58 research outputs found
Critical Military Studies as Method: An Approach to Studying Gender and the Military
No full textThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Palgrave Macmillan via the DOI in this record
Gender, Race, Militarism and Remembrance: The Everyday Geopolitics of the Poppy
No full textThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis (Routledge) via the DOI in this record.This paper offers a feminist analysis of how British military violence and war are, in part, made possible through everyday embodied and emotional practices of remembrance and forgetting. Focusing on recent iterations of the Royal British Legion’s Annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the emotionality, and gendered and racial politics of collective mourning provide opportunities for the emergence of “communities of feeling”, through which differently gendered and racialised individuals can find their “place” in the national story. I aim to show that in relying on such gendered and racial logics of emotion, the Poppy Appeal invites communities of feeling to remember military sacrifice, whilst forgetting the violence and bloodiness of actual warfare. In so doing, the poppy serves to reinstitute war as an activity in which masculinised, muscular ‘protectors’ necessarily make sacrifices for the feminised ‘protected’. The poppy is thus not only a site for examining the everyday politics of contemporary collective mourning, but its emotional, gendered and racialised foundations and how these work together to animate the geopolitics of war
Liberal militarism as insecurity, desire and ambivalence: Gender, race and the everyday geopolitics of war
No full textThe use and maintenance of military force as a means of achieving security makes the identity and continued existence of states as legitimate protectors of populations intelligible. In liberal democracies, however, where individual freedom is the condition of existence, citizens have to be motivated to cede some of that freedom in exchange for security. Accordingly, liberal militarism becomes possible only when military action and preparedness become meaningful responses to threats posed to the social body, not just the state, meaning that it relies on co-constitutive practices of the geopolitical and the everyday. Through a feminist discursive analysis of British airstrikes in Syria and attendant debates on Syrian refugees, I examine how liberal militarism is animated through these co-constitutive sites, with differential effects. Paying particular attention to gender and race, I argue that militarism is an outcome of social practices characterized as much by everyday desires and ambivalence as by fear and bellicosity. Moreover, I aim to show how the diffuse and often uneven effects produced by liberal militarism actually make many liberal subjects less secure. I suggest therefore that despite the claims of liberal states that military power provides security, for many militarism is insecurity.</jats:p
War is Where the Hearth is: Gendered Labour and the Everyday Reproduction of the Geopolitical in the Army Reserves
No full textThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordThe feminized imaginary of ‘home and hearth’ has long been central to the notion of soldiering as masculinist protection. Soldiering and war are not only materialized by gendered imaginaries of home and hearth though, but through everyday labours enacted within the home. Focusing on indepth qualitative research with women partners and spouses of British Army reservists, we examine how women’s everyday domestic and emotional labour enables reservists to serve, constituting ‘hearth and home’ as a site through which war is made possible. As reservists – who are still overwhelmingly heterosexual men – become increasingly called upon by the state, one must consider how the changing nature of the Army’s procurement of soldiers is also changing demands on women’s labour. Feminist IPE scholars have shown broader trends in the outsourcing of labour to women and its privatisation. Our research similarly underscores the significance of everyday gendered labour to the geopolitical. Moreover, we highlight the fragility of military power, given that women can withdraw their labour at any time. The article concludes that paying attention to women’s everyday labour in the home facilitates greater understanding of one of the key sites through which war is both materialized and challenged.This study was jointly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/L013029/1) and the Ministry of Defence
Beyond the state: Reimagining protection as constellations of care
No full textProtection is traditionally conceptualised in relation to the state. Not only does the state provide protection externally, i.e. vis-à-vis other states in an assumed anarchical system, but also internally through various instruments of care. Such protection however relies on the social contract and is thus inherently transactional. Protection, and associated care, then becomes something earned, something one is entitled to by virtue of certain, past, actions and behaviours, rather than something that is compassionately provided. How can we rethink protection away from the state? How to transform glimmers of hope of alternatives to the transactional model into sustained and sustainable change and care? We want to think through and offer alternative ways of care/ing: those more (inter-)personal, more community-focused, centred around intergenerational promises and responsibilities to ensure both a liveable present and future, ultimately disrupting imposed (state) boundaries that rely on and foster difference
From Hitler’s Youth to the British Child Soldier: How the Martial Regulation of Children Normalizes and Legitimizes War
No full textTelling Geopolitical Tales: Temporality, Rationality, and the Childish in the Ongoing War for the Falklands-Malvinas Islands
No full textAnniversaries of war often present opportunities for the telling and retelling of tales about the geopolitical; tales of a nation’s sovereignty, its identity, its security, and how these are imagined and reimagined through the notion of specific conflicts, their histories, beginnings, ends and aftermaths. By examining the case of the ongoing ‘war’ over the Falklands-Malvinas, and a particular set of stories where the ‘childish’ has come to characterise relations and differences between Britain and Argentina, this paper explores how the temporality of ‘the anniversary’ can enable certain claims, about the rationality of war, as a means of safeguarding sovereignty, identity and security, to become common sensical. The paper argues that more attention should be paid to geopolitical tales of supposedly ‘adult’ and ‘childish’ characters because these constructions have the potential to normalise violence as a common-sensical act of strong, adult nations; as an integral part of their national stories that obscures the aggressive role of the state in normalising and perpetuating violence
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