Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations 0367477629, 9780367477622

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GENDER MATTERS IN GLOBAL POLITICS

Gender Matters in Global Politics is a comprehensive textbook for advanced undergraduates studying politics, international relations, development and similar courses. It provides students with an accessible but in-depth account of feminist methodologies, gender theory and feminist approaches to key topics and themes in global politics. This textbook is written by an international line-up of established and emerging scholars from a range of theoretical perspectives, bringing together cutting-edge feminist scholarship in a variety of areas. This fully revised and updated third edition: • introduces students to feminist and gender theory and explains the relevance to contemporary global politics; • explains the insights of feminist theory for a range of fields of study, including international relations, international political economy and security studies; • presents feminist approaches to key contemporary issues such as climate change, digital politics, war and militarism, disability and global health; and • features pedagogical tools and resources, including discussion questions, suggestions for further reading and online resources. This text enables students to develop a sophisticated understanding of the work that gender does in policies and practices of global politics. Support material for this book can be found at www.routledge.com/9780367477608 Laura J. Shepherd is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her primary research focuses on the United Nations Security Council’s ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda, and the motifs of gender, violence and security that animate it.

Caitlin Hamilton is a researcher, writer and editor. She holds a doctorate in International Relations and has industry experience across law, education, publishing, not-for-profit and government. She is also the founder of Hamilton Editorial.

GENDER MATTERS IN GLOBAL POLITICS A Feminist Introduction to International Relations Third edition

Edited by Laura J. Shepherd and Caitlin Hamilton

Cover image: © Getty Images Third edition published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Laura J. Shepherd and Caitlin Hamilton; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Laura J. Shepherd and Caitlin Hamilton to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2010 Second edition published by Routledge 2015 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shepherd, Laura J., editor. | Hamilton, Caitlin, editor. Title: Gender matters in global politics : a feminist introduction to international relations / edited by Laura J. Shepherd and Caitlin Hamilton. Description: 3rd edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022021161 (print) | LCCN 2022021162 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367477622 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367477608 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003036432 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: International relations. | International relations--Social aspects. | Feminism. | Feminist theory. Classification: LCC JZ1253.2 .G46 2023 (print) | LCC JZ1253.2 (ebook) | DDC 327.101--dc23/20220627 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021161 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021162 ISBN: 978-0-367-47762-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-47760-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-03643-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432 Typeset in Sabon LT Std by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. Support material for this book can be found at www.routledge.com/9780367477608

For James

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

CONTENTS

List of Figures x Notes on Contributors xi Acknowledgements xvi Foreword by Cynthia Enloe xvii

SECTION 1 1 1. Introduction Laura J. Shepherd and Caitlin Hamilton

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2. Feminist International Relations Cristina Masters and Marysia Zalewski

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3. Creativity and Feminist Knowledge shine choi

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4. Feminist Methodology Roxani Krystalli

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5. Intersectionality Celeste Montoya

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6. (Why) Gender Matters in Global Politics Laura J. Shepherd

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SECTION 2 

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7. Advocacy, Activism and Resistance Valentine M. Moghadam

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CON T EN T S

8. Art and Aesthetics Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison 9. Body Politics Wendy Harcourt

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10. Care Work 124 Christina Gabriel 11. Development 140 Alba Rosa Boer Cueva 12. Digital Politics 154 William Clapton 13. Disability 167 Ana Bê 14. Ecology/Environment 180 Emma Foster 15. Global Governance 195 Penny Griffin 16. Global Health 211 Sara E. Davies 17. International/Global Political Economy 227 V. Spike Peterson 18. International Law 243 Sara Bertotti 19. Land, Water and Food 259 Monika Barthwal-Datta and Soumita Basu 20. Migration and Displacement 275 Lucy Hall 21. Militarism and Security 288 Megan MacKenzie and Nicole Wegner viii

CON T EN T S

22. Nationalism and Populism 301 Dibyesh Anand 23. Peace 314 Catia C. Confortini and Annick T. R. Wibben 24. Queer Politics 327 Rahul Rao 25. ‘Race’ and Coloniality 340 Columba Achilleos-Sarll 26. Religion 354 Katherine E. Brown 27. Terrorism and Political Violence 370 Caron Gentry and Laura Sjoberg 28. Violence 385 Swati Parashar Index 399

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LIST OF FIGURES

6.1 Can you make sense of these signs? 62 8.1 US Navy Lieutenant Commander Loring Issaac Perry takes a moment to comfort an Indonesian woman and her child that lost everything they had during the tsunami in the city of Meulaboh on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. 98 8.2 Matteo di Giovanni (1435–1495), The Madonna and Child with Saints Bernardino of Siena and Jerome, Behind Them Two Angels. 101 17.1 The gendered ‘iceberg’ of (licit) informal economic activities. 235 17.2 Lurie’s ‘Foreign Affairs’ 238 27.1 Nelson Mandela (right) and F.W. de Klerk. 373

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Columba Achilleos-Sarll is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her primary research examines the United Nation’s Security Council’s ‘Women, Peace and Security’ (WPS) agenda. More broadly, her work focuses on feminist and postcolonial approaches to international relations, gender, race and security, civil society and advocacy, feminist foreign policy and visual politics. Dibyesh Anand is the Head of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Westminster, London, UK, and a Professor of International Relations. He has spoken about, and published on, varied topics, including Tibet, China, the China-India border dispute, Hindu nationalism in India, Islamophobia, conflict in Kashmir and sexuality. He identifies as queer in personal and political terms. Monika Barthwal-Datta is a Senior Lecturer in International Security in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia. Her primary areas of research are critical security studies, strategic narratives, non-traditional security issues, and regional security in South Asia. Soumita Basu is an Assistant Professor (Sr.) of International Relations at the South Asian University, New Delhi, India. She is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. She has published on gender, security, and the United Nations. Ana Bê is a Lecturer in Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University, UK. Her research focuses on issues of inequality and exclusion for disabled people, with a particular focus on people who live with chronic conditions. She has published in numerous prestigious international journals and her work is included in several edited collections. Sara Bertotti is a Doctoral Researcher at the School of Law at SOAS University of London, UK. Her research focuses on law, peace agreements, and emancipatory socio-political change, and her thesis is entitled xi

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‘Between Law and Peace: A Critical Study of the Relationship between Peace Agreements, Law and Socio-political Change’. Roland Bleiker is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, Australia, where he coordinates an interdisciplinary research program on Visual Politics. His research explores the political role of aesthetics, visuality, and emotions, which he examines across a range of issues, from security, humanitarianism, and peacebuilding to protest movements and the conflict in Korea. Alba Rosa Boer Cueva is a PhD Candidate in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia, researching conceptualisations of women’s empowerment and (in) security within Colombia’s context of violent internal conflict. Drawing on decolonial feminism and feminist peace research, her research offers a reinterpretation of women’s empowerment in relation to (in)security and hopes to contribute to the generation of more meaningful analyses of and partnerships across various frameworks for peace and justice. Katherine E. Brown is a Reader in Religion and Global Security in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham, UK. She researches the role of gender and religion in relation to extremism, and has an interest in gender-mainstreaming countering and preventing violent extremism efforts. Her current project focuses on gender, religion, and resilience in marginalised groups. shine choi teaches Political Theory and International Relations at Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research has focused on how an illiberal state such as North Korea creates the international as a space of politics. Other research areas include non-western IR theory, intercultural relations, visuality and aesthetics, postcolonial feminist theory, and critical/creative methods. William Clapton is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia. He has research interests in risk in International Relations, the immigration and security policies of the USA, European Union, and Australia, and popular culture in global politics. Catia C. Confortini is an Associate Professor of Peace and Justice Studies at Wellesley College, USA. Her work is inscribed in the feminist peace research tradition and explores the contributions of women’s peace activism to peace studies and feminist theories of peace and violence. Sara E. Davies is a Professor of International Relations at the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, Australia. Her research career has been devoted to identifying the political conditions that deny humans access to civil, economic, and social human rights. xii

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Her research has focused on situations where humans face immense vulnerability: disease outbreaks events, gender-based and sexual violence in conflict, and forced displacement. Emma Foster is an Associate Lecturer in International Politics and Gender in the Department of Political Science and International Politics at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research interests include environmental politics, gender and sexuality studies, (de)politicisation and anti-politics, international sustainable development policy, and development studies more broadly. Christina Gabriel is a Professor of Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her research addresses themes relating to Canadian immigration policy, temporary labour migration, border control, transnational care labour, and North American regional integration. Caron Gentry is Faculty Pro Vice-Chancellor for Arts, Design, and Social Sciences at Northumbria University, UK, where she is also a Professor of International Relations. Her main research area is on gender and terrorism. Penny Griffin is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia. Her work explores the global political economy from a gender perspective, including the relationship between gender and economic crisis. Lucy Hall is a Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her research explores questions of gender, protection and violence. She previously worked for the UN Refugee Agency in protection learning and training. Caitlin Hamilton is a researcher, writer and editor. She is a qualified lawyer, holds a doctorate in International Relations and has industry experience across law, education, publishing, not-for-profit and government. She is also the founder of Hamilton Editorial. Wendy Harcourt is a Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She joined the ISS in November 2011 after 23 years at the Society for International Development, Rome, Italy, as Editor of the journal Development. She has published widely on gender and development issues. She received the 2010 FWSA Book Prize. Emma Hutchison is an Associate Professor and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her work focuses on xiii

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emotions and trauma in world politics, particularly in relation to security, humanitarianism and international aid. She has been awarded the British International Studies Association Susan Strange Book Prize and the ISA Theory Section Best Book Prize. Roxani Krystalli is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of St Andrews School of International Relations, UK. Her research and teaching focus on feminist peace and conflict studies, as well as on the politics of nature and place. She is particularly interested in the role and ethics of storytelling about violence, as well as how the study and pedagogy of peace would be different if we centred experiences of love and care. Megan MacKenzie is a Professor and Simons Chair in International Law and Human Security in the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her work focuses on gendered myths that sustain war. Cristina Masters is a Lecturer of International Politics at the University of Manchester, UK. She has written on the gendered politics of technology and warfare. Broadly, she is interested in how bodies are rendered as killers and killable through gendered and raced logics in practices of global politics. She is also a committed teacher and has been awarded by the Faculty of Humanities and School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester with Outstanding Teacher Awards in 2019/20 and 2020/21. Valentine M. Moghadam is a Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. In addition to her academic career, she has twice been a UN staff member (UNU/WIDER, Helsinki, Finland, 1990–1995; and at UNESCO, Paris, 2004–2006). Celeste Montoya is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. Her work focuses on the ways in which women and racialised communities mobilise to enact change, with a particular focus on Latinas and other women of colour. She is interested in how marginalised groups work within and outside of political institutions, domestically, transnationally and intersectionally. Swati Parashar is a Professor in Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies at Gothenburg University, Sweden. Her research interests include feminism, postcolonialism, conflict, and development in South Asia. She is a co-editor of the International Feminist Journal of Politics and serves on the advisory boards of Millennium, Security Dialogue, Third World Quarterly and Critical Terrorism Studies. V. Spike Peterson is a Professor of International Relations and affiliated faculty in Gender and Women’s Studies and the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona, USA. Her cross-disciplinary critical theory work addresses sex/gender and racial dynamics of global political economy and Anglo-European imperialism in relation to marriage, migration, xiv

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citizenship and nationalism. She is currently working on the undertheorised power relations of privilege that produce, normalise and sustain intersecting social hierarchies. Rahul Rao is a Lecturer in International Political Thought in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, UK. His research interests encompass postcolonial and queer approaches to IR, gender and sexuality and the politics of South Asia. He is currently writing a book about the global politics of race and caste as manifested in controversies over statues. He is a member of the Radical Philosophy collective. Laura J. Shepherd is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her primary research focuses on the United Nations Security Council’s ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda, and the motifs of gender, violence, and security that animate it. She tweets from @drljshepherd and blogs semi-regularly for The Disorder of Things. Laura Sjoberg is a British Academy Global Professor of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway University of London, UK. She specialises in genders, sexualities, international relations and international security, with work on war theory and women’s political violence. Nicole Wegner is an Affiliated Researcher of the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research explores gendered security, war and peace, through a feminist, antimilitarist perspective. Annick T. R. Wibben is Anna Lindh Professor of Gender, Peace and Security at the Swedish Defence University. Her research straddles critical security and military studies, peace studies and feminist IR. Marysia Zalewski is a Professor of International Relations at Cardiff University in Wales, UK. Most of her work is about studying global politics using critical feminist theories. She is the recipient of an Eminent Scholarship awarded by the International Studies Association. Currently she is working on critical projects on masculinities, performance and knowledge production in international politics and creative writing in global politics. She is currently one of the Editors-in-Chief of the journal International Feminist Journal of Politics.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Cait’s work on this project was supported by a postdoctoral research fellowship provided by the UKRI GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub. The editors are grateful to Caitlin Biddolph for her assistance in compiling the online resources for the collection.

xvi

FOREWORD

Cynthia Enloe Four young Kashmiri scholars got together recently to launch an online webinar series. They wanted to explore the gender dynamics that have fuelled – and still are fuelling – militarism in their daily lives. It felt urgent to them. When they asked me to take part, I could feel their collective urgency. Doing gender analysis didn’t seem ‘academic’. It felt like a lifeline for survival in perilous times. It mattered. Laura Shepherd and Caitlin Hamilton have brought together this splendid community of gender experts to show us when, how and why our doing explorations of gender matters. That is, they are offering us here investigations of the workings both of the politics of masculinities (those standards and beliefs of manliness which are always diverse, multiple and fluid) and the politics of femininities (even when one sort of femininity is held up as the alleged model, femininities too are diverse, multiple and in flux) because those workings matter. If we each are going to act effectively and responsibly in this complex world, they matter. What matters? Each of us makes almost hourly decisions about what matters and what does not matter, what we need to pay attention to and what we can shrug off. We decide that something matters when we presume or discover (presuming and discovering, of course, are not identical) that it has significant consequences. By contrast, we dismiss something as not mattering – ‘Oh, let’s not bother about that!’ – when we believe that it has no consequences or that its consequences are merely trivial. Getting this calculation right takes energy and self-awareness. Getting wrong our calculation of what matters can be risky, sometimes dangerously risky. Here’s a suggestion: as you read – with pen in hand – each of the chapters here, try making your own list of all the mistaken presumptions that many gender-dismissive observers of world politics have made: for instance, that national security officials aspiring to seem ‘manly’ in the eyes of other nuclear experts has had nothing to do with governments’ pursuit of nuclear weapons; or that many women’s identity as mothers never has led to women effectively challenging their governments; or that men’s violence against women – on a date, in marriage, on a battlefield, in xvii

FOREWORD

the workplace – is simply a natural (inevitable, unquestioned) part of social life, thus outside the political arena. Wait. You’re not done yet. Now look at your list. After each genderdismissive assumption you’ve found, write what about political reality you think that gender-uncurious commentator missed: a chief cause driving what happened? One of the influential actors who should be held to account? The sort of hardships that certain people endured? As the contributions here make clear, however, doing gender-curious political investigations will call on each of us to muster extra energy. A ‘laid-back feminist analyst’ is an oxymoron. But not paying serious attention to the intersectional workings of gender in world politics carries a steep price. Or, to put it more positively, paying serious attention to, weighing and assessing the intersectional workings of gender, can make each of us a more reliable, more useful actor in today’s global affairs.

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SECTION 1

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Laura J. Shepherd and Caitlin Hamilton We signed the contract for this book on 12 December 2019, almost exactly a month after the danger posed by the bushfires burning across New South Wales, Australia, was declared ‘catastrophic’ in the Greater Sydney region, where we both live. This was the first time that this level of risk had been announced since the fire danger ratings were introduced in 2009. The months that followed became known as the ‘Black Summer’, with the last of the raging fires extinguished in March 2020. The fires burned more than 24 million hectares – an area approximately the size of Uganda, or the United Kingdom – and it is estimated that over a billion animals were killed (ABC News 2020a), while 33 people lost their lives directly as a result of the fires (Cook et al. 2021), and nearly 450 more died from smoke inhalation (ABC News 2020b). At its worst, the air quality in the country’s capital city of Canberra was more than 20 times the level deemed hazardous in the Air Quality Index, making it the worst place in the world for breathable air on 1 January 2020 (SBS News 2020). The ecological, environmental and health effects – both physical and mental – continue to reverberate across the worst affected communities (see, for example, Pender 2021), and, while estimates of the economic cost vary, losses run to billions of dollars. There is nothing ‘natural’ about this kind of ‘natural disaster’: the 2019/2020 bushfires were deeply political. Like other kinds of ‘natural disasters’, such as famines, droughts and even weather events like tsunamis, the bushfires were also in large part attributable to human endeavour (see Cannon 1994). Catastrophic climate harms more broadly occur in part because of decisions made by political leaders. In Australia, there is a culture of ‘climate denialism’ and ‘fossil fuel hegemony’ (Wright, Nyberg and Bowden 2021) that contributed to the conditions within which the fires caused such harm. The relationship between humans and their environment in the settler colonial context of Australia has been largely extractive and ignorant of the ways that Aboriginal people have worked with fire to DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-2

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sustain country – the land area to which a particular group has traditional and ancestral ties. The use and management of landscape fires has been of vital cultural and ecological importance to Aboriginal peoples across the continent for millennia and, today, fire practices remain highly important to many Aboriginal peoples, a central expression of their co-constitutional relations with place and a meaningful cultural connection to ancestors. (Neale et al. 2019, 342)

The historical practices, and ongoing violence, of colonisation in Australia have displaced many Aboriginal people from country and have further marginalised and discounted Aboriginal ways of knowing, being and doing in relation to fire practices. Thus, the fires that choked the skies during the ‘Black Summer’ were kindled by the violent, racist and exploitative colonial (mis)management of the Australian environment. Environmental politics also have a distinctly gendered dimension. As elaborated in Chapter 6, economic activity – narrowly defined in such a way as to contain only formal ‘productive’ labour (see Chapters 15 and 17 for feminist perspectives on political economy) – that is reliant on fossil fuel combustion is reinforced by, and reinforces, specific ideas about authoritative masculinity. To acknowledge the ill effects of anthropocentric climate change is thus configured as ‘unmanly’; in turn, ‘manly men’ live lives that force the continued consumption of fossil fuels – working industries reliant on coal or gas, driving inefficient trucks or SUVs and heating or cooling large homes that purport to reflect social status. Australia’s then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s response to the 2019/2020 bushfires was particularly interesting in this regard. In a radio interview in late December 2019 Morrison commented, ‘I don’t hold a hose, mate, and I don’t sit in a control room’, in response to criticism about his vacation to Hawai’i in mid-December, when large parts of the country were on fire (Prime Minister of Australia 2019); the backlash was immediate and fierce, with many people questioning his leadership. In response, Morrison released a video via Twitter featuring a montage of Australian Navy ships, and Defence planes and helicopters, with the accompanying tweet stating: ‘We’re putting more Defence Force boots on the ground, more planes in the sky, more ships to sea, and more trucks to roll in to support the bushfire fighting effort and recovery as part of our co-ordinated response to these terrible #bushfires’ (@ScottMorrisonMP 2020). The images are predominantly of firefighters and Morrison himself, functioning to associate him with firefighters, presumably in a way that is intended to be positive, and the military; in one frame he is stood, hands in pockets (perhaps to avoid having to ‘hold a hose’) and talking to another (White) man while text on the screen reads ‘Emergency payments to those who have lost homes or incomes due to fires’. The muscular paternalism on display here attempts to position Morrison as a strong, authoritative leader, able to provide for those rendered vulnerable by the fires through a militarised, masculinised response (unsurprisingly, 4

Introduction

the video was not well received; see Murphy 2020, and the replies to the tweet cited above). The fires set the context for our thinking about the book and ensured that we proceeded in our planning with a careful eye to what our prospective readers might want to learn about the dynamics of crisis, coloniality and climate, as well as political leadership, economics and land management. When we signed the contract, we set a delivery date of late 2021, because we wanted to give ourselves plenty of time to sit with, and think about, the third edition, plenty of time to explore how our combined ideas about what the third edition might look like could be manifest. As it turned out, we needed every day of the two years we had agreed on with Emily, our editor at Routledge, and then some. At the same time as much of the Australian population was excoriating Morrison for his woefully inadequate leadership in December 2019, the World Health Organisation (WHO) country office in the People’s Republic of China picked up a report from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission about a cluster of cases of viral pneumonia in Wuhan. The first ‘disease outbreak report’ was issued by WHO on 5 January 2020, and Chinese authorities confirmed to the WHO that the outbreak was caused by a novel coronavirus, now known to be SARS-CoV-2, on 9 January 2020 (WHO 2020). In March 2020, just as the last of the ‘Black Summer’ fires were being extinguished, the WHO characterised the disease caused by the virus, COVID-19, as a pandemic. As we write this introduction, the pandemic shows no sign of easing, nor yet is there any indication that the forecast transition from pandemic to endemic disease is likely to occur soon (on the forecast transition, see Phillips 2021). Many of you will have lost loved ones to COVID-19. We are so sorry for your loss. Many of you will have caught COVID-19 yourselves and may be living with its extended effects. All of you will have experienced the profound disruption of the past three years, though of course the impact of that disruption is unevenly distributed. As is the case with climate change, the burdens of the pandemic are not equally felt. While ongoing climate change amplifies, compounds, and creates new forms of injustices and stresses, all of which are interlinked and interconnected, the emergences of the COVID-19 pandemic co-created new challenges, vulnerabilities, and burdens on top, while reinforcing old ones. (Sultana 2021, 448)

An intersectional feminist lens reveals how this uneven distribution has affected the lives of so many. All kinds of inequalities have emerged. The location of the outbreak led to a spike in anti-Asian racism in many countries, with predictably negative mental health effects on Asian people and communities (Yang, Nhan and Tung 2021). Many countries, especially those in the Global North, responded to the pandemic by closing international borders and enforcing ‘lockdowns’ that limited the movement of people; this enforced stasis both separated people from their families overseas and led to the stratification 5

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of society into those privileged enough to be able to work from home, having groceries and other supplies delivered to avoid risking contact with people who might be infected, and those deemed to be ‘essential workers’ and others – often already disadvantaged through racial discrimination and economic status – in the low-waged and undervalued jobs that keep food supply chains moving and hospitals clean. The ability to ‘lock down’ and minimise risk of contracting COVID-19 in this way is something of a privilege, then, but even within that category, there was significant differentiation, especially when additional care responsibilities emerged as a result of school closures; one study of dual-earner heterosexual couples showed that women with children under 13 reduced their paid work hours by almost five times more than their male partners in the March-April 2020 period (Collins et al. 2020, 102), as a result of the combined pressures of working from home and home-schooling young children while surviving a pandemic. And then there are those for whom ‘home’ is not a safe place to shelter; globally, reports of domestic violence spiked noticeably when countries imposed ‘stay at home’ or ‘lockdown’ orders (Boserup, McKenney and Elkbuli 2020). If the fires of our ‘Black Summer’ set the context for our initial thinking about the book, the pandemic is the context within which our contributing authors – and we, ourselves – worked on the words we have collected here. Chapters were written early in the morning and late at night, before and after the demands of supervising children through remote school (an activity for which none of us, we feel, were at all prepared). Chapters were delayed as contributors caught and recovered from COVID-19, or cared for relatives, or grieved and mourned for their family members. Some chapters that we originally hoped to include fell away altogether, as difficult decisions were made about how to prioritise what little time and energy each of us could sustain as the pandemic ground on. As we wrote, world leaders caught COVID-19, were cared for, and confronted their humanity. The organisations of global governance tracked the health, labour and economic effects of the pandemic, drew our attention to the intersecting and compounding effects of the pandemic in conflictaffected settings and advocated for global vaccine equality commitments to ensure the well-being of all, not just the privileged few. And we all were changed a little. With no end of the pandemic in sight, we have all had to reckon with uncertainty, ‘pivot’ in our professional practice (often repeatedly) and learn how to care for ourselves and each other a little better. The book you have in your hands is a labour of care and commitment – minimally our own, but more significantly, the authors who contributed and the people who in turn support them. A feminist analysis reveals those relations, in which we are all held, and shows the intricacy of connections between the most mundane and everyday occurrences and the most elite spaces of global politics. For this reason, we decided not to divide up this edition of Gender Matters in Global Politics into somewhat arbitrary subject fields (previous editions were structured in this more conventional way, with sections on security, political economy, international organisations and so on). Instead, the first section engages with feminist approaches, 6

Introduction

concepts and ways of knowing (Chapters 2–6 inclusive). The rest of the book is arranged alphabetically by topic, so we have, for example, a chapter on disability between a chapter on digital politics and a chapter on ecology/environment. This organisational strategy, while perhaps unconventional, will hopefully allow readers to make unexpected connections, as well as showing how feminist analysis often shares some commonalities irrespective of the subject matter. The pandemic blurred the boundaries between private and public for many people; for feminists, the division has always been spurious – the personal is political is international, as Cynthia Enloe reminds us (1989). Care is personal, political and international also. The chapters that follow are infused with care (as well as address the concept directly, see Chapter 10) and will hopefully enable you to explore your own personal, political and international spheres with a feminist commitment and curiosity. May a feminist future bring us all better days. References @ScottMorrisonMP. 2020. “We’re Putting More Defence Force Boots on the Ground, More Planes in the Sky, More Ships to Sea, and More Trucks to Roll in to Support the Bushfire Fighting Effort and Recovery as Part of Our Co-Ordinated Response to These Terrible #bushfires.” Twitter, https://twitter.com/ScottMorrisonMP/status/1213330419044 638722?s=20 ABC News. 2020a. “Have More Than a Billion Animals Perished Nationwide This Bushfire Season? Here Are the Facts.” 31 January 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-31/fact-check-have-bushfireskilled-more-than-a-billion-animals/11912538 ABC News. 2020b. “Bushfire Royal Commission Hears That Black Summer Smoke Killed Nearly 450 People.” 26 May 2020, https://www. abc.net.au/news/2020-05-26/bushfire-royal-commission-hearingssmoke-killed-445-people/12286094 Boserup, Brad, Mark McKenney, and Adel Elkbuli. 2020. “Alarming Trends in US Domestic Violence During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” The American Journal of Emergency Medicine. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1016/j.ajem.2020.04.077 Cannon, Terry. 1994. “Vulnerability Analysis and the Explanation of ‘Natural’ Disasters.” In Disaster, Development and Environment, edited by Ann Varley, 13–20. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Collins, Caitlyn, Liana Christin Landivar, Leah Ruppanner, and William J. Scarborough. 2020. “COVID-19 and the Gender Gap in Work Hours.” Gender, Work & Organisation, 28 (1): 101–112. Cook, Garry, Andrew Dowdy, Juergen Knauer, Mick Meyer, Pep Canadell, and Peter Briggs. 2021. “Australia’s Black Summer of Fire Was Not Normal – and We Can Prove It.” 21 November 2021, https:// theconversation.com/australias-black-summer-of-fire-was-not-normaland-we-can-prove-it-172506 7

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Enloe, Cynthia. 1989. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Murphy, Katharine. 2020. “Scott Morrison’s Political Ad is a Bizarre Act of Self-Love as Firefighters Battle to Save Australia.” The Guardian, 4 January 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/ jan/04/scott-morrisons-political-ad-is-a-bizarre-act-of-self-love-asfirefighters-battle-to-save-australia Neale, Timothy, Rodney Carter, Trent Nelson, and Mick Bourke. 2019. “Walking Together: A Decolonising Experiment in Bushfire Management on Dja Dja Wurrung Country.” Cultural Geographies, 26 (3): 341–359. Pender, Kieran. 2021. “‘We’ve Been Abandoned’: The Long Road to Recovery for Black Summer Bushfire Survivors.” The Guardian, 9 November 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/ nov/09/weve-been-abandoned-long-road-recovery-black-summerbushfire-survivors-nsw-south-coast-cobargo Prime Minister of Australia. 2019. “Radio Interview with John Stanley 2GB: Media Release.” https://www.pm.gov.au/media/radio-interviewjohn-stanley-2gb Phillips, Nicky. 2021. “The Coronavirus is Here to Stay—Here’s What That Means.” Nature, 16 February 2021, https://www.nature.com/ articles/d41586-021-00396-2 SBS News. 2020. “Canberra’s Air Quality is “the Worst in the World” as Bushfire Smoke Shrouds Capital.” 1 January 2020, https://www. sbs.com.au/news/canberra-s-air-quality-is-the-worst-in-the-worldas-bushfire-smoke-shrouds-capital /71c54267- 6ef8- 4644-8e77587a630d9428 Sultana, Farhana. 2021. “Climate Change, COVID-19, and the Co-Production of Injustices: A Feminist Reading of Overlapping Crises.” Social & Cultural Geography, 22 (4): 447–460. World Health Organisation (WHO). 2020. “Listings of WHO’s Response to COVID-19.” 29 June 2020, https://www.who.int/news/item/29-062020-covidtimeline Wright, Christopher, Daniel Nyberg, and Vanessa Bowden. 2021. “Beyond the Discourse of Denial: The Reproduction of Fossil Fuel Hegemony in Australia.” Energy Research & Social Science, 77. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.102094 Yang, Joyce P., Emily R. Nhan, and Elizabeth L. Tung. 2021. “COVID-19 Anti-Asian Racism and Race-Based Stress: A Phenomenological Qualitative Media Analysis.” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0001131

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CHAPTER 2

Feminist International Relations Cristina Masters and Marysia Zalewski It is increasingly difficult to write a chapter on ‘feminist IR’, given this field has become much more complexly layered since its inception, and defies easy or simple categorisation or narrative. Though what is meant by its inception? There is certainly a conventional disciplinary framed temporal story one might narrate, which may indeed be necessary and right for a book of this nature, which is intended to be a supportive and informative pedagogical text. Yet, we hesitate. A key reason for our hesitation is that the conventional disciplinary story of feminist IR is firmly tethered to the discipline of International Relations (IR), which is historically a very masculinised, White and ‘Global North’-centric intellectual institution. It is perhaps only over the past few years that the racialised parameters within which the discipline defines itself have been more staunchly criticised and held to account. This might seem a surprising comment, given there is a rich corpus of work on critical race theory and postcolonialism available within the discipline (and an abundance outside of it), though it seems that it is only more recently that the levels of attention to the contemporary heritage of IR’s racialised frames have become more serious. This is, we think, partly connected to incidences and activities related to Black Lives Matter in both the USA and the UK (where IR is disciplinarily dominant), the ascendance of critical race theory, as well as to increasingly visible criticisms of teaching programmes in IR with calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ gathering pace, all helping to better and more explicitly expose the White racialised shroud embracing the discipline (Sabaratnam 2020). That is the hope anyway.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-3

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Perhaps the hesitation is also the case because of the seeming tight connections between a good deal of ‘feminist IR’ work with some of the establishment institutions of international governance – the United Nations for example. Such institutions appear abundantly interested in issues concerning gender and feminism, given, for example, related United Nations Security Council resolutions, the need for gender advisors and gender-‘sensitive’ policymaking. This close attachment of ‘feminist IR’ work to such establishment institutions is a cause for concern for many feminists, given the levels of compromise on feminist principles that are arguably inevitably made to progress in such institutions. Analyses of ‘femocrats’ and ‘governance feminism’ regularly imply that feminism has to be made palatable to survive in such institutions – which for many means it is not feminism at all (see Çağlar et al 2013; Halley et al 2019). And yet there is a story about feminist IR which is important to narrate. A rich archive of work has been produced within the frame of feminist IR which has gifted an array of inviting and disruptive questions about the relationship between gender and international politics. Can we imagine saying the following statement currently? ‘It’s difficult to imagine just what feminist questioning would sound like in the area of international politics’, as Cynthia Enloe pondered in Bananas, Beaches and Bases, first published in 1989 (Enloe 1989, 5). In 2021, feminist questions about international politics are plentiful and diverse! Moreover, the initial questions Enloe articulated so succinctly – ‘Where are the women?’ ‘What work is gender doing?’ ‘What work is masculinity doing?’ – remain both vastly important and regularly used, producing rich empirical studies and copious theoretical investigations. Importantly, these questions do not inevitably dictate specific methodological or epistemological paths or commitments, while quite clearly insisting that feminist-inspired intellectual, political and epistemological commitments remain at the centre. This matters hugely and we can start to think about why through the title of this chapter, ‘Feminist International Relations’. We should always question the ordering of the three words – ‘feminist IR’ – as feminism can appear as an ‘add on’, or adjunct, an afterthought: a thing added to something else. This is arguably how feminist IR has typically been represented in the discipline; that is, as a contribution to an existing field of study, namely IR, where the latter is usually selfrepresenting as the discipline primarily responsible for the study of international politics. Yet, we understand ‘feminist IR’ to be ‘simply’ IR, the study or enquiry into matters of international or global politics. The key difference is that feminist-inspired questions are at the centre and remain there (though the traditional inclusion of the word ‘relations’ perhaps implies a smaller or more restricted sphere of enquiry, given for IR, this meant relations between states. For feminist thinkers, the latter would seem paltry). As such, perhaps the conventional empirical, theoretical and methodological narrowness of IR is a good starting point to think about the institutional development of feminist IR.

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A BEGINNING The late 1980s and early 1990s conventionally mark the inaugural moment for feminist IR. At that time, IR could be described as a discipline of caricatured masculinised proportions in personnel (overwhelmingly male scholars and students) and interests (highly masculinised politics: ‘bombs and bullets’, ‘wars and weapons’) and dominated by traditional theoretical approaches, namely realism and liberalism. With the apparently unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall circa 1989, the discipline experienced something of an upheaval with assaults on its long-held theoretical, methodological and empirical certainties. These assaults were intimately connected to the ‘unpredicted’ (in IR terminology) end of the Cold War, arguably exposing the weak theoretical grounds on which the discipline had so long rested. This opened up fissures for other theoretical approaches to enter; a list of these would include critical theory, postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and feminism (Sterling-Folker et al 2021; Zalewski 2017). The then-new (to the discipline) feminist approaches generated a profusion of articles, books, workshops, conferences, institutional groups (including Feminist Theory and Gender Studies, a section of the International Studies Association, and the Gender and International Relations Working Group, a section of the British International Studies Association) and new teaching programmes notably in the USA, Canada, the UK and Australia. Moreover, the activities and political, institutional and academic work of a prolific number of scholars have opened up a vast array of publishing opportunities and provided reams of teaching syllabi. Three decades on, feminist IR seems very well established within the discipline, with feminist academics researching, teaching and publishing across a wide range of subjects and topics, both conventional IR ones (for example, security, foreign policy, militaries, war and conflict) and others less familiar (for example, women’s traditional ‘domestic’ activities and work, popular culture and the work of emotions and affect). In the beginning, institutionally speaking, just posing the question, ‘where are the women?’ was suggestive of novelty, boldness and audacity. But where were the women in international politics in ‘the beginning’? They were everywhere! Foreign policy, diplomacy, international political economy, military machineries – just not necessarily in what were (and perhaps still are?) considered to be the important international political roles or positions. For example, Enloe’s discussion of diplomats and gender focused on ‘diplomats’ wives’ and the myriad unpaid roles they performed to ensure the ‘smooth running’ of their husband’s foreign policy jobs. Contemporarily, Karin Aggestam and Ann Towns suggest that the gendered character of diplomacy has remained understudied. Their recent research illustrates how ‘diplomacy is intimately linked to gender and the practices of inclusion and exclusion of men, women, non-binary and transgender individuals over time’ (2019). Or, to offer another contemporary example of feminist IR work in a previously under-noticed empirical

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site, Åse and Wendt (2021) explore the work of gender and sexuality in ‘memory making’ in current Cold War ‘tourist attractions’. Their analysis reveals how gender works to construct a geopolitical outlook, enable emotional identifications and restore national order. And crucially, they find that heterosexuality and hierarchical gender norms emerge as prerequisites for national security. The ‘early’ questions launching ‘feminist IR’ have morphed into an extensive labyrinth of searching questions and detailed analyses revealing, always, how significant and essential gender is in the construction and practices of global politics. Along with integral questions about the work of masculinities, femininities and sexualities, asking ‘where are the women?’ continues to radically expose how much work gender does in matters of international and political importance. Though feminist IR has perhaps too often been seen in conventional disciplinary imaginaries as about a ‘single issue’ (women being perceived as such often), ‘empirically interesting’ (though not discipline altering), or regularly as a ‘helpful contribution’ (to disciplinary-defined issues or theories), even as all of these questions about gender are much more revolutionary and destabilising than this implies.1 The vast range of glittering insights and questions presented in Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics helped to launch myriad subsequent collections of scholarship on feminist IR (as did a number of works by feminist IR scholars at the time; a brief selection includes: Cohn 1987; Elshtain 1987; Runyan and Peterson 1989; Whitworth 1994). The landscape of international politics may have appeared as almost exclusively male in ‘the beginning’, though it clearly was not. What does it look and feel like in 2021? Less male? It, of course, depends where one looks – where one’s attention is drawn – and what theoretical tools one uses (or has available) to help ‘make sense of international politics’, though we might pause to ponder the images of the people leading the G7 summit held in the UK in 2021 – still a majority male. Consider also ‘COVID-leadership’ teams in most western governments.2 Keeping feminist-inspired questions at the centre remains a hallmark of feminist IR as ‘paying serious attention to women can expose how much power it takes to maintain the international political system in its present form’ (Enloe 1989, 1), and ‘how the conduct of international politics has depended on men’s control of women has been left unexamined’ (Enloe 1989, 2). Enloe’s questions are particularly provocative in the context of writing a narrative about ‘feminist IR’ in 2021. It is reminiscent of Adrienne Rich’s musings about the difficulties of gathering enough words to write about feminism and motherhood when embarking on the writing Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1977). In environments dominated by patriarchal preferences (are there any which are not?), a significant part of the challenge for feminists is to first imagine and propel such questions into being (though once this feminist breakthrough occurs, words might and do flow). Yet we might want to think about how such ‘new’ questions can be imagined in the first place, especially when they come from places of conventional invisibility, silencing or indeed discrimination and oppression. At the same time, we also might want to question 12

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what feminist questioning has sounded like in IR over the last three decades, including its silences, violences and complicities, points to which we will return.

WHAT WORK IS MASCULINITY DOING? As we write in the Northern summer of 2021, two topics of very serious international political importance saturate the media, both traditional and social: the global pandemic of COVID-19 and the ‘takeover’ of Afghanistan by the Taliban. It is perhaps inconceivable to not write about both of these (though what emerges as ‘inconceivable to not write about’ bears critical feminist scrutiny). The global COVID-19 pandemic, which has been with us all since late 2019, has forcefully pushed to the surface a host of inequalities which are always shaping lives, if extremely variably. Many questions have been raised, for example about morbidity (who dies?), vulnerability (who cares about the ‘more vulnerable’? And who is likely to become ‘more vulnerable’?), access (who has access to appropriate health care or protective equipment?) and who are most and least secured by lockdown measures (such as those who suffer ‘domestic’ violence)? How have political leaders fared or, indeed, how have they cared (if at all)? The last question generated a good amount of media attention, given initially it seemed that women political leaders were responding better to the pandemic (where by ‘better’, this meant in terms of speed of action and consequent effects on levels of illness, infection and death from the disease). COVID death ‘league tables’ have become a common feature on many news sites, with the UK, the USA, India and Brazil consistently at the top of these morose tallies. Notably, countries with women leaders appeared to fare much better and with strikingly different affective tones in their approaches. Here Jacinda Ardern (New Zealand), Angela Merkel (Germany), Mette Frederiksen (Denmark), Tsai Ing-wen (Taiwan) and Sanna Marin (Finland) were regularly positively singled out. Conversely, leaders such as Donald Trump (former President of the USA), Boris Johnson (former Prime Minister of the UK) and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil) have been differentially singled out for their inadequate leadership in the ongoing throes of the pandemic. These questions about the gendered differences in leadership are both useful and problematic. They are useful in that they can draw attention to how what we have come to understand as ‘masculinity’ (or performances of masculinity) remain hugely significant in the practices of international politics in that they continue to be seen or understood to be doing ‘gendered work’, and this work has effects. Think of this comment about masculinely-inflected leadership from Bhattacharya et al (2021, 127): … we appear to be living in the age of the buffoon … not only Boris Johnson, all mumbles and blond dishevelment … also Trump’s violently assertive stupidity, Bolsonaro’s inexplicable denial of coronavirus, and Modi’s claim that drinking cow urine could guard against Covid-19. 13

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One thing we might take from these observations is how they illustrate the continuing virulent impact of masculinised behaviours in global politics. Bhattacharyya et al’s comments might also help us to think further about the long-standing understanding of gender as a hierarchical relation, in that masculinity so often emerges as ‘superior’ or more valuable, even in its most wildly violent manifestations (or at least more acceptable than so many things associated with ‘femininity’). To flesh this out: imagining women leaders acting in the ways that the male leaders mentioned above act would likely materialise as absurd and unacceptable (and invite refrains such as those chanted about Hillary Clinton at Donald Trump’s presidential rallies: ‘lock her up’). And even their ‘caring’ leadership performances can quickly rematerialise as ‘grating’ and not appropriate for the high political positions they hold. Here one might reflect on the ‘macho’ performances exemplified by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin – ‘boorish, brash, and impulsively petulant displays of manliness’ (Ashwin and Utrata 2020) – and yet how they still appeal to voters. Take, for example, the perilous appeal of Donald Trump’s petulant heteronormative manliness which informed his decision-making and leadership style (if we can call it that): For many long months of Donald Trump’s unhinged presidency, his collection of stern-faced generals had been begging him to send more troops into Afghanistan to stop hemorrhaging losses to the ascendant Taliban … The president did not want to do it … And then he saw the miniskirts. (Zakaria 2017)

The ‘mini-skirts’ were those worn by three women in Afghanistan in 1972 shown in a famous photo that was circulated widely online (Timmons 2017), which seemingly inspired Donald Trump to increase US troops in Afghanistan. These examples of the oppositional functioning force of gender, despite gender being notoriously fluid and slippery, show how ideas about gender are persistent and regularly dangerous. Though we surely still might want to contemplate the placing of ‘mumbles and dishevelment’ (Johnson) or ‘violently assertive stupidity’ (Trump) in the realm of (masculinised and racialised) superiority and acceptability, how can this behaviour be/come so acceptable? To think about this, let us circle back to popular culture as one of the more recent sites of empirical investigation in contemporary feminist IR, specifically to the film Joker (2019), an immensely successful film (grossing over $1 billion globally) depicting a character from the popular DC comic series linked to the stories of Batman and Robin. This contemporary cinematic rendition initially depicts the lead character, Arthur Fleck/Joker, as a poor White man, suffering from some undisclosed form of neurological disorder. Portrayed as childlike at first, the film begins to build empathy for his character (Sooriyakumaran 2019). As the film develops, we learn more about his abused life – the overt physical violence meted out to him by various men, and the psychic violences meted out by the women in his life for seemingly not loving him enough or in the right ways. 14

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These latter violences are particularly curious for how the film portrays women withholding love or sex – or ‘just’ attention – as the trigger for Fleck/Joker’s violent rampages. Indeed, the film drips with the misogynist logics of disaffected (mostly White) men popularly called ‘incels’; a shorthand for ‘involuntary celibates’ who appear to blame women for their inability to secure sexual relationships. They largely communicate via the internet and are responsible for a number of mass killings of women (see Manne 2018). That Fleck/Joker perpetrates his revenge on women and kills his mother – something which filmically feels expected, inevitable (even disturbingly laudable in its working-class revolutionary guise), as if in retribution for his own damaged life for which women are to blame – affectively materialises as unremarkable, even invoking a measure of empathy. The empathetic gaze becomes trained on his (White and masculine) pain, deftly avoiding any critical confrontation with gendered and raced structures of power. As such, the film gets us to think again about the continuing political and affective work of masculinity, not least in its White male enactments on the current global stage and leads us to ask what more work is White masculinity doing currently in more conventional sites of global politics? To offer two further examples: in their contemporary investigation of UK nuclear weapons policy, Duncanson and Eschle (2021) demonstrate how policy options linked to purportedly masculine traits such as toughness, rationality and independence are likely to be perceived as superior to those options linked to ostensibly feminine traits of compromise, empathy and interdependence: We suggest that it is only with an eye on such racialized gendered logics that we can fully explain the British government’s decision to raise the ceiling on the nuclear warhead stockpile, increase the reasons that could justify their use, and refuse transparency about deployed warheads; all whilst cutting aid to the world’s poorest countries.

In thinking about (gendered) roadblocks to climate action, Megan MacKenzie (2019) offers an interesting twist on the work of masculinity in sustaining toxic environmental status quos. She shows how a (White and western) hyper-masculinity associated with consumption, extraction and burning of fossil fuels and ‘manly’ meat-eating is at the ‘fragile’ heart of climate change denial. She suggests that ‘we must shift the way we see world leaders responding to the climate crisis. They are not ill-informed or ignorant, they are just fragile and anxious. We can help them recover’ (MacKenzie 2019). These examples of feminist IR scholarship remind us that the seemingly disparate and unconnected is so often intimately entangled. As detailed in this section, a wide range of questions can be asked about the work of masculinity in global politics, though we would caution that gender-informed questions about, for instance, COVID leadership hardly touch the surface of potential feminist questioning about the pandemic, which has made more visible the gendered determinants of health 15

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emergencies and global health security. As Sophie Harman demonstrates, ‘gender can determine who gets sick and how, who makes decisions in a health emergency and who performs the frontline response, and who suffers the long-term consequences of an outbreak’ (2021, 601). But focusing on gender alone might not get us to where we need or want to be in our feminist IR investigations. That is because gender is never ‘alone’ but always intersected with and by other vectors of identity.

HESITATIONS We started this chapter with some hesitancy, and we return to that place to open up thinking about another contemporary site of international political importance: Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a country in South Asia and one regularly on the top of international political media and political agendas. The country was identified by the USA as a key base for al-Qaeda which was held to be responsible for the attacks on the USA on 11 September 2001. A ‘War of Terror’ was launched by then-US President George W Bush, which included his calling on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to deliver to the US authorities all the leaders of al-Qaeda who ‘hide in your land’ (The Washington Post 2001). In October 2001, the US military, supported by British troops, began a bombing campaign against Taliban forces. Fast forward nearly two decades, and thousands of (mostly Afghan) lives lost and devastated: in 2014, President Barack Obama announced a timetable for withdrawing most US forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2016. In April 2021, President Biden announced the withdrawal of all US troops by 11 September 2021, the 20th anniversary of what has become known as 9/11. By the end of August 2021, all foreign troops had left Afghanistan and the Taliban had taken (back) control of the whole country. 3 Western media sites were teeming with stories and images from Afghanistan in the last weeks of August, largely focusing on Kabul airport as thousands of people tried to get on a flight out of the country. Many of these were foreigners, though large numbers were Afghans (and their families) who worked for foreign governments and militaries. The Taliban spoke in unexpectedly ‘measured tones’ about wanting Afghans to stay given ‘Afghanistan needs them’, offering reassurances to Afghans, including women and girls indicating that ‘rights’ will be respected. However, many Afghan people as well as western media and governments remain immensely sceptical of these reassurances. Images, stories and videos of escape attempts bombarded social media in the last weeks of August 2021. Crowds had gathered outside Kabul airport, queues of people shown walking towards military aircrafts, phalanxes of foreign soldiers with their bloated military attire and Taliban fighters policing all outside of Kabul airport, weapons at the ready. At times such as this, it is worth paying close attention to the kinds of images that circulate on social and formal media, perhaps especially those that appear to attract particular attention. One image that circulated 16

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widely on social media caught our attention. The image we viewed was, it seems, cropped;4 it features two women, at least that is what we assume. The women are soldiers – it’s not clear whether they are British or American from the image itself, though it could be either given the photo is likely to have been taken inside Kabul airport in the last week or so before the end of August 2021 deadline. The women are holding small babies in their arms, and we assume that these are Afghan babies, given reports and accompanying images of babies and children being passed or thrown over the perimeter walls and fences of Kabul airport. This was reportedly in the hope that they would be gathered up and allowed safe passage away from Afghanistan. One of the soldiers is standing and looking down at the baby she cradles; the other soldier is seated and stares into the distance. It is an arresting image, and it doesn’t really matter that we don’t know the precise facts or truth of it – it will have effects regardless of its authenticity. More interesting than the photograph itself was a tweet that accompanied one posting of it. To paraphrase, it read: I suppose we will now see feminist IR academics writing dozens of papers on this photograph. Will they all be about ‘gender’ and ‘women’ soldiers ignoring the overlay of race, empire and imperial wars? We pause here to take seriously the sense of feminist IR infusing this tweet – the picture of feminist IR painted also arresting, perhaps for similar reasons to that of the photograph. While feminist IR has been – and is – groundbreaking in many ways (as noted in the previous sections), it has also produced its own centres, margins and bottom rungs (Enloe 1996); especially given that some of the very things that are constitutive features of feminist IR’s radical work – taking seriously gender as a productive site of power and asking ‘where are the women?’ – might also be constitutive features of feminist IR’s racial work. To explore this, let’s return to the photograph. Many feminist IR stories could be told about this photo: stories about femininity, mothering, caring and war; stories about the shifting gendered terrain of militarised masculinities and soldierly subjects; stories about the gendered and raced visual politics of war and bearing witness to it; and stories about the absent presences in the frame – the missing mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters of the cradled babies; babies with names we don’t know. Many of these feminist IR stories would be nuanced, richly detailed and carefully thought through. They would be told and handled with care. Many might consider the intersecting sites of power, with race placed alongside gender. Hierarchies of power are considered and contested. And yet, one thing would likely remain the same – White (gendered) liberal subjects would be at the centre (see Nayak and Selbin 2010). The picture briefly painted here isn’t as pretty as we might desire, and likely uglier than we can even imagine. And perhaps the photo’s ugliness can be felt through its depiction of all that is problematic about ‘feminist IR’: only giving us variations of the dominant script, appearing critical and outside what produced the image, and yet still so much (an integral) part of it all. How much more can we do as feminist IR scholars in/via/against the discipline to refuse inevitable returns to ‘obsessing about what imperialists 17

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have been up to, and what their offspring are doing’.5 What do we have to lose? Much it seems. How much might we gain? Let’s find out.

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS What would it mean to write a chapter engaging and reflecting upon feminist IR in 2021 without some kind of confrontation with its participations in empire(s), colonialism(s) and White supremacy(s)? We recall the feminist IR invocation initiated in Enloe’s Bananas, Beaches and Bases to start elsewhere. But how do we start elsewhere when our acknowledgement of Whiteness, racism, ongoing colonialism and imperialisms are often little more than lip service? When the lines we identify but rarely cross to more overtly put our privileges in jeopardy and not merely in question? These are difficult and necessary questions, with no comforting answers. For us, we want to end by putting into question our many hesitations guiding the chapter: hesitations around telling a feminist IR story tethered to the discipline of IR; hesitations around the intimate relations between feminist IR and the global halls of governance; hesitations around a focus on gendered leadership and COVID-19; and hesitations around a potently sad photograph, to name but a few. Perhaps such hesitations might be a way of keeping the focus on the ‘obvious’ centres of power – something raised in a recent exchange with a close feminist colleague. What remains crucial however, for studying global politics with feminist theory, is that feminist questions always remain central – even as those questions, or their answers, importantly and necessarily change over time. Discussion questions 1. How might feminist IR reproduce imperial encounters? 2. What different ‘beginnings’ could there be for ‘feminist IR’? 3. Nayak and Selbin (2010 p. 3) ask, ‘do you ever wonder if the peasants, farmers, oppressed women, child soldiers, sick and dying, poor – or others you study, categorise, and write about – are sitting around somewhere wondering about you, ready to compile a list of recommendations about what to do about you or your problems?’ What might these thoughts and lists include? Notes 1. See special issues of the Review of International Studies (2020) and International Affairs (2019), both edited by Helen Kinsella and Laura Shepherd. 2. These images are readily accessible via internet search engines. 3. Important to note here is that the takeover of Afghanistan did not simply happen in the aftermath of the American and British exodus in August 2021. Taliban 18

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control was underway throughout various provinces at least several years prior to the planned withdrawal of US troops in 2021. See Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) at http://www.rawa.org/ 4. See France 24 (2021); the ‘uncropped’ image is shown here. 5. These are the words of shine choi in conversation with us on 10 September 2021, paradoxically one day before the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and what we can understand as a new chapter in America’s ongoing imperial adventures.

Further reading Gago, Verónica. 2020. Feminist International: How to Change Everything. London and New York: Verso. Hartman, Saidiya. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. London: Serpent’s Tail. McKittrick, Katherine. 2021. Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press. Manchanda, Nivi. 2020. Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nash, Jennifer C. 2019. Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. Durham: Duke University Press. References Aggestam, Karin and Anne E. Towns. 2019. “The Gender Turn in Diplomacy: A New Research Agenda.” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 21 (1): 9–28. Åse, Cecilia and Maria Wendt. 2021. “Gendering the Military Past: Understanding Heritage and Security from a Feminist Perspective.” Cooperation & Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1177/ 00108367211007871 Ashwin, Sarah and Jennifer Utrata. 2020. “Restoring Masculinity: Putin and Trump.” http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/101146/3/Contexts_Revengeofthe LostMen_21_January_2020.pdf Bhattacharya, Gargi, Adam Elliot-Cooper, Sita Balani, Kerem Nisancioglu, Kojo Koram, Dalia Gebrial, Nadine El-Enany and Luke De Noronha. 2021. Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State. London: Pluto Press. Çağlar, Gülay, Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel. 2013. Feminist Strategies in International Governance. London and New York: Routledge. Cohn, Carol. 1987. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs 12 (4): 687–718. Duncanson, Claire and Catherine Eschle. 2021. “Bombs, Brexit Boys and Bairns: A Feminist Critique of Nuclear (In)Security in an Integrated Review.” GenderEd, 25 August 2021. https://www.gender.ed.ac.uk/ bombs-brexit-boys-and-bairns-a-feminist-critique-of-nuclear-insecurityin-the-integrated-review/ 19

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Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1987. Women and War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 1989 (2014). Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. California: California University Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 1996. “Margins, Silences and Bottom Rungs: How to Overcome the Underestimation of Power in the Study of International Relations.” International Theory: Positivism & Beyond, edited by Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski, 186–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. France 24. 2021. “Viral footage of US Marine aiding baby captures Kabul chaos”, 21 August 2021, https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/ 20210820-viral-footage-of-us-marine-aiding-baby-capturesHalley, Janet, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché and Hila Shamir. 2019. Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Harman, Sophie. 2021. “Threat Not Solution: Gender, Global Health Security and COVID-19”. International Affairs 7 (3): 601–623. Joker. 2019. Directed by Todd Phillips, Warner Brothers. Kinsella, Helen M. and Laura J. Shepherd (eds). 2019. “Special Section: ‘Well, What is the Feminist Perspective on International Affairs?’: Theory/Practice.” International Affairs 95 (6). Kinsella, Helen M. and Laura J. Shepherd (eds). 2020. “Forum: Thinking with Gender: Feminist Methodologies of International Relations.” Review of International Studies 4 (3). Mackenzie, Megan. 2019. “Is Fragile Masculinity the Biggest Obstacle to Climate Action?” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-15/is-fragilemasculinity-the-biggest-obstacle-to-climate-action/11797210 Manne, Kate. 2018. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nayak, Meghana and Eric Selbin. 2010. Decentering International Relations. New York: Zed Books. Rich, Adrienne. 1977. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. London: Virago. Runyan, Anne Sisson and V. Spike Peterson. 1989 (2011). Global Gender Issues. 3rd edition, Boulder, Colorado: Worldview Press. Sooriyakumaran, Dhakshayini. 2019. “Joker: Brief Reflections on Race, Gender and Class.” Medium, https://dhakshayini.medium.com/jokerbrief-reflections-on-race-gender-and-class-890a124cd7f0 Sabaratnam, Meera. 2020. “Is IR Theory White? Racialised SubjectPositioning in Three Canonical Texts.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49 (1): 3–31. Sterling-Folker, Jennifer, Annette Freyberg-Inan, Lauren Wilcox, Umut Ozguc and Rosemary E. Shinko. 2021. “Forum: Thinking Theoretically in Unsettled Times: COVID-19 and Beyond.” International Studies Review 23 (3): 1100–1125.

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Timmons, Heather. 2017. “This 1972 Photo of Women in Miniskirts Helped Persuade Trump to Commit to War in Afghanistan.”Quartz, 23 August 2017, https://qz.com/1059459/war-in-afghanistan-this1972-photo-of-women-in-miniskirts-helped-persuade-trump-tocommit-to-war-in-afghanistan/ The Washington Post. 2001. “Text: President Bush Addresses the Nation” 20 September 2001, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/ specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html Whitworth, Sandra. 1994. Feminism and International Relations: Towards a Political Economy of Gender in Interstate and Non-Governmental Institutions. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Zakaria, Rafi. 2017. “General McMaster and the Miniskirts.” The Baffler, 24 August 2017, https://thebaffler.com/alienated/mcmasterminiskirts-zakaria Zalewski, Marysia. 2017. “Feminist Approaches to International Relations Theory in the Post-Cold War Period.”In The Age of Perplexity: Rethinking the World we Knew, 166–183. London: BBVA Open Mind, Random House.

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CHAPTER 3

Creativity and Feminist Knowledge shine choi This chapter on creativity and feminist knowledge is a collective effort, by which I mean less at the level of acting as a collective but a collection of efforts that produce collective visions, however momentary, and an archive of efforts with a collective purpose. It is a collective effort to feel out the boundaries of where feminist questions about politics are now, as well as the ethical implications of where and how the boundaries remain. I wanted to see what happens when feminist knowledge is practiced, what we learn about power and what we learn about the boundaries of ethics and our responsibility to them. What keeps the focus of politics and questions of ethics there, and not elsewhere? To begin then, in this chapter, feminist knowledge is mainly practices of asking questions, asking curious feminist questions, which Cynthia Enloe reminds us are best when asked reflexively and early (Enloe 2016, 258). In focusing on boundaries in feminist knowledge practices, I wanted to begin with a reflection on how feminist approaches, even with their critical relationship to knowledge and politics, have centres and margins, the more powerful and the less, those who get to (re)draw parameters and those who have to work within the parameters drawn for them, the supported, seen and heard, and those who have to demand they be (better) supported, seen and heard. The patterns of more and less, and ‘yes’s and ‘no’s, in feminist knowledge practices reflect the non-feminist worlds that feminist knowledge practices operate in and have to variously negotiate. After all, we all still live in societies where universities, media, publishing, governance, the arts, popular culture and other institutions are organised by (and organise for) patriarchal norms that subordinate women, outsiders, femininity and differences of all kinds, in ways that keep power in the hands of a few who can dominate. What is creativity 22

DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-4

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in this global context? What use is creativity in feminist conversations about knowing, being, creating? In this chapter, I begin by explaining the nature of political and ethical issues that arise in feminist practices of producing knowledge. I then discuss more explicitly what creativity means as it matters for feminist politics and knowledge. Creative thinking, writing and doing happen everywhere, and this creative mode is always present, always waiting for an outing if we slow down and pay attention to the basics of what it means to ask questions, to write, to think, to act and to be. If there is one key takeaway from this chapter, I hope it is this: feminist knowledge is about telling more complete and open stories about the world, and for this, we need to tell stories that matter to, and reflect the lived experiences of, you, me and those we walk with. Politics here is about making this happen safely, tellingly, in fullest equity; creativity is this expansion of imagination happening in real time, now, here, in this moment of you reading these sentences. What are you thinking?

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH KNOWLEDGE? ‘I write this as an act of defiance, as a work of carving myself into being’, begins Sara Motta in her book Liminal Subjects: Weaving (Our) Liberation (2018, 3). As a mestiza woman, which is a political and epistemological choice for Motta, liberation is linked to overturning and journeying out of the object positions that ‘our line of women’ had to survive: Our healing refuses to be contained within the disembodied epistemological borders and boundaries of modernity for whom we have always been the non-subject; the present absence whose silent screams haunt Your claims to Reason, Progress, Knowledge, and Revolution. (2018, 3)

In this defiant mode of writing, we detect how, rather than mere ‘reflections’ or ‘symptoms’ of power, people create, and are subjects beyond the power structures and relations that attempt to shape them (Ferguson 2012, 80–81). We also see that knowledge, along with other related ideals, are claimed and become fixed, and that academic theory writing as conventionally practiced – with Reason – might be part of the power dynamics. In the context of the United States in the 1960s, June Jordan, an African American feminist writer, teacher and activist, asks, ‘What is the university, until we arrive?’ Using and to speak to her experience, she answers: ‘It is where the powerful become more powerful. It is where the norms of this abnormal power, this America, receive the ultimate worship of propagation. It is where the people become usable parts of the whole machine: Machine is not community’ (Jordan 1981, 50). The university, if left to its own devices, is a machine that reinforces and creates power inequality and is where the abnormality of this power differential gets normalised. 23

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Like Motta, Jordan argues this machinery, which turns people into ‘usable parts’, needs radical transformation. Or, to be more precise, it needs a radical reoccupation. Writing from and about the open admissions demands of Black and Puerto Rican students in New York’s public university system, Jordan calls for choosing community, choosing ‘a real, a living enlargement of our only life’ by willing a return of persons: ‘We will to bring back the person, alive and sacrosanct; we mean to rescue the person from the amorality of time and science’ (1981, 47). White dominant power structures have made life all but impossible and deformed the very possibility of a self for Black and other colonised people. Jordan’s point is that science – in other words, a form of knowledge with particular uses and relations with the modern state – is a site where the ‘person’ needs to be brought back to transform how knowledge is organised, put to use, and developed in/for negotiation with power (on science, see Harding 2015; McKittrick 2021). In other words, universities are sites of life and knowledge, not because they themselves generate life, community and knowledge, but rather because they are sites of deformation that people must enter for survival and, in their entry, they transform the machine through the ideas they generate, that is, through their imagination. In the present global pandemic, a collective voice of Indigenous scholars in Aotearoa and Australia resounds and further extends this point about dominant knowledge structures when they write, The institution tells us to continue as usual, yet our kaupapa, our purpose, tells us that we must be whānau and whanaunga first, that continuing our research during a pandemic, during a country-wide lockdown is one of the most dangerous, and extractive, things we could do (Akuhata-Huntington et al 2020, 1380).

Doing as told by the institution turns Indigenous students and researchers into a ‘minority’ who must either conform and do as ‘the majority’ or receive special treatment as ‘others’. This creates a dangerous environment for people both within and outside the institution. For the purposes of this chapter, an important extension of the idea of radical reoccupation here is the collaged poem that the article ends with which creatively recomposes lines from the previous pages to reach the final point: reality of COVID-19 brought us all to our knees continue to write amidst a global pandemic one of the most dangerous, and extractive things we could do not bringing us closer together pushing us further apart (Akuhata-Huntington et al 2020, 1381)

Continuing to write amidst a global pandemic only heightens the sense that academic writing has remained anything other than liberating. What is dangerous in writing within the academy is not only that it is extractive 24

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but also that it breaks relations, pushes apart relations and connections already under erasure, fragmentation and duress in the present neocolonial extractive structures. If anything, writing in a collective voice for the collectivity is the only way to continue. The collaged lines poetically illustrate how voice or truth lies not in carefully arranged sentences for coherence or logic, but in inclusion – including and weaving together voices in infinitely different ways that speak regardless of logic and argumentation, that speak by returning knowing, writing, sharing to the basics of what gives life, what sustain communities. In other words, the problem with knowledge is that it can break life and living connections; it can break what holds people up. Feminist knowledge practices have historically been part of this knowledge problem. For example, turning more specifically to feminist International Relations (IR), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak put this problem sharply in her interview with ‘IR’/global governance feminist researchers, ‘Whatever your own personal goodwill may be, you are engaged by a kind of movement that is ambiguous – international civil society for development – especially in Africa. Historically you are their race enemy. History is larger than personal will’ (2014, 74). Spivak points out that feminist movements, under the rubric of the ‘international’, mainly (and perhaps even only?) re-enact a history of domination. However wellintentioned, that makes us ‘race enemy’ to what June Jordan earlier calls community. This tension is important to register because it helps us ask the question, if feminist knowledge practices about global politics historically are part of this problem, what would it take for my, your, our practices to be part of breaking with this history rather than perpetuating it with good intentions?

CREATIVE MATTERS IN FEMINIST POLITICS AND KNOWLEDGE I think creative thinking and creating methods to sound a collective voice contribute to answering the question of how we can break with history. I make two delineations about creativity to clarify what I mean. Firstly, creativity is whatever remains as an excess in creating knowledge and knowledge-based politics

Instead of assuming that creativity is inherent or found within structures of knowledge production and knowledge-based politics, it is more useful in feminist politics to think of creativity as what is excluded, kept out or seen as trivial or surplus to whatever familiarly gets valued and kept in any activity, any collectivity, any mobilisation for change. In a way, creativity is akin to bringing the person back into sites of power and privilege to transform the conditions of human life, and to clarify, what is creative here is the created deformations. In short, creativity and newness are not products of the intended design, but illicit effects. To fully understand these effects that exceed the design, we have to create a 25

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different language system to get to them, a perspective that is outside in. The stories we started this chapter with remind us that this ‘other system’, this ‘outside in’ perspective has always been and is present when we listen to and walk with those who consistently have been and continue to be colonised, written over, ‘minoritised’. In the context of IR, Anna Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling have critiqued the discipline using the imagery of the colonial house with the upstairs occupied by the western and the men, the Cosmo Man, and the downstairs by ‘the rest’ that ‘perpetuate parochial and discriminatory practices’ that police ‘patriarchal borderings of race, gender, class, and culture in IR’ (2004, 35). In other words, in the context of IR as a site of knowledge production and knowledge-based politics, it becomes even more important to pay attention to the excesses of IR proper and how race, gender, class and culture are policed as ‘other’. The critical/creative focus then in the study of IR, that is as a site of theories and explanations about global politics, is to trace what surprising, unplanned, off-the-script things get said and expressed in the colonial house of IR. But this is only the first step. Accompanying this must be extra-critical moves, moves that extend beyond a tracing of what is considered excess and illicit to the design and somehow actually leave the colonial house and move around outside it. My experience as a ‘minoritised’ critical feminist theorist is that I am entrapped when I stay at the level of words, at the level of thinking that separate out what I do in the world of words as a wordsmith and the world I live in, day in and day out, as a person. Important in thinking creatively and following the traces of excess – in trying to occupy this excess – involve confounding and refusing this separation between words and worlds, and the compartmentalising of what we do and choices we make that erase the inconvenient contradictions. It is important to – somehow! – work to unflatten the world, the spaces you and I enter, as readers, students, writers, workers, speakers at events, audience members and so on. While Sousanis (2015) uses the term ‘unflatten’ to talk about the relationship(s) between images and texts, for me, it has an aesthetic and socio-political significance. I agree with Sousanis that unflattening the world is, on one level, an aesthetic matter: to make strange, to see anew what we thought we already knew by taking apart an image, or listening to the rhythm, to the sound rather than the words and so on. On another level though, to think aesthetics and politics simultaneously means attending to differences not through even further abstractions and conceptual innovations but to unflatten social relations so histories that structure the everyday encounters inform and are perceivable in what each of us in our different locations do there, or do next. This importantly means refusing the separation of what we say and write on the page for academic purposes from what we do in everyday life, as human beings. How Trinh Minh-ha explains the issue of intercultural relations, that is, as encounters across cultures, helps clarify the implications of unflattening the world in International Relations. In a way, international relations is nothing more than intercultural relations that requires reckoning with issues of differences and limitations to knowing across difference. 26

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As Trinh explains ‘if one is to meet cultures other than one’s own, and to embark in any artistic or creative venture – theory, for example, is also a form of creativity. One can only approach things indirectly’ (Trinh 1999, 33). Trinh here is highlighting how theorising about cultures other than one’s own – so across difference – is valuable not because of their accuracy but because they show and generate differences if creatively pursued. Understanding international theorising for feminist politics this way helps register how international feminist work is valuable not so much for what they say in content, in their findings and arguments (world of words) but what ‘the international’ marks or means, the markings of differences in positions, lineages, cultures, lives. Often, the stories of how a feminist researcher arrived at a topic, their personal backgrounds or the differences in lived experiences that shape feminist perspectives are thought to be side stories, excess nice-to-haves or -knows. But if the excess is what matters for feminist politics and knowledge practices, the excesses here might also require creative reckoning. Differences matter. Stay creative by staying loose and excessive. Secondly, creativity is learning to tell stories by doing that repurposes spaces and encounters

Lynda Barry, a cartoonist and a self-described ‘accidental professor’, practices and teaches her craft with the premise that everyone is creative, and that the more untrained, uncomfortable or unsure a person, the more interesting their art. Rather than understanding art as being about skills, accuracy or genius, Barry thinks of the comics she and her students draw as objects to gaze at through the aesthetics of ‘interesting’. This helps her learn something new about experiences and the world: There is a certain kind of drawing that I adore. It shows up in the very first drawings we do as a class. It’s here in this drawing. The line is unpracticed, even a little timid. It’s the line of someone who quit drawing a while ago. It’s impossible to fake and difficult to copy. My copy on the right is missing something. To me it’s just a little less alive than the original. (2019, 4)

I pause in my reading and I look at the drawings on the page: two seemingly identical sketches of ‘Alex’ with squiggly lines making up the curly hair and ‘colouring’ (or patterns?) of the shirt, with the only other distinguishing feature being the hand on their face. I try to see what Barry means. In a way she is right; Barry’s copy of ‘Alex’ is more balanced and intentional even in the squiggles that effect free lines. In the original, the figure is tilted awkwardly to one side, the copy has a more rounded and balanced-out stature. The following page of Barry’s work takes this point about the original/ copy further to illustrate how drawing is a way of learning about another’s world, of learning across difference. Barry turns to a four-year-old’s ‘handwriting’ drawing of her friends’ names. ‘She could draw each letter 27

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as I spelled out the names, and I noticed spacing happening in unexpected ways. The letters are in relation to both each other and to the page’ (5). I look at the letter-drawings of the four-year-old. They are lanky, uneven lines that require attention – reading attention – to decipher. Aaah, ‘LiLLY’, ‘MAX’, ‘ELLA’ and ‘ALAEX’? I am not sure. If these are what makes lines/drawings alive, then for me, it is also about the uncertainty in these image words. The mistakes and flaws in unpractised lines add something – a feeling – that a more intentional skilled copying or knowing takes away. But in a way, the four-year-old’s letter-drawings that map out a friendship circle are also more accurate about relations. They account for not only the persons that the letters spell out but also show the relations between the letters that spell out the names in such a way that shows a commitment to the page. In other words, letters together not only spell out a meaning (a word) but are also in relation to the page that makes strange the uniformed way that schooled writing spells out names, or how we have come to read meaning in uniform ways. Staying too closely with how we write/know through acquired skills, we lose relational equity, the experience of relating to the page, the basics. ‘Everything we have come to call the arts seems to be in almost every 3-year-old’ (Barry 2019, 15). What I find useful about Barry’s pedagogy is how she understands making art and telling stories as a matter of gaining insights by doing that lets go of the hierarchies of learning and knowing. The doing here is not about turning others or the world into an object of one’s actions or knowing. It is not about skilfully extracting ‘data’ or what another knows, but a way of stretching one’s imagination, by practising a quite elemental thing we all knew how to do but forgot by growing up. For Barry, learning by doing does not mean we learn by doing as the better skilled, the more knowledgeable people in the room does, but learning by doing occurs in all directions. The basic ingredient here is that the experience of becoming involved with another’s world by hand: ‘There is a feeling I get when I draw over the lines of a kid’s drawing. I’m on the path their hand took – it’s a walking pace that gives me a different view of the image. Now my hand is involved’ (Barry 2019, 13). Following the lines and crevices in another’s movement is to learn about an other through a mode of experiencing or inhabiting the ‘mistakes’ or ‘timid’ lines, that is, as a way of learning something specific about them, their vulnerability, by experiencing-with. Barry conceives this movement as a walk around, a pace that is slow and attentive to the speed of one’s legs, a human speed. This humanist approach is fundamentally different from how we are schooled (Smith et al 2019; Vergès 2019), or how in the social sciences we teach doing research. As an instructor in a research methods course, I find myself explaining the different academic categories and various methods and what distinguishes them. I talk about, supposedly walk through for students, how research is designed, what is involved in writing a research plan, to ensure research is more rigorous, safer for all involved, to create knowledge that is based on sound data, methodology and contribute to furthering existing knowledge about the world(s). 28

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The textbook overview approach of doing teaching is to move at superhuman speeds and take angles that have a way of cohering the social world of doing research that flattens out histories. The world of doing research seemingly appears coherent, rational and even harmonious (hint: it is not, see Ling 2014, 2017). A step further, this superhuman walkthrough has a way of flattening histories and issues of power by staying at the level of seeing research as a matter of designing projects rigorously, as if rigour was about design or good intentions, as if research is about planning out knowledge practices (hint: it is not, see Dauphinee 2013; Zalewski 2013, 2019; Särmä 2019). What creates these assumptions and the disciplining boundaries of knowing and writing in social sciences disappear when the figure of the researcher remains in ways that assume being schooled, being skilled – disciplined – is what it is all about. This makes research-writing ‘one of the most dangerous, and extractive, things we could do’ (Akuhata-Huntington et al 2020, 1380). I can hear Barry complaining, ‘You do not even encourage doodling, how do you even know what people are learning in their listening, in their effort to stay put so they can gain something from words given to them?’ I agree; the least we can do is try to understand the doodles that the talking sessions create. Theory as a creative practice that learns by doing is a human, democratising practice. We all tell stories, but growing up (in the machine) and privilege deaden the imagination so the key is to return to the basics of stories and theorising. Creativity, Lynda Barry would add, is to tell stories that we do not yet know how to tell but we learn only by relearning how to be, to move and be moved by the lines, where the hand meets the pen that meets the paper that draws a line – where the line is a meeting place, an encounter, a way to feel out relations in full equity.

WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE TO THINK ABOUT CREATIVITY AS A FEMINIST, OR THROUGH A GENDER LENS? Contributors to this new, updated edition of the textbook were asked by the editors to think about this question. I began drafting my notes for this chapter with the ‘or’ in this question, which felt like an opening, a spacing that made a difference in not just the editors’ question but also for me to loosen up how I think about writing this chapter. The ‘or’ in the question gestures to a gap, a looseness worth exploring between not only feminist theory and gender but also between all categories we take for granted as related, as one following the other. As I have said in a few different ways now, making difference – especially when they feel trivial or outside the script – is what a creative practice or process is, what a creative mode helps with in feminist thinking and thinking/seeing with gender. For me, at its basis, feminist theorising is a creative practice, a collection of efforts to make movements towards bringing back the person in to the site of knowledge production, to the international, and in doing so, unflatten social relations. 29

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To put it more directly, I am fundamentally unsure of gender’s centrality in feminist thinking and politics because of where feminism is now globally, because I am not sure what feminist IR’s relation to the ongoing struggles of liberation of all people are not just ‘over there’, but in their full complexity visible here, there, everywhere ‘hidden in plain sight’ (Rutazibwa 2020; also Tate 2016; Kidman 2020; Baaz and Parashar 2021). Even when I follow gender and sexuality theorists who rather than define gender, invites us to think about gender/sex as questions that bear questions (Marysia Zalewski’s work being a good example in IR), I am still unsure if indeed gender is the main thing in feminist theory and politics because oftentimes in conversations among feminists where ‘gender’ is privileged over ‘race’ relations, these turn out to be instances when positions and implications are flattened. These moments lead me to ask, how is it that ‘gender’ and ‘race’ became factors that can be added, subtracted along with other ‘factors’ such as class, civilisational differences, sexual orientation, religion and so on? How did these issues of differences and history of power become ‘factorised’ (Ferguson 2012, 104–106)? And in a ‘gender’ move, whose everyday reality gets centred? What relations get flattened? What kinds of movement and doing are put on hold? Who puts them on hold? These questions variously lead me to the real possibility, one I keep on coming up against, that perhaps ‘the academic’ remains still too much a machine, and a machine is not a community, as June Jordan said in 1969. The question posed by the editors raises more questions about the relationship between gender and feminism, and also the difference creativity makes in feminist politics. For me, gender or a feminist lens is an entry way to think more ethically and politically about creativity that works best when we keep the ideas and methods that have been developed to help us, undetermined, creative, democratic. I have argued that this is a move towards difference, to intervals, to the what is not. A feminist or gender lens – or maybe just feminist? – keeps the politics visible in creative knowledge production, and the invitation to create ways to stay open, keeps, I hope, feminist or gender research and movements on task, which takes knowing as less about providing answers but of asking reflexive, critical questions early, and asking curious questions that feel out the current boundaries of politics even earlier.

CONCLUSION In sum, as Trinh put it well, ‘a creative event does not grasp, it does not take possession, it is an excursion’ (1999, 33). The point of creation – whether it takes the form of theory, cartoons or film – is to interrogate our own starting points and professional home grounds, and ‘destabilize its own grounding in the process’ (Trinh 2013, 73). Rather than establishing truths and solidifying the grounds that a ‘we’ stand on, creative events are unplanned processes that unravel the illusion of confidence gained from schooling in the very way expressions gain form. 30

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The argument here is not ‘wither social sciences’ or feminist IR, but rather an invitation we learn to embrace, inhabit difference, the not: ‘It is from and toward nothingness that all creative powers spring forth and flow back’ (Trinh 2013, 74). International feminist thought and politics have a history entangled with colonialism and imperialism that keeps feminist spaces divided and a place where dominant structures are reproduced. And this is where boundary feeling questions become imperative: what is feminist thinking as an intellectual movement supposed to be? Are we sure we are what we think we are? Discussion questions 1. How do institutions shape creativity? How can we stay creative in institutional contexts? 2. What is feminism’s relationship to knowledge-based change? What are the various ways knowledge can be, or needs to be, re(de)fined for feminist politics? 3. What does the chapter suggest we do with our personal experiences in relation to political theorising?

Further reading Barry, Lynda. 2008. What It Is. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly. Berlant, Lauren and Stewart, Kathleen. 2019. The Hundreds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. choi, shine, Anna Selmeczi and Erzsébet Strausz, eds. 2019. Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics: Creativity and Transformation. London: Routledge. de Jong, Sara, Rosalba Icaza and Olivia U. Rutazibwa, eds. 2019. Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning. London: Routledge. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. McKittrick, Katherine. 2021. Dear Science and Other Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Trinh, T. Minh-ha. 1999. Cinema Interval. London: Routledge. Zalewski, Marysia. 2013. Feminist International Relations: An Exquisite Corpse. London: Routledge. References Agathangelou, A and L.H.M. Ling. 2004. “The House of IR: From Family Power Politics to the Poisies of Worldism.” International Studies Review 6: 21–49. 31

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Akuhata-Huntington, Zaine (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Tūhoe, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Kahungunu ki Te Wairoa), Shannon Foster (D’harawal Saltwater Knowledge Keeper), Ashlea Gillon (Ngāti Awa), Mamaeroa Merito (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaeu, Ngāti Awa), Lisa Oliver (Gomeroi Nation), Nohorua Parata (Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāti Kahungunu, Rongowhakaata), Yvonne Ualesi (Mulivai Safata, Pu’apu’a, Savalalo Samoa, Fakaofo Tokelau, Ovalau Fiji) and Sereana Naepi (Natasiri). 2020. “COVID-19 and Indigenous Resilience.” Higher Education Research & Development 39 (7): 1377–1383. Baaz, Maria Eriksson and Swati Parashar, eds. 2021. Forum: “Race and Racism in Narratives of Insecurity.” Critical Studies on Security 9 (1): 2–45. Barry, Lynda. 2019. Making Comics. Montréal: Drawn and Quarterly. Dauphinee, Elizabeth. 2013. The Politics of Exile. London: Routledge. Enloe, Cynthia. 2016. “Afterword: Being Reflexively Feminist Shouldn’t Be Easy.” In Researching War: Feminist Methods, Ethics and Politics, edited by Annick T.R. Wibben, 258–259. London and New York: Routledge. Ferguson, Rodrick A. 2012. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Durham: Duke University Press. Harding, Sandra. 2015. Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Jordan, June. 1981. “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person.” In Civil Wars. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Kidman, Joanna. 2020. “Wither Decolonisation? Indigenous Scholars and the Problem of Inclusion in the Neoliberal University”. Journal of Sociology 56 (2): 247–262. Ling, L.H.M. 2014. Imagining World Politics: Sihar and Shenya, a Fable for Our Times. London: Routledge. Ling, L.H.M. 2017. “Romancing Westphalia: Westphalian IR and Romance of the Three Kingdoms.” In Asia in International Relations: Unlearning Imperial Power Relations, edited by Pınar Bilgin and L.H.M. Ling, 184–194. London: Routledge. Motta, Sara C. 2018. Liminal Subjects: Weaving (Our) Liberation. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Rutazibwa, Olivia U. 2020. “Hidden in Plain Sight: Coloniality, Capitalism and Race/ism as Far as the Eye Can See”. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48 (2): 221–241. Särmä, Saara. 2019. “Collage as an Empowering Art-Based Method for IR.” In Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics, edited by shine choi, Anna Selmeczi and Erzsébet Strausz, 289–305. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, Eve Tuck and Kevin Wayne Yang. 2019. “Introduction.” In Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View, edited by Linda T. Smith, Eve Tuck and Kevin W Yang, 1–23. New York: Routledge. Sousanis, Nick. 2015. Unflattening. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 32

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Spivak, Gayatri. 2014. “Institutional Validation of the Agency of the Researcher.” In Studying the Agency of the Governed, edited by Stina Hansson, Sofie Hellberg and Maria Stern. London: Routledge. Tate, Shirley Anne. 2016. “‘I Can’t Quite Put My Finger On It’: Racism’s Touch.” Ethnicities 16 (1): 68–85. Trinh, T. Minh-ha. 1999. Cinema Interval. London: Routledge. Trinh, T. Minh-ha. 2013. “A Sound Print in the Human Archive with Sidsel Nelund”. In D-Passage: The Digital Way. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Vergès, Françoise. 2019. “Decolonial Feminist Teaching and Learning: What Is the Space of Decolonial Feminist Teaching?” In Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning, edited by Sara De Jong, Rosalba Icaza and Olivia U. Rutazibwa, 91–102. London: Routledge. Zalewski, Marysia. 2019. “Trying Not to Write an Academic Book (While At the Same Time Trying to Write One).” In Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics, edited by shine choi, Anna Selmeczi and Erzsébet Strausz, 226–238. London: Routledge. Zalewski, Marysia. 2013. Feminist International Relations: An Exquisite Corpse. London: Routledge.

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CHAPTER 4

Feminist Methodology Roxani Krystalli Discussions of feminist methodology are situated within the broader framework of the politics and philosophy of knowledge. To conceptually define methodology, we need to first understand some other key terms that shape the processes and power dynamics of knowledge creation. This chapter relies on the definitions developed by the feminist scholars Ackerly, Stern and True (2006, 6): • Epistemology refers ‘to an understanding of knowledge – of how we can know’ what we know. • Ontology refers to ‘an understanding of the world; for instance, what constitute relevant units of analysis (i.e. individuals, genders, states, classes, ethnicities) and whether the world and these units are constant or dynamic and able to be changed through […] research’. • Method indicates the ‘kind of tool of research or analysis that a researcher adopts; for example, discourse analysis, oral history, participant observation, and qualitative data collection’. • Ethics refers to ‘the rights and responsibilities that inhere in the relationship between the research subject and the researcher’. • Methodology refers to ‘the intellectual process guiding reflections about the relationship among all of these; that is, guiding selfconscious reflections on epistemological assumptions, ontological perspective, ethical responsibilities, and method choices’. Two aspects of these definitions make them particularly salient for this discussion. First, methodology is not just a longer word for ‘method’. Reflections on methods and their suitability for exploring particular kinds of questions (for example, should I conduct interviews? With whom? About what? How do I do that through a feminist lens?) are part of methodological contemplation – but the full picture also includes interrogating assumptions about what counts as knowledge, how researchers can know 34

DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-5

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what we claim to know and how power shapes research relationships. It is on that broader picture and web of dilemmas and relations that this chapter focuses. Second, the stakes of exploring feminist methodology are not merely abstract, unfolding only in the classroom or belonging exclusively to the realm of ideas. In the words of Lola Olufemi, ‘theory can be lived, held, shared. It is a breathing, changeable thing that can be infused in many political and artistic forms’ (2020, 7). The questions of methodology, too, are lived, held, shared and changeable – and, indeed, political (Yanow 2014). Scholars have remarked on the abundance of interest in methodology as a subject in its own right (Aradau and Huysmans 2014). Feminists welcome the attention to this subject and add that caring about methodology requires acknowledging ‘that the questions we ask and the language we use matter’ (Wibben 2016, 2). They matter for the theories we develop, the imprint the research process leaves on all the actors engaged in it and the ways in which researchers relate to ideas, sources and notions of evidence, and to our subject matter. Cast in this light, methodology and methods are not ‘just’ tools or ideas researchers invent or use; rather, they are shaped by and shape the researchers as well as everyone else involved in the research (Shepherd 2016). Paying (feminist) attention to methodology, then, allows us to understand how power affects the research process.

FEMINIST METHODOLOGY IN AND BEYOND IR Writing about feminist methodologies, Marysia Zalewski argues (2006, 47), is a ‘task invoking responsibilities’. That sense of responsibility is heightened when the writer imagines both expectant and sceptical faces among the readers. Fellow feminist researchers, from those just starting out to those seasoned in and exhausted by the neoliberal patriarchal academy, may hope that this chapter will give them a language, a tool, a way to render their research legible and credible in the eyes of those who occupy the (often-not-feminist) centre or mainstream of academic disciplines. ‘Tell me what feminist methodology is, what it can do’, I imagine these readers whispering to me, ‘so I can convince my teacher, or my PhD supervisor, or this grant committee, or a reviewer at an academic journal that what I am doing is real, and rigorous, and worthy – that it matters’. Those anxious voices – with which I relate, as they express yearnings and worries that I have had about feminist methodology over the years – sit alongside other, more sceptical ones. ‘What is it that feminist methodologies can do for international relations’, those other voices insist. This is a question worthy of both engagement and reframing. To begin with, the field of International Relations does not have a monopoly over thinking about feminist questions and methodologies. Feminists have been thinking about ways of knowing and the politics of knowledge creation across fields and disciplines (England 1994; Abu-Lughod 1990), as well as from beyond and outside the academy (Collins and Bilge 2020). Many of these 35

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differently situated feminists challenge the idea that pursuing feminist questions or relying on feminist methodologies is relevant only insofar as it is of use to the centre and mainstream of their respective academic disciplines or spheres of action. A key feminist tenet is that one cannot ‘add women and stir’ – to a peace process, a syllabus, a board of directors – and assume that this addition is the same as a meaningful, intersectional feminist analysis of power. This chapter proceeds from the understanding that one cannot ‘add feminist methodologies to International Relations and stir’, and then conclude with satisfaction that the feminist work of gendering things is done. Feminist methodologies cannot ‘settle down within, instead of unsettling, the established frames of knowledge production and dissemination’ (Collins and Bilge 2020, 87). This means that if IR scholars are genuinely interested in engaging with the value of feminist methodologies, they need to be prepared to revisit their assumptions about the sources, creators, processes and stakes of knowledge. In reframing ‘what feminist methodologies can do for IR’, I am also intrigued by David Duriesmith’s invitation to not ‘expend further energies and efforts trying to speak to unloving disciplines’ (2019, 74). Duriesmith analyses the ways in which feminists are disciplined – through teachers and syllabi, through ideas of ‘the canon’, through peer review and other academic mechanisms – to engage with ‘bodies of work whose hegemony in a discipline acts against the normative agenda of feminist work’ (2019, 70). I want to be clear here: I am not suggesting that all International Relations scholarship disregards or is antithetical to feminist work, nor that feminists cannot engage in fruitful conversations with that scholarship. (After all, we can no more speak of ‘International Relations’ as a homogeneous field than we can speak of a singular understanding of feminism.) Rather, I am cautioning against understanding feminist methodology exclusively or primarily through the prism of what it can contribute to the study of international relations. I am suggesting that by decentering International Relations as the only or main interlocutor for this conversation on methodology, we can begin to feel more of what Zalewski described as ‘the possibility or the hope of an answer to the question of how to study social reality’ (2006, 45).

WHAT IS FEMINIST ABOUT FEMINIST METHODOLOGIES? It is tempting to frame the question of feminist methodology as one that can yield a yes/no answer: Is this methodology feminist or not? That question is seductive because of the ease of classification it suggests, as though we could sort feminist methodologies to one side, apart from the rest. In many ways, debates about methodology are debates about classification, with implicit (and sometimes explicit) value judgements, ‘drawing boundaries between research “worth” doing and research which has not been thought out carefully, properly or sufficiently’ (Aradau and Huysmans 2014, 599). 36

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However, a yes/no approach to pronouncing methodology as feminist or otherwise is misleading. For one, as well-meaning as the desire to understand what the feminist methodology may be (Harding 1989; Zalewski 2006), the problem lies in the definite article: there is no single feminist methodology. This is not a failure, but rather a recognition of the many ways in which people interpret the task of feminist research and the welcome tensions and contradictions that emerge in the process. Just as definitions, interpretations and experiences of feminism vary, so too do approaches to feminist methodology. Any attempt to distil this variation to a singular, definitive guide to feminist methodology will risk eliding the diversity of meanings, goals and approaches that different researchers attach to feminism. The question of whether a methodology is feminist or not also tells us very little about the texture of the research itself. As such, this chapter proposes a different set of questions to accompany us on the journey of exploring feminist methodologies. What is potentially feminist about a particular orientation of research, and what understandings of feminism lie at the heart of that approach? How does the researcher put these understandings of feminism into practice, and what barriers, opportunities and sources of frustration or delight emerge along the way? And, crucially, what effect does a feminist methodological orientation have on the subject of the research, the ways of knowing about it, the researcher and the texts, humans or ideas with whom the researcher interacts? In response, I explore four pillars of feminist methodology: the role of feminist curiosity in generating and pursuing research questions; the importance of a practice of reflexivity throughout the cycle of research; the acknowledgement of the relational nature of research and its manifestation in collaborations, partnerships and citational politics; and the capacity for feminist methodologies to shed light not only on patriarchal violence, but also on the sources of care and joy that exist alongside it. The characteristics of feminist methodology that I have chosen to focus on have emerged both from my own experiences as a feminist researcher of questions of peace, conflict and justice and from reviewing the extensive feminist scholarship on methodological approaches across fields and disciplines. I offer these four pillars not as a checklist with which researchers should scrutinise each piece of work to declare it feminist or not, but as my interpretation of what feminist methodologies can be, echoing Lola Olufemi’s proposition that ‘feminism is a political project about what could be’ (Olufemi 2020, 1, emphasis in the original). Feminist curiosity The decisions regarding which questions are worthy of study and how the researcher should formulate those questions are key sites of power in the research process. Echoing this recognition, J. Ann Tickner suggests that ‘feminist research asks feminist questions’ (2006, 22). On one level, feminist questions take the lives, experiences and insights of women seriously 37

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and treat those women not only as survivors and victims of various forms of patriarchal violence and exclusion, but also, simultaneously, as agents and bearers of knowledge. Feminist research questions also explore the lives of men as gendered subjects, and the experiences of non-binary people who don’t identify with and/or who challenge binary understandings of gender identity. On another level, feminist gender analysis goes beyond individual identity and beyond the gendered body. Cynthia Enloe’s concept of feminist curiosity is a useful guide for informing feminist methodological approaches aimed at understanding these structural, systemic and symbolic dimensions of gender and power. Enloe writes (2004, 220): A ‘feminist curiosity’ is a curiosity that provokes serious questioning about the workings of masculinized and feminized meanings. It is the sort of curiosity that prompts one to pay attention to things that conventionally are treated as if they were either ‘natural’ or, even if acknowledged to be artificial, are imagined to be ‘trivial’, that is, imagined to be without explanatory significance.

In referring to masculinised and feminised meanings, Enloe highlights that understanding gender requires an examination of not only bodies and individual identities, but also relationships, hierarchies, institutions, documents, discourses, symbols, metaphors and notions of authority (Cohn 2013). Feminist curiosity inspires researchers to ask how certain bodies, ideas and relationships came to be masculinised or feminised, and to what effect. For example, how did masculinised ideas about the body, violence and the notion of protection shape scholarly imaginations of who is a combatant in war? How did feminised notions of vulnerability and certain ideas of gendered harms influence popular imaginations of who is a victim of war? And how do these gendered meanings shape how people make sense of their own experiences of violence, as well as how they tell their stories, interact with peacebuilders, humanitarians or justice mechanisms, become eligible (or not) for certain forms of assistance and protection and relate to different institutions and communities? Feminist curiosity also prompts researchers to investigate which sites and temporalities International Relations scholarship treats as relevant to the study of world politics. Methodologically, these questions matter because they shape whom we imagine as a political actor, which experiences of politics scholarship takes seriously and which sites and time frames remain out of view. In that vein, feminist curiosity leads scholars to ask: When is war said to start and end? Who made those declarations and on what basis? In what kinds of spaces is war imagined to unfold? And, crucially, what are the implications of these pronouncements for experiences of violence that may have pre-dated and outlasted the official start and end of armed conflict, or those that may have unfolded in places that don’t look like battlefields? A key insight here is that feminist methodology invites us to direct feminist attention towards questions that are, seemingly, on their 38

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surface, perhaps not explicitly ‘about women’ or even ‘about gender’. It is possible to ask the question ‘When did the Colombian armed conflict start and end?’ without explicitly articulating feminist curiosity – but a feminist methodology would challenge us to answer that question by paying attention to its underlying gendered meanings and effects, and generating follow-up questions to investigate them. What counts as the official armed conflict? Which forms of violence may this official standard overlook? How do differently situated actors (for example, state armed forces, non-state armed groups, women’s organisations, femaleheaded households, human rights defenders) experience beginnings and endings of violence differently? Feminist curiosity goes beyond the articulation of the question itself to also inform the researcher’s relationship to inquiry. A good feminist research question is not just a restatement of the researcher’s argument with a question mark at the end. Rather, feminist curiosity encourages researchers to be open to being surprised. ‘The capacity to be surprised – and to admit it – is an undervalued feminist attribute’, Enloe claims. ‘To be surprised is to have one’s current explanatory notions, and thus one’s predictive assumptions, thrown into confusion’ (2004, 13). Surprise can be the source and fuel of feminist curiosity in ways that anchor feminist methodology. This notion of surprise is not a one-time event; rather, a feminist methodology invites researchers to be open both to what nonfeminists may have missed in their own analyses and to notice what their own research process may have overlooked. Reflexivity throughout the research process Sandra Harding has argued that feminist methodology acknowledges the importance of ‘locating the researcher in the same critical plane as the overt subject matter’ (1989, 8). The concepts of positionality and reflexivity are helpful for putting Harding’s invitation into practice. Laura Shepherd defines positionality as understanding ‘the position of the researcher in relation to her research environment, her position in the social world: it is a consciousness of self’ (2016, 10). Reflexivity invites us to consider how the researcher’s positionality shapes the research process, including the relationships that arise from it, the knowledge that emerges through it and the effects of that knowledge and relationships on the researcher, research subjects and actors (such as readers, students and communities) engaging with this work. Scholars across disciplines, regardless of whether they identify explicitly as feminist researchers, have written about and practiced reflexivity. For the purposes of this chapter, three characteristics of reflexivity make it an essential component of feminist methodology. First, reflexivity is part of the acknowledgement that knowledge is socially constructed and situated, and that the identity and positioning of the researcher have an effect on the nature of knowledge that emerges through the research process. This recognition challenges a view of knowledge that 39

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is disembodied, entirely distinct from and unaffected by the researcher. Second, reflexivity – like other components of feminist inquiry – orients the researcher’s attention towards power and the many ways it manifests during the research process. And third, reflexivity is an iterative practice, meaning that feminists build it through repetition. It is not a single event or bounded outcome of the research process. It requires constant thought and work throughout the research process, from the development of a research question through to the writing phase and the literature with which we engage. Meaningful feminist reflexivity goes beyond a mere acknowledgement of privilege or a naming of the identities the scholar embodies and enacts (for example, woman, Latina, trans, working class, university-educated and so on). Reflexivity is an invitation to consider the scholar as socially situated within relations of power: How does being a man, a person of colour, a foreigner, a feminist, or a person in the Global North shape this particular inquiry? Which of these vectors are most relevant in this context and how have they affected the research process? What lines of sight does this positioning enable and foreclose?1 ‘Reflexivity is often misunderstood as a ‘confession to salacious indiscretions, ‘mere navel gazing’, and even ‘narcissistic and egoistic’, Kim England writes, ‘the implication being that the researcher let the veil of objectivist neutrality slip’ (England 1994, 82). Reflexivity is not an admission of limitation or flaw (even though such admissions may also belong in a feminist approach to methodology). Rather, it is ‘self-critical sympathetic introspection and the self-conscious analytical scrutiny of the self as researcher’ (England 1994, 82, emphasis in the original). As such, thinking, practicing and writing about reflexivity does not need to be an apologetic or defensive exercise. Rather, it requires reckoning with both the ways in which the researcher’s position and situatedness within power relations grant her access to certain ways of knowing, and the possible limitations of that view. One may be tempted to consider reflexivity as only pertaining to certain methods: those that rely on direct interaction with living human subjects, such as ethnographic fieldwork or interviews. That would be a mistake. The ways in which the researcher is situated in relations of power also shape interactions with documents, texts, landscapes, emotions and ideas. How did the researcher interpret this document and why? Whom did this researcher treat as a credible voice? What did the researcher consider to be evidence and on what basis? These questions highlight that reflexivity applies to feminist methodology more broadly, and not only to specific methods within it. Acknowledging the relational nature of research Feminist methodology also emphasises the importance of meaningfully acknowledging the relationships that shape the research process. This can take a number of forms, depending on the methods in question. For 40

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example, for researchers conducting ethnographic studies, reflexivity about partnerships and collaborations is an invitation to consider how to recognise the work of those who make fieldwork possible, whom Eriksson Baaz and Utas (2019) call ‘research brokers’: the drivers, fixers, researchers from/in the context of study, cooks, caregivers and other actors who do not always appear in the published version of an academic output (Bouka 2018). For those relying on interviews or archival research, reflexivity about collaborations and partnerships requires consideration of how to credit those who facilitated connections to research participants or access to documents. Regardless of method, feminist methodology draws attention to the labour of research assistants, interpreters and translators, students whose questions may have shaped the work, as well as colleagues and thought companions. What all of these voices have in common is that their insights, labour, care and ideas that shape research processes. They remind us that research unfolds in an ecosystem, and that this ecosystem is not always fully or meaningfully acknowledged in academic work. ‘Acknowledging’ or ‘recognising’ this ecosystem can take many forms, which will vary depending on context. It can include ensuring that the list of (co-)authors attached to a publication appropriately reflects the intellectual, emotional and logistical contributions of an array of actors. As Eriksson Baaz and Utas argue (2019, 158), ‘research brokers could […] be considered as full-blown “co-authors” without writing a single word’. Acknowledgement also includes appropriate compensation, as well as consideration of this wider ecosystem of research when making plans for the physical and emotional safety and well-being of researchers. Once again, one may think this relational approach only creates responsibilities for those who do direct research with living humans. Yet, feminist scholars recognise that we also exist in relation to ideas. Acknowledging the relational nature of research, therefore, also involves tracing the intellectual and emotional lines that shape the research journey, and ensuring that those lines are visible in the outputs that result from this research. In practice, this is most clearly observable in the attitude towards citations. ‘Citation is feminist memory’, Sara Ahmed says. ‘Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way’ (Ahmed 2017, 15–16). A reflexive feminist approach to citation opens up a set of questions that go beyond who is (not) cited in a given text. Who is framed as a credible voice of authority, how and with what effect? Who gets to speak directly and about what kinds of subjects? Whose work is paraphrased? And what stories may citational silences tell about the (gendered) politics and power dynamics of knowledge creation? Feminist methodology, care and joy Taking up the invitation to practice the kind of reflexivity I called for in the preceding pages, I must at this point state that I wrote this chapter during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first draft of this sentence, I had typed ‘near the end of the pandemic’, but my feminist curiosity kicked in and reminded 41

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me to trouble easy narratives of endings. I do not, after all, know if the pandemic is near its end, and I can imagine that the echoes of the pandemic (and its associated inequalities and grief) will be palpable long after lockdowns have been lifted. Alongside writing this chapter, I have been teaching Feminist Theories in Global Politics for third-year undergraduate students who share many characteristics with the intended readers of this book. At the start of the semester – the third such semester unfolding under full lockdown in Scotland, where I live and work – my students and I shared a hesitation. What brought most of us together was a curiosity about feminist approaches to theorising about global politics. However, many of my students worried that this orientation would involve reading about gender-based violence and sexist oppression – and doing so in isolation, as opposed to in the company of one another in classrooms and libraries. I worried alongside them about teaching material that can be disheartening and infuriating without full access to the kinds of spaces and ways of being in community that make doing this work sustainable and even nourishing. This shared worry has prompted me to add one more tenet to my approach to feminist methodology: its capacity to shed light on care, joy and the ways in which people survive and thrive in relation to one another (Berry and Lake 2020). Feminist methodology and feminist curiosity allow us to examine, and sometimes challenge, the many forms and effects of patriarchal violence, exclusions, marginalisation, inequalities and injustices in this world. But they can be and do more than that. In thinking about what that ‘more’ looks like, I am inspired by Elina Penttinen’s questions in her book on joy as a methodology (2013, 10): ‘What if the world was not a problem to be fixed? Or, what if the world was not a hopeless place?’ How might these questions relate to feminist methodology? To begin with, they remind us to direct methodological attention and feminist curiosity to ‘women who have stood up, spoken back, risked lives, homes, relationships in the struggle for more bearable worlds’ (Ahmed 2017, 1). They invite us to ask questions about agency, resistance and survival in the face of patriarchy. They also make room for the study of care, joy, love and the other positive practices that fuel our days, and for those practices to shape the research process and the researcher, not just the subject matter. Taking these dimensions of life seriously is not a denial of patriarchy, or an erasure of violence. It is an attempt to hold multiple truths in one embrace, to frame feminist methodology as more than a way of thinking about how to research terrible things. For feminism to be a life-giving project, we need to dedicate some feminist curiosity to exploring and documenting the fuel that enables us to go on.

CONCLUSION If, as stated earlier, debates about methodology are partly about classification, one might be tempted to draw boundaries around the applicability of this discussion on feminist methodology. ‘This analysis can only be 42

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relevant to qualitative research’, a reader may be tempted to call out. ‘Feminist methodology is just for post-structuralists’, another reader may hasten to add. (A third reader may be confused as to the meanings of these terms. I will remind that reader that the meanings of these identifications vary, and that often the scholars using them are confused too.) I offer a word of caution against drawing too rigid or narrow lines around the domains of feminist research and methodology. Feminists rely on statistical indicators and feminists (sometimes those very same feminists!) question how those indicators came into being and how gendered power has shaped that process (Merry 2016). Feminists embrace and critique positivism (Sprague and Zimmerman 1993); feminists do ethnography and worry about its limitations (Abu-Lughod 1990). And there are, of course, feminists who do not neatly identify as working exclusively with one method, or within one theoretical or methodological tradition. Many of us question the work these particular labels do and call attention to the ways in which they fail to capture the full texture of our research and range of our interests. The point, therefore, is to encourage us to pause when our first instinct is to think that a feminist methodology does not apply to a certain way of thinking about or doing research, or that it applies only to certain, limited domains, but not others. In such moments, we should prod further: What understanding of feminism are we working with? Why do we think that understanding of feminism is incompatible with a particular methodological approach to research? And how may feminist researchers situated within that allegedly incompatible field surprise us with their insights? If some readers notice the limits of applicability, others may turn their keen eye on the echoes and overlaps. A reader may wonder whether the characteristics of feminist methodology described here are also features of critical methodologies more broadly – and, if so, why and to whom might it matter that these methodologies be called feminist? A different reader may spot the similarities with decolonial research approaches, or with participatory action research, or the list could go on. Feminist researchers welcome these identifications of kinship with other approaches. Feminist methodologies have developed in conversation and community, through acts of cross-pollination. These are conversations and communities within and beyond the academy, among people who identify as feminists and those who do not, and across fields of interest and disciplines. As such, it is both unsurprising and fruitful that there are echoes and overlaps with other critical methodologies. Feminist methodologies share common ground with approaches that are interested in understanding, analysing and questioning how power works. They are particularly, though not exclusively, interested in the manifestations and effects of gendered power. Because gendered power and analyses of it have often slipped too easily between the cracks of mainstream academic attention, the label ‘feminist’ can do important signalling work when attached to methodology. At the same time, there are limits to the analytic work a label can do 43

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on its own. As bell hooks has written (2014, 30), feminism is best understood as something that we do, as opposed to rallying behind ‘feminist’ as something that we are. It is, therefore, the responsibility of those of us who shape and are shaped by feminist methodologies to explain what we think is feminist about them in a given context, and how that feminist lens shapes experiences of power in the research process. Discussion questions 1. What appeals to you about feminist methodologies? What do you think you would most struggle to put into practice? 2. What areas of commonality do you see between feminist methodologies and other methodologies for researching world politics? In what ways do feminist methodologies depart from approaches that do not identify as feminist? 3. What are some possible feminist questions about world politics that do not focus exclusively on violence? Note 1. My thanks to Timothy Pachirat for exposing me to the ‘lines of sight’ framing of reflexivity at the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research in June 2016.

Further reading Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Parpart, Jane L., and Swati Parashar, eds. 2019. Rethinking Silence, Voice and Agency in Contested Gendered Terrains: Beyond the Binary. London: Routledge. Shepherd, Laura J. 2016. “Research as Gendered Intervention: Feminist Research Ethics and the Self in the Research Encounter.” Critica Contemporánea. Revista de Teoría Política, 6: 1–15. Sylvester, Christine. 1994. “Empathetic Cooperation: A Feminist Method for IR.” Millennium 23 (2): 315–334. Zalewski, Marysia. 2006. “Distracted Reflections on the Production, Narration, and Refusal of Feminist Knowledge in International Relations.” In Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, edited by Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True, 42–61. London: Cambridge University Press. References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1990. “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 5 (1): 7–27. 44

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Ackerly, Brooke A., Maria Stern, and Jacqui True, eds. 2006. Feminist Methodologies for International Relations. London: Cambridge University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Aradau, Claudia, and Jef Huysmans. 2014. “Critical Methods in International Relations: The Politics of Techniques, Devices and Acts.” European Journal of International Relations 20 (3): 596–619. Berry, Marie E., and Milli Lake. 2020. “Imagining a Distanced Future: Centring a Politics of Love in Resistance and Mobilisation.” LSE Blogs, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/wps/2020/05/01/imagining-adistanced-future-centering-a-politics-of-love-in-resistance-and-mobili sation/. Bouka, Yolande. 2018. “Collaborative Research as Structural Violence.” Political Violence at a Glance, https://politicalviolenceataglance. org/2018/07/12/collaborative-research-as-structural-violence/. Cohn, Carol. 2013. Women and Wars: Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures. Cambridge: Polity. Collins, Patricia Hill and Sirma Bilge. 2020. Intersectionality. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Duriesmith, David. 2019. “Negative Space and the Feminist Act of Citation.” In Rethinking Silence, Voice, and Agency in Contested Gendered Terrains, edited by Jane L. Parpart and Swati Parashar, 66–77. London: Routledge. England, Kim V.L. 1994. “Getting Personal: Reflexivity, Positionality, and Feminist Research.” The Professional Geographer 46 (1): 80–89. Enloe, Cynthia. 2004. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eriksson Baaz, Maria, and Mats Utas. 2019. “Exploring the Backstage: Methodological and Ethical Issues Surrounding the Role of Research Brokers in Insecure Zones.” Civil Wars 21 (2): 157–178. Harding, Sandra. 1989. “Is There a Feminist Method?” In Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues, edited by Sandra Harding, 1–14. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. hooks, bell. 2014. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. London: Pluto Press. Merry, Sally Engle. 2016. The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Olufemi, Lola. 2020. Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power. London: Pluto Press. Shepherd, Laura J. 2016. “Research as Gendered Intervention: Feminist Research Ethics and the Self in the Research Encounter.” Critica Contemporánea. Revista de Teoría Política, 6: 1–15. Sprague, Joey, and Mary K. Zimmerman. 1993. “Overcoming Dualisms: A Feminist Agenda for Sociological Methodology.” In Theory on Gender/Feminism on Theory, edited by Paula England, 255–280. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. 45

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Tickner, J. Ann. 2006. “Feminism Meets International Relations: Some Methodological Issues.” In Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, edited by Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True, 19–41. London: Cambridge University Press. Wibben, Annick T.R. 2016. Researching War: Feminist Methods, Ethics and Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Yanow, Dvora. 2014. “Thinking Interpretively.” In Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, 2nd edition, edited by Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, 5–26. London: Routledge. Zalewski, Marysia. 2006. “Distracted Reflections on the Production, Narration, and Refusal of Feminist Knowledge in International Relations.” In Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, edited by Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True, 42–61. London: Cambridge University Press.

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CHAPTER 5

Intersectionality Celeste Montoya Over the years, feminist scholars have made a number of critical interventions in the study of international relations, demonstrating how international processes and institutions are products and producers of power hierarchies that are fundamentally gendered. These interventions started with simple, but pivotal, questions such as ‘where are the women?’ (Enloe 1990) and later expanded to contemplate the various and intricate ways that gender shapes politics. Postcolonial and transnational feminists have played an important role in this development, contesting decontextualised understandings of gender and emphasising other relevant dimensions of power (race, class, sexuality and nation) that intersect with gender to shape lived experiences. This type of intersectional analysis or approach – one that recognises multiple and interlocking dimensions of power and oppression – has been and continues to be crucial in developing more complete understandings of gender and its role within domestic, global and transnational power structures. This chapter discusses the importance of intersectional analyses for the study of international relations, as articulated both by activists and scholars. The first section provides an introduction to intersectionality as a field of study generally, as well as an overview of its genealogy within International Relations. While scholars across a range of disciplines have studied intersectionality and/or incorporated intersectional analysis into their work, its explicit application and study in political science and International Relations has been somewhat limited (Mügge et al 2019). At the same time, the ideas underpinning intersectionality are not new; they permeate the work of ‘Third World’, ‘postcolonial’ and ‘transnational’ feminists – scholars and activists – who have long used intersectional analyses to unpack the gendered, classed and raced constructions and consequences of international relations, with particular attention to imperialism and colonialism (see also Chapter 25). The second section discusses the development and application of intersectional frameworks that are better DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-6

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able to interrogate complex power dynamics in international relations and further discusses how intersectionality can be used as a methodology for studying world politics.

GENEALOGIES OF INTERSECTIONALITY Social justice movements, and their corollaries in the academy, have often focused on single dimensions of oppression at a time. Traditionally, feminist activists and scholars have identified and challenged gender hierarchies and worked to empower women and girls. Critical race theorists, alongside ethno-racial liberation movements, have focused on race hierarchies and the empowerment of marginalised ethno-racial groups. Postcolonial theorists, as well as national liberation movements, have emphasised and mobilised against geopolitical hierarchies – against colonisation and imperialism. These focused approaches have been crucial in drawing attention to singular dimensions of oppression, making important interventions to hegemonic knowledge production and in coordinating collective action; however, they inevitably provide only partial interrogations of power hierarchies that tend to overlook or even obscure the experiences of those at the intersection of multiple and interlocking forms of oppression. Single-axis approaches can perpetuate marginalisation along one dimension of oppression while seeking liberation along another. ‘Intersectionality’ emerged in the space between social movements and academic politics as an alternative to single-axis approaches that were gender-only, class-only, race-only or nation-only (Collins 2015). The term was introduced in the late 1980s as a heuristic to draw attention to the complexity of multiple and interlocking forms of oppression. Crenshaw (1989, 1991), a US legal scholar, introduced the concept of ‘intersectionality’ as a means of critiquing single-axis approaches to the law and movements that often obscured the experiences of Black women and precluding them from legal justice. This naming was an important moment, but the ideas it represented had a much longer and broader history. Collins (2012, 451) argues that the coinage of the term by Crenshaw (1989, 1991) marked ‘a juncture when the ideas of social movement politics were named and subsequently incorporated into the academy’. This entry point often characterises intersectionality as a product of US Black feminist thought, where it indeed has strong theoretical and activist roots. However, Crenshaw herself (along with others) has also argued that, What makes an analysis intersectional is not its use of the term ‘intersectionality’ nor its being situated in a familiar genealogy, nor drawing on lists of standard citations. Rather, what makes an analysis intersectional … is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power. (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013, 795)

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The ideas and political commitments represented in the concept of intersectionality can be traced more widely to other social and geopolitical contexts. The theorising of interlocking forms of oppression has risen from embodied experiences that have been simultaneously shaped by the structural inequalities of gender, race, class and sexuality. Hancock (2016) has argued for a broader approach to the intellectual history or histories, looking at intersectional thinking that predates the naming and takes a cross-racial and cross-national approach. Because it emerged between various movements, intersectionality has no discrete origin point, historically or geographically; instead, the concept has a multitude of intellectual threads that have arisen in parallel but overlapping trajectories, with important points of connection and exchange. Many foundational texts were written in the 1980s and 1990s amid the various (domestic and transnational) social movements that connected women of colour. The emphasis on interlocking forms of oppression developed – not as an intellectual exercise, but as a political consciousness – and mobilised resistance to the universalising tendencies of feminist, labour, ethno-racial and sexuality rights movements that prioritised one form of oppression over others and failed to address the needs of those who are multiply marginalised. US Black feminist thought played a pivotal role and is often referenced by other activists and authors, but the evolution of intersectionality as a field was dialogical, taking into account broader experiences and conceptualisations. This included the work and experiences of postcolonial feminists, both inside and outside the US, who added new dimensions to intersectional analyses. Over the past two decades, a ‘burgeoning field of intersectionality studies’ (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Collins and Chepp 2013) has developed, complete with robust discussions and debates over the concept’s genealogy, theorisation and application. With this has come the need to be reflective on the evolution of intersectionality. Important critiques have been raised on how intersectionality has travelled within the academy, such as the criticism of a ‘depoliticisation’ that happens when intersectionality is used merely as an analytical tool without a social justice lens. For example, scholars have noted the increasing erasure of women of colour – and Black women in particular – from the scholarly project of intersectionality (Alexander-Floyd 2012; Bilge 2013; Collins and Bilge 2016; Jordan-Zachery 2013). Mügge et al (2018) document these patterns in political science journals, particularly in the transatlantic movement of intersectionality from the US to Europe. Another important critique focuses on the US-centric nature of the intersectionality project globally (Emejulu and Sobande 2019; Patil 2013; Puar 2007). Patil (2013) notes that most applications of intersectionality focus on the Global North and the US in particular, likely due to its understanding as a US theory that has travelled to other places and a purported tendency to neglect geopolitical dimensions of oppression. Taking these two types of critiques together is important in discussing intersectionality in the context of International Relations, where there are similar critiques about the lack of racial analysis

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and Western-centric approaches (Darby and Paolini 1994; Zvobgo and Loken 2020). The next two sections focus on two different genealogies of intersectional thought: one focused on Third World and women of colour feminisms in the US and the other on postcolonial and transnational feminisms. Chowdhury (2009, 53) argues that these two traditions might fruitfully be ‘braided’ together – a metaphor that she argues implies the necessary connecting but not merging of distinct strands of feminist theorising – leading us to a more powerful and coherent analysis of global politics. Third World and women of colour feminists in the US An expansive approach to understanding the intellectual history or histories of intersectionality, one that emphasises its ideas and commitments rather than the explicit use of the terms, allows for the identification and exploration of intersectional analyses within the intellectual threads of feminist IR. One way to chart this genealogy (or genealogies) is to follow Patricia Hill Collins’ characterisation of intersectionality as emerging in the space between social movements and academic politics. In this section, I start with a brief discussion of the genealogy focused on women of colour or ‘Third World women’ in the US before shifting to a genealogy focused on postcolonial and the ‘Third World women’ of the Global South. In the US, the complicated and difficult cross-racial dialogue on intersectionality was largely initiated by (often queer) women of colour. While some scholars have traced the intersectional intellectual history much further (see Hancock 2016), the 1980s and 1990s were foundational to the growth of contemporary intersectional thought and practice. Starting with influential anthologies, like This Bridge Called My Back (edited by Moraga and Anzaldúa), self-described ‘Third World women in the U.S.’ and ‘women of colour’ pushed back against White-dominated feminisms. They levied critiques against the discrimination they experienced in feminist and other ostensibly liberatory spaces. They articulated the need for an alternative mode of politics. This Bridge included the influential ‘A Black Feminist Statement’ from the Combahee River Collective: The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.

The writings of these times were attentive to ethno-racial differences and took a pluralist approach in recognising Black, Chicana, Indigenous and Asian-American feminisms. At the same time, they also referenced women of colour feminisms as a coalitional identity that could be mobilised across and between social justice movements. While intersectionality 50

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is often criticised as being US dominated and domestically oriented, some of this early work took on critiques of colonialism and imperialism and challenged hegemonic constructions and understandings of nation states and borders. This work would later be referenced by postcolonial feminist scholars, who added their own intersectional experiences and analysis. Postcolonial feminist critiques In charting the genealogies of intersectional thought within International Relations, transnational feminist movements and mobilisations are key sites. There, similar but distinct critiques of hegemonic feminisms were levied by women of the Global South against women of the Global North. Women of the Global South not only echoed some of the concerns articulated by US women of colour, but also pushed further for an analysis that better highlighted the geopolitical dimensions of oppression. They articulated the need for an alternative mode of politics based on the recognition of difference in efforts to forge transnational solidarities. Within international relations (the practices) and International Relations (the discipline), postcolonial and transnational feminisms have played a similar role to US women of colour feminisms in pushing back against single-axis approaches to power and oppression. As discussed above, single-axis approaches have been important in bringing attention to and facilitating collective action against important components of structural inequality. In the context of IR, they have challenged hegemonic and limited understandings of power that focus on the state as the primary unit of analysis and overlook other relevant constructions of power. Feminists drew attention to the role of gender, Marxist scholars to class and postcolonial scholars to colonialism and imperialism (which sometimes, but not always included discussions of race). These are each important but incomplete interventions. Postcolonial and transnational feminists emphasised the need to better engage with and integrate all of these critiques to recognise and grapple with the complexities of multiple and interacting dimensions of oppression. Postcolonial feminism was often engaged in what Lewis and Mills (2003) characterise as a two-fold project: gendering postcolonialism and postcolonialising/racialising feminism. Postcolonial feminists pushed back against hegemonic (First World and White) feminisms and against gender essentialisms, highlighting the intersecting dimensions of geopolitical, racial, class and heteronormativity permeating international relations. This included essentialist approaches that overlooked the lived experiences of those at the intersection of multiple oppression or that presumed a unified category of a ‘poor woman of the Third World’ (Agathangelou and Turcotte 2010; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Mohanty et al. 1991; Narayan and Harding 2000; Nnameka 2005; Spivak 1988). Postcolonial feminists also highlighted the dominance of male scholars in postcolonial studies and the tendency to overlook the relevance of gender. Furthermore, postcolonial and 51

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transnational scholars challenged ‘domestic intersectionality’ approaches to better consider geopolitical power structures (see Patil 2013). These academic engagements emerged alongside (and in response to) the work that was being done by activists (and activist-scholars) engaging in transnational mobilisation. Here, the United Nations Decade of Women, organised by the UN Committee on the Status of Women, was an important impetus and the organising around it became a site for some of the important intellectual work on interlocking forms of oppression. The Decade included three world conferences: the first in Mexico City in 1975, a second in Copenhagen in 1980 and a third in Nairobi in 1985. The first two World Conferences on Women, in Mexico and Copenhagen, were characterised by the political conflicts in the broader international system – North-South, the Cold War, apartheid and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Fraser 1987; Joachim 2003; 2007; Stienstra 1994; Weldon 2006). These divisions carried over into the parallel NGO Forum where asymmetrical representation was notable. Women from the U.S. dominated the Mexico City Forum and European women the Copenhagen Forum (Weldon 2006). Feminists from the Global South pushed back against what they saw as ‘Western imperialism’ in the discussions of women’s rights. This included, for example, the targeting and characterisations of particular practices of gendered violence (such as ‘female genital mutilation’) in the Global South by feminists from the Global North. Such discussions were particularly contentious and would become the source of important scholarly and activist discussions regarding the complexities of multiple and interlocking dimensions of power. In the 1980s, activists in the Global South started organising transnationally, building networks and engaging in dialogue at the regional level in preparation for the Third World Conference on Women in Nairobi. The Nairobi Forum was the first meeting in which Southern women constituted a majority. Women of colour (from both the Global North and South) challenged the emphasis and expectations of finding immediate consensus and instead focused first on sharing different experiences and perspectives (Fraser 1987; Weldon 2006). Groups were invited to debate as well as work to find common ground. This approach was more attentive to pertinent differences, helped moderate power differentials (or at least be more reflective of them) and facilitated agency. This new approach helped groups to find common ground in the desire to combat violence against women, but with careful attention to addressing the concerns of ‘Western imperialism’. From these interactions grew a powerful transnational movement to combat gender violence. Foundational postcolonial feminist writings emerged alongside these transnational engagements, theorising the critiques and tensions articulated by activists. Most notable are two oft cited essays: Spivak’s (1988) work, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ and Mohanty’s (1984) ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’. These scholars articulated the need to consider geopolitical dimensions of power in feminist analysis so as to trouble universalist and essentialist understandings of gender that overlook relevant differences. Spivak and Mohanty critiqued 52

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what they saw as an unreflexive reification of power hierarchies within feminism, whereby Western feminists construct ‘Third World women’ homogenously, as passive, powerless, victims. Their approaches, however, are distinct. Spivak’s essay primarily focuses on building a Marxist postcolonial critique, which she then uses to critique hegemonic feminisms. She distinguishes her approach from other intersectional writing by arguing that race (in the configuration of race, class, and gender) is rendered insignificant when moving from the First-World context – an argument that other scholars (postcolonial and beyond) have echoed. Mohanty, on the other hand, does not dismiss the significance of race but rather argues the need to better consider the context of global hegemony (including its role in scholarship). In ‘Western Eyes’, she questions the presumed solidarity of US women of colour and women from the ‘Third World’, but she doesn’t preclude it. She pushes and extends US women of colour intersectional approaches to incorporate the geopolitical dimensions while also acknowledging the potential points of connection. Transnational solidarities After the conference in Nairobi, transnational activist networks started to flourish. While the critique of hegemonic feminisms remained, there was also a commitment to charting a way forward, of creating a politics that could recognise salient differences and power dynamics while building coalitional solidarities. In the 1990s, scholars started writing about transnational feminism in reference to these growing networks as well as a contemporary paradigm (Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Grewal and Kaplan 1994). Like postcolonial feminism, transnational feminism emphasised structural asymmetries and distinct positionalities among groups but also focused more heavily on the cross-cutting nature of inequality that could recognise intragroup differences and intergroup commonalities – a form of intersectionality attentive to the crossing of geographic as well as social borders. Mohanty’s work was already moving in this direction in the early 1990s. While ‘Under Western Eyes’ levied (and inspired) critiques against hegemonic feminists, her introduction to Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism spoke of solidarity, of ‘imagined communities of women with divergent histories and social location, woven together by the political threads of opposition to forms of domination that are not only pervasive but also systematic’ (Mohanty 1991, 4). Mohanty’s emphasis on the ‘political threads’ of opposition is important. As discussed earlier, intersectionality was not just about academic analysis, but a political orientation committed to combating oppression in all its complexity. A corollary to This Bridge Called My Back, the anthology which brought together US women of colour from different ethno-racial backgrounds and sexuality, is Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Mohanty co-edited the volume with Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres in 1991. But whereas This Bridge is a coalitional project between 53

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US women of colour feminisms, Third World Women is a transnational project. It includes US feminists discussing intersectionality and extends the intersectional discussions to other parts of the world, highlighting the global geopolitical dimensions of oppression. Mohanty’s introduction is particularly important in how it weaves together these different experiences: Black, white, and other third world women have very different histories with respect to the particular inheritance of the post-fifteenth century Euro-American hegemony: the inheritance of slavery, enforced migration, plantation, and indentured labor, colonialism, imperial conquest, and genocide … third world feminist have argued the rewriting of history based on the specific locations and histories of struggles of people of color and postcolonial peoples, and on the day-to-day strategies of survival utilized by such peoples. (Mohanty 1991, 10)

While some scholars have dismissed the relevance of race because of its varied context in different parts of the world, Mohanty does not, conceptualising it in a more dynamic way so as to be a possible point of connection, a theme that carries over into her conceptualisation of transnational feminism. Women of colour can be marginalised within domestic racial hierarchies (which may vary in different contexts) as well as through global racial hierarchies that are enacted through colonisation and imperialism. Mohanty’s work with Alexander (Alexander and Mohanty 1997) continued to explore some of the tensions of ‘oppositional and relational consciousness’. Some contemporary criticisms of intersectionality dismiss it because of dominant narratives characterising it as specific to the US context, in its focus on ‘domestic intersectionality’ (Patil 2013). While there is legitimacy to this claim, it is not entirely accurate. Some of the US theorising did follow in the postcolonial tradition and was often in transnational dialogue with scholar-activists, so as to not be disconnected from its movement roots. As intersectionality has moved more fully into the academy, some of this history has been lost. Revisiting the more diffuse origins of intersectional thinking (the ideas and not just the terms) is important in revisioning its potential for International Relations. A recent criticism of the discipline of IR by Zvobgo and Loken (2020) highlighted the many ways that IR continues to overlook, and even resist, explicit attention to race. They argue, Race and the racism of historical statecraft are inextricable from the modern study and practice of international relations …. Race continues to shape international and domestic threat perceptions and consequent foreign policy; international responses to immigrant and refugees; and access to health and environmental stability.

To the extent that race is engaged, it is often in discussions of colonialism, although even there relatively little explicit attention is given to race. 54

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The situation for gender is comparatively better, though while Feminist IR has grown expansively, gender is still far from being mainstreamed into IR. It is still often treated as a perspective rather than as a central organising feature of world politics. Because of these exclusions, there may still be a need (or the perceived need) to continue with single-axis interventions, though they can only ever be partial.

INTERSECTIONAL METHODOLOGIES AND PRAXIS FOR IR So how do we incorporate intersectionality into the study of IR? The beginning of the chapter characterises intersectionality as a growing field where it is discussed not only as a theoretical/analytical framework and political orientation, but also as a methodology and praxis. While much of the work on intersectionality has been theoretical, increasingly scholars (and activists) have been turning their attention towards putting the various commitments of intersectionality into practice. This section focuses on intersectionality as methodology, both for research and activism. While there is not one way of conducting intersectional research, there are a few places where it might be incorporated within feminist methodologies. A distinctive feature of feminist and critical methodologies is the emphasis on reflexivity – the need for researchers to continually reflect on their positionality and power throughout the research process (Ackerly, Stern, and True 2006). Often, research reflexivity focuses on the power researchers hold in the research process and the ways in which they may (intentionally or unintentionally) oppress research subjects and cause harm. This is important, and scholars need to be conscientious of this, as well as the other power dynamics that may be present in research relationships. There is a much work in feminist methodology that focuses on the ways of mediating power throughout the research process, including via methods that emphasise group participation in the research in ways that allow for representation and agency (both of which are important components of intersectional praxis). Intersectional reflexivity might also reflect on the particular positionality of the researcher and the impact it may have on the research. Reflexivity in this way is an important part of being a good critical thinker. Our positionality may actually prevent us from seeing relevant power dimensions if we are not intentional about uncovering them. Intersectional work coming from the feminist standpoint tradition (a feminist theoretical perspective that argues knowledge is socially situated) argued the recognition of epistemological privilege – that those experiencing oppression have a better understanding of the structures and institutions that created those conditions. Humans are more aware of environmental factors that work against them than those that work with and for them. We are more likely to notice a slope when we are moving up it than down it; when the wind is in our face than when it is at our back. Thus, as researchers (and as activists and human beings), it is useful to be reflexive on our own positionality in 55

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relations to others in thinking through tensions that arise from conflicting understandings and narratives. In our analysis, we might want to consider a methodology that Matsuda (1991, 1189), a legal theorist, simply calls ‘ask the other question’. She goes on to explain, ‘when I see something that looks racist, I ask, “Where is the patriarchy in this?” When I see something that look sexist, I ask, “Where is the heterosexism in this?” When I see something that looks homophobic, I ask, “Where are the class interests in this?”’ Her work focuses on building coalitions based on what is essentially an intersectional analysis, looking for both obvious and non-obvious relationships of domination. Here, the work done by the scholars and activists above can inform what questions we ask. What are the dimensions of power that have been theorised or discussed by differently positioned groups? How can we attend to them in our research? How might we be on the lookout for additional dimensions relevant to the context? How might we be complicit in enacting oppression, even if we are unaware of doing so? And given that we might not be able to identify our complicity, even when we are trying to be reflexive, how can we respond to critiques that are levied against us by those who may have the epistemological privilege? Beyond these general guidelines, which we should all be thinking about, there are some limitations to what we can do on a particular research project. And, as mentioned earlier in the chapter, single-axis interventions are not inherently bad; they are important and sometimes necessary, particularly in state-centred understandings of power relations which often ‘render invisible or inconsequential the racialized, gendered, and class nature of power in IR’ (Chowdhry and Nair 2003). Intersectional scholars (in the various traditions – including postcolonial) have discussed the importance of ‘strategic essentialism’, which is the idea that a particular dimension of oppression (or even a particular intersection) may be deployed contingently and strategically. This may be important for scholarly interventions as well as in organising collective action. The point is that it is deliberate and in recognition of its limitations as well as the potential consequences.

CONCLUSION The concept of power is central to the study of international relations. Feminist scholars and activists have done important work demonstrating how international processes and institutions are products and producers of power hierarchies that are fundamentally gendered. Postcolonial and transnational feminist have expanded upon this, highlighting the complexity of intersecting dimensions, such as race, class, sexuality and nation. Intersectional analysis is a crucial means of not only recognising and understanding the multiple and interlocking dimensions of domestic, global and transnational power structures, but also of the activism aimed at challenging them. 56

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Discussion questions 1. What are the various components of intersectionality? What does it mean to say that it ‘emerged in the space between social movements and the academy’? What implications does that have for its characterisations and genealogies? 2. How successful are transnational feminisms in ‘braiding together’ US women of colour and postcolonial feminism? What are the points of connection and difference between them? How might these be reflected in the possibilities and challenges posed by efforts to build solidarities in social movements? 3. How might intersectionality be applied to the study of international relations? How might we think about intersectionality as a method?

Further reading Chowdhry, Geeta and Sheila Nair. 2003. Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill and Sirma Bilge. 2020. Intersectionality. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lewis, Reina and Sara Mills. 2003. Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. London: Routledge. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (eds). 1991. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Moraga, Cherríe and Gloria Anzaldúa. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back. Boston, MA: Persephone Press. References Ackerly, Brook A., Maria Stern, and Jacqui True. 2006. Feminist Methodologies for International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alexander, Jacqui and Chandra Mohanty. 1997. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, and Feminist Futures. New York: Routledge. Alexander-Floyd, N. 2012. “Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming Intersectionality in the Social Science in a Post-Black Feminist Era.” Feminist Formations 24 (1): 1–25. Agathangelou, Anna M. and Heather M. Turcotte. 2010. “Postcolonial Theories and Challenges to ‘First World-ism.’” In Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations, edited by Laura J. Shepherd, 44–58. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. Bilge, Sirma. 2013. “Intersectionality Undone: Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies.” Du Bois Review 10 (2): 405–424. 57

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Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. 2013. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs 38 (4): 758–810. Chowdhry, Geeta and Sheila Nair. 2003. Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations. London: Routledge. Chowdhury, Elora Halim. 2009. “Locating Global Feminisms Elsewhere: Braiding US Women of Color and Transnational Feminisms.” Cultural Dynamics 21 (1): 51–78. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2012. “Social Inequality, Power, and Politics: Intersectionality and American Pragmatism in Dialogue.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 26 (2): 442–457. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2015. “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas.” Annual Review of Sociology 41: 1–20. Collins, Patricia Hill and Valerie Chepp. 2013. “Intersectionality.” In Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, edited by Georgina Waylen, Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola, and S. Laurel Weldon, 31–61. New York: Oxford University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–167. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women.” Stanford Law Review 46: 1241–1299. Darby, Phillip and A.J. Paolini. 1994. “Bridging International Relations and Postcolonialism.” Alternatives 19 (3): 371–397. Emejulu, Akwugo and Francesca Sobande (eds). 2019. To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe. London: Pluto Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 1990. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fraser, Arvonne S. 1987. The U.N. Decade for Women: Documents and Dialogue. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan. 1994. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practice. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Joachim, Jutta. 2003. “Framing Issues and Seizing Opportunities: The UN, NGOs, and Women’s Rights.” International Studies Quarterly 47 (2): 247–274. Joachim, Jutta. 2007. Agenda Setting, the UN, and NGOs: Gender Violence and Reproductive Rights. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Jordan-Zachery, Julia. 2013. “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: My Political Fight against the Invisibility of Black Women in Intersectionality Research.” Politics, Gender, and Identity 1 (1): 101–109. Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2016. Intersectionality: An Intellectual History. New York: Oxford University Press. 58

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Lewis, Reina and Sara Mills. 2003. Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. London: Routledge. Matsuda, Mari. 1991. “Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory Out of Coalition.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1183–1192. Mohanty, Chandra. 1991. “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by Chandra Talpade, Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, 1–47. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mohanty, Chandra. 1984. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2 12 (3): 333–358. Mügge, Liza, Celeste Montoya, Akwugo Emejulu, and S. Laurel Weldon. 2018. “Intersectionality and the Politics of Knowledge Production.” European Journal of Politics and Gender 1 (1–2): 17–36. Mügge, Liza M., Daphne J. van der Pas and Marc van de Wardt. 2019. “Representing Their Own? Ethnic Minority Women in the Dutch Parliament.” Western European Politics 42 (4): 705–727. Narayan, Uma and Sandra Harding. 2000. Decentering the Center: Postcolonial and Feminist Challenges to Philosophy. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Nnameka, Obioma. 2005. Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses. Westport, CT: Praeger. Patil, Vrushali. 2013. “From Patriarchy to Intersectionality: A Transnational Assessment of How Far We’ve Really Come.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 38 (4): 847–867. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson, 271–313. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Stienstra, Deborah. 1994. Women’s Movements and International Organizations. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Weldon, Laurel. 2006. “Inclusion, Solidarity and Social Movements: The Global Movement on Gender Violence.” Perspectives on Politics 4 (1): 55–74. Zvobgo, Kelebogile and Meredith Loken. 2020. “Why Race Matters in International Relations.” Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/ 2020/06/19/why-race-matters-international-relations-ir/

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CHAPTER 6

(Why) Gender Matters in Global Politics Laura J. Shepherd The title of this book can be read in two ways. It is ambiguous, and deliberately so, as it seeks to draw attention not only to the subject matter of the book – ‘gender matters’ in global politics – but also to a belief shared by its contributors: that gender matters in global politics. That is, it is important to pay attention to gender, as both an identity category and a relation of power, when we are trying to make sense of global politics. Partly, this is about investigating the representation, regulation, and disruptions of people’s bodies, which are necessarily gendered, though research on global politics has not always been terribly good at focussing on bodies. As Jindy Pettman argues, ‘it should be possible to write the body into a discipline that tracks power relations and practices which impact so directly and often so devastatingly on actual bodies’ (1997, 105). Our understanding of global politics is much improved through critical interrogation of the operation of gendered power, and the investigation of how that particular form of power works on and through bodies. This means paying attention to the practices of global politics, and seeing these practices as simultaneously the practices of gendered bodies (that is, these practices are things that actual people do, and these people have/enact gendered identities) and practices that affect the experience of gendered embodiment (that is, practices of global politics interact with the ‘rules’ about gendered bodies and behaviours, which I discuss further below). In other words, global political practices have an impact – direct or indirect, immediate or delayed – on how actual people live in the world, even though discussions about global politics can feel quite far removed from discussions of everyday life. In addition to studying bodies and the significance of gender as an identity category, which we can think of as the material dimension of gender, 60

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we also need to acknowledge gender as a relation of power, because the ideas that people have about gender, and bodies, and behaviour matter too and influence all of the stuff that we think about being related to global politics. This chapter, then, explores why and how gender matters and interrogates various conceptions of the body in global politics through the discussion of some key gendered practices and effects. In the first section, I explain how everyone has a theory of gender and expand upon the material and ideational dimensions of gender. I then present two sites of global political practice inhabited by (particular kinds of) bodies: social movements and nuclear science.

IDEAS/MATTER: EVERYONE HAS A THEORY OF GENDER To understand what I mean by the claim that ‘everyone has a theory of gender’, it is necessary to explain both what I mean by theory and what I mean by gender. A scientific theory is supposed to explain and predict things about the world, and it is supposed to be both ‘objective’ and ‘value-free’. This has important implications for the study and practices of global politics, because International Relations as an academic discipline is usually described as a ‘social science’ (see Smith 2000). However, theory needn’t be seen as a tool or device. Rather than retaining a commitment to theory as a something that can be applied to the world as it exists independent of our interpretation of it, we can see ‘theorising [as] a way of life, a form of life, something we all do, every day, all the time’ (Zalewski 1996, 346). This is relevant to international relations scholars because it means that first, we are all theorising (not just the ‘theorists’) and second, that the theorising that counts or that matters, in terms of affecting and/or creating international political events, is not confined either to policy makers or to academics. (Zalewski 1996, 346, emphasis in original)

‘Theorising’, in this context, means that the way we think about, and make sense of, the world is constitutive of that world – it creates that world. How we think we might be able to ‘solve’ certain problems of global politics, whether we think certain issues are problems in the first place and who gets to make these decisions: all of these affect and effect how we perceive the world we live in and therefore our responses to it. These responses in turn affect and effect our social/political reality; this is what is meant by ‘constitutive’. Theory is a practice rather than a tool to be applied and is something that informs our everyday lives. If we think of gender as something we are ‘theorising’ – making sense of, enacting, constituting – daily, we can perhaps begin to see why gender matters. Ideas about appropriate and inappropriate gendered behaviours are wide-ranging, influential and sometimes unconscious, but because they affect and effect how we behave in the world, they are of interest to the scholar of global politics. 61

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Figure 6.1  Can you make sense of these signs? Source:  Photograph by Tim Mossholder (retrieved from https://unsplash.com/photos/UcUROHSJfRA and reproduced under the Unsplash Licence).

An example might help clarify the issue. Look at the image in Figure 6.1. Imagine that these signs are fixed to doors, and you must pick one of the doors. Can you make sense of those signs? If you can then you have a theory of gender. You have a theory, or an understanding, of what the signs signify and of their social importance, because to make sense of these signs – and assuming that these are the only options available to you – you have to accept that there are two types of people and that each type of person is represented by one or the other figure in the sign. If you identify yourself as part of the group signified by the picture on the right, you would not (apart from in unusual circumstances) go through the door on the left, and vice versa. We know what the signs mean, and even though they bear no necessary relevance to the way we look, today or ever, they order the way we act in the world. This may seem like a trivial example to some people, but the regulation of bodies and the spaces they can access through enforcing the ‘rules’ that these signs are presumed to communicate is part of the broader constructs of gender that inform how we make sense of the world – and how we are in turn ‘made sense of’ by others. As Judith Butler says, ‘[d]iscrete genders are part of what “humanizes” individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right’ (1999, 178). Doing gender ‘right’ means adhering to the gender ‘rules’ of the space and time you occupy. Gender ‘rules’ do vary over time, and according to socio-cultural context; within countries and even within cities, there are spaces in which gender ‘rules’ are more and less rigid, and communities that have different ‘rules’ about how certain bodies are expected to behave. 62

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Historically, for example, gender has been regulated by a very powerful assumption about the duality of gender in the Anglophone world: it has been assumed that humans (and most other living things, for that matter) can be assigned either ‘M’ or ‘F’, although gender categories need not be confined to these two, of course – there are infinite possible genders and ways to perform gender, and the gendered identity a body is assigned at birth may not be the gender with which that individual identifies later in life. The ‘pluralities inherent in gender(s)’ (Weerawardhana 2018, 189) cannot be contained even within a categorical schema that recognises non-binary or queer identities; Indigenous gender theorists and gender theorists of colour have drawn attention to the problematic imposition of colonial categories of gender on Indigenous ways of knowing gender, such as Two-Spirit, mixed blood and muxes (Driskill et al. 2011, 2–3; Mirandé 2016; Morgensen 2012). The assumption of duality (which we can also understand as a ‘rule’ about the binary nature of gender) is best described as an ontological commitment to dimorphism: the assumption that human beings can be easily and unproblematically divided into two (di) distinct categories based on their physical forms (morph). This informs the ways in which we think about the body and the ways in which we think about a host of social and political events and relationships that have to do with the body and how bodies (can/should or can’t/shouldn’t) behave – for example, marriage ceremonies, parenting, sports, even eating. Unless we are aware of gender ‘rules’ and how our own behaviour conforms to or breaks those rules, we are not usually even aware most of the time that our preconceptions about bodies influence how we dress in the morning, what we eat, what sports or subjects we think we should or shouldn’t learn at school, and who we and other people should and shouldn’t have sex with, on the basis of the identity category into which we have been sorted at birth. These categories, and the multiple ways in which the categories are reinforced over a lifetime, are manifestations of gender theories. Some theories of gender suggest that ‘M’ and ‘F’ are ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ categories and thus perceive a rigid separation between sex and gender but with a one-to-one relationship between the two, such that male (‘M’) bodies (sex) have essentially masculine characteristics (gender). Other theories of gender propose that sex is biological, but gender is cultural, which frees up the relationship between sex and gender while still retaining a distinction between them; according to this view, it is possible to be assigned female at birth (sex) but masculine in character or practice (gender). In this chapter, I subscribe to the idea that gender as a system of regulation, or ‘rules’, conditions how we think of sex. That means that sex as a category is constructed through the ideas that we have about gender – including the idea that gender is meaningfully binary. As Butler explains: Consider the medical interpellation which … shifts an infant from an ‘it’ to a ‘she’ or a ‘he’ and in that naming, the girl is ‘girled’ …. But that ‘girling’ of the girl does not end there; on the contrary, that founding interpellation 63

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is reiterated by various authorities and throughout various intervals of time to reenforce or contest this naturalized effect. (Butler 1993, 7–8)

Assigning ‘sex’ (and again, this is often – consciously or otherwise – within the dimorphic frame which presumes humans can be sorted into two ‘sex’ categories) is a ‘medical interpellation’, according to Butler, which means it is a form of intervention: an altogether human and social practice, rather than a reflection of the ‘natural’ or essential qualities of the body. Put simply, the shape of the infant’s body at birth is interpreted through the ideas that we already have as a society about the relationship between body and identity; this informs the categorisation of the infant, and from that moment forward the infant is regulated by rules, norms and expectations about how they should behave. In this way, bodies are expected to take on the gendered characteristics appropriate to their designated identity category from birth, and it can cause great stress and dysphoria when these expectations cannot be met. The regulatory ideals of gender are extremely powerful, and – as noted above – people who ‘fail to do their gender right’ (Butler 1999, 178) frequently find themselves facing social sanctions. Thankfully, in many contexts over the past few years, we have seen the recognition of gender categories beyond ‘M’ and ‘F’, and the space for people to identify not only with genders that do not necessarily align with the categories they were assigned at birth but also with categories that transcend the gender binary altogether: nonbinary, gender nonconforming or queer are just a few examples of identity categories which confound the assumption of duality informing how the body is often interpreted. The proliferation of gender categories, and the shifting of gender ‘rules’, will hopefully continue, affording freedom for all individuals to identify in ways that are meaningful and authentic to them, because bodies that are perceived as transgressive are not what have to be explained. Rather, the requirement that they explain themselves should itself be investigated. For it is this requirement that naturalizes nontransgender and nonintersex bodies and obscures the processes whereby all bodies are understood through complex systems of meaning. (Valentine and Wilchins 1997, 221, emphasis added)

These systems of meaning are how ideas about gender become the material reality of gender identity and gender presentation – and, in turn, different forms of gender identity and gender presentation shape the systems of meaning through which we make sense of bodies and ways of being in the world. If we accept that gender is the social meaning attached to the shape of our bodies, we can begin to understand why it is that feminist scholars of global politics insist that gender is not something we add to our investigations but rather is integral to how we understand the world. That is, you cannot ignore the ways that gender informs and shapes the practices 64

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of world politics; gender is a ‘lens’ we can use to reveal insights about how the world works (Runyan and Peterson 2014, 6). This means we can conceive of gender not only as a noun (as an identity category) and a verb (a way to look at the world, as in the phrase ‘gendering global politics’) but also a logic, which is produced by and productive of the ways in which we understand and perform global politics. The crucial insight of this book is that these assumptions about bodies are intrinsically, inherently related to the study and practices of global politics, because global politics is studied and practiced by gendered bodies. Conventional contemporary theories of International Relations do not speak much of bodies because the individual does not matter – only collectives of individuals, known as ‘nations’ feature, and only then insofar as they are assumed congruent with the state (hence ‘nation-state’). Admittedly, in classical realist theory, representations of state behaviours draw heavily on ideas relating to ‘human nature’ (Morgenthau 1952, 963). Classical realism claims as its antecedents theorists of ‘human nature’ such as Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes, and appeals to logics of ‘human nature’ to explain self-interest and rationality as ‘evidenced’ by the unitary state. However, the ‘human nature’ under discussion is, on closer inspection, the nature of ‘man’ (see Morgenthau 1973, 15–16). ‘Men’ feature, then, but only inasmuch as they are abstract universalised individuals; men as embodied subjects do not enter into discussion. This is largely due to the conventional understanding of the body as natural rather than social or political. However, as Chris Weedon explains, ‘[t]he appeal to the “natural” is one of the most powerful aspects of common-sense thinking, but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies history and the possibility of change for the future’ (1997, 3, emphasis in original). Gender, and the body more specifically, are stubborn sites of power, of ‘common-sense thinking’, and this is part of the reason we need to pay close attention to ideas about gender and the body in global politics. ‘Formerly, the body was dominantly conceptualized as a fixed, unitary, primarily physiological reality. Today, more and more scholars have come to regard the body as a historical, plural, culturally mediated form’ (Bordo 2003, 288). This claim is a useful starting point for thinking about the body in global politics: How, and in what ways, is the body mediated? How, and in what ways, are bodies regulated? How have our understandings of ‘appropriate’ gendered behaviours (and bodies) changed over time? How do variously located practices of global politics mediate and situate bodies differently? In the following section, I give two examples of political events and processes that revolve around gender and the body, to show how analysis of global politics needs to interrogate these sites of power.

OF SCIENCE AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Christine Sylvester argues that we are socialised into believing in the identity categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in part through the repetition of stories that are told about men and women; we learn to behave in 65

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accordance with these stories – for example, ‘Boys don’t cry’ and ‘That’s not ladylike’ (1994, 4). Similarly, Cynthia Weber calls these stories ‘unconscious ideologies’, which she describes as ‘the foundations of our ideological and political thinking that we place beyond debate’ (2005, 4). Weber suggests, and I agree, that drawing these unconscious, ‘commonsense’ stories about gender and the body back into debate can be profoundly unsettling as it can threaten our own ideas about being in the world (see also Peterson and True 1998). But it is an important analytic, by which I mean that interrogating these stories helps us to see how gender is working to regulate, order and organise social, cultural and political practices – how ideas about gender and the body are shaping and informing material events and phenomena. In the study of global politics, we should pay attention to the stories that are told about gendered subjects, as well as attending to the positioning and marking of bodies: stories of loving mothers and manly men (because ‘gender is not a synonym for women’; see Carver 1996). Accordingly, I offer two accounts of bodies in global politics in this section: bodies in social movements and bodies as scientists. Bodies in social movements My analysis of social movements begins with the body, in particular the female body, and behaviours that are assumed to be appropriate to it (or not). In this section, I discuss several social movements that involve women mobilising explicitly as women in different social movements to effect political change and explore some of the possible explanations for the success (or lack of success) that these social movements enjoyed. I suggest that movements involving women acting in accordance with social norms and rules about feminine behaviour are more likely to be validated and supported than movements in which women transgress those norms and rules. In 2020, then-President Donald Trump dispatched federal officers to break up Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests across the USA. In Portland, Oregon and other locations, community organisations and individuals mobilised to defend the protestors. One organised form of defence was the ‘Wall of Moms’: a group of women who assembled to create a human barricade between the BLM protestors and the police forces. The ‘Wall of Moms’ was mobilised in one area of Portland by a woman called Bev Barnum, who posted an expression of support for the BLM movement on Facebook and encouraged her friends to join her in a physical demonstration of solidarity. Barnum deliberately appealed to gender norms in her expression of support, writing ‘We moms are often underestimated. But we’re stronger than we’re given credit for. … Let’s make it clear that we will protect protesters without the use of violence’ (quoted in McGreal 2020). When the ‘Wall of Moms’ congregated, they chanted ‘Feds stay clear, moms are here’, deliberately deploying motherhood as a political

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identity and drawing on the associations among gender, maternality, pacifism and protection as a means of legitimating their actions. Similarly, in Kenya, women leveraged the symbolic power of motherhood to protest widespread gender-based violence and extra-judicial killings across the country. The Mothers of Victims and Survivors Network was founded in Mathare, Nairobi, to draw attention to the violence women suffered not only at the hands of people in the community but also at the hands of local police. Mama Victor, one of the women involved in forming the organisation, reported that she formed the network ‘to provide strength, comfort, and purpose to other women whose loved ones were killed by police’ (Wadekar 2020). The idea that women – and in particular mothers – are uniquely capable of providing ‘strength, comfort, and purpose’ is part of what makes the political mobilisation as mothers effective. These are two contemporary examples of social movements that organise around the identity of motherhood, but there are many more such examples throughout history. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, for example, congregated in the Plaza from 1977 onwards, to protest the illicit arrest and capture of their (biological and symbolic) relatives; their organisation had profound implications for the social movements and for the study and practices of gender in global politics. The women at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the UK during the early 1980s campaigned for the removal of US nuclear weapons from the Greenham Common military base drawing on symbols and practices of motherhood. Although these were local social movements, both attracted the attention of and, in the case of the former, support from the international community. (Besides, problematising the divide between politics designated international and that designated domestic or ‘everyday’ is an important analytical contribution of feminist scholarship in IR.) In the remainder of this section, I identify three sets of common practices through which the women associated with each movement reaffirmed their identities as mothers. The first of these is biologically determined separatism. Second, I discuss the question of boundaries and political space and third, the role of ‘the child’ as metaphor and physical embodiment of vulnerability informing the politics enacted by these groups. These social movements were explicitly ‘women only’ at times. From Greenham, the opinion that ‘women-only actions offered a more complete guarantee of nonviolence’ (Liddington 1989, 235) echoes the statements made five years previously by women in Argentina: ‘We endure the pushing, insults, attacks by the army …. But the men, they never would have stood such things without reacting’ (Mariá Adela Antokoletz cited in Arditti 1999, 35). In terms of the protest by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, it was both justified and justifiable: the junta in power at the time, influenced by the Catholic family-oriented values of a traditional Argentine way of life, was less likely to ‘disappear’ mothers than fathers. This was in keeping with the gender expectations of the time that

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idealised motherhood and the family in the hope of rebuilding society in an image pleasing to the eyes of the regime. The ‘Wall of Moms’ in the USA deployed the same imagery and drew on the same gender stereotypes as the women organising almost 50 years previously, acting in concert as women in the hope that the forces of the state would be dissuaded from using violence against them. The question of boundaries is a second element common to these groups. These social movements were comprised of women who would not ‘sit still and keep at home’ (Rowbotham 1972, 16) as women were expected to do, leaving the realm of formal politics to masculine or masculinised subjects. Instead, they used their weapons of protest – their bodies, and specifically their female bodies – in a carefully articulated statement of female agency. Initially the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo organised their protests in socially sanctioned ‘women’s spaces’, ‘using feminine/maternal public parks and tea houses as places to make plans and exchange information’ (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996, 157). Taking their protest to the steps of the government buildings in the Plaza de Mayo altered the social and spatial impact of the movement. By associating themselves with the Plaza de Mayo, which is deeply significant in Argentine history and politics, the Mothers achieved recognition and a public space for their political protest. This, however, is not the same thing as saying that the Mothers ‘moved in’ to that public space; the Plaza de Mayo was occupied by the Mothers just once a week. In contrast, the Peace Camp at Greenham Common was a permanent fixture. The women involved in the camp inhabited an altogether more liminal space. They had left their fixed houses for tenuous settlements on common land; the mothers at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp did ‘move in’ to that public space, both with and without their children by their sides, in a confrontational bid to challenge notions of home and security in the shadows cast by missile silos. The permanence of their move is reaffirmed in the memories recorded by the women who lived there: ‘women who have been there … say they will never be the same’ (Elshtain 1995, 241). The women’s refusal to return ‘home’ at the end of each day was interpreted as the challenge to public order that it intended. Instead of questioning that order, however, the widespread response in UK media coverage of the events was to question the behaviour of the women. ‘The question of women’s roles as mothers was used frequently as a stick of castigation with which to beat the Greenham women: if they were so fond of children, why were they not at home with them?’ (Young 1990, 68). Finally, the third practice that helped construct the collective identity of ‘mother’ for the women in question was a commitment to child-centred politics. While the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo searched for their niños desaparecidos, their disappeared children, the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was dedicated to ensuring a better life for the children of the future. Similarly, in the Nairobi neighbourhood of Kayole, one community organiser, Faith Kasina, commented that the women organise as women in the hope of creating better lives for the children they bring into the world (quoted in Wadekar 2020). The same key terms 68

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resonate across the diverse contexts: the movements sought to offer children protection, to provide them with security and to honour a notion of maternal care. The symbols used to denote this child-centred commitment are also similar. The Association of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo adopted a white headscarf, symbolising a baby’s nappy, as their emblem of collective identity. As one mother suggested, ‘a gauze shawl, a diaper … will make us feel closer to our children’ (cited in Bouvard 1994, 74). The whiteness signifies peace and innocence as well as life, in a tacit refusal to don the black mantilla worn as part of traditional mourning dress in Argentina. The symbolic function of the baby’s nappy reinforces the notion of maternal care mentioned above, as well as evoking thoughts of birth, thus life and hope. Similarly, nappies and toys pinned to the fence at Greenham Common were among the many symbols of ‘mundane’ domesticity deployed in contrast to the high-powered high politics of a nuclear base. These symbols sought to idealise motherhood and legitimise the presence of the protestors. This is by no means an unproblematic view, but a culturally intelligible narrative nonetheless; the children of tomorrow represented by a soft toy pinned to a hard wire fence being protected, cared for, mothered by the women at the Peace Camp, who felt ‘a special responsibility to offer them [the children] a future – not a wasteland of a world and a lingering death’ (cited in Liddington 1989, 227). There are some striking similarities across the cases I have discussed here, although they are separated by almost 50 years. The presence of women’s bodies as the substance of protest is legitimised in all cases by the women claiming the political identity of ‘woman’ and, specifically, of ‘mother’. This, of course, underscores the relationship between femininity and maternality and reaffirms the gender norms that dictate that it is women, and only women, who mother, an idea which is worth exploring further (see, for example, Hall, Weissman, and Shepherd 2020). Further, the protests were effective in part because the women leveraged those stereotypes about femininity and maternality: the Portland women and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were largely able to avoid sanction by state security forces by tapping into cultural discourses about motherly love, pacificism and nurture. Thus, the gendered politics of social movements is an interesting site at which to explore the work that bodies (are made to) do in world politics. Bodies in science In this section, I turn from social movements to discuss bodies in science, a second set of significant bodies which become visible through feminist interrogations of weapons technology and strategic culture. In 1987, Carol Cohn published an analysis of ‘nuclear strategic thinking’ in the ‘almost entirely male world’ of ‘distinguished “defence intellectuals”’ (Cohn 1987, 678–679). This article remains one of the most significant 69

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accounts of the effect of gender, gendered language and bodily images on the study and practices of global politics. Cohn also draws our attention to the complex intersections of race, gender and class, referring to ‘white men in ties discussing missile size’ (Cohn 1987, 683) in a typically snappy turn of phrase. The gendered imaginings used to make sense of the new weaponry are obvious and inscribe a link between violence and masculinity that feminist scholarship has long sought to problematise. When the first fusion device was tested in the United States of America in 1952, the telegram reporting its success to authorities – describing an explosion about a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 – read ‘It’s a boy!’ (Easlea 1983, 130; see also Cohn 1987, 701).1 Admittedly, that was back in the 1950s; surely we can expect to see contemporary defence experts refusing to deploy the gendered metaphors employed by their ancestors? On the contrary, Cohn reports that defence intellectuals continue to construct their language, which Cohn names ‘techno-strategic discourse’, using a gendered framework. Cohn witnessed a country without tested nuclear capacity being referred to as a nuclear ‘virgin’ (Cohn 1987, 687). Similarly, phrases such as ‘more bang for the buck’, ‘the Russians are a little harder than we are’ and the assertion that ‘you’re not going to take the nicest missile you have and put it in a crummy hole’ all contribute to the ongoing masculinisation of nuclear weapons technology (Cohn 1987, 683–684). As one scientist reported: At one point, we re-modelled a particular attack, … and found that instead of there being 36 million immediate fatalities, there would only be 30 million. And everybody was sitting around nodding, saying, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great, only 30 million’, when all of a sudden, I heard what we were saying. And I blurted out, ‘Wait, I’ve just heard how we’re talking – Only 30 million! Only 30 million human beings killed instantly?’ Silence fell upon the room. Nobody said a word. They didn’t even look at me. It was awful. I felt like a woman. (quoted in Cohn and Ruddick 2004, 416–417)

Feeling ‘like a woman’ compromised not only this interviewee’s masculinity, but also his professionalism: the underlying assumption is that women (irrational, emotional creatures) have no place in the hard-headed world of defence strategy. Cohn later extended her ground-breaking analysis to the social media exchange between then-President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, regarding the size and functionality of the latter’s ‘nuclear button’ (2018). Cohn argues that their spat, which involved Trump tweeting ‘I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!’, was motivated by ‘their need for the world to believe that they are manly men’ (2018), demonstrating the continued importance of gender analysis to understanding nuclear politics. 70

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Similarly, others have explored how ideas about gender, and particularly masculinity, affect other domains of science, including climate politics. Cara Daggett, for example, develops the concept of ‘petro-masculinity’ to understand the complex interactions among race, gender and climate politics. Daggett argues that misogyny and climate denial are ‘mutually constituted, with gender anxiety slithering alongside climate anxiety, and misogynist violence sometimes exploding as fossil violence’ (2018, 28). In her analysis, Daggett explores how a political economy reliant on fossil fuel combustion is reinforced by, and reinforces, specific ideas about authoritative masculinity, particularly in the US context. To acknowledge the ill effects of anthropocentric climate change is thus configured as ‘unmanly’; in turn, ‘manly men’ live lives that force the continued consumption of fossil fuels – working industries reliant on coal or gas, driving inefficient trucks or SUVs, heating or cooling large homes that purport to reflect social status. Associating these trappings of a particular lifestyle (which is heavily inflected by race and class as well as gender) with the successful performance of masculinity is one of the ways in which bodies matter in popular discourse on science. Crucially, this kind of sharp gender analysis draws attention to the ways in which gender as a relation of power operates in world politics by not only interrogating the actions of physical bodies but also by asking what work gender is doing to organise and make sense of scientific discourses and discourses about science. The rationality employed and deployed by the communities in which Cohn has conducted her research is literally dis-embodied, amounting to the denial of human experience in the narratives of the defence intellectuals: ‘it is not only impossible to talk about humans in this language, it also becomes in some sense illegitimate to ask the paradigm to reflect human concerns’ (Cohn 1987, 711–712). It is precisely these ‘human concerns’ to which researchers working on these topics wish to draw our attention, facilitated by a nuanced and convincing analysis of the ways in which bodies, and particularly masculine bodies, manifest and are made sense of within the domains of science and technology.

PROBLEMATISING ‘BODIES THAT MATTER’ 2 This chapter has provided an overview of the ways in which it is possible to conceptualise sex/gender and introduced you to some illustrations to show how and why gender matters in global politics. There is more to gender than bodies, and there is more to bodies than materiality. Each of the following chapters focuses on and interrogates the operation of gendered power and the association with, and effects of, gendered identity categories. In its entirety, this book encourages you to develop a ‘feminist curiosity’ (Enloe 2007, 1) about the study and practices of global politics. Challenging the assumptions of conventional theories and approaches, unsettling that which was previously taken for granted, even (perhaps especially) such things as ‘human nature’ and the body – these are among the ways in which a feminist curiosity works. 71

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Discussion questions 1. Why should the study of global politics attend to the practices of bodies? How, and with what effects, are bodies regulated in global politics? Discuss, using contemporary examples. 2. What have been the most significant shifts in gender ‘rules’ in global politics in recent years? 3. Can you imagine a world without gender identity categories? Is a ‘post-gender’ world a good thing? Notes 1. The nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 was named ‘Little Boy’. 2. This subheading is borrowed from Butler’s (1993) text of the same name.

Further reading Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge. Feinberg, Leslie. 1993. Stone Butch Blues. Ann Arbor, MI: Firebrand Books. Mirandé, Alfredo. 2016. “Hombres Mujeres: An Indigenous Third Gender.” Men and Masculinities 19 (4): 384–409. Rice, Carla, Karleen Pendleton Jiménez, Elisabeth Harrison, Margaret Robinson, Jen Rinaldi, Andrea LaMarre and Jill Andrew. 2020. “Bodies at the Intersections: Refiguring Intersectionality through Queer Women’s Complex Embodiments.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 46 (1): 177–200. Wilcox, Lauren. 2014. Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. References Arditti, Rita. 1999. Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina. London and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bordo, Susan. 2003. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, revised edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bouvard, Marguerite Guzman. 1994. Revolutionising Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, revised edition. London: Routledge. 72

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Carver, Terrell. 1996. Gender is not a Synonym for Women. London and Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Cohn, Carol. 1987. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12 (4): 687–718. Cohn, Carol. 2018. “The Perils of Mixing Masculinity and Missiles.” The New York Times, 5 January 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/ 05/opinion/security-masculinity-nuclear-weapons.html Cohn, Carol and Sara Ruddick. 2004. ‘A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction.” In Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives, edited by Sohail H. Hashmi and Steven P. Lee, 405–435. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daggett, Cara. 2018. “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47 (1): 25–44. Driskill, Qwo-Li, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley and Scott Lauria Morgensen. 2011. “Introduction.” In Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature, edited by Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley and Scott Lauria Morgensen, 1–30. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Easlea, Brian. 1983. Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists and the Nuclear Arms Race. London: Pluto Press. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1995. Women and War, 2nd edition. London and Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 2007. Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link. Plymouth and Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Hall, Lucy B., Anna L. Weissman and Laura J. Shepherd (eds). 2020. Troubling Motherhood: Maternality in Global Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liddington, J. 1989. The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism and AntiMilitarism in Britain since 1820. London: Virago. McGreal, Chris. 2020. “‘I Wanted to Take Action’: Behind the ‘Wall of Moms’ Protecting Portland’s Protesters.” The Guardian, 22 July 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/21/trump-federalagents-portland-protests-moms Mirandé, Alfredo. 2016. “Hombres Mujeres: An Indigenous Third Gender.” Men and Masculinities 19 (4): 384–409. Morgensen, Scott Lauria. 2012. “Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction.” Settler Colonial Studies 2 (2): 2–22. Morgenthau, Hans. 1952. “‘Another ‘Great Debate’: The National Interest of the United States.” American Political Science Review 46 (4): 961–988. Morgenthau, Hans. 1973. Politics Among Nations, 5th edition. New York: Knopf. Peterson, V. Spike and Jacqui True. 1998. ‘“New Times” and New Conversations.” In The ‘Man’ Question in International Relations, edited by Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart, 14–27. Boulder, CO: Westview. 73

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Pettman, Jindy. 1997. “Body Politics: International Sex Tourism”. Third World Quarterly 18 (1): 93–108. Radcliffe, Sarah A. and Sallie Westwood. 1996. Remaking the Nation: Identity and Politics in Latin America. London: Routledge. Rowbotham, Sheila. 1972. Women, Resistance and Revolution. London: Penguin. Runyan, Anne Sisson and V. Spike Peterson. 2014. Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium, 4th edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Smith, Steve. 2000. “The Discipline of International Relations: Still an American Social Science?” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 2 (3): 374–402. Sylvester, Christine. 1994. Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Valentine, David and Wilchins, Riki Anne. 1997. “One Percent on the Burn Chart: Gender, Genitals and Hermaphrodites with Attitude.” Social Text 15 (3/4): 215–222. Wadekar, Neha. 2020. “Mothers, Sisters, Wives: Kenyan Women Lead Fight against Police Violence.” The New Humanitarian, 3 September 2020. https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2020/09/03/ Kenya-women-gender-police-violence Weber, Cynthia. 2005. International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction. 2nd edition. London, Routledge. Weedon, Chris. 1997. Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. 2nd edition. London: Blackwell. Weerawardhana, Chamindra. 2018. “Profoundly Decolonizing? Reflections on a Transfeminist Perspective of International Relations.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 16 (1): 184–213. Young, Alison. 1990. Femininity in Dissent, London: Routledge. Zalewski, Marysia. 1996. ‘“All These Theories Yet the Bodies Keep Piling Up”: Theories, Theorists, Theorising.” In International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, edited by Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski, 340–353. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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SECTION 2

CHAPTER 7

Advocacy, Activism and Resistance Valentine M. Moghadam That gender matters in global politics is now widely accepted, the result of decades of feminist knowledge-building in such fields as revolutions, social movements, development, political economy, democratic transitions, institutions, and conflict, peace and security. In this chapter, I focus on how women’s and feminist action matters in world politics as well as within societies. Women’s advocacy, activism and resistance take diverse forms and occur at different scales. Local women’s groups, feminist organisations, women-led non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and transnational feminist networks (TFNs) have been among the organisational forms that feminist activism has taken. Targets may be institutions of global governance, states or non-state actors. Framings, tactics, goals and outcomes may vary according to cultural context or political opportunity. I begin with a conceptual and literature survey, followed by an elaboration of two forms of feminist action that have had both policy and political ramifications: transnational feminist research and advocacy for women’s economic empowerment and against misguided economic policies, and Tunisian feminist defence of women’s rights and resistance to Islamisation after the 2011 political revolution.

WOMEN’S ACTIVISM AND FEMINIST ACTIVISM Women’s activism has been the subject of considerable scholarly analysis. Early on, West and Blumberg (1990) identified four major issues that motivated women’s protest activism: economic survival and welfare; nationalist or racial/ethnic struggles; humanistic/nurturing issues (such as peace and the environment) and women’s rights struggles. Feminist theorising has DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-9

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focused on national-level factors including the growth of the population of educated women with grievances about their second-class citizenship, varieties of feminism, the evolution of women’s movements and campaigns and cross-regional similarities and differences in mobilising structures and strategies (see, for example, Basu 2017; Jaquette 1994; Margolis 1993; Molyneux 2001; Ray 2000; Sameh 2019; Weldon 2011). Research also distinguishes between women’s movement – social movement defined by a demographic group or constituency – and feminist movement, a subset of women’s movement guided by critiques of patriarchy and demands for gender equality (Beckwith 2000). In feminist action, ‘participants explicitly place value on challenging gender hierarchy and changing women’s social status, whether they adopt or reject the feminist label’ (Sperling, Ferree, and Risman 2001, xx). Towards that end, strategies may involve research, advocacy, educational outreach and lobbying; grassroots or local service delivery; public protests, rallies and demonstrations; and involvement in resistance movements.1 Activism can take place at local, national, regional and global levels. Specific campaigns may be launched at multiple levels, targeting local authorities, regional decisionmaking bodies or institutions of global governance. TFNs – which bring together women from three or more countries around a common theme or set of priority issues – may include local women’s groups, but their advocacy and activism are typically directed at international organisations and decision-making bodies (Moghadam 2005, 2013). 2 As Keck and Sikkink (1998, 3) explain, a transnational advocacy network is a set of ‘relevant actors working internationally on an issue who are bound together by shared values, a common discourse and dense exchanges of information and services’. Activists in such networks focus on specific issues and try to influence relevant policies. Similarly, many TFNs have had explicit policy focus areas – such as structural adjustment or neoliberal economics, violence against women, religious fundamentalisms and militarism and war – and have organised and mobilised around those issues to influence public debates and policy outcomes (Moghadam 2005 [2009], 2013, 2020). TFNs may be professionalised or more fluid, but they tend to be relatively small, with a cadre of committed activists (including scholar-activists), and with clearly defined goals inspired by feminist values of equality, care and solidarity. Much international research has explored how and why feminist movements and organisations emerge when they do, how they are affected by state policies and international processes, their mobilisational capacity, their ability to influence policy, ideological trajectories and framing processes. Htun and Weldon (2018), for example, emphasise the importance of ‘women’s movement autonomy and strength’, defining ‘autonomy’ as distance from male-dominated organisations or institutions. Such autonomy, they argue, is responsible for legal and policy changes for the advancement of women’s empowerment or gender justice. Contemporary feminist action has its roots in first-wave feminism, with its focus on suffrage and justice for women, and in second-wave feminism, with its demands for equality and cultural change. First-wave 78

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feminism brought about international women’s organisations around abolition, women’s suffrage, opposition to trafficking in women, antimilitarism and labour legislation for working women and mothers. The early 20th century also saw the emergence of an international socialist women’s movement. In 1900, the Socialist International passed its first resolution in favour of women’s suffrage, and suffrage became a demand of socialist parties in 1907. Within the Second International – an organisation that brought together socialist parties from around the world – the women’s organisations of France, Germany and Russia mobilised thousands of working-class and middle-class women for socialism and women’s emancipation. In Asian countries, as Jayawardena (1986) showed, many of the women’s movements and organisations that emerged were associated with socialist or nationalist movements. Examples of early international women’s organisations are the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the International Council of Women (ICW), the International Alliance of Women (IAW), the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF, associated with socialist and communist movements) and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). In promoting women’s rights, maternity legislation and an end to child labour, they engaged with inter-governmental bodies such as the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization (Berkovitch 1999; Rupp 1997). Poulos (2017, 63) points out that the WIDF, ‘the postwar consolidation of the wartime mobilization of women on an unprecedented scale’, became the most influential international women’s organisation of that era. We can therefore consider the IAW, ICW, WILPF, WIDF and YWCA as the first generation of women’s transnational networks. A second generation, more explicitly feminist, would come about in the mid-1980s and continue into the 21st century (Moghadam 1996, 2005, 2013, 2020). Second-wave feminism called for cultural change to accommodate demands for women’s equality and autonomy. Having emerged from other social movements while also rooted in the first wave, secondwave feminism had socialist, liberal and radical strands.3 Starting largely within national borders in the 1970s, it began to take on a global, transnational form in the mid-1980s, the result of the opportunities and challenges of globalisation and of the United Nations’ global women’s rights agenda. The latter included the 1952 UN Convention on the Political Rights of Women, followed by the 1957 Convention on the Nationality of Married Women; the 1960 UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education; and the 1962 UN Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriage. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (CEDAW) was adopted in 1979, in the aftermath of the first UN World Conference on Women and during the UN Decade for Women. These treaties and events have been effective in promoting the international standards and norms of the global women’s rights agenda around the world, although Rademacher (2020) finds variations in CEDAW’s implementation across the world-system’s economic zones. 79

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Across time and space, feminist movements have emerged to resist male domination, women’s subordination, patriarchal states and nonstate actors and oppressive market processes. They have done so in several ways: by creating feminist organisations with a collective identity and common purpose; engaging in research to document injustices and advocate for change; building websites and engaging in public debates; lobbying like-minded elite allies; organising seminars, meetings and press conferences; forming or joining coalitions; and launching public rallies and demonstrations around specific grievances or campaigns. Unlike other organised resistance movements, feminist movements have been famously non-violent (although confrontational collective action has occasionally occurred).

FEMINIST ACTION ON THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE World-systemic shifts in the 1980s – including welfare cuts and the decline of the Keynesian economic policy paradigm, the imposition/ adoption of structural adjustment policies in developing countries to service their debts and the rise of the religious right and fundamentalist movements – led to the emergence and growth of the second generation of international women’s networks, now more explicitly feminist. Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and Women in Development Europe (WIDE) penned scathing critiques of the new economic orthodoxy, which they argued were placing the burden of debt servicing and privatisation onto poor households and especially on women, whose reproductive or domestic responsibilities were intensified. The DAWN ‘manifesto’, Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives (Sen and Grown 1987), was a call to action as well as a sustained critique of development failures. Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) was formed in response to the Islamist turn in many Muslim-majority countries and state initiatives to strengthen or introduce patriarchal family laws to placate Islamists. The UN Decade for Women concluded with the 1985 Third World Conference on Women, held in Nairobi. From this meeting came the first of what would become a series of outcome documents that were clearly influenced by feminist scholars and activists. The Nairobi ForwardLooking Strategies refer to ‘the aggravation of an economic crisis in the developing countries, which has been an important obstacle that endangers not only the pursuance of new programmes in support of women but also the maintenance of those that were already under way’ (paragraph 7). Although the next World Conference on Women was not to take place until Beijing in September 1995, TFNs and allies met at other UN conferences to ensure that women and gender issues would not be ignored. This included the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the 1993 Human Rights Conference and the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994. 80

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More TFNs emerged, working independently, together and in collaboration with other civil society organisations to push forward the women’s rights agenda, oppose the consolidation of the neoliberal capitalist model of globalisation and engage in progressive internationalism. The Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) emerged in the run-up to UNCED, for example, while MADRE was established in 1983 to provide support and solidarity to women in Nicaragua who were suffering under the US-supported Contra war. MADRE later expanded its remit to include feminist humanitarian work with women in Cuba, Haiti, Palestine and Iraq. Marche Mondiale des Femmes/The World March of Women was formed in 2000, as was the Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development and Peace (WLP).4 Policy successes followed. TFN lobbying led to the insertion of important items in the final Vienna Declaration of the 1993 Conference on Human Rights, including the assertion that violence against women was an abuse of human rights. It also called attention to the harmful effects of certain traditional or customary practices, cultural prejudice and religious extremism and declared that human rights abuses of women in situations of armed conflict – including rape, sexual slavery and forced pregnancy – constituted violations of the fundamental principles of international human rights and humanitarian law. In the wake of devastating conflicts in the Balkans and Central Africa, UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security was adopted in October 2000. That same year, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were adopted and included Goal 3 to promote gender equality and empower power (through ending gender-based literacy, education and employment gaps and increasing women’s political representation). 5 All of these developments came about, in one way or another, because of the activities of TFNs.6 Their activism has helped diffuse the global women’s rights agenda and the adoption of feminist frames such as gender equality, women’s human rights and women’s empowerment.

CASE STUDY 1: INFLUENCING THE WORLD BANK AND INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND (IMF) In the wake of the DAWN manifesto, feminist scholars produced key studies criticising the social and gender effects of structural adjustment policies, male bias in the development process and gender gaps in macroeconomic theory and policy (Bakker 1994; Benería and Feldman 1992; Elson 1991; Sparr 1994). At the same time, the growing international chorus of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) critics included the Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice, the Women and Trade Network and Women’s Eyes on the Bank (Moghadam 2005). Along with other TFNs, they took part in Jubilee 2000, the Coalition to End the Third World Debt, 50 Years is Enough and United for Peace and Justice. After the establishment of the World Social Forum 81

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(WSF) in 2001 – an international gathering of neoliberal globalisation critics and the progressive counterpart to the corporate-dominated World Economic Forum – TFNs took part in WSF convergences and several joined its International Council. On the advocacy front, TFNs participated in multilateral and intergovernmental political arenas (see, for example, O’Brien, Goetz, Scholte and Williams 2000; Sen 2018). They observed and addressed UN departments such as the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and bodies such as the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), and they consulted UN agencies and regional commissions. By taking part in and submitting documents to meetings, and by preparing background papers, briefing papers and reports, they shared their expertise on issues; by lobbying delegates, they raised awareness and cultivated supporters. The World Bank began to take notice of TFN advocacy and expertise, and World Bank President Wolfensohn created an ‘external gender consultative group’, inviting several feminist critics to join (Moghadam 2005, 122). Hafner-Burton and Pollack (2002) describe the influence of the ‘international women’s movement’ in the adoption of gender mainstreaming at the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (see also Reanda 1999). That influence continued. TFNs took part in the first UN International Conference on Financing for Development, in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002, with WEDO facilitating the Women’s Caucus (Sen 2018, 11). The 2008 financial crisis put paid to the effort to ensure financing for the various international development and women’s rights treaties, but the Gender Equality Architecture Reform Campaign successfully pushed for the creation of UN Women in 2010. Shortly afterwards, the World Bank produced the World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development (World Bank 2011). With its call on governments to take gender equality seriously, remove legal and policy obstacles to women’s entry into the paid labour force and acknowledge women’s unpaid labour, the report emphasised ‘women’s empowerment as smart economics’ and marked a turning point in the Bank’s thinking on gender equality (Razavi 2012). Chapter 6 of the report examines globalisation’s adverse effects, citing several feminist studies, though it generally supports the project of free markets. A companion report, Gender at Work (Morton et al. 2014), conceded that the drive for global competitiveness had ‘reinforced occupational segregation and downward pressure on women’s wages’ and that ‘the type of growth matters’ (Morton et al. 2014, 10–11). The same year saw the publication of Voice and Agency: Empowering Women and Girls for Shared Prosperity. Meanwhile, some feminist scholars criticised the MDGs for their limited attention to gender and to the role of women’s empowerment in achieving the other goals of ending poverty and improving health outcomes (see, for example, Kabeer 2003). The subsequent Sustainable Development Goals (2015–2030) mainstream gender across the 17 goals, while Goal 5 specifically focuses on gender equality.7 In sum, the World Bank’s attention, resources and personnel dedicated to gender issues increased significantly. Caren Grown, once a feminist 82

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critic of the Bank’s policies and programmes and co-author of the 1987 DAWN study, became Group Senior Director on Gender in 2014. Women occupy more leadership and decision-making positions, and the framing, designing and implementation of projects increasingly contain gender components and themes. The World Bank’s Gender Data Portal is now a source of significant data aimed at policymakers and scholars alike (see http://datatopics.worldbank.org/gender/). As Grown has noted, the Bank’s eventual recognition of gender issues resulted from the research and advocacy of feminist social scientists outside the Bank (as well as some within the organisation).8 The IMF followed suit, paying attention to women’s economic empowerment and programmes to improve economic opportunities for women. As with the World Bank, the IMF highlights opportunities for women’s employment, entrepreneurial and financial inclusion or ‘macroeconomic gains from gender equality’, with recommendations to remove obstacles such as unequal inheritance and restrictions on women’s property ownership and household headship (IMF 2015). Such recommendations were now included in the IMF country studies for the Middle East and North Africa, where female labour force participation has been lower than other regions. In one study of Jordan, for example, the IMF recommended ‘increased social spending to support child care’, which ‘would free up women’s time for caring young and elderly and facilitate an increase in FLFP’ (IMF 2017, 46).9 Blackmon (2020) has stressed the role of former IMF director Christine Lagarde in the new focus, which the new IMF director, Kristalina Georgieva, has continued (see, for example, Georgieva 2020). The IMF’s ‘gender turn’ (Coburn 2019, 2) is more likely the result of three decades of sustained feminist research and advocacy.

CASE STUDY 2: FEMINIST RESISTANCE IN TUNISIA A small country situated in the Arab North Africa subregion (the Maghreb), Tunisia is the birthplace of the Arab Spring. It has the distinction of being the only country to have embarked on a democratic transition following regime change, successfully establishing democratic processes and an egalitarian constitution, in part because of its influential women’s rights movement. Although Tunisia is not the only country in the region to have experienced feminist-Islamist tensions, the ideological gap between the two movements and their respective political-cultural projects was especially visible during the early years of the country’s democratic transition (2011–2014), when the new constitution was being forged and intensely debated. Scholarship on Tunisia’s feminist movement has tended to focus on its emergence and growth under authoritarian conditions after the 1989 legalisation of two key women’s organisations – l’Association Tunisienne des Femmes Démocrates (Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, or ATFD) and l’Association des Femmes Tunisiennes pour la Recherche et le Développement (Association of Tunisian Women for Research on 83

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Development, or AFTURD). Studies also examine feminist resistance to the newly empowered Islamist movement after the 2011 political revolution and during the democratic transition (Charrad and Zarrugh 2014; Khalil 2014; Moghadam 2018; Tchaicha and Arfaoui 2017). They show how ATFD and AFTURD worked in coalition with progressives in the country’s large trade union, the Union Général des Travailleurs Tunisiens (UGTT), and with the left-wing political parties to challenge authoritarian rule and advance a socialist, democratic or secular alternative. To provide some context, postcolonial Tunisia was built on the concept of modernity and a moderate Arab-Muslim identity, with the rights of women firmly enshrined in family law and the personal status code, known in French as le Code du Statut Personnel (CPS) and, in Arabic, as the Medjella.10 Adopted in August 1956, the CPS was the most liberal in the Arab region, as it raised the age of marriage for girls to 17, banned polygamy outright and gave women the right to divorce and child custody. Tunisia also gained the distinction of producing many women lawyers and jurists, who were perhaps inspired by the French-educated lawyer-president Habib Bourguiba. Tunisia’s ‘state feminist’ regime was reflected in Bourguiba’s measures to improve the legal status of women, encourage schooling and higher education and incorporate women in public administration. Medical abortions were legalised in Tunisia in 1973. Under these conditions, the feminist movement grew. In a special issue of a Lebanese women’s studies magazine, scholar Accad (1985, 1) wrote: Having lived and worked, read and met most of these women during the six months I spent in Tunisia as a researcher, I can only conclude that Tunisia is indeed a vital and dynamic place for women. Despite political upheavals in the Arab world the achievements of Tunisian women are a leading force not only for Tunisia; but for their sisters in other parts of the world.

Accad also described her interview with a leading Tunisian feminist, legal scholar Hafidha Chékir. She explained that Chékir saw three kinds of feminist movements: the reformist, which seeks to improve women’s condition; the radical, which goes beyond mere reforms and attacks the foundation of patriarchal society; and the ideological, which combines class struggle and women’s equality. Chékir argued that Tunisia needed to integrate all three types for a more ‘militant’ triple action: a feminist struggle for the acquisition of full citizenship in a democracy and for a change of the socio-economic structures. Accad further reported that, according to Chékir, Tunisia’s feminist movements had the necessary components for the transformation of the entire society, because their struggle combined the fight against social exploitation, political imperialism and the specific oppression of women. At the same time, Chékir (1985, 6) saw the misogynous attitudes and, above all, the Islamic revival movement, as the most serious threats to women wanting to achieve equality and expand their rights. These ideas were rooted in Tunisia’s own political history as well 84

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as in connections with France, where many Tunisian feminists spent some time studying. In addition, socialist and communist ideas were present in Tunisia (as they were in many Third World countries) and were especially strong among students and women’s rights activists as well as trade union leaders, even though the communist party had been banned in 1963. In the 1980s, Tunisia, like other countries in the Arab region and elsewhere in the Muslim world, began to experience pressure from Islamists, specifically in the form of the mouvement de la tendance Islamique (MTI), which later was renamed Ennahda (or Al-Nahda). According to one activist, the emergence of Islamists was in part a move to counter the growth of the radical student movement.11 Inspired by the Islamic revolution in Iran and by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the MTI was founded by Rachid Ghannouchi in 1981 but was banned in 1989 when members were charged with inciting violence. The ban was welcomed by Tunisian feminists and secularists, although several secular human rights lawyers were appalled when the new president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, ordered the jailing of many Islamists, whom they subsequently came to represent in court. In the 1990s, social and economic development, a well-organised social provisioning system and friendly ties with Europe as well as the Arab world and Africa ensured Tunisia’s stability. While ruling in an authoritarian manner despite regular elections, Ben Ali continued the secular republican legacy of his predecessor and presented himself as a champion of women’s rights. The end of the Cold War and democracypromotion activities by the European Union and the United States created some room for manoeuvre for Tunisia’s burgeoning civil society. Tunisian feminists joined Algerian and Moroccan partners to form the TFN Collectif 95 Maghreb-Egalité, and women’s groups worked together and with other civil society associations on human rights, social welfare and fair elections. The ATFD and AFTURD also turned their attention to the gaps in family law that still permitted unequal inheritance, to domestic violence and to sexual harassment. Privatisation, the rising cost of living and high unemployment – all of which were exacerbated by the global recession of 2008 – triggered labour protest actions. Long-standing citizen dissatisfaction eventually led to the 2011 political revolution that ended the Ben Ali regime and ushered in a democratic transition. In the October 2011 elections, the Islamist Ennahda party won a plurality of votes and thus formed a coalition government with two secular political parties. Rachid Ghannouchi, the party leader, presented himself as a moderate and democrat, but Tunisian feminists and many secularists felt that Ennahda was quietly supportive of the group of salafist men bent on disrupting artistic gatherings deemed un-Islamic, attacking cafés and shops that sold alcohol, and trying to change the university dress codes so that only heavily veiled women, wearing the Saudistyle niqab, could attend classes. The emergence of Islamism following the revolution raised a dilemma for feminist activists. On the one hand, they were committed to the democratic process, which had brought Ennahda to power. On the other hand, 85

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the fact that Ennahda women wore modest Islamic dress and a headscarf seemed to suggest that unveiled Tunisian women deserved moral opprobrium, and the Salafists took advantage of the new political environment, expressing their hypermasculinity and harassing unveiled women as well as public figures known to be staunch secularists. Tunisian feminists were furious when Islamists spoke of overturning the ban on polygamy or tolerating ‘religious marriages’ that would enable a man to have more than one wife simultaneously or to ‘marry’ one ‘temporarily’.12 Abortion, legal since 1973 and provided in public hospitals and clinics, was subjected to open criticism from within conservative circles (ATFD 2013; Ben Gamra 2014). At the same time, a female Ennahda member of the Constituent Assembly argued against single mothers, asserting that they ‘do not deserve any governmental help’ because they are a ‘disgrace’ to the country ‘and have no right to exist’ (Barducci 2011). Such statements created a polarising situation in the country, with secularists, feminists and leftists on one side, and Islamists on the other.13 Another Constituent Assembly member, a French Tunisian who returned to the country to take part in the revolution, ran in the elections for the Constituent Assembly under the left-wing El Massar party as a form of ‘personal defiance’ of the Islamists.14 She won a seat and – along with allies in the Constituent Assembly and in civil society – spent two years opposing efforts to insert ‘Sharia’ in the draft constitution and to call women and men ‘complementary’ rather than equal. Amel Grami, a women’s rights activist and professor of Islamic studies at Manouba University outside Tunis, described how life had changed since Ennahda had come to power in the October 2011 election: The main subject is civil liberties and how to survive the current wave of violence against women. There is tension vis-à-vis women in terms of their clothes, their life-style, etc. For example, swimming in Ramadan causes problems now for some women. It is a new phenomenon in Tunisia. (Grami and Bennoune 2013)

Tunisia’s feminist movement fought to take part in the agenda-setting process during the transitional period and the deliberations of the National Constitutional Assembly, which was charged with drafting a new constitution. Feminist organisations remained mobilised, insisting that there be no changes to the country’s fairly egalitarian family law, and that women’s presence in political bodies be increased (see Tchaicha and Arfaoui 2012). A coalition of ATFD, AFTURD, the Human Rights League, the UGTT Women’s Commission, the Tunisian section of Amnesty International and the National Council for Freedom in Tunisia called for full and equal citizenship and opposed attempts to change constitutional language from equality to complementary.15 Eventually Ennahda backed down and agreed to retain the constitutional reference to women’s equality. The new was constitution adopted in January 2014, with the now-famous Article 46: ‘The state commits to protect women’s accrued rights and work to strengthen and develop those rights. The state guarantees the equality 86

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of opportunities between women and men to have access to all levels of responsibility in all domains. The state works to attain parity between women and men in elected Assemblies. The state shall take all necessary measures to eradicate violence against women’. In 2014 and 2015, the ATFD and its partners began to push conceptual and political boundaries by adopting ‘gender-based violence’ and extending it to include acts of violence against women and men accused of ‘immoral’ acts, whether premarital sex, adultery or homosexuality. Some ambitious proposals were made, not only to criminalise all forms of rape, but also to call for acceptance and non-penalisation of cohabitation of consenting adults, and for ‘la liberté de choix du partenaire et de l’orientation sexuelle’ – the freedom of choice of partner and sexual orientation. The feminist groups withstood the predictable backlash and helped shape new advances for women. In 2017, a 1970s directive banning the marriage of a Muslim Tunisian woman to a non-Muslim man (unless he converted to Islam) was lifted, and the toughest law to date on violence against women was adopted. Feminists then tried to tackle the last discriminatory aspect of family law: unequal inheritance, whereby male kin receive more than female kin. However, new developments – the death of the country’s president, who supported change, the election of a new president who did not support it, and polls showing that in the context of the country’s economic stagnation, the public did not prioritise the matter – put the question of equal inheritance on the back burner (Moghadam 2019).

CONCLUSION Advocacy, activism and resistance have been hallmarks of feminist movements, organisations and networks since at least the early 20th century. These activities continue to characterise contemporary TFNs and nationally based women’s groups alike. As ‘outsiders’, transnational and local feminist groups work with each other, with partners in civil society and with supportive ‘insiders’ to help shape key national and international issues. In Tunisia, such strategies helped feminists retain past gains and push for new ones. Feminist activism and resistance to Islamist encroachments led to constitutional, legal and policy advances, although the weight of economic difficulties continues to burden lower income women and their families. With TFNs, advocacy and activism similarly led to significant achievements in the arena of international policymaking, including SCR 1325, the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals, the creation of UN Women, the World Bank’s World Development Report 2012 and the IMF’s attention to gender equality and women’s economic empowerment. At the time of writing, the capitalist world-system remains mired in militarism and armed conflicts, the COVID-19 pandemic, ecological disasters and gross income and wealth inequalities. The world is as troubled today as it was over a century ago, when women mobilised to oppose war 87

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and injustices and promote progressive social change. Nonetheless, we can expect local women’s groups and TFNs alike to continue to confront economic crisis, war and backlashes and promote gender equality and social justice. Discussion questions 1. How do the local and the global intersect in transnational activism? 2. In what ways does transnational feminism matter in global politics? 3. In the case of Tunisia, how did the relatively small feminist movement take on a large Islamist movement? Notes 1. ‘Resistance’ has broad meanings and ranges from everyday ‘weapons of the weak’ as in James Scott’s 1987 study of Southeast Asian peasants to large-scale revolutionary movements. Historians have documented women’s roles in the revolutions and resistance movements of the early modern era (for example, Rowbotham 1973). In the Middle East, feminist resistance may include Egyptian women’s organised actions against sexual harassment, Iranian women’s defiance of compulsory veiling and Tunisian feminist resistance to Islamist encroachments after the 2011 political revolution, which will be discussed more fully here. 2. On transnational feminist activism, see also Hawkesworth (2006), Lycklama À Nijeholt, Vargas, and Wieringa (1998), Naples and Desai (2002) and Stienstra (2000). 3. On the United States, see Evans (1980), Ferree and Hess (1985), Taylor (1989). 4. Women-led NGOs in the 1990s were initially criticised for their connection to neoliberalisation and their perceived departure from the more radical or transformative goals of women’s social movements (Alvarez 1999; Jad 2004). There is merit to this critique, though many women’s NGOs have crafted explicitly feminist mission and vision statements. Some are affiliated to TFNs that work with UN agencies or the regional commissions; many lobby their governmental delegations at annual meetings of the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). 5. https://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/2015_MDG_Report/pdf/MDG%20 2015%20rev%20(July%201).pdf 6. Despite the advances, however, the decade that followed saw the outbreak of more wars and development setbacks. In response to the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded and occupied Afghanistan and, two years later, Iraq. The emergence of the dynamic resistance group Code Pink: Women for Peace was one feminist response to the invasions. 7. https://sdgs.un.org/goals. For feminist analyses of SDG strengths and weaknesses, see contributions in Gender & Development, vol. 24, issue 1, 2016. 8. Comments made at the conference, ‘Women’s Empowerment and International Organizations: Achievements, Opportunities, Constraints’, organised by V. M. Moghadam, Bilge Erten and Catalina Herrera Almanza, Northeastern University, Boston, 22 April 2016. 88

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9. The present author made the same case two decades earlier. See Moghadam (1998): 125, 134, 137, 150 and 226. But better late than never! 10. For details, see Arfaoui 2007; Chékir and Arfaoui 2011; Charrad 2001. 11. Personal communication via email, June 2015. 12. Personal communication from a prominent Tunisian feminist. 13. See, for example, http://blogs.mediapart.fr/blog/salah-horchani/020815/hamadijebali-archetype-de-l-islamiste-se-disant-modere-qui-feint-d-ignorer-l-islampolitique-et last accessed April 2021. 14. Personal communication via email, June 2015. 15. ‘Protégez les droits de citoyenneté de la femme en Tunisie!’ Avaaz.org: Petitions Citoyennes (2 August 2012). http://www.avaz.org/fr/petition/Protegez_les_droits_de_citoyennete_de_la_ femme_en_Tunisie/See also http://www.babnet.net/cadredetail-53060.asp

Further reading Basu, Amira (ed.). 2017. Women’s Movements in a Global Era. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Moghadam, Valentine M. 2015. “Transnational Feminism and Movementbuilding.” In The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements, edited by Rawwida Baksh and Wendy Harcourt, 53–81. London: Oxford University Press. Rupp, Leila. 1997. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stienstra, Deborah. 2000. “Dancing Resistance from Rio to Beijing: Transnational Women’s Organizing and United Nations Conferences, 1992–6.” In Gender and Global Restructuring: Sighting, Sites and Resistances, edited by Anne Sisson Runyan and Marianne Marchand. London: Routledge. Tchaicha, Jane and Khedija Arfaoui. 2017. The Tunisian Women’s Rights Movement: From Nascent Activism to Influential Power-Broking. London: Routledge. References Accad, Evelyne. 1985. “Women in Contemporary Tunisia.” Al-Raida VIII 33 (1), 1 August 1986. Arfaoui, Khedija. 2007. “The Development of the Feminist Movement in Tunisia 1920s–2000s.” International Journal of Humanities 4 (8): 53–60. Alvarez, Sonia. 1999. “Advocating Feminism: The Latin American Feminist NGO ‘Boom’.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 1 (2): 181–209. ATFD. 2013. “Le Droit à l’Avortement en Tunisie – 1973 à 2013.” March 2013. Tunis: ATFD, Oxfam, and World Social Forum. Bakker, Isabella (ed.). 1994. The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy. London: Zed Books. 89

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Basu, Amira (ed.). 2017. Women’s Movements in a Global Era. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Barducci, Anna Mahiar. 2011. “Single Mothers Have No Right to Exist.” 9 December 2011. Gatestone Institute. http://www.gatestoneinstitute. org/2650/tunisia-single-mothers Beckwith, Karen. 2000. “Beyond Compare? Women’s Movements in Comparative Perspective.” European Journal of Political Research 37: 431–468. Benería, Lourdes and Shelley Feldman (eds). 1992. Unequal Burden: Economic Crises, Persistent Poverty, and Women’s Work. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Ben Gamra, Mona. 2014. “Libertinage an nom du féminisme.” Le Temps, 5 December 2014. http://www.letemps.com.tn/article/88052/ libertinage-au-nom-du-f%C3%A9minisme Ben Romdhane, Mahmoud. 2006. “Social Policy and Development in Tunisia since Independence: A Political Perspective.” In Social Policy in the Middle East: Economic, Political, and Gender Dynamics, edited by Massoud Karshenas and Valentine M. Moghadam, 31–77. London: Palgrave Macmillan and UNRISD. Berkovitch, Nitza. 1999. From Motherhood to Citizenship: Women’s Rights and International Organizations. Baltimore, OH: Johns Hopkins University Press. Blackmon, Pamela. 2020. “The Lagarde Effect: Assessing Policy Change under the First Female Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).” Global Society. DOI: 10.1080/13600826.2020.1763925 Charrad, Mounira. 2001. States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Berkeley: University of California. Charrad, Mounira and Amina Zarrugh. 2014. “Equal or Complementary? Women in the New Tunisian Constitution after the Arab Spring.” Journal of North African Studies 19 (2): 230–243. Chékir, Hafidha. 1985. “What Feminism for Tunisia?” Al-Raida (Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World, Beirut) 33 (1) August 1985. Chékir, Hafidha and Khedija Arfaoui. 2011. “Tunisia: Women’s Ecoinomic Citizenship and Trade Union Participation”. In Making Globalization Work for Women: The Role of Social Rights and Trade Union Leadership, edited by Valentine M. Moghadam, Suzanne Franzway and Mary Margaret Fonow, 71–92. New York: State University of New York Press. Coburn, Elaine. 2019. “Trickle-down Gender at the International Monetary Fund: The Contradictions of ‘Femina Economia’ in Global Capitalist Governance.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 21 (5): 768–788. Elson, Diane (ed.). 1991. Male Bias in the Development Process. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Evans, Sara. 1980. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Libe­ ration in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Vintage. 90

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Ferree, Myra Marx and Beth B. Hess. 1985. Controversy and Coalition: The New Feminist Movement. Boston, MA: Twayne. Georgieva, Kristalina. 2020. “No Going Back”. Finance & Development, 57 (4): 10–11. Grami, Amel and Karima Bennoune. 2013. “Tunisia’s Fight against Fundamentalism: An Interview with Amel Grami.” OpenDemocracy, 7 October 2013. https://www. opendemocracy.net/5050/amel-gramikarimabennoune/tunisias-fight-against-fundamentalism-interview-withamel-gram Hafner-Burton, Emilie and Mark A. Pollack. 2002. “Mainstreaming Gender in Global Governance.” European Journal of International Relations 8 (3): 339–373. Hawkesworth, Mary. 2006. Globalization and Feminist Activism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Htun, Mala and Laurel Weldon. 2018. The Logics of Gender Justice: State Action on Women’s Rights Around the World. London: Cambridge University Press. IMF. 2015. “Fair Play: More Equal Laws Boost Female Labor Force Participation.” IMF Staff Discussion Note. IMF. 2017. IMF Country Report No. 17/36. Washington, DC: IMF. Jad, Islah. 2004. “The NGO-isation of Arab Women’s Movements.” Institute of Development Studies Bulletin 35 (4): 34–42. Jaquette, Jane (ed.). 1994. The Women’s Movement in Latin America: Participation and Democracy. 2nd edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Jayawardena, Kumari. 1986. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books. Kabeer, Naila. 2003. Gender Mainstreaming in Poverty Eradication and the Millennium Development Goals: A Handbook for Policy-Makers and Other Stakeholders. London: Commonwealth Secretariat. Keck, Margaret and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Khalil, Andrea. 2014. “Tunisia’s Women: Partners in Revolution.” Journal of North African Studies 19 (2): 186–199. Lycklama À Nijeholt, Geertje, Virginia Vargas and Saskia Wieringa (eds). 1998. Women’s Movements and Public Policy in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Garland Publishing. Margolis, Diane. 1993. “Women’s Movements around the World: CrossCultural Comparisons.” Gender & Society 7 (3): 379–399. Moghadam, Valentine M. 2020. “Gender Regimes in the Middle East and North Africa: The Power of Feminist Movements.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 27 (3): 467–485. Moghadam, Valentine M. 2019. “Women’s Employment in Tunisia: Structures, Institutions, Advocacy.” Sociology of Development 5 (4): 337–359. Moghadam, Valentine M. 2018. “Explaining Divergent Outcomes of the Arab Spring: The Significance of Gender and Women’s Mobilizations.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 6 (4): 666–681. 91

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Moghadam, Valentine M. (2009). 2013. Globalization and Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement. 2nd edition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Moghadam, Valentine M. 2005. Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Moghadam, Valentine M. 1998. Women, Work, and Economic Reform in the Middle East and North Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Moghadam, Valentine M. 1996. “Feminist Networks North and South: A Case Study of DAWN, WIDE, and WLUML.” Journal of International Communication 3 (1): 111–126. Molyneux, Maxine. 2001. Women’s Movements in International Perspective: Latin America and Beyond. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Morton, Matthew, et al. 2014. Gender at Work: A Companion to the World Development Report on Jobs. Washington DC: The World Bank. Naples, Nancy and Manisha Desai (eds). 2002. Women’s Activism and Globalization. London: Routledge. O’Brien, Robert, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte, and Marc Williams. 2000. Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements. London: Cambridge University Press. Poulos, Margarite. 2017. “So that Life May Triumph: Communist Feminism and Realpolitic in Civil-War Greece.” Journal of Women’s History 29 (1): 63–86. Rademacher, Heidi. 2020. “The Transnational Women’s Rights Movement and the World Economy: An Event History Analysis of the Ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 1981–1999.” Sociology of Development 6 (2): 145–175. Ray, Raka. 2000. Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Razavi, Shahra. 2012. “World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development, An Opportunity Both Welcome and Missed (An Extended Commentary).” 5 October 2012. Geneva: UNRISD. Reanda, Laura. 1999. “Engendering the United Nations: The Changing International Agenda.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 6: 49–68. Rowbotham, Sheila. 1973. Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It. London: Pluto Press. Rupp, Leila. 1997. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sameh, Catherine. 2019. Axis of Hope: Iranian Women’s Rights Activism Across Borders. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Sen, Gita. 2018. “The SDGs and Feminist Movement Building.” Discussion Paper No. 27. December 2018. New York: UN Women. Sen, Gita and Caren Grown. 1987. Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives. New York: Monthly Review Press. Sparr, Pamela (ed.). 1994. Mortgaging Women’s Lives: Feminist Critiques of Structural Adjustment. London: Zed. 92

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Sperling, Valerie, Myra Marx Ferree and Barbara Risman. 2001. “Constructing Global Feminism: Transnational Advocacy Networks and Russian Women’s Activism.” Signs 26 (4): 1155–1186. Stienstra, Deborah. 2000. “Dancing Resistance from Rio to Beijing: Transnational Women’s Organizing and United Nations Conferences, 1992–6.” In Gender and Global Restructuring: Sighting, Sites and Resistances, edited by Anne Sisson Runyan and Marianne Marchand. London: Routledge. Taylor, Verta. 1989. “Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in Abeyance.” American Sociological Review 54 (5): 761–775. Tchaicha, Jane D. and Khedija Arfaoui. 2012. “Tunisian Women in the Twenty-First Century: Past Achievements and Present Uncertainties in the Wake of the Jasmine Revolution.” The Journal of North African Studies. 17 (2): 215–238. Tchaicha, Jane and Khedija Arfaoui. 2017. The Tunisian Women’s Rights Movement: From Nascent Activism to Influential Power-Broking. London: Routledge. Weldon, Laurel. 2011. When Protest Makes Policy: How Social Movements Represent Disadvantaged Groups. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. West, Guida and Rhoda Lois Blumberg (eds). 1990. Women and Social Protest. New York: Oxford University Press. World Bank. 2011. World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development. Washington, DC: World Bank.

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CHAPTER 8

Art and Aesthetics Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison The realm of art and of aesthetics may seem a world away from that of global politics. The study of aesthetics is the study of taste and beauty and how together they awaken in us a certain affective sensibility. Global politics, by contrast, is dominated by hard power and military might. Or is it really so? In the past three decades, there have been conscious efforts to challenge these assumptions and approach the study of global politics with an aesthetic sensibility. How can insights derived from art help us rethink the realities of global politics? And what do such engagements tell us about the gendered dimensions of the international and its various political manifestations? The purpose of this chapter is to explore these links among art, aesthetics and gender. We ask, in particular: what difference does it make to think about global politics from a feminist approach that pays attention to questions of aesthetics? We begin the chapter by defining art and aesthetics and outlining how they relate to a feminist approach to global politics. We then illustrate the issues at stake by focusing on one particular art form in one specific political realm – photographic representations of humanitarian crises – and examine their deeply gendered nature. Whether they relate to war, famines or natural disasters, images of suffering often replicate gender and racial stereotypes. Almost all disaster media coverage prominently features images of women and children in deep distress. They tend to be situated in the Global South and are depicted as passive and dependent, as if they have no agency and are only waiting for men to rescue them. We then discuss the broader implications of these gendered and aesthetic patterns by drawing on some pioneering feminist scholars, such as Jean Bethke Elshtain and Cynthia Enloe. Their contributions show how such gender stereotypes feed into and perpetuate deeply entrenched gendered narratives of global politics. In a final step, we show how women – and men – have challenged these problematic narratives through various 94

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artistic endeavours. We focus, in particular, on a movement that uses theatre to address structural violence, including gender violence, in West Bengal in India. The resulting feminist aesthetic encourages us, quite literally, to view the world differently. Seeing, in this sense, is a form of agency, an active engagement with politics, for established models of international relations can ultimately only change when we and our aesthetic sensibilities change too.

AESTHETIC POLITICS AS FEMINIST POLITICS Aesthetics may appear a fanciful place to inquire about the links between gender and politics. But look around you. Our everyday life is replete with aesthetic patterns that are highly political and highly gendered. Advertisements for perfumes or cars, for instance, regularly depict gender stereotypes in a way that are both obvious and, at the same time, highly effective. Hollywood movies or Netflix series are equally full of gender stereotypes that assign men and women societal roles that are deeply entrenched in systems of inclusion and exclusion. Significant here is that aesthetics is not simply about art. Aesthetics is about perception, taste, emotion and meaning – phenomena that animate, distinguish and give colour and texture to our lives. Aesthetics is about who we are and what we do. In the past two decades, International Relations scholars have begun to look to aesthetics for alternative political insights – so much so that we can now speak of an ‘aesthetic turn’ (Bleiker 2001, 2009). Two issues are key to this ‘turn’. First is the recognition that all knowledge of global politics is based on representations that are inevitably partial and political. We have no way of representing the world neutrally. When we depict the world around us – whether this is in scholarly analysis, through media, or in any other way – we draw on acquired and wellrehearsed conventions. Representations, in this sense, are always embedded with power (Hall 1997, 1–11; Rai 2014, 898–915). Artists intuitively know this. Their aesthetic contribution emerges not from authentically depicting the world, but from engaging the process of representation. Picasso’s painting Guernica, for instance, became such a powerful symbol of the horrors of war because it brings out a kind of truth that goes beyond external appearances. This is why some of the most significant insights into world politics emerge not from endeavours that ignore representation, but from those that explore how representative practices themselves have come to constitute and shape political events. Second, aesthetic sources can offer us alternative insights into international relations: a type of reflective understanding that emerges not from systematically applying the technical skills of analysis which prevail in the social sciences, but from cultivating a more open-ended level of sensibility about the political. We might then be able to appreciate what we otherwise cannot even see: the gendered foundations of power or the emotional nature and consequences of political events (Moore and Shepherd 2010, 301, 305–308). Aesthetics, in this sense, is about the ability to step 95

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back, reflect and see political conflict and dilemmas in new ways. This is why aesthetics refers not only to practices of art – from painting to music, poetry, photography and film – but also, and above all, to the type of insights and understandings they engender. Feminists have extensively engaged the links among aesthetics, gender and politics. They have, for instance, shown how violence and male heroes are omnipresent in popular culture; how they are part of much deeper entrenched and highly problematic gender stereotypes that shape both our identities and our politics (Griffin 2015). These links among violence, gender and aesthetics are part of global power relations that come into being through the images we see, the movies we watch and the stories we tell; these stories become real because they are rehearsed, time and again, as part of dominant and largely masculine ways of understanding sexuality, identity and community (Shepherd, 2013; see also Griffin 2019). Or consider how feminists such as L.H.M. Ling (2014a, 2014b), Rai (2014), Weber (2011), Pruitt (2020), Caso (2020) and Zalewski (2013) draw on a variety of artistic sources, from fairy-tales and cartoons to visual art, video and film, to challenge the gendered and racial foundations of the theory and practice of international relations. In doing so, they offer us alternative, non-masculinist and non-Eurocentric visions of world politics.

GENDERED IMAGES OF HUMANITARIAN CRISES We now begin our exploration of the links among gender, aesthetics and global politics by focusing on a particular example: photographs of humanitarian crises. Featured on the front pages of newspapers and across the internet, including social media, these images of suffering and crises are common. Crisis imagery is imbued with a specific representational aesthetic: it is designed to pull a viewer in, tug on our heartstrings and, often through a sublime horror, entice a viewer to look again. Unlike most other social and political phenomena, where women’s roles are often underrepresented, crisis imagery is one realm where representations of women tend to out-number those of men. Indeed, through dominant crisis imagery, women are brought into focus in a highly visible and emotive manner. The visual focus on women in disaster settings has much to do with their perceived ability to communicate human tragedy and need. Often pictured up close and in distress, women are thought to provide a humanising face for what might be a large-scale, distant and de-humanising disaster. So recognisable are women in times of crisis that some contend they have come to be seen as the ‘ideal’ or ‘universal disaster victim’ (Dogra 2011; Enarson and Meyreles 2004, 49). As such, images of women enduring hardship are said to have become a ‘standardized’ (Briggs 2003, 179) or ‘conventionalized’ (Malkki 1996, 388) representation of catastrophe. As Manzo (2008) puts it, women have become ‘humanitarian icons’: 96

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globally identifiable symbols capable of raising humanitarian awareness and sympathy. But what kind of gendered – and emotional – political dynamics are at play in depictions of humanitarian crises? How do these dynamics shape the political and ethical issues at stake? Dominant crisis images resonate with and replicate instantly recognisable gender stereotypes. Women are presented not only in a range of customarily female social roles – such as that of a caregiver – but also, and all too often, as ‘tearful, beleaguered, and overwhelmed’, as ‘struck down’ and paralysed by catastrophe (Enarson and Meyreles 2004, 49). Women are frequently used to depict processes of mourning, distress, hardship and suffering: their eyes will be downcast or searching religiously for the sky; their hands will be on their head; they will kneel or crouch or appear somehow physically diminished; they will stare up into the camera, visibly distressed; they will seek others’ help or be trying to care for or feed children (see for example, Briggs 2003; Childs 2006; Dogra 2011; Enarson 2006; Fordham 1998, 128; Strüver 2007). Characteristic here as well is that crisis imagery tends to place women in a domestic (private rather than public) home-life setting (Childs 2006, 205). Arguably the most classic – as well as stereotypical and readily identifiable – gendered humanitarian symbol is the image of the mother and child. So commonplace and powerful are images of women together with children in disaster/humanitarian aid discourses that some scholars contend that the mother-and-child image has come to be understood as an international ‘symbol of distress’, as a marker of charity and humanitarianism (Manzo 2008, 649–651). Much of the emotional and cultural symbolism of the mother-and-child image emerges from the customary notion of motherhood, specifically that motherhood is a female role (see Åhäll 2012; Briggs 2003, 183–184). As Malkki (1996, 388) explains, the image of mother and child presents something that goes to the heart of humanity and is essential to all cultures, a ‘sentimentalized, composite figure – at once feminine and maternal, childlike and innocent.’ But there is more to this visual pattern, as Malkki (1996, 388) knows: there is also a lack of power and a cry for help to those who have the ability to deliver. The gendered dimensions of such crisis imagery are readily apparent. Women are represented in a manner that taps into conventional gender stereotypes. Significant here is that women are portrayed as passive – powerless and prone to the circumstances surrounding them. Women are shown not as active agents but as vulnerable and needy victims, devoid of the capacity and agency to help themselves. Women and women’s social roles after disaster are thus typecast; women are presented in a singular light that highlights and links a traditional familial domesticity with a sense of fragility and vulnerability. Implicated here as well are conventional notions of women as incapacitated and powerless in times of turmoil and grief, which prompts further established perceptions of women as dependent upon others for rescue and survival. 97

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The woman and child metaphor

Figure 8.1  US Navy Lieutenant Commander Loring Issaac Perry takes a moment to comfort an Indonesian woman and her child that lost everything they had during the tsunami in the city of Meulaboh on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. Source:  Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Woman_%26_child_in_Meulaboh_after_2004_tsunami_DM-SD-06-11958.JPEG)

The image in Figure 8.1 is from the 2004 Asian tsunami, which was one of the most devastating natural catastrophes of recent times. It claimed more than 275,000 lives and left one billion people homeless. The photograph represents a visual theme that was very common in the worldwide media coverage of the disaster: it depicts a woman and child as victims and a Western rescue/aid worker providing assistance. In many instances, victims were portrayed in an even more desperate, emotional and needy state than is visible in this photograph. Still, the visual patterns are clear. Such and other, more dramatic, images played a key role mobilising support for the relief and reconstruction effort. They demonstrated the need and positive impact of aid. In fact, the humanitarian response to the tsunami was as unprecedented as its scale of destruction. But these images also entrenched gender stereotypes. They presented women as fragile, powerless and submissive. A benevolent male Western rescue worker provides both assistance and solace. He is in charge and has the ability to deliver. Note, too, that in the official description of the photograph, the US Lieutenant Commander has a name, whereas the women/child victims remain nameless. One has to visually assume that they are reliant upon the distribution of foreign aid. Although this was indeed the case at that dramatic moment, one could have presented them in different ways too; as pursuing reconstruction activity themselves, for example, or as helping Western aid workers to distribute aid (see Hutchison, 2014).

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Such ‘infantilising’ visual patterns mirror the broader treatment of disenfranchised people, including Indigenous communities, depriving them of dignity, autonomy and the capacity to act (Nakata 2018; see also Parpart and Parashar 2019). This is why many scholars highlight the neo-colonial values that underpin much crises photography and stereotypical images of women and children in particular. These visual patterns entrench hierarchical humanitarian relations between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds (Ademolu and Warrington 2019, 365–376; Hutchison 2019, 219–241; I’Anson and Pfeifer 2013, 49–63; see also Sabaratnam 2017). At the same time, however, it is arguably through these gendered and racial stereotypes – in other words, through the implied sense of female passivity, dependence and ever-present emotionality – that such imagery so readily mobilizes humanitarian compassions. It has been said that through such frames, disaster is in effect ‘feminised’: the excessive use of feminine gender stereotypes shapes how viewers come to consider the respective humanitarian situation more generally (Kelleher 1997; Sassen 2002). Distant disaster is consequently perceived through a gendered lens: women come to represent all disaster victims, who then also become perceived as having a corresponding sense of stricken powerlessness. The apparent fragility and helplessness of women prompts viewers to bring into play a host of pre-conceived ideas about how all disaster victims would think, feel and act – the dominant interpretation of which would be to assume the inability of survivors to cope and, consequently, the necessity of outside assistance. Dominant crisis imagery thus presents a significant paradox – one that highlights how gender constructions are subsumed, complicit in and reproduced through discourses of humanitarian disaster. On one hand, it may be precisely because such imagery is inherently gendered that it is very effective in mobilising compassion, political will and necessary aid (Brauman 1994). Research has also found that employing stereotypical feminine frames is often rationalised through the idea that some representation of women, even if stereotypical, is better than none at all (for a summary of this position, see Carpenter 2005). But, and on the other hand, such imagery relies upon and replicates a reductionist, one-dimensional perspective of women’s social roles and agency. Indeed, through such singular, excessively feminine stereotyping, female agency is essentialised and limited; whittled down to an established and simplistic gender cliché: women are typecast as emotionally fragile, vulnerable and at the same time helpless, powerless and perpetually needy.

TOWARDS A FEMINIST AESTHETIC CRITIQUE OF GLOBAL POLITICS There are two ways in which feminist politics can break (and has broken) through these gender stereotypes. First is the need to recognise and problematise deeply entrenched gender patterns. Second is the effort to 99

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provide alternative aesthetic options. We briefly touch upon both of these strategies. For decades, feminist scholars have fought hard to expose and interrogate the types of gender constructions we highlighted in the previous section. Feminist International Relations scholarship began by challenging the assumption that global politics is gender neutral. The respective scholars situated gender front and centre in the reproduction of global politics as a practice and discipline. They sought to show that ‘gender makes the world go round’ (Enloe [1989] 2000, 1) – that the personal is not merely political, but moreover that ‘the personal is international’ (Enloe [1989] 2000, 195). Significant for feminist scholars is therefore that the gendered dynamics of prevailing political aesthetics – such as the crisis imagery we examined above – are not merely marginalizing and subjugating women but are also part of larger gendered patterns and mindsets that shape and constrain how we think about global politics. Feminist International Relations scholars demonstrate the effects of gendered imagery by drawing out how such accounts reproduce constructed notions of ideal male and female identities and roles. In her pioneering book Women and War, Elshtain (1987, 3) drew a picture of opposing yet mutually reinforcing gender images. She labelled these gender ideals the ‘just warrior and beautiful soul’. For Elshtain (1994, 109), the ‘just warrior’ metaphor captures male identity as it has been inscribed through discourses of ‘armed civil virtue’. The just warrior is ‘a figure central to the story of war and politics in the West’: a figure bound by honour and implicated in violence. The ‘beautiful soul’ is, likewise, a time honoured and established metaphor for female identity: the woman who waits at home and often exhorts men to war by honouring them for their deeds. In this binary, women are keepers of the home and family; men, the defenders of the public realm, the people, the power, the state (Elshtain 1994, 114). Male/female binaries are, for feminists, a chief vehicle through which global political life has been constituted. Foremost is that sovereign statehood is founded upon and sustained by ideas and images of masculinised power and dignity versus feminised sacrifice (Enloe [1989] 2000, 197). Elshtain (1987), for instance, writes that the just warrior/beautiful soul dichotomy has shaped men’s and women’s self-understandings and actions in relation to war and peace. Moreover since ‘just warriors’ are the protectors of the state, the state itself is seen as ‘manly’ (Hooper 2001): they are ‘male-defined and male-dominated’ (Youngs 2004, 81). In this framing, women are cast merely as bystanders in the international political order; as the very opposite of traditional masculine power and subjectivity, women are situated outside of global politics altogether. Aesthetics matter to feminist inquiry because artistic representations are a powerful mechanism through which traditional gender roles and ideals have been (and continue to be) constructed. Consider again our examination of crisis imagery. We demonstrated how an overwhelming focus on feminized representational frames depicts women through a singular and stereotypical lens that ultimately renders them passive – as 100

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Madonna and child

Figure 8.2  Matteo di Giovanni (1435–1495), The Madonna and Child with Saints Bernardino of Siena and Jerome, Behind Them Two Angels. Source:  Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: MATTEO_DI_GIOVANNI_AND_STUDIO_THE_MADONNA_AND_CHILD_WITH_ SAINTS_BERNARDINO_OF_SIENA_AND_JEROME.jpg)

All gender stereotypes are based on deeply entrenched aesthetic patterns. They are often so old and so entrenched that we no longer recognise their subjective and problematic nature. Consider dress codes for men and women. We all – mostly – adhere to them. Few Western men would, for instance, dress up in a skirt when they go to work in a bank. Doing so would violate social codes that are widely accepted. But there is nothing objective about these dress codes. They have emerged at a particular time in history and then have been around for so long that they have become accepted as normal, even natural (see Chapter 6 on the idea of gender ‘rules’). The same is the case with the mother-child metaphor we introduced in the context of representations of humanitarian crises. It is a stereotype that goes back to the very beginnings of historical narratives. One of many examples is the visual prominence in Christian art of the pietà: the Madonna mourning the loss of her child. It is so widely depicted and recognised that this visual metaphor has become an icon of compassion and grief (Cohen 2001, 178–181; Dogra 2011, 336; Zarzycka 2012). And this metaphor is, of course, linked to perhaps the most iconic image of Christian art: that of Madonna and child (see Figure 8.2). But, of course, like any metaphor, this one is based on very particular religious, cultural and, not least, gendered assumptions about the world.

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helpless caregivers and victims. We then drew out that this is significant for women and how we think about women’s roles and potentials in so far that ensuing meanings continue in a long history of essentialising and limiting female political agency. Powerful and ‘seductive’ gender ideals that confine and regulate how both men and women consider their possible political actions are thus mobilised through aesthetic frames. Cynthia Enloe explains that feminised imagery recreates the myth that ‘only men, not women or children, have been imagined as capable of the sort of public decisiveness international politics is presumed to require’ (Enloe (1989) 2000, 4). Feminised political imagery therefore not only produces reductionist understandings of female political capacity but also reinforces the mindset that global politics is a realm in which conventional ‘hard’ male forms of power must prevail (Cohn 1987). These gendered dynamics are, of course, part of a larger trend of imaging women. Prevailing historic imagery of women in both war and peacetime typically stereotypes women in ways that marginalise and often depoliticise their social involvement (see MacDonald, Holden, and Ardener 1987). Historically, the world of art, too, has revolved around a masculine ideal, leading to the proliferation of a masculine gaze (Korsmeyer 2004, 6). Women became the subjects of men’s watchful eyes and tastes. Chow (1992, 105) has suggested that the appropriation of female bodies through the predominant masculine mindset and framing is one way through which women are rendered especially vulnerable and helpless. They are ‘consigned to visuality,’ reduced to the stereotypes that have become so entrenched that they are naturalised. The naturalisation of gender norms – both in terms of actions and emotionality – is one way through which aesthetics yield considerable power. Images of masculine power and action versus feminine passivity and inaction have over time come to be considered truths rather than the ‘deeply encoded… symbolic constructions’ that they are (Elshtain 1994, 110). Feminist scholars have sought to uncover the gendered assumptions and social dynamics that are proliferated in the realm of the everyday, from TV programmes to newspaper ads and internet sites (see Shepherd 2013; Zalewski 2013). For some, traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity may seem no longer so present, so powerful or even so normal. Perhaps some consider that gender ideals have been done away with altogether and that women in particular are now free to do and be as they like. After all, women today don military fatigues; women can go to war and fight. But such an apparent reversal or ‘solution’ to the construction of gender identities and roles is not always viewed as evidence of women’s emancipation. That both sexes now engage in battle can rather be seen as illustrative of just how powerful and seductive masculinised narratives of power and war have become (Elshtain 1987, 8; 1994, 111; Enloe [1983] 1988). Simply put, the symbolism of war – what it means culturally and politically to possess superior military might – has meant that war has become interesting, thrilling even, to the extent that women seek to incorporate some of the so-called just warrior into their ‘beautiful soul’. But even here the reality is 102

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far more complex. The images of Lynndie England, for instance, as well as the heroic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch both demonstrate the continuing influence of the age-old fear that women and female sexuality can be used as a threatening interrogation tool or weapon (Oliver 2007, 5).

