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Nuclear invisibilities: Feminised performativities of dissent in Koodankulam
KTH, School of Architecture and the Built Environment (ABE), Philosophy and History, History of Science, Technology and Environment.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4044-7344
2026 (English)In: Gendered (In)Visibilities: The Pasts and Presents of Socio-Political Activism in and from South Asia / [ed] Maria Framke and Fritzi-Marie Titzmann, London: Routledge, 2026Chapter in book (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Koodankulam, on India’s southern coast, has witnessed one of the country’s longest-running women-led antinuclear movements, which intensified in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima accident. The intimacies of shared community spaces, conventionally sites of communal childcare and traditional livelihood practices, transformed into sites of exceptional protest when confronted with the imposition of a nuclear power plant. It was through the affective intimacies of shared sisterhood that a sustained resistance against the Koodankulam nuclear project was mobilized. Through embodied and performative repertoires of dissent, women sought to render visible the precarities imposed by the project, even as legal, bureaucratic, and security apparatuses systematically dismissed their concerns. Even as women’s bodies became hyper-visible through spectacular protest imagery that drew global attention, the same bodies were excluded from formal dialogue, criminalised under colonial-era laws, and subjected to multiple forms of gendered violence and repression. Drawing on frameworks of performativity, space-making, and nuclear invisibilities, and based on fieldwork conducted in 2017 and beyond, this chapter traces the trajectories of the Koodankulam project and the protests against it, and argues that the women’s resistance constitutes a sustained refusal of erasure within India’s nuclear modernity.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
London: Routledge, 2026.
Keywords [en]
Koodankulam, feminisation, antinuclear protests, repression, women and radiation, nuclear invisibilities
National Category
Gender Studies Technology and Environmental History
Research subject
History of Science, Technology and Environment
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-375740OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-375740DiVA, id: diva2:2030068
Available from: 2026-01-19 Created: 2026-01-19 Last updated: 2026-01-21

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Huria, Sonali

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf