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... Whereas some scholars have highlighted widening opportunities for women through concepts such as "gender equivalency" (Brownson 2014) and "regendering" (Duncanson and Woodward 2016), others have pointed out that the increasing visibility of uniformed female-identified bodies has yet to lead to productive visions of militarized femininities, with women often framed as "ambivalent" bodies, "incomplete" soldier "tomboys," desexualized "honorary men," and/or "sluts and bitches," all of which, to various extents, sustain the dominance of male heteronormative soldiering (Basham 2009(Basham , 2013(Basham , 2016Belkin 2013;Brownfield-Stein 2017;Crowley and Sandhoff 2017;Dittmer and Apelt 2008;Enloe 2014;Ette 2013;Fiala 2008;King 2017;MacKenzie 2015;Wadham et al. 2018;Woodward and Winter 2007). Furthermore, "femonationalism," embodied by the figure of the Western "equal-opportunity soldier" (Eichler 2013, 256), works to reproduce the gendered/racialized hierarchies used to legitimize Western interventions, further accentuating the contradictory positionalities of women/ LGBT+ soldiers (Enloe 2014;Hunt 2006;Khalid 2011;Shepherd 2017;Sjoberg 2010). ...
... (Danilova, field notes, 2019) Artists attempted to dismantle the traditional heteronormative imperative of the love story by representing women/LGBT+ soldiers first as agentive subjects, and second as capable of embracing "the humanity of everybody" (interview with HG cast, August 17, 2019). However, we argue that as this aspirational "humanity/equality" code coexisted with the representation of Australian women doctors as "Virgin Marys," those "with angels on their side" who "have made things [safe]" for local populations (HG 2019), it subverted this emancipatory message and reproduced the dominance of Western "saviors" over inferior and "backward" Others (Dittmer and Apelt 2008, 73;Hunt 2006;Khalid 2011;Shepherd 2017;Sjoberg 2007Sjoberg , 2010Smith 2019). ...
... This imbues the story with moral rightness, Western trauma, and responsibilitythemes that reinforce "violence in violent places" as selfinflicted (Welland 2015; see also Van der Meulen and Soeters 2005). In the performance of the GWoT, Tam's racial difference within the Australian forces highlights her ability to better "understand" local racialized populations, resonating with feminist scholarship on female inclusion during the GWoT (see for example Hunt 2006;Shepherd 2017), yet this does not move beyond a fatalistic message: "Every war is the same." Ultimately, Tam's character allows for the normalization of Western war making in the GWoT through dichotomies of gendered/racialized development versus underdevelopment, lack of hygiene and basic knowledge versus advanced knowledge and technological progress, and Iraqi/Kurdish women's oppression versus the freedom of Western women. ...
Building on Judith Butler’s understanding of visibility as “the object of continuous regulation and contestation,” art/aesthetics studies in international relations, and feminist theater studies, we identify feminist “her-story” theater as a unique site where Western “gender-/sexuality-inclusive” soldiering is visibilized, contested, and subverted. Drawing on ethnographic observations of two award-winning dramas, interviews with artists and military hosts, and findings from a wider research project on contemporary British military culture, we reveal the key role of heteronormative and patriarchal cultural discourses in reproducing the ambivalent positionalities of women/LGBT+ soldiers. We argue that the very visibility of women/LGBT+ soldiers on the stage paradoxically operates to make the complexities of–and struggles against–masculinized heteronormative military cultures invisible. Furthermore, despite artists’ attempts to dissociate empowerment through soldiering from the problematic context of modern conflicts, “her-story” theater ultimately entrenches gendered/racialized hierarchies that normalize Western military interventions. We conclude that only through sustained feminist reflection on the contours of “imagined” futures of female/LGBT+ soldiering can this persistently problematic (in)visibility be productively disrupted. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
... Simultaneamente ao engajamento dos Estados Unidos e de seus aliados na intervenção militar no Afeganistão, a sociedade estadunidense testemunhava a ascensão de certo tipo de discurso humanitário que colocava as "mulheres e crianças" afegãs como vítimas que precisavam ser salvas através da força militar. Como meio de formar consenso público em torno da guerra ao terror, discursos de gênero sobre a Guerra do Afeganistão moldaram o apoio público ao que ficou definido como o 'projeto de libertação' para 'civilizar' o Afeganistão (Jasmin ZINE, 2006;HUNT, 2006). Nas palavras de Laura Bush (2001), ao falar pelo rádio à população estadunidense, todos nós temos a obrigação de falar. ...
... Da mesma maneira, as "mulheres e crianças" afegãs precisavam ser resgatadas das mãos de antagonistas masculinos -sejam eles os combatentes do Talibã ou os homens muçulmanos em geral. Nesse sentido, Hunt (2006) argumenta que, além de ganhar apoio público, a construção discursiva de gênero sobre a Guerra do Afeganistão era um modo efetivo de identificar o inimigo como bárbaro, como um animal, como menos humano. ...
... Finalmente, a construção da Guerra do Afeganistão em termos de gênero é um processo em constante reprodução, com reverberações até os dias de hoje. Em 2004, três anos após a deflagração da guerra ao terror, a administração Bush ainda enfatizava a libertação das mulheres afegãs como uma das principais conquistas da intervenção militar dos Estados Unidos no país (HUNT, 2006). Em 2010, quase dez anos depois do início da guerra, o periódico semanal Time trazia em sua capa a face mutilada de Aesha Mohammadzai, jovem afegã que teve seu nariz e suas orelhas cortadas fora por seu marido (um combatente do Talibã) e sua família, sob os dizeres "O Que Acontece se Deixarmos o Afeganistão". ...
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the American society saw the emergence of a set of gender discourses that framed the War in Afghanistan as a military intervention to "free" the Afghan women. Drawing on a critical reading on the Women, Peace and Security agenda, we argue that gender justifications of the War in Afghanistan were made possible by the way the international community has been treating the issue of gender and security when it comes to military interventions and peacekeeping missions, invisibilizing how hegemonic ideals of masculinity(ies) inform the very logics of military interventions. In this sense, the process of gendering the "war on terror" was made possible by the advancement of particular and restricted understandings on women and gender equality within a broader international agenda on gender mainstreaming - which had as ultimate consequence the depolitization of the debate on gender and international security.
... US-Kriegserklärungen von Laura Bush bis zu Jean Bethke Elshtain" die Unterstützung der von den USA geführten Invasion in Afghanistan im Jahr 2001 durch prominente feministische Intellektuelle, eine große Frauenorganisation und die Gattin des Präsidenten der USA. Die angebotene gendersensible Lesart der Legitimierungen eines "War on Terror" durch Stimmen eines "embedded feminism" (Hunt 2006) macht deutlich, dass feministische Positionen nicht per se mit einer Antikriegshaltung zusammenfallen, sondern im Gegenteil auch zur Legitimierung von kriegerischer Gewalt verwendet werden. Langenberger stellt diese Argumente in einen Zusammenhang mit der Unabhängigkeitserklärung der Vereinigten Staaten aus dem Jahr 1776 und zeigt, wie sich gegenwärtige Legitimierungen kriegerischer Interventionen indirekt auf dieses historische Dokument berufen. ...