ART AS A FEMINIST POLITICS OF RESISTANCE AND TRANSFORMATION Since aesthetics have helped to make global politics, even as gendered a political realm as it may now be, aesthetics can also help to break down gendered patterns and mindsets. There are numerous feminist activists who have embarked on innovative and influential aesthetic engagements with gender stereotypes. Consider the famous Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group of female art activists operating since the early 1980s. They seek to reveal and challenge gender-based exclusions in numerous locations, for instance, in museums. The facts are clear, they point out: ‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? … Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of nudes are female’ (Guerrilla Girls 2012). One of their most well-known campaigns thus prompts us to wonder about the consequences of such gendered aesthetic practices. Consider a second example. Premaratna (2018, 153–186) examines how Jana Sanskriti, a grassroots activist group in India’s rural West Bengal region, uses theatre to address structural violence. Comprised of diverse backgrounds, including male and female agricultural workers, Jana Sanskriti focuses on religious and gender-based violence. They use the ‘multivocal and dialogic’ nature of theatre to open up space for discussions on structural discrimination and injustice (Premaratna 2008, 153). An explicit part of this engagement involves a critique of established power hierarchies, including the gender relations embedded therein. Travelling from village to village, Jana Sanskriti’s performances are grounded in the experiences of the local population and make structural violence an explicit topic of discussion. One play, for instance, problematises the substantial pay gap between men and women in a brick factory (Premaratna 2008, 164–167). Another play, A Story of Onem, exposes the story of a young woman who was married off as a child and then experienced domestic violence. With all of their plays, Jana Sanskriti promotes onstage discussion with the audience that they then hope will lead to off-stage discussions, resistance and, eventually, socio-political change (Premaratna 2008, 177–181). Art-based engagement with genderbased discrimination will not change things overnight. But the kind of activism that Jana Sanskriti engages in – an artistic and aesthetic effort to bring the problem of gender-based violence and structural discrimination into the public realm – offers the preconditions for eventual social transformation. 103

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CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have asked what difference it would make to think about global politics from a feminist approach that pays attention to question of aesthetics. We began by exploring how aesthetic practices are a powerful mechanism through which men and women have come to understand their political capacity, agency and actions. These aesthetic representations touch on all aspects of our lives, from television shows to dress codes, from advertising campaigns for perfumes to the organisation of national celebrations and military parades. We illustrated the issues at stake with regard to one realm: media images of humanitarian crises. Taking the mother-child metaphor as an example, we highlighted both the effective and the highly problematic nature of deeply entrenched gender stereotypes. Women and children are seen as ‘good’ victims. They resonate with existing sensibilities and generate empathy in viewers, thus enabling humanitarian action. But the very same depictions also entrench highly problematic gender stereotypes. Women are seen as highly emotional, passive, unable to help themselves and thus reliant on the rescue and support of rational men. By focusing on images of humanitarian crises, we tried to show that aesthetics is not just a realm of beauty and sensibility, but an inherent part of politics, including gender politics. Problematic gender stereotypes are at the core of humanitarian communication. But one could find countless other examples of how aesthetic practices are highly political and serve to legitimise gendered systems of domination and exclusion. They range from television shows to dress codes. Aesthetic forms of exclusion are at their most powerful when they are so widespread and so widely accepted that they have become a form of common sense. The manner in which men and women conventionally dress varies around the world, but in almost all parts of the globe these practices are deeply entrenched in history and culture. And, more importantly, these aesthetic practices signal and symbolise gendered role assignments that are highly political in nature and often part of systemic forms of gender discrimination. Because these aesthetic practices are so old and well-rehearsed, they manage to mask the deeply political messages they contain and entrench. Aesthetic is not just a form of domination. Wherever and whenever forms of domination appear there are also counter-movements that resist these practices. Aesthetics are central to these practices as well. Art, for instance, can challenge deeply held helps assumptions about the world and encourage – perhaps even force – us to think in new ways. Feminist activists have for long embarked on numerous aesthetically driven campaigns to raise awareness of gender stereotypes and to break through them. We have illustrated how the use of art can serve as a catalyst for change, focusing on the Guerrilla Girls, a group of female art activist, and on Jana Sanskriti, a group in West Bengal that uses theatre to generate public discussions on sexual violence and discrimination. While these are just two small local examples, they illustrate that aesthetics is both an essential part of gender

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discrimination and an equally essential part of overcoming them. Through history, changing gender norms have gone hand in hand with changing aesthetic practices. This is why greater awareness of the interactive links among art, aesthetics, gender and politics is essential if we are to overcome practices of domination and promote fairer and more equal societal norms, institutions and practices. Discussion questions 1. How do aesthetic practices entrench global gender relations? Provide examples. 2. How do aesthetic practices challenge global gender relations? Provide examples. 3. To what extent is the woman/child metaphor a reflection of either natural attributes or socially assigned roles? Further reading Åhäll, Linda. 2012. “Motherhood, Myth and Gendered Agency in Political Violence.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 14 (1): 103–120. Bleiker, Roland. 2009. Aesthetics and World Politics. New York: Palgrave. Hutchison, Emma. 2019. “Humanitarian Emotions through History: Imaging Suffering and Performing Aid.” In Emotional Bodies: The Historical Performativity of Emotions, edited by Dolores MartínMoruno and Beatriz Pichel, 219–241. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Premaratna, Nilanjana. 2018. Theatre for Peacebuilding: The Role of Arts in Conflict Transformation in South Asia, New York: Palgrave. Rai, Shirin M. 2014. “Political Aesthetics of the Nation.” Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16 (6): 898–915. Shepherd, Laura. 2013. Gender, Violence and Popular Culture: Telling Stories. New York: Routledge. References Ademolu, Edward and Siobhan Warrington. 2019. “Who Gets to Talk About NGO Images of Global Poverty?” Photography and Culture 12 (3): 365–376. Åhäll, Linda. 2012. “Motherhood, Myth and Gendered Agency in Political Violence.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 14 (1): 103–120. Bleiker, Roland. 2001. “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30 (3): 509–533. Bleiker, Roland. 2012 (2009). Aesthetics and World Politics. New York: Palgrave.

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Bleiker, Roland and Emma Hutchison. 2008. “Fear No More: Emotions and World Politics.” Review of International Studies 34 (1): 115–135. Brauman, Rony. 1994. “When Suffering Makes a Good Story.” In Life, Death and Aid: The Medicines Sans Frontières Report on World Crisis Intervention, edited by François Jean. London: Routledge. Briggs, Laura. 2003. “Mother, Child, Race, Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption.” Gender and History 15 (2): 179–200. Carpenter, R. Charli. 2005. “Women, Children and Other Vulnerable Groups: Gender, Strategic Frames and the Protection of Civilians as a Transnational Issue.” International Studies Quarterly 49: 295–334. Caso, Federica. 2020. “Representing Indigenous Soldiers at the Australian War Memorial.” Australian Journal of Political Science 55 (4): 345–361. Childs, Merilyn. 2006. “Not Through Women’s Eyes: Photo-Essays and the Construction of a Gendered Tsunami Disaster.” Disaster Prevention and Management 15 (1): 202–212. Chow, Rey. 1992. “Postmodern Automatons.” In Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott. New York: Routledge. Cohen, Stanley. 2001. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity. Cohn, Carol. 1987. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12 (4): 687–718. Danchev, Alex and Debbie Lisle. 2009. “Introduction: Art, Politics, Purpose.” Review of International Studies 35 (4): 775–779. Dogra, Nandita. 2011. “The Mixed Metaphor of “Third World Women”: Gendered Representations by International Development NGOs.” Third World Quarterly 32 (2): 333–348. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1994. “Thinking about Women and International Violence.” In Women, Gender and World Politics: Perspectives, Policies and Prospects, edited by Peter R. Beckman and Francine D’Amico. Westport: Bergin and Garvey. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1987. Women and War, New York: Basic Books. Enarson, Elaine. 2006. “Women and Girls Last? Averting the Second PostKatrina Disaster.” In Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, Social Science Research Council. http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Enarson/ Enarson, Elaine and Lourdes Meyreles. 2004. “International Perspectives on Gender and Disaster.” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 24 (10/11): 49–93. Fordham, Maureen H. 1998. “Making Women Visible in Disasters: Problematizing the Private Domain.” Disasters 22(2): 126–143. Enloe, Cynthia. 2000 (1989). Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Femi­ nist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 1988 (1983). Does Khaki Become You? The Militari­ zation of Women’s Lives. London: Pandora Press. 106

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Griffin, Penny. 2015. Popular Culture, Political Economy and the Death of Feminism. London: Routledge. Griffin, Penny. 2019. “Symposium ‘Exploring the (Multiple) Futures of World Politics through Popular Culture,” Australian Journal of Political Science 54 (4): 508–514. Guerrilla Girls. 2012. “Posters/Actions: Do Women STILL Have to be Naked to Get Into the Museum?” http://www.guerrillagirls.com/ posters/nakedthroughtheages.shtml Hall, Stuart. 1997. “Introduction.” In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall, 1–11. California: Sage/Open University. Hooper, Charlotte. 2001. Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations and Gender Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. Hutchison, Emma. 2019. “Humanitarian Emotions through History: Imaging Suffering and Performing Aid.” In Emotional Bodies: The Historical Performativity of Emotions, edited by Dolores MartínMoruno and Beatriz Pichel, 219–241. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Hutchison, Emma. 2014. “A Global Politics of Pity? Disaster Imagery and the Emotional Construction of Solidarity after the 2004 Asian Tsunami.” International Political Sociology 8 (1): 1–19. I’Anson, Chioke and Geoffrey Pfeifer. 2013. “A Critique of Humanitarian Reason.” Journal of Global Ethics 9 (1): 49–63. Kelleher, Margaret. 1997. The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? Durham: Duke University Press. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 2004. Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction. New York and London: Routledge. MacDonald, Sharon, Pat Holden and Shirley Ardener (eds). 1987. Images of Women in Peace and War: Cross-Cultural and Historical Pers­ pectives. Houndmills: Macmillan with Oxford University Press. Malkki, Lisa. 1996. “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization.” Cultural Anthropology, 11 (3): 377–404. Manzo, Kate. 2008. “Imaging Humanitarianism: NGO Identity and the Iconography of Childhood.” Antipode 40 (4): 632–657. Moore, Cerwyn and Laura J. Shepherd. 2010. “Aesthetics and International Relations: Towards a Global Politics.” Global Society: Interdisciplinary Journal of International Relations, 24 (3): 299–309. Nakata, Sana. 2018. “The Infantilisation of Indigenous Australians,” Griffith Review, 60: https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/infantilisationindigenous-australians-problem-for-democracy/ Oliver, Kelly. 2007. Women and Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media, New York: Columbia University Press. Parpart, Jane L. and Swati Parashar. 2019. Rethinking Silence, Voice and Agency in Contested Gendered Terrains, London: Routledge. Pruitt, Lesley J. 2020. “Participatory Video: A New Outlook for International Relations Research.” Australian Journal of International Affairs 75 (2): 142–162. 107

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Rai, Shirin M. 2014. “Political Aesthetics of the Nation.” Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16 (6): 898–915. Sabaratnam, Meera. 2017. Decolonising Intervention, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Sassen, Saskia. 2002. “Women’s Burden: Counter Geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival.” Nordic Journal of International Law 71 (2): 255–274. Shepherd, Laura J. 2013. Gender, Violence and Popular Culture: Telling Stories, New York: Routledge. Strüver, Anke. 2007. “The Production of Geopolitical and Gendered Images through Global Aid Organisations.” Geopolitics 12 (4): 680–703. Youngs, Gillian. 2004. “Feminist International Relations: A Contradiction in Terms? Or: Why Women and Gender are Essential to Understanding the World ‘We’ Live In.” International Affairs 80 (1): 75–87. Weber, Cynthia. 2011. ‘I am An American’: Filming the Fear of Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zarzycka, Marta. 2012. “Madonnas of Warfare, Angels of Poverty: Cutting Through Press Photographs”. Photographies 5 (1): 71–85. Zalewski, Marysia. 2013. Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse. New York: Routledge.

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CHAPTER 9

Body Politics Wendy Harcourt In this chapter, I show how rights are claimed on behalf of bodies in the practice of global body politics. But first, we need to understand: ‘What is body politics?’ It is not an easy concept to explain as it operates on many levels. Put simply, it brings what is intimate, private and personal to the public sphere in order to claim rights for the body. It is peoples’ political struggle to claim control over their felt and lived biological, social and cultural embodied experiences – such as, for example, the rights for wheelchair access. In this chapter, I explore feminist body politics that uses the body (historically the female body) as a vehicle for political change by making visible gender inequalities. I look at how women (and other genders) use their bodies and their social and cultural position in society as the basis for resistance. In feminist body politics, female bodies in particular become sites of cultural and political resistance to the dominant understanding of the ‘normal’ or ‘default’ body as White, male and western from which all ‘other’ forms of bodies differ. In other words, body politics uses bodies as intimate vehicles of protest and resistance to power. The chapter looks at how feminist body politics seeks to transform oppressive practices related to gender, sexuality, health and rights. Feminist body politics challenges the norms and practices which condone and institutionalise intersecting inequalities based on gender, sexuality, age, ability and race. Feminist body politics is about the negotiation of power using the body. It seeks to undermine and transform how power operates by drawing attention to the body through direct action, advocacy and performance. In body politics, the ‘body is very much a contextualised product of the relationship between capitalism, patriarchy, racism, colonialism and other systems of oppression’ (O’Keefe 2014, 1). In short, feminist body politics aims to ‘demystify capitalism as a system of debilitating sexism and racism and envision anticapitalistic resistance’ (Mohanty 2003, 514). In writing about feminist body politics, as with any feminist research, it is important to make clear who is speaking for whose bodies, whose DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-11

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knowledge counts about the body and in what ways bodies can know. The political is not about ‘objective’ ‘non-biased’ processes; it is culturally biased towards particular notions of rights, citizenship and democracy that seek stability and predictability (Desai 2015). Similarly, the body is understood in a plurality of ways and is the subject, not the object, of political struggles. This chapter points to how there are different feminisms as well as differently positioned bodies according to race, gender, class and positionality (such as crip or queer). In addition, it is important to recognise that feminist body politics is praxis based – meaning that it emerges from experience and reflections about that experience – and is motivated by a desire for change, enacted at different levels through protest and cultural contestation (Baksh and Harcourt 2015). It is a fluid arena of action that has taken many directions in many places, so this short chapter can only be partial in its explanation of body politics. That partiality also comes from my specific authorship. It is important that, as a reader, you know my position as a White feminist (pronouns: she/her) who has been practicing, writing and teaching about body politics globally while based in Europe since the 1990s. As well as drawing on a small but vibrant literature, the examples I give here are mostly from my direct experience or from discussions with feminist activists working around the world with whom I have engaged over the years. I have engaged in body politics with feminists located in various geopolitical sites around the globe striving to create solidarity across the divides of class, race, sexuality and gender (Harcourt 2009). The type of knowledge such connection produces arises from the practice of feminist solidarity and awareness of diverse locations, realities, needs and aspirations. The chapter is therefore embedded in lived, place-based experiences and in this way offers a different kind of analysis of why gender matters, as opposed to theory that sees itself as neutral and distanced from its subjects. In the sections that follow, I first review briefly some of the trends in feminist body politics in the last two decades as global feminist actions shifted public political discourse on gender notably in global institutions such as the United Nations (UN). I then look in more detail at two examples of body politics in action: naked protest and menstrual activism. These forms of feminist body politics use the gendered body as a vehicle of protest for gender rights which aim to shock and expose and therefore challenge the power that seeks to confine and define female (and other gendered) bodies.

TRENDS IN BODY POLITICS IN GLOBAL FEMINIST STRUGGLES Many feminist movements were historically built by and centred on the experiences of cis women, though men and trans individuals also align themselves with the politics of feminism. As stated above, feminism intersects with struggles against capitalism, racism and ethnic privilege, heterosexism and ableism. LGBT and queer theorists and activism in the last decades have worked within and alongside feminists to challenge an 110

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essentialist understanding of gender. They have raised questions around who can claim the identity of ‘woman’, who is entitled to use ‘women’s spaces’ and resources, and who belongs (or, perhaps, who is made to feel as though they belong) in feminist and women’s rights communities, both in theory and in practice (Connell 2012). Body politics in the global arena largely emerged in the 1990s as part of transnational feminist movements engaged in struggles around rights, equality and difference, essentially altering what counts as political in gender and development. In global gender and development policy, for example, feminist body politics has been at the core of demands for gender equality, human rights and public health. A series of UN conferences held in the 1990s were key international events that consolidated gender and development practices around body politics. Feminists brought to the UN issues such as intimate partner violence; rape as a weapon of war; denial of sexual and reproductive rights; sexual oppression; and discrimination based on race, ageism and ableism. In making these issues visible, feminists transformed how bodies are shaped in global political discourses. As the result of advocacy at both the state and international level, feminist demands have entered into international human rights law, such as in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), in the struggle to have rape recognised as a weapon of war, in the inclusion of gender-based crimes in the Rome Statute of 1998 that set up the International Criminal Court and in Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 to include the specific retaliation faced by ‘women human rights defenders’ (Taylor 2015). Shaping this UN space were feminists working in a multi-level and multi-themed set of national and regional movements challenging deeply embedded patriarchal power relations in global politics through concepts such as body politics, along with human rights, economic justice, citizenship and democracy (Sandler 2015). They established and maintained fluid process of coalitions and networks which linked local, national, regional and global groupings and fought against the systematic exclusion and marginalisation of people based on patriarchal gender power relations that put the collective interests of privileged men and boys over those of other genders (Baksh and Harcourt 2015). The UN has also been an important arena for global politics around sexual and reproductive rights, where women and other genders have fought to gain autonomy over their own bodies in order to be able to exercise their rights. This includes, for example, the right to decide when to have (or not to have) children, and the right to express their sexuality safely and for their own pleasure (not only for procreation or male pleasure). The global reproductive justice agenda includes the struggle for access to bodily integrity and autonomy; health care; right to conception, contraception and abortion; and the right to express all forms of sexuality for cis women, lesbians, gays, bi and trans people. The reproductive rights agenda looks at how power affects intimate aspects of all women’s lives – and particularly those of marginalised women, whose bodies remain crucial sites of political battles over health and sexuality (Harcourt 2009). 111

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NAKED PROTESTS Naked protest used by women in different parts of the globe has brought public attention to various political demands. Body politics as naked protest seeks to reverse the norm that nakedness – especially female nakedness – is associated with cultural and social shame. In employing subversive nakedness, women use their bodies to expose oppression and demand their rights. In naked protests, women disrupt public arenas and turn vulnerability into defiance and demands for change. I look here at a range of naked protests which have been traditional ways for women to demand change in sub-Saharan Africa and the more recent phenomenon of naked protest in Europe and North America. Female nakedness in politics has a long history across sub-Saharan Africa. Women have gone topless, exposed their genitals (otherwise known as ‘genital cursing’)1 and stripped in public in order to challenge male power and disrupt gender relations in post-colonial Africa (Anumo and Onyango 2020, 209–210; Ebila and Tripp 2017; Ekine 2001). Women use their naked body in public demonstrations for a range of political demands – against gender oppression, and to demand peace, access to land and economic compensation. An early record of naked protest in Kenya was in 1922 by Mary Muthoni Nyanjiru, who was killed in her demands for the release of freedom fighter Harry Thuku. Nyanjiru evoked a Kijuyu curse by lifting her dress over her head in an act of protest (Anumo and Onyango 2020, 206). Her act of naked protest was recalled 70 years later at Uhuru Park’s ‘Freedom Corner’ in Nairobi, during a protest supported by Wangari Maathai, the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize Winner. In response to police intervention in a peaceful demonstration against prison torture, the mothers of political prisoners retaliated by showing their breasts to the police. These women’s use of nudity as a political tool sparked stone-throwing riots in Nairobi and made headlines around the world (Anumo and Onyango 2020, 207–208; Tibbetts 1994, 27). Another example comes from Liberia. ‘Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace’ demanded an end of war. In 2011, Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee threatened to remove her shirt as naked protest, pushing the Taylor government to the negotiating table (Young 2020). Widows in Liberia continued to use naked protest as a tool in May 2014 when they marched to the Capitol building and stripped in protest at the failure to receive widow benefits (Liberian Observer 2014). The protest led to wide press coverage and their demands were eventually met in the following government budget. In 2016, in the Amuru District of Northern Uganda, women stripped to their bras before the Minister of Land and Minister of Internal Affairs over a land dispute in Kampala. Their demonstration evoked the power of the maternal body, or ‘the mother’s naked curse’ (Ebila and Tripp 2017, 26), to push for the community’s political claim to the land. The naked protest was a powerful way for elderly women to make themselves noticed by the Ministers, helped by the national media coverage.

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Feminist activists have also used naked protest to make visible the impact of gender-based violence in post-apartheid South Africa (Young 2020). Protests at South African university campuses in 2016 and 2017 called attention to entrenched racism and gender-based violence. The activists used their bodies to demand their rights when they exposed themselves in protest against sexual harassment and gender-based violence. They brought attention to rape culture on campus and in other areas of public life (including in the government). In their ‘defiance of social codes’ by using nudity, their bodies spoke to power and for transformation ‘of the political landscape’ (Young 2020, 159). These examples of naked protest form part of a longer tradition of negotiations of gender relations, where the body is used to contest power. The purported vulnerability of the female body, and the sacredness of the mother and women’s sexuality, is used strategically by exposing breasts and other intimate parts of the body, as women seek to condemn and shame powerful men. This form of body politics is integral to African gender power relations where ‘women rioting naked has historically been a way in which they’ve rioted’ (Matendela quoted in Young 2020, 160). This form of political resistance has been erased from colonial political narratives, now being restored to political studies by feminist scholars – in Africa and elsewhere. The new writing and awareness contribute knowledge about how women’s power, identity and vulnerability through body politics is turned into a political statement (Ebila and Tripp 2017; Ekine 2001; Young 2020). The scholars point out how ‘feminist activists have garnered this language of the body to make visible both bodily vulnerability and defiance of the social and political systems that produce that vulnerability’ (Young 2020, 161). Body politics disrupts normative gender presumptions in a negotiation of power via the body, both directly and through visual representation. We can find an example of this in Afghanistan. In 2015, performance artist Kubra Khademi created a metal armour that covered (but also emphasised) her breasts, belly, and crotch. She wore it in a performance in the streets of Kabul designed to denounce sexual harassment in the neighbourhood of Kote Sangi. She donned the armour for just 8 minutes before a crowd of men gathered and began to insult her and attack her with rocks (Alijani 2015). Khademi stated that, in her political art, she used her body rather than words to speak out against harassment which Afghan women experience every day. Her performance, which was captured by the crowd’s mobile phones, quickly went viral on social media and was picked up by traditional media around the world. It led to death threats, forced her into hiding and ultimately saw her flee Afghanistan (Graham-Harrison 2015). Khademi’s walk was a courageous – and risky – form of feminist body politics, performed in the name of art, which drew attention to the everyday injustices of Afghan women. Hers was an isolated voice that spoke to collective wider political struggles for gender justice in Afghanistan. It is one that has resonated and endured in the Afghan context – the example was brought to my attention by one of my students from Afghanistan, 113

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who recalled it five years later when we were collecting examples of body politics in class. In Europe and North America in recent years, naked protest has emerged as part of feminist campaigns which use body politics in political performance as a protest. In Eastern Europe, the feminist group FEMEN first began their naked protest/activist campaigns in 2009 with topless protests in Kyiv in order to denounce sex tourism, trafficking and sexism in the Ukrainian government (O’Keefe 2014, 9). FEMEN are young, ‘model’like women who use their naked bodies to bring attention to a range of issues. In a form of political performance art, they write slogans on their bodies (such as ‘our bare breasts are our weapons’) and describe their activism as ‘sextremism’ (Channell 2014). Their stated goal is to denounce the exploitation of women’s sexuality by the patriarchal system. FEMEN attract media in staged public exhibitions; they have appeared unexpectedly from the crowd to uncover themselves in front of political and cultural leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi as well as disgraced Hollywood actor Bill Cosby, and have also turned up at high-level economic institutions such as Davos. FEMEN has an active social media presence (along with a range of merchandise for sale). Their website (femen. org) shows there are FEMEN protests taking place not only in Ukraine but also in France, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Poland, Germany and Tunisia. Not all feminists appreciate FEMEN or see them as helping local women’s demands. For example, Tunisian FEMEN activist Amina Sboui Tyler in March 2013 posted topless pictures online, and she wrote ‘my body is my own and not your honour’. Some Tunisian feminists did not see this as helpful, and Sboui Tyler has since left Tunisia for France after receiving death threats from conservative preachers (O’Keefe 2014). There has also been considerable debate in feminist circles including academic journals about whether such headline-grabbing exploits by the FEMEN help feminist struggles in the important issues they seek to address (Nagarajan 2013; O’Keefe 2014). In public debates addressed by FEMEN which I have attended in the Netherlands, the audience raised several concerns, including about why women of colour, larger sizes, older age and different physical abilities do not seem to fit into FEMEN’s politics. Questions were asked about whether the reclaiming of women’s bodies as a living ‘manifesto’ by writing scripts across their breasts is subversive or just playing back to the male gaze. There were also questions asked about how the FEMEN groups are organised, particularly around how members are recruited, where the organisation’s funds come from and whether using specifically young and pretty female bodies feeds and confirms media and fashion stereotypes. SlutWalks are another instance of liberatory forms of feminist performance that seeks to attract media attention to end gender-based violence. SlutWalks began in Toronto, Canada after a police officer told university students in 2011 that ‘if women want to avoid rape, they shouldn’t dress like “sluts”’ (Valenti 2011). The movement went viral on social media with 75 demonstrations in cities in Canada and the United States, Europe and South Africa in the first months of 2011. Later, in Latin America, the 114

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Marcha de Las Putas became part of the ‘green wave’ that fight for abortion and against femicide, also in some demonstrations stripping to demand their rights (Malm 2016; Urdinola and Salazar 2017). Organised by young people (women, men and trans), SlutWalks reclaims the right for people to dress how they want. To make this point they wear ‘slutty’ clothes – exaggerated, western, ‘sexy’ clothes, such as fishnet stockings, corsets and bras, and use lipstick to write the word ‘slut’ on their bare flesh. Like FEMEN, the form of feminist body politics represented by SlutWalks is controversial and some feminists, in what seems to be a generational divide between second and third-wave feminists, question if reclaiming the word ‘slut’ should be considered feminist politics (O’Keefe 2014). Both SlutWalk and FEMEN show how the female body is a site of struggle. Their demonstrations have led to broad conversations about the rights of bodies that have engaged particularly young people and have drawn attention to how sex, sexuality and sexual violence are played out on female bodies (specifically but not only). They show how feminists can use their bodies to challenge power relations by way of public performance. Their strategies of working with certain types of bodies (young, sexy, White and stereotypically desirable) may not engage fully with an intersectional understanding of gender oppression, but they have certainly drawn many young people to engage in this form of feminist activism. Feminist body politics as naked protest unsettles the gender social order by bringing injustice and violence into view through the use of the exposed body. While naked protests do not engage all feminists, they show how bodies can be a powerful resource for strategic political intervention through public activism. By bringing intimacy into the public, they disrupt codes of how women (and gendered others) are expected to behave, breaking taboos that have allowed men to act with impunity towards female bodies.

MENSTRUAL ACTIVISM Menstrual activism is another form of feminist body politics that has become highly visible in the last few years, bringing global attention to a hitherto silent form of gender inequity. Menstrual health became a particularly prominent feminist issue in the 1980s in the United States, as a result of Toxic Shock Syndrome linked especially to the ‘Rely’ brand of tampons (which were subsequently withdrawn from the market) (Reame 2018, 252; Reame 2020, 687). Menstrual activism has more recently made major inroads into UN and national government health and gender programmes, making menstruation visible as an important focus of gender equity in relation to social, economic and environmental policy. The core aim of menstrual activism is to fundamentally question the gender bias of the biomedical paradigm which constructs how bodies are understood in medicine, health and sanitation (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Laquer 1990; Martin 1987, Stein and Kim 2009). Menstrual activism 115

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seeks to expose western medical gender bias which reduces ‘women’s health’ to their sexual and reproductive functions, disregarding the impact of common illnesses due to gender difference while at the same time medicalising and pathologising ‘processes or emotional discomforts which are produced by social inequalities’ (Guilló-Arakistain 2020, 878–879). In unpacking the biomedical conceptions of menstruating bodies, menstrual activism moves away from seeing the menstrual cycle as an exclusively reproductive function, instead understanding it more broadly in its diverse biological, cultural and social context. Menstrual activism aims to end the shame and stigma around menstruation through visibility and self-knowledge, including celebrating menstrual blood and menstrual cycles. In aiming to understand menstruation as part of self-care and the (self-)management of sexual and reproductive health and gender relations, menstrual activists aim to free menstruation from cultural stigma, along with social and economic gender inequality. Menstrual activism argues for an emphasis on understanding how menstruation is part of a woman’s (or menstruator’s)2 health and life in general, not as stigma, but as a visible and accepted part of life. Menstrual activism seeks to challenge the oppressive social cultural and religious discourse of menstruation that leads to daily violations of women’s human rights, discrimination and inequality (Manorama and Desai 2020, 510). There are many examples of how menstrual activism challenges cultural, economic and social stigma as feminist body politics. These include self-organised gendered (women-centred) approaches to menstruation which acknowledge marginalised menstruators and recognise the need for women’s knowledge of their own bodies. Menstrual activists offer autonomous alternatives to the femcare industries and medical professionals such as menstrual cups. They are organising alternative cultures which aim to empower menstruators individually and collectively. Initiatives include online and in-person workshops on the alternative management of menstrual bleeding; visual and performance art and production of independent zines; art exhibitions, street actions, websites and social media; conferences; and now a discipline in the form of ‘menstrual studies’ (Guilló-Arakistain 2020, 869). There are also global campaigns to distribute menstrual products at no cost to women and girls living in low-income countries. A major and successful global campaign has brought to an end the taxing of menstrual products. Taxes were removed in Kenya in 2004, Canada in 2015, Malaysia, India and Australia in 2018 and Scotland in 2020 (Bobel 2020, 5). A ‘#StopTaxingPeriods’ campaign was launched in 2014 in the UK through the platform Change.org, while the ‘#Menstruaccion’ in Argentina called for the state to eliminate tax on menstrual products (Gaybor 2018). In Mexico, the Senate ruled to eliminate the ‘period tax’ in 2016, and in Colombia, the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Colombia ruled to abolish the 5% tampon tax in 2018 (Gaybor 2019). These actions are part of a menstrual justice framework which argues for policies that can transform social and cultural taboos with respect to women’s psychosocial, gynaecological, reproductive and menopausal 116

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health. This framework includes grassroots activism which reaches many millions of menstruators around the world. For example, in India, menstruating women are forbidden from entering Hindu temples. Menstrual activists in recent years have fought this custom, arguing that women have the right to make choices about their bodies and enter temples. A grassroots campaign in Kerala emerged around the Hindi Sabarimala temple where all women aged between 10 and 50 are forbidden to enter the temple because they are at the age of menstruation (Krishnan 2020). Activists took the case to Supreme Court in 2018, and the Constitutional Bench ruled that forbidding women to enter the temple when menstruating was constitutional. In response, women in Kerala organised a 385mile ‘women’s wall’, with somewhere between 3.5 million and 5 million women standing hand-in-hand along a national highway to protest the ruling as a violation of women and girl’s bodily rights (Thomas 2019). This ‘wall of women’ protest was a graphic illustration of how grassroots women used their bodies to speak politically calling for their rights as menstruators. In another example, Stella Nyanzi, a lecturer on gender and sexuality at Makerere University, Kampala, challenged socio-cultural attitudes to menstruation at great personal cost. She wrote her essay for the Handbook of Menstrual Studies (Bobel et al. 2020) while in jail, having been imprisoned for her efforts to bring menstrual health issues to public attention. She was charged with using social media for public solicitation of money while fundraising for sanitary pads. Her campaign #Pads4GirlsUg requested citizens to donate pads and funding for 3000 schoolgirls, young mothers and teachers in five districts of Uganda (Nyanzi 2020, 551–553). Nyanzi describes how she was condemned for breaking the taboos surrounding menstruation by speaking openly about menstruation stigma in schools, performing a chant and dance for children, and illustrated in class how to wear menstrual hygiene materials. As a well-known public figure (also internationally – she is a regular lecturer in Europe), Nyanzi prompted the ire of the Ugandan President by holding him to his election promise in 2015 to provide free sanitary pads to primary school students. Nyanzi described how she was ‘maligned as an obscene, vulgar, profane, rude, radical, and angry woman who was dangerous to the status quo and a source of pollution for respectable people’ (Nyanzi 2020, 556). She also states how ‘deeply political – or rather politicised – decisions about pad distribution and menstrual health education are in Uganda where the President manipulated poor girls’ menstruation in order to enhance election votes’ (Nyanzi 2020, 557). Menstrual activism also draws attention to the need for more scientific knowledge and understanding of environmental impacts of menstrual technologies and overall safety of the menstrual process (Gaybor 2018). This takes countless forms. For example, in Argentina, the menstrual activist group #Menstruaccion undertakes research on the safety of menstrual products – it has an online campaign asking for scientific research on menstruation in order to change policy towards menstrual health (Gaybor 2020, 7). Other examples are the Diva menstrual cup, 117

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tracking apps such as Clue and the blog ‘Womenlivingbetter’ which offer women ways to generate their own data, share consumer complaints and monitor symptoms, while also raising environmental concerns and encouraging women to take action when needed (Reame 2020, 698; Women’s Voices 2018). Menstrupedia, a digital platform originating in India produces information about the menstrual cycle in different languages spoken across India and also in Spanish, Swahili and English. Soy1Soy4 (I am 1, I am 4), an online menstrual school run by the Spanish menstrual therapist Erika Irