses artistic endeavours to make sense of the gendered narratives in the midst of violence and resistance. In particular, this paper uses a feminist perspective to reflect how visuals depicting grieving mothers simultaneously reproduce and trouble narratives of motherhood and grief in war and resistance. This reflection also directs focus on the transformative potential of revolutionary mothering as reinforced by the Black feminist scholarship. Through an empirical example of a novel resistance artform—a digital mural of a grieving mother made by an anonymous group of resisters in Kashmir, this paper uncovers the significance of art in reinforcing gendered scripts of motherhood, on the one hand, and the creative agency exercised by resisters and artists on the other. This example builds on the pervasiveness of depictions on grieving mothers across time and contexts in the midst of violence and resistance, with particular discussions on artwork by Käthe Kollwitz, Shamsia Hassani, Mana Neyestani—in order to understand what political ends such imageries serve; for whom; and the transnational connections between resistance movements they enable and support.