... Über eine Erweiterung des Spektrums an möglichen Themen für feministische Ein-und Widersprüche rund um Anti/Terror/Kriege hinaus gilt es aber auch, methodologische und epistemologische Fragen erneut zu diskutieren. Die verstärkte Ausrichtung der feministischen Forschung im Bereich der Friedens-und Konfliktforschung auf empirische Studien führt tendenziell zu einer Vernachlässigung von Gesellschaftskritik. Angesichts einer oft zahnlosen Integration von Gender in den Mainstream und der Indienstnahme eines "embedded feminism" (Hunt 2006) durch konservative Strömungen ist es notwendig, sich nicht nur mit Empirie, sondern auch wieder verstärkt mit wissenschafts-und gesellschaftstheoretischen Fragen zu beschäftigen. Wir denken auch, dass die feministische IP von einer noch fundierteren Verortung in und Bezugnahme auf Feministische Theorien und Politik profitieren könnte. ...
Das vorliegende Schwerpunktheft hat zum Ziel, gegenwärtige Debatten um Terrorismus, Krieg
und Sicherheit aus einer Perspektive der Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung bzw. der feministischen
Kritik an der Internationalen Politik (IP)1 zu beleuchten. Der sperrige Titel „Anti/Terror/
Kriege“ wurde von den Herausgeberinnen bei der Entwicklung des Heftes bewusst gewählt, um
vermeintlich selbstverständliche Begriffe wie Krieg und Terror(ismus) sowie die klare Trennung
von terroristischer und antiterroristischer Gewalt zu hinterfragen. Politikwissenschaftliche Frauen-
und Geschlechterforschung entwirft nicht nur jeweils eigene und neue Fragestellungen zu
Terrorismus und politischem Widerstand, Staatsterror und „War on Terror“, AkteurInnen und
Konfliktfeldern u.v.a.m., sondern problematisiert gerade auch die damit einhergehenden Begriffe,
Konzepte und Normen, die hinter staatlichen und nichtstaatlichen Politiken stehen oder
diese erst mit hervorbringen. Der Begriff Anti/Terror/Kriege soll dieses Unternehmen erleichtern,
aber auch komplex halten.
Folgende Fragen waren der Ausgangspunkt für die Entwicklung dieses Heftes: Welche
Rolle spielt Geschlecht zusammen mit andere Kategorien wie etwa Klasse und Ethnizität in
Diskursen und Praktiken rund um Terrorismus und Antiterrorkriegen? Wie wirken sich die verschiedenen
Formen terroristischer und antiterroristischer Gewalt auf lokale und globale Geschlechterverhältnisse
aus? Welche Aspekte von Krieg und Gewalt, aber auch von Frieden und
Sicherheit sind dabei dominant und welche erfahren eine Marginalisierung? Worin besteht das
Potential einer feministischen Perspektive auf Anti/Terror/Kriege?
... 19 However, international human rights organisations and Afghan women's rights organisations reported that the war on terror failed to liberate Afghan women but exacerbated the situation in many ways. 20 In daily life, most Afghan women as well as men persistently suffer from poor social, economic and health problems aggravated by chronic violence, criminality, poverty and food shortages, instability and insecurity. However, gender has played a crucial role in the rhetorical approach and strategy to legitimise the military presence in Afghanistan. ...
... In diesem Bereich zeigt sich eine erhebliche Schnittmenge feministischer und postkolonial angeleiteter Forschungen: Hier sind zahlreiche Arbeiten zu finden, die sich an postkolonial-feministischer Theorie orientieren, sich dabei insbesondere auf Gayatri Spivak (1988Spivak ( , 1995 sowie Krista Hunt (2006) beziehen und deren Gegenstände Konflikt, Frieden und Sicherheit sind. Sie weisen in der empirischen Forschung oft eine (theoretisch begründete) Präferenz für bestimmte methodische Vorgehensweisen und Themen auf. ...
... Foreign powers have always aligned with one side or the other as long as it suits their convenience. That genuine concern regarding women's rights was never a factor in US foreign policy is a well-acknowledged fact (Afary 2004a;Bronwyn, 2011;Tickner 2002;Cooke 2002;Marchand 2009;Hunt 2006). Thus, in 1996, the US propped up the Taliban against the Mujahideen, in the promise of an important oil pipeline and Saudi Arabia financed the Taliban to funnel its brand of Wahabbism (a highly rigid form of Islam) into Afghanistan. ...
This paper aims to show the relevance and applicability of Martha Nussbaum’s Capability Approach (MNCA) in feminism to the lives of the women in Afghanistan-Pakistan (Af-Pak) regions who are impacted by war, underdevelopment, entrenched patriarchy and religious fundamentalism and face its deadly repercussions on their daily lives and human rights. Contrary to the reductionist representation of women in these regions in terms of their religio-cultural identity, this article bases itself in their harsh, socio-economic-political reality, history of the cold war, erosion of democratic institutions, war on terror and the rise of militarism and nationalism. Thus, issues of development, specifically, gender gap and human rights need to be brought centre-stage to address the systematic violation of women’s rights. The MNCA, being rooted in the dignity and personhood of each individual, is an indispensable baseline in terms of basic human rights for women in the Af-Pak region. Here, I show how the MNCA does not contradict institutions of family, culture and religion in the region and actually serves to build a bridge between universality and the specific local context.
... They further pointed out that cooptation of women issues into political projects so as to draw moral foundation on the claims of serving women but in fact compromised them to "more important matters of national interest." 15 Others pointed out that there was lack of interest in the dismal conditions of Afghan women during the Taliban rule. And now after the 9/11 attacks there is sudden growth of interest, which shows the coincidental and opportunistic face of the US counterinsurgency policy. ...
In this article I take up the counterinsurgency policy and practice of the US armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. By focusing on the Counterinsurgency Manual 2006, I highlight how the US counterinsurgency policy did not fully incorporate the concept of human security. Accordingly, the counterinsurgency operations that were carried out in the wake of the War on Terrorism failed to ensure human security to the vulnerable segments of the populations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
... Carol Cohn andCynthia Enloe (2003, 1201) welcome female leadership in international institutions, praise the passing of UNSC resolution 1325, but also emphasize the perils of legitimizing military intervention as a way to save non-Western women: 'You have to have a feminist understanding of orientalism'. Other scholars more strongly criticize the alliance of 'elite feminists' (Harrington 2011, 2) with militarized humanitarian intervention as 'neo-orientalist' (Doezema 2001(Doezema , 2010, 'embedded' (Hunt 2006), or 'governance feminism' (Halley et al. 2018). These affirmations and criticisms mirror the paradox inherent in the humanitarian machine, which invests power resources to liberate victims from their plight. ...
The prevention and mitigation of sexual and gender-based violence in (post-) conflict societies has become an important humanitarian activity. This introductory article examines the analytical discourses on these interventions, the institutionalization of SGBV expertise in international politics, and the emancipatory potential of anti-SGBV practices. It argues that the confluence of feminist professional activism and militarized humanitarian interventionism produced specific international activities against SGBV. As part of the institutionalization of gender themes in international politics, feminist emancipatory claims have been taken up by humanitarian organizations. The normal operating state of the humanitarian machine, however, undercuts its potential contribution to social transformation towards larger gender equality in (post-) conflict societies.
... The purported war of liberation, as reported by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and RAWA(the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan), has in many levels worsened the situation. 2 Afghan conservatives, in particular, have vehemently rejected a war being led in the name of women's rights since it was perceived as a threat to Afghan women's culture and religion. ...
The captivity narrative remains one of the most interesting and often troubling forms of writing. The captivity genre usually sheds light upon the abduction experience of white men and women in North Africa – historically known in Europe as ‘the Barbary Coast’ – and the Middle East. As a matter of historical fact, white women’s cultural encounter with their captors made them reveal their imperialist anxieties and perpetuate a stock of pre-conceived clichés about Muslim sexual predation as it has been echoed in the traditional Barbary Coast captivity narratives. My readings then reveal how white women’s interaction with the trope of Muslim captivity in contemporary abduction stories is characterised by ambivalence and identity reconstruction. By adopting a comparative study approach, this chapter attempts to show how white women’s incarceration in the Middle East was deployed by the Bush administration to rally support for the ‘War on Terror.’ It also endeavours to subvert the dominant Euro-American perceptions of the Muslim Other as ‘infidel’ and ‘rapist’ by foregrounding a counterstereotypical discourse on the relationship between white women hostages and their captors, and thereby destabilising the legitimacy of neo-colonial discourse and power.
... Like colonial projects before them, a rhetoric of protecting victimised Third World women is embedded within the discourse of intervention, even though militarised interventions subvert feminist aims and can ultimately exacerbate gendered insecurities (Hunt 2006; see also Orford 2002, 276). The most prominent case here is that of US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in the War on Terror, framed in the immediate post-9/11 period as wars for women's rights ). ...
In 1999, after 24-years of violent military occupation by Indonesian forces, the small country of Timor-Leste became host to one of the largest UN peace operations. The operation rested on a liberal paradigm of statehood, including nascent ideas on gender in peacebuilding processes. This book provides a critical feminist examination of the form and function of a gendered peace in Timor-Leste. Drawing on policy documents and field research in Timor-Leste with national organisations, international agencies and UN staff, the book examines gender policy with a feminist lens, exploring and developing a more complex account of 'gender' and 'women' in peace operations. It argues that gendered ideologies and power delimit the possibilities of building a gender-just peace, and contributes deep insight into how gendered logics inform peacebuilding processes, and specifically how these play out through the implementation of policy that explicitly seeks to reorder gender relations at sites in which peace operations deploy. By utilising a single case study, the book provides space to examine both international and national discourses, and contextualises its analysis of Women, Peace and Security within local histories and contexts. This book will be of interested to scholars and students of gender studies, global governance, International Relations, and security studies.
... CB: Do we need to think of NGOs as 'embedded' within the current structures? MF: The tendency toward 'embedded feminisms', a term coined by Krista Hunt (2006) and discussed by you in your work on terrorism studies (Brunner 2011), might apply to some NGO work. But certainly we need to keep a differentiated view: above all, I would make a plea for taking the agency of subjects seriously. ...
... Poverty and demand for credit also feed into discourses that have legitimized the expansion of microfinance. This instrumentalization of women's right was called 'embedded feminism' by the Canadian political scientist Krista (Hunt 2008) at a time when the USA also sought to morally legitimize its military intervention in Afghanistan by referring to women's rights. In this country where women have very limited scope for action and movement in the public sphere, microcredit programmes were again set up as the vehicle for empowerment, i.e. as a universal context-neutral instrument. ...
This chapter discusses microcredits at the intersection of four power regimes: the international financial market, development aid, policies of the nation state, and local and household systems of social reproduction and production. Gender, class/caste, race and post-colonial North–South relations as social categories of inequality cross cut these power regimes. Microcredits are a gendered instrument for inclusion into the financial market based on the narrative of a high female repayment morale. Development aid has adopted the Grameen Bank model and links lending to productive investment and ‘income-generating activities’ mainly in non-agricultural sectors. Thus microcredits facilitate a restructuring of rural economies from subsistence to market orientation and imply a financialization of everyday life and social reproduction in villages. However, owing to interest rates of 35 per cent, mostly consumptive investment and multiple lending, many women have found themselves caught in a spiral of debt. In 2010, following a period of rapid expansion, overheating and oversupply, the microcredit industry crashed in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Highly indebted women stopped repayment of loans, and some even committed suicide. The chapter highlights the paradox and ambivalent effects of microcredit on poverty reduction and women’s empowerment and discusses them as vehicles for leaving poverty management, in accordance with neoliberal ideology, up to the poor themselves and ease the responsibilities of the nation-state for development aid.
... Poverty and demand for credit also feed into discourses that have legitimized the expansion of microfinance. This instrumentalization of women's right was called 'embedded feminism' by the Canadian political scientist Krista (Hunt 2008) at a time when the USA also sought to morally legitimize its military intervention in Afghanistan by referring to women's rights. In this country where women have very limited scope for action and movement in the public sphere, microcredit programmes were again set up as the vehicle for empowerment, i.e. as a universal context-neutral instrument. ...
The power resources theory of labour is currently a popular instrument for the analysis of workers’ organizing efforts in developed economies with formalized labour markets. As it asks questions about the structural, organizational, institutional and societal (discursive) power resources of labour, it can be applied to the analysis of organizing efforts in economies with high levels of informal employment as well. Using the example of the informal economy in Senegal and specifically the organizing experience of the Confédération Générale des Travailleurs de l’Économie Informelle au Sénégal (CGTIS, Senegalese Confederation of Informal Economy Workers), this chapter explores the possibilities and limits of the power resources theory of labour to analyse informal economies and workers. In addition to traditional dependent workers, the Senegalese informal economy is characterized by small businesses and self-employed workers often acting as employers. These diverse actors are able to articulate mutual interests in an effort to establish institutional protections for labour, particularly for social protection. At the same time, they have organized themselves into joint organizations despite the fact that the diversity of their economic interests as business owners, employers and dependent employees cannot be captured by the power resources theory of labour. I find that Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, which highlights the role of identity in the formation of interests, makes it possible to understand that self-organization in the Senegalese informal economy at this time follows identity much more than class, because the diverse actors, regardless of their actual role, all perceive themselves as underprivileged and under-represented ‘workers’.
... Poverty and demand for credit also feed into discourses that have legitimized the expansion of microfinance. This instrumentalization of women's right was called 'embedded feminism' by the Canadian political scientist Krista (Hunt 2008) at a time when the USA also sought to morally legitimize its military intervention in Afghanistan by referring to women's rights. In this country where women have very limited scope for action and movement in the public sphere, microcredit programmes were again set up as the vehicle for empowerment, i.e. as a universal context-neutral instrument. ...
The book explores the debates surrounding sustainable livelihood in the neoliberal era effected through transformation of the nature of work and the role of institutions, particularly in the Global South. By creating gainful work and employment opportunities through formal and informal institutions using progressive instruments and innovations within rural and urban economies, livelihood becomes ‘sustainable’, thereby reducing inequality and increasing resilience among households.
Based on both theoretical and empirical studies from Asia and Africa, the book establishes the relationship between three broad concepts – work, institutions and sustainable development. The content has been divided into three broad sections: Rural Economy and Its Transformations; Urbanisation and Sustainable Livelihood; and Innovations and Instruments of Transformation. This book is a valuable resource for scholars of development studies, rural and urban studies, labour studies besides economics, sociology, political science and policymaking.
... Importantly, feminism has also struggled with assuming a monolithic identity and projecting this onto the homogenised category of 'women' which has been challenged by post-colonial and thirdwave feminist theorists (Butler 2006). Consideration of this is especially important when examining gender in peace operations and interventions: as a number of authors have highlighted, feminist rhetoric was historically utilised in colonial interventions into women's lives which saw 'other' women constructed as victimised, vulnerable and in need of intervention (Spivak 1988;Mohanty 1988;Hunt 2006;Kapur 2002). A constructed and homogenised category of 'woman' excludes and is silent on other axes of power, thus subverting these alternate and co-existing identities. ...
... Though it was hardly the first time the media played a role in warfare, as indicated by research on e.g. war photography, propaganda, embedded reporters and "CNN effects" (Sontag 2002;Hunt 2007;Brittain 2007), the war in eastern and southern Ukraine in 2014-15, in the aftermath of the "Maidan Revolution" and Russia´s annexation of Crimea, brought renewed attention to this issue. Observers have pointed at how Russian state-aligned media were mobilized in order to win not only the hearts and minds of people in Russia, but also of Russian-speakers in Ukraine who consume Russian TV news (Goble 2014;Pomerantsev & Weiss 2014;Kniivilä 2015). ...
The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the role of visibility in the production and contestation of belonging to political communities. On the basis of an empirical enquiry of Russian media during the 2010s, a theoretical conceptualization of the relation between visibility and belonging is suggested, starting in the idea that what becomes visible to publics and how, and what is rendered invisible, are the objects of constant political regulation and contestation. The suggested theory seeks to move beyond both an exclusively speech-oriented approach to belonging, and a binary view on visibility as either emancipatory or repressive. In three case studies, the thesis explores aspects of the problem of belonging and visibility. In all cases – each of which focuses on a specific project of belonging as enacted in contemporary Russian media – gendered, sexualized and ethnicized conceptions of community are at the center of the contestations. First, by analyzing narratives in Russian media about the 2013 ban on “homosexual propaganda”, the thesis shows that as projects of belonging produce specific gendered and sexualized conceptions of community, they seek to regulate the visibility of undesired, non-normative subjectivities. However, those regulatory efforts contain tensions that may serve as starting points for contestation. Second, by studying media narratives about the 2014 Sochi Olympics, the thesis shows that spectacular media events may serve to depoliticize particular notions of community by making them hypervisible and producing them as natural and inevitable, but such events may also serve as sites of repoliticization. Third, by analyzing how the Russian state-promoted narrative on the war in Ukraine 2014-15 was challenged, by Russian internet satire and by the media exposure of how Russian soldiers who had died in Ukraine were secretly buried, the thesis shows that contestations of dominant projects of belonging draw on invisibility, and often have an ambivalent, inside/outside relation to dominant narratives. The central claim of the thesis is that projects of belonging, aimed at (re)constituting political communities and their boundaries, seek to produce particular arrangements of visibility regulating what can be seen and how it can be seen in the public sphere, and what cannot be seen. Moreover, as visibility cannot be fixed entirely, precisely those arrangements become the target of political contestation. On a more analytically useful level, it is suggested that politics of belonging involves efforts to contain, amplify and contest visibility.
... Embedded Feminism -"white women saving brown women from brown men"In den Jahren nach den Anschlägen auf World Trade Center und Pentagon in den USA haben sich vor allem US-amerikanische feministische Theoretikerinnen intensiv mit den weitreichenden Konsequenzen des war on terror auseinandergesetzt, insbesondere mit den militärischen Interventionen der USA in Afghanistan und im Irak. Als sich abzeichnete, wie sehr Frauenrechte zur Legitimation vor allem für den Angriff auf Aufghanistan ins Treffen geführt würden, hat Krista Hunt den Begriff des embedded feminism(Hunt 2006) geprägt. Dieser bezieht sich bewusst auf die offizielle embedded journalism-Politik des US-amerikanischen Verteidigungsministeriums, die durch Integration ausgewählter Medien in den Prozess militärischer Operationen für patriotischere Berichterstattung sorgen sollte. ...
... CB: Do we need to think of NGOs as 'embedded' within the current structures? MF: The tendency toward 'embedded feminisms', a term coined by Krista Hunt (2006) and discussed by you in your work on terrorism studies (Brunner 2011), might apply to some NGO work. But certainly we need to keep a differentiated view: above all, I would make a plea for taking the agency of subjects seriously. ...
BETWEEN ACTIVISM AND ACADEMIA
INTRODUCTION
‘Democracy in Crisis: The Dynamics of Civic Protest and Civic Resistance’ was
the title of the twenty-sixth State of Peace Conference held in September 2012
at the Austrian Study Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution (ASPR).1
Located in the medieval castle of Stadtschlaining, the ASPR lies near the
former ‘iron curtain’ or ‘cold-war’ border between Austria and Hungary. At
the conference, scholars and practitioners from Austria, Germany, Slovenia,
Hungary, Italy, Northern Ireland and the Ukraine came together to discuss
the preconditions and challenges for civic protest, resistance and mobilization.2
Lilijana Burcar from Ljubljana and Magdalena Freudenschuß from Lueneburg
were invited to participate in the panel ‘Feminist Critique and Resistance’,
which was convened and chaired by Claudia Brunner from Klagenfurt.
The following conversation features the key points of the debate that took
place among the three of us: a feminist sociologist (Magdalena); a feminist political
scientist (Claudia); and a feminist literary scholar (Lilijana). Our conversation
began in preparation for the conference, continued on the conference
panel and during the breaks, and was put into written form via email after
the conference. The salient points of this discussion are shared here in an
effort to link European feminist insights3 to international feminist debates
on the multiple crises that mark contemporary global politics: the current
economic and financial crisis; environmental issues such as climate change;
and the crisis of reproduction and gender relations (see Demirovic´ et al.
2011). We do not seek to offer ready-made feminist solutions to these crises,
but hope to move forward the search and articulation of feminist solutions.
... Second, the reference to 'Muslim' highlights that ethnicity and religion are separable, although these terms are often used synonymously and/ or interchangeably for this population. the US and British governments to 'save' Muslim Afghan women by protecting women's rights from the oppressive rule of the Taliban (Bhattacharyya 2008;Hunt 2006;Kapur 2002;Razak 2008). Yet, interestingly, these same governments made no such commitments to women's issues in Afghanistan (and Iraq) before 9/11. ...
... Violence against women forms a significant theme in post-Cold War peacekeeping and democracy-building discourse. Narratives of violence against women and other atrocities justify military interventions to protect women from violent men who adhere to backward patriarchal cultures and routinely violate human rights (Hunt, 2006;Sagan, 2010). Peacekeeper training materials represent women in post conflict zones as likely traumatized by sexual violence (DPKO, 2002;Harrington, 2006). ...
Feminists have celebrated success in gendering security discourse and practice since the end of the Cold War. Scholars have adapted theories of contentious politics to analyze how transnational feminist networks achieved this. I argue that such theories would be enhanced by richer conceptualizations of how transnational feminist networks produce and disseminate new forms of global governmental knowledge and expertise. This article engages social movement theory with theories of global governmentality. Governmentality analysis typically focuses upon governmental power rather than political contention or the collective agency of political outsiders. However, I argue that governmentality analysis contributes to an account of feminist influence on the fields of development and security within global politics. The governmentality lens views politics as a struggle over truth and expertise. Since experts have authority to speak the truth on a given issue, governmentality analysis seeks to uncover the social basis of expertise. Such analysis of expertise can illuminate important aspects of the power of movements. The power of transnational women's movements lies in production and dissemination of knowledge about women within global knowledge networks.
The debate surrounding Muslim bodies and in particular Muslim women, continue to problematise dress typically associated with Islam, and in doing so question the agency of Muslim women. This chapter highlights how using an intersectional lens allows us to progress understanding of Muslim women. In particular, it is argued that beyond dress, wider aspects of racialised and gendered identities significantly determine experiences of Islamophobia. This chapter argues that the limiting and debilitating labels given to Muslim women, combined with a failure to recognise their agency results in them continuing to be crudely stereotyped in political and social discourses, as well as in sociological understanding. In challenging the oversimplification of Muslim women especially through dress, omits recognition that they have varied and complex identities, which involve different levels of association with their faith. In sum, the homogenisation of Muslim women does not depict the reality of their identities and experiences. This chapter argues that seeing Islamophobia as an intersectional phenomenon will result in a meaningful and more accurate understanding of the lives and identities of Muslim women.
Islam and Women” is a very broad topic, as complex as the lives of women that it encompasses. The volume is purposefully multidisciplinary. These authoritative chapters are from scholars at the cutting-edge of scholarship on, inter alia, Qur’ānic hermeneutics and ḥadīth studies; women’s legal and social rights; women’s scholarly, cultural, economic, and political activities in the premodern and modern Islamic societies; the rise of Islamic feminism and women’s activism and movements in a number of contemporary Muslim-majority countries and regions—including Egypt and North Africa, Turkey, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region, and South and Southeast Asia—and in Muslim-minority contexts in western Europe, the United States, and China. The politicized portrayal of Muslim women, especially of those who wear the headscarf (ḥijāb), in the global Western-dominated media and the weaponization of their bodies in certain kinds of political and feminist discourses also receive attention. These chapters delineate a broad spectrum of views on key issues that are prevalent inside and outside of academia and provide sophisticated and careful analysis of textual sources and of broad sociological and political trends. They emphasize above all the diversity present in Muslim women’s lives, both in the premodern and modern periods, and pay close attention to the historical and political contexts that shaped their lives and framed the thinking and actions of key female figures throughout Islamic history. Such an approach results in fine-grained macro- and microstudies of Muslim women’s lives that problematize reified assumptions of gender and agency in the context of Muslim-majority societies.
p>It is ironic, if not completely hypocritical, that in the same environment where gender equality has disappeared from discourses, making and implementation of policy, gender plays a rather prominent part, often centre-stage, when it comes to policy talk on specific groups of racialized women, immigrant women, multiculturalism and citizenship. As [Alexandra Dobrowolsky] has aptly observed, whereas women in Canada have in general been "invisibilized", "disappeared from the words and deeds of state actors" (2008: 465), some, specifically immigrant women, have been "instrumentalized," made "hyper visible, purposefully positioned in the public eye" (466). In the general public discourse and policy discussions, gender inequality is treated as a problem solved for white women, as if Canada is in a post-feminist state. As [Janine Brodie] and [Isabella Bakker] comment on Minister Bev Oda’s 2006 statement, gender is "everywhere but nowhere" in general policy discussions. Yet it is seen as a problem specific to immigrant women, often from racialized communities. On the one hand, there is no discourse (other than claims to a post-gender, post-feminist order) or policy on gender; on the other, there is an inflation of discourses on the gender of "others."
What is specific to the attention gender gets in recent public and policy discourses is that this attention is based specifically on a culturalist perspective. This perspective, which has gained a widespread currency as a central operational category in the social sciences and policy making in recent decades, uses a de-contextualized, de-materialized notion of "culture," often based on essentialized, simplified, homogenized, and static conceptions of how culture is assumed to operate. One of the major problems with a culturalized understanding of the problems facing immigrant women from racialized ethno-cultural communities is that this perspective blames a "package picture" of "culture" (Narayan 1997, 2000) in the country of origin for all of the gender inequalities immigrant women face in diaspora. This "package picture" of culture relies on essentialized, overgeneralized, and distorted assumptions about the "cultural luggage" individual women may carry. A second major problem is that culturalization overlooks the significance of gendering and racializing effects of Canadian policies and experiences on the women. Invisibilizing the relevance and significance of what happens "here and now" and through real, material impacts of state policies and dominant social, economic and political forces, it helps to let the "host" society and the state "off the hook" in both the analyses of and solutions offered for gender inequality for immigrant women.
[Hester Eisenstein] develops a powerful critique of liberal, "hegemonic feminism," showing how its central ideas have helped legitimize corporate capitalism. Critiquing recent U.S. feminist writing which suggests that we might be living in the best of times for women12 Eisenstein sides with Brenner instead, who has argued that it is rather "the best of times and the worst of times," a time when some women have clearly benefited and enjoyed opportunities whereas for most women economic changes in recent decades have represented a downward spiral in recent years. In this context, Eisenstein argues, "feminism in its organized forms has become all too compatible with an increasingly unjust and dangerous corporate capitalist system" (2009: 1), as some "demands of feminism have been absorbed and co-opted" within the system (Eisenstein, 2009: 16). In a world where alternatives to capitalism have become devalued and de-legitimized, she argues, several developments associated with the restructuring of the economy and of the state, as well as the "war on terrorism" have been able to draw on feminist ideas. As examples, Eisenstein (2005, 2009) mentions the decline of the family wage, the abolition of "welfare" in the traditional sense, and the 1996 Social Responsibility Act under the [Clinton] administration,13 as well as the targeting of women for microcredit and the use of female labour in export processing zones. Eisenstein concludes, "in its 21st century incarnation, feminism has been a useful handmaiden of capitalism" (Eisenstein, 2005:511).</p
Against the Eurocentric, heteronormative paradigms that continue to structure analysis of post-9/11 global warfare, this article asks what it means to decenter the view from the imperial war room, illustrated most poignantly in the 2016 thriller Eye in the Sky. Highlighting the role played by the Kenyan state in the ongoing war against the Somali militant group al-Shabaab, it takes seriously the African subjects who co-constitute geographies of war making in East Africa today, from the political and business elite who normalize militarized masculinities and femininities, to the African troops whose affective and violent labor sustains war making in Somalia. Far from a celebration of subaltern agency, the article engages the notion of a “subaltern geopolitics” that is mindful of asymmetries of power and that foregrounds ambiguous positions of marginality that are neither dominant nor resistant. Attention to entanglement disrupts binary analytical paradigms of global/local and masculine/feminine, and calls for a deeper consideration of collaboration and complicity.
Since 9/11, a number of scholars added gender as a new variable to explain how economic, political, and/or social developments in the Middle East have diverged from developments elsewhere. These studies relied almost exclusively on statistical analysis and frequently discounted much of the extant literature, especially the more feminist and historically sensitive and in-depth qualitative works on the subject matter. Almost uniformly, the point of departure for many of these works was the disempowered socioeconomic and/or political status of Arab/Muslim women. Most of the scholars of these works had no gender expertise and had never written on women previously. Regardless, these works spawned an important discussion in the field of comparative politics and their scholarly impact has been noteworthy. Such scholarship, however, is not benign.
Accordingly, this article seeks to answer two critical questions: How does the work of non-gender specialists of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) come to have such a significant impact on the study of women and politics in the field of comparative politics? How can we approach these research inquiries differently so that expertise, lived realities, and history matter? The article argues that feminist international relations could serve as a critical corrective to this current trajectory of comparative politics research. This corrective also requires a commitment to feminist scholarship that begins with women's lives and seeks to eliminate gender inequality, as well as greater understanding of the composition and changing structure of our disciplinary communities.
Feminist and postcolonial international relations scholars have demonstrated that representations of Middle Eastern women are used to legitimize wars. This article explores a recent, novel instance of this phenomenon that occurred in Syria. The article argues that Western representations of Kurdish female fighters (members of the Women’s Protection Units, or YPJ) helped to legitimize Operation Inherent Resolve. The article first uses content analysis to demonstrate that Western media reporting about the group, which rendered the YPJ hyper-visible, reflects a change in the discourse, which, I argue, made this foreign policy possible. This is followed by a discourse analysis of English-language documentaries, supported by Turkish-language sources, to show how specifically gendered and Orientalist narratives legitimized Western intervention. I find that rather than being depicted as they are typically, as passive, silent victims (requiring liberation), YPJ women are instead depicted atypically as agentic (as liberators). I then contrast this discourse with original translations of YPJ members’ counter-articulations about their identity in their own words, and show that Kurdish female militants propose radically alternative, non- and anti-Western accounts of their politics. In light of the tension between these two discourses, the article suggests that Western accounts, although endowing agency, suppress possibilities for more subversive (postcolonial) forms of agency.
Depois de décadas de debate entre estudiosas feministas, ainda há uma resistência generalizada a relações sérias entre as perspectivas ocidentais e não ocidentais de feminismo e gênero. Isso é ainda mais sintomático quando se trata de estudiosas feministas islâmicas. Com isso em mente, examino a obra da socióloga marroquina Fatema Mernissi. Argumenta-se que sua “dupla crítica” às representações das mulheres muçulmanas nos discursos das autoridades locais orientalistas e marroquinas realiza uma abordagem interseccional do gênero que está atenta a como ele se relaciona com classe e raça, mas que também é condicionado por encontros culturais. A atenção de Mernissi aos encontros culturais Leste/Oriente e Ocidente como constitutivos das relações de gênero contemporâneas em Maghreb oferece uma visão mais histórica e culturalmente informada sobre a questão de gênero nas sociedades de maioria muçulmana e ajuda a facilitar as conversas entre feministas ocidentais e islâmicas.
This paper is based on a case study of the online media practices of the neo-Nazi organisation, the Nordic Resistance Movement, conducted in the context of an ongoing project on contemporary forms of violent extremism in Sweden. Focusing on the activities of female “online influencers”, the paper explores the contradictory discourses around the role of women as “race warriors” and “Nordic wives” as this is articulated both by the women in the organisation themselves and in the online universe of the organisation more generally. On the one hand, women’s positions are determined and heavily policed by men in an organisation that openly propagates women’s subordination to men and their natural and biological role in the realm of homemaking. On the other, the discourses produced by these women are saturated by ideas of female empowerment, sisterhood, emancipation and the importance of women in the reproduction of the white race. The content analysis of online propaganda produced by female activists about the role of women positions these contradictory pulls of “White femininity” inherent to the white supremacist movements at the current political juncture in which the extreme right is growing and actively looking to recruit women as part of a broader strategy to “mainstream” in Sweden and mobilise internationally.
This chapter critically explores the existing literature and understandings of the gender dynamics of violent extremism and countering it. It outlines the ways in which violent extremism has been framed as a male phenomenon, and women’s participation has been neglected. This has generated a number of flawed assumptions regarding women’s roles in countering violent extremism (CVE). This chapter suggests ways in which security studies might progress, not through the simple addition of women, but via a reframing of the way in which gender is understood to incorporate power dynamics, and men.
Historically the captivity narrative served as an important metaphor for the risks faced by white settlers in the midst of menacing and barbaric savages. The Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 was the last captivity story that lived up to its seventeenth-century counterparts, and this chapter examines its features as well as its contradictions. Subsequent captivity dramas foisted the older model onto humanitarian wars designed to save helpless victims, particularly children, from the savagery of ruthless governments.
In this chapter, the move towards humanitarian intervention and the rise of human rights discourse is examined in terms of the politics of protection and international ordering. Since the end of the Cold War, human rights and human security has become a central focus of the international security agenda. Intervening to defend and protect human rights is now an embedded practice and norm in international relations. This chapter explores how humanitarian intervention and human rights discourse is inherently gendered and how it reworks masculinism in subtle and discreet ways. Working from the perspective of the politics of protection, it queries the discourses that permit a more robust form of military humanitarian intervention to protect human rights and to ‘save women’.
This chapter demonstrates how masculinism continues to haunt many attempts to account for or challenge gender-based violence or violence against women. While worthwhile and marking progress, approaches that target men for primary prevention still risk negating structural gendered elements that underpin the phenomenon and re-individualising solutions. These approaches also risk re-invoking essential and dominative masculinism in protectionist ways. Additionally, some men-centred approaches risk construction of protectionist masculinism rather than challenging the underpinning gender dynamics. Feminist responses to gendered violence likewise risk recuperation by dualistic discourses that perpetuate didacticism. For example, unproductive oppositions between third wave approaches such as SlutWalk against contemporary radical feminism perpetuates adversariality. Likewise, failures of SlutWalk and more extremely protectionist Femen to take on intersectional critique limits their capacity to address inequalities.
Drone warfare has been the subject of intense debate and scholarly attention in recent years, with a clear focus on killing from a distance, the subjectivity of the drone operator and the impact of this form of warfare on militaries and soldiers. Few studies, however, have treated drone warfare to a gendered analysis. This chapter aims to explore drone warfare from a number of different gendered perspectives that bring to the fore the intricate ways in which the domestic/international divide blurs, and how masculinism is reasserted in warfare. It focuses on the primacy of technology and how masculinist subjectivities are reconstituted through drone warfare.
‘Surrounded as we are by a masculinized populism that continues to enable insecurity, violence, and oppression, this book demonstrates the depth and breadth of the lineages that facilitate these masculinist practices.’
- Brent J. Steele, University of Utah, USA
‘This book shows how reactionary movements systematically mobilize masculine resentment, and how that links up with broader structures of patriarchy, white supremacy, and colonialism. It is essential for scholars, writers and journalists seeking to fully understand antifeminism as a political and ideological force.’
- Jason Wilson, Columnist and Journalist at The Guardian
This book examines whether we are witnessing the resilience, persistence and adaptation of masculinist discourses and practices at both domestic and international levels in the contemporary global context. Beginning with an innovative conceptualisation of masculinism, the book draws on interdisciplinary work to analyse its contours and practices across four case studies. From the anti-feminist backlash that can be found in various men’s rights movements, and responses to gender-based and sexual violence, to the masculinist underpinnings of human rights discourse, and modes of intervention to protect, including drone warfare. This interdisciplinary work will appeal to students and scholars of gender studies, security and international relations, and sociology.
Lucy Nicholas is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Swinburne University, Australia.
Christine Agius is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Swinburne University, Australia.
This book offers an accessible and timely analysis of the 'War on Terror', based on an innovative approach to a broad range of theoretical and empirical research. It uses 'gendered orientalism' as a lens through which to read the relationship between the George W. Bush administration, gendered and racialized military intervention, and global politics. Khalid argues that legitimacy, power, and authority in global politics, and the 'War on Terror' specifically, are discursively constructed through representations that are gendered and racialized, and often orientalist. Looking at the ways in which 'official' US 'War on Terror' discourse enabled military intervention into Afghanistan and Iraq, the book takes a postcolonial feminist approach to broaden the scope of critical analyses of the 'War on Terror' and reflect on the gendered and racial underpinnings of key relations of power within contemporary global politics. This book is a unique, innovative and significant analysis of the operation of race, orientalism, and gender in global politics, and the 'War on Terror' specifically. It will be of great interest to scholars and graduates interested in gender politics, development, humanitarian intervention, international (global) relations, Middle East politics, security, and US foreign policy.
Wer sich politikwissenschaftlich mit Konfliktursachen und Konfliktdynamiken auseinandersetzen will, sieht sich mit einer Reihe von Herausforderungen konfrontiert. Als Erstes stellt sich die Frage, was Konflikte eigentlich sind und welche Konflikte überhaupt als untersuchungsrelevant eingestuft werden.
Schlagwörter: Krise der Mikrofinanzierung, finanzielle Inklusion, Finanzialisierung des Alltagslebens, Armutsreduktion, Frauenempowerment, neoliberale Eigenverantwortung
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About Reliable Women and Financial Inclusion.
Abstract
Founded on a discourse which assumes a feminized high repayment morale, the article discusses microcredits as a gendered instrument for the inclusion of poor women in India into the financial market. Microfinancing is analysed at the intersection of four power regimes: the international financial market, development policies, nation-states and their social policies, and reproduction and production regimes at the local and household levels. Cross-cutting these power regimes, are the hierarchical social relations of class, caste, race, gender and the post-colonial North-South divide. The expansion of microcredit lending in India was legitimised by development aid organisations as a means to proverty reduction and women’s empowerment. However, not only do microcredits create cycles of debt, they restructure the local economy and reproduction and are implicated in a neoliberal shift of social responsibilities from the nation-state to the poor. Furthermore, as a result of the commercialisation of financial services and, thus, their subjugation under the rationale of profit and growth, in 2010 the microcredit industry in India crashed. Following, this article highlights the paradoxical and ambivalent effects of microcredits on poverty management and on women’s empowerment in the Indian context.
Keywords: crisis of microfinance, financial inclusion, financialisation of everyday life, poverty reduction, women’s empowerment, neoliberal responsibilisation
Shadia Edwards-Dashti reflects on the impact of orientalism on the construction of the Middle Eastern woman, which in presenting her as a commodity serves to objectify her. Significant in this is the relationship between patriarchy, orientalism and imperialism, and their intersectionality with religion, culture and the state. Western secular discourse characterises the Middle East by its subjugation and oppression of women (Bryan 2012). Yegenoglu (1998) explores how the West constructs the ‘oriental’ woman and women of the Middle East. Images and representations of women and men are dominated by oriental presumptions and colonial legacies that continue to affect the shaping of gender norms and relations. Edwards-Dashti observes that destruction of the twin towers in New York, now known universally as ‘9/11ʹ, provided the catalyst for a new escalation, building on an already established view—that Muslims in the Middle East were incapable of establishing democratic, secular and egalitarian societies, leaving the Western world responsible for ‘saving’ women in these societies from subjugation to men. Western feminists are, she notes, implicated in the failure to acknowledge that however truncated women’s lives and sphere of operation may be, nevertheless women (in whatever culture, religion, society or geographical region they live) are capable of and do ‘shape their own lives’ in resistance to subjugation and oppression. Yet Western governments have eagerly appropriated and manipulated feminist rhetoric to advance imperialistic designs, starkly illustrated by Edwards-Dashti in the Bush administration’s pretence of a so-called humanitarian and civilising mission to liberate Muslim women. She points to Kurdish women fighting for their own and their compatriots’ lives, rights and personhood as confirming that Muslim women are not lacking in their own agency.
At the time of the Kosovo intervention in April 1999, Tony Blair, as British Prime Minister, was deeply committed to what he called humanitarian intervention. At a NATO summit in Chicago in that month he set out his personal concerns for the victims of oppressive regimes and proposed political responses in moral terms:
We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure…the principle of non-interference must be qualified in important respects. Acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter. When oppression produces massive flows of refugees which unsettle neighbouring countries then they can properly be described as ‘threats to international peace and security’.1
Was haben operative Eingriffe an weiblichen Genitalien mit von Frauen verübten
Selbstmordanschlägen zu tun? Die zunächst nahe liegende Antwort scheint „nichts“
zu sein – zu divergent erscheinen AkteurInnen, Motivationen, Ziele, Begleitumstände
und Orte des Geschehens. Die diskursive Dynamisierung rund um die genannten
Themen wirft Fragen zur Funktion von feministischen „Konjunkturen“ bestimmter
Themen und deren Kompatibilität mit geopolitischen Transformationen globaler
Machtverhältnisse auf. Vor diesem Hintergrund stellt sich die Frage, „(w)er soll von
wem und von was befreit werden?“ (Castro Varela/Dhawan 2004, 205), wann, warum
und mit welchen (Neben-)Absichten, immer wieder neu.
In recent years in Canada, even as women in general have become almost invisible in social policy areas, the direction of policy debates and policy making has moved simultaneously and increasingly to invisibilizing and/or individualizing issues for white and Canadian-born women and culturalizing issues facing immigrant and racialized women. It seems that policy discourse and policy making under neoliberalism treat gender inequality as a problem solved for white Canadian women,1 and an ongoing, cultural (baggage) problem for immigrant and racialized/culturalized women. The paper first focuses on the conditions of migrant caregivers as an example of a paradox in relation to recent developments in women's place in Canadian social policy and then discusses the paradox of invisibility and hyper-visibility of women in public and policy discourses. The second section raises questions on where mainstream feminism stands in relation to this paradox to interrogate the contradictory and potentially subversive effects of neoliberalism and neoconservatism on feminism itself.
In the 1990s, feminist scholars on the politics of rape experienced a sudden surge of interest in their, until then, marginal field. Why was the 1990s the right time for rape to become an international security problem? Furthermore, why suddenly in the 1990s did rape become problematized as an international issue not just by the feminist fringes of protest movements but also by intergovernmental bureaucracies? To explore these questions, Carol Harrington traces the historical change in the politicization of rape as an international problem and explains how early international women's organizations gained expert authority on rape by drawing on abolitionist rhetoric of bodily integrity. She discusses why they abandoned their politicization of rape in the inter-war period and why rape only reappeared as an international security question requiring gender expertise on trauma after the Cold War.
This article brings gender into the two-solitudes debate in Canadian foreign and defence policy by analyzing English- and French-Canadian newspaper coverage of women in combat in Afghanistan. We argue that there are no “two solitudes”—no national divisions are apparent between Quebec and the rest of Canada (ROC) when it comes to media representations of women in combat. Our findings confirm what other scholars have recently argued, which is that differences between the two solitudes on issues of defence policy may be less significant than often stated. The narrative of female combat soldiers presented in the media helps construct a pan-Canadian identity around the idea of Canada’s progressiveness on military gender integration. We also found that the extent to which the death of a female combat soldier received media attention was largely based on her origin from Quebec or the ROC. These differences lead us to conclude that a selective heroization of soldiers on the basis of their origins affects Canadian media coverage of the war.
This article examines gender mainstreaming processes in successive UN peacebuilding missions in Timor-Leste, with a focus on the relationship between these missions and the national women's organizations who were vehicles for implementation. Apparent frictions occur in this process and the article suggests that the gender rhetoric and practice incorporated into UN peacebuilding since 2000 can have potentially destabilizing effects for women's activism in post-conflict settings. Women's organizations socialize and negotiate around gender norms in order to mitigate this potential and aim to identify the synergies between women's activism before peacebuilding, and gender mainstreaming policies and practice post-conflict. This article provides insight into how national women's organizations socialize gender norms, as well as how women's post-conflict activism can be shaped by the presence of UN peacebuilding.
Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Mike Nichols's film about the womanizing Congressman who engineered black funds for the CIA's proxy war in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, is historically misleading but highly instructive, because in packaging dominant American masculine identity and war politics as popular entertainment for post-9/11 audiences, it reveals the sexed and gendered ‘politics of the visual’ in global affairs. This intertextual study of ‘Charlie Wilson's war’ as movie, constructed history and legacy examines Wilson as a prime exhibit of a needy masculinity that, like the film's emasculated CIA, bulks itself up through surrogate military selves. It also analyses modes of the imaginary and specularity in brother-bonding with the mujahidin, tracks the proxy system's loops of masculine identity-and-war-making between Stateside and South Asia in the post-Vietnam 1980s and interrogates the dynamics of imperial ‘un-seeing’ in this campaign and its long aftermath. While US proxy wars proliferate worldwide, the lack of useable political memory about the ground truths of ‘Charlie's war’ continues to matter because America's second ‘good’ war in Afghanistan, bound to the first by gendered causal links, has re-empowered the forces that still menace women's rights and lives.
This article explores English women's important contributions to the campaign against sati (widow-burning) in India. It investigates how they attempted to eradicate sati through supporting missionary activity and female education in India, and through petitioning Parliament in Britain. English women's involvement in this campaign, which was contemporaneous with their involvement in the anti-slavery movement, has hitherto been ignored by historians. The research presented in this article offers new perspectives on the meaning of female emancipation within an evangelical and imperial framework. Taken alongside work on the anti-slavery movement, it adds to ourunderstanding of early nineteenth-century female philanthropy throughclarifying the imperial dimensions of ‘women's mission to women’. It alsooffers new insights into women's relationship to politics in the period, and into the origins of ‘imperial feminism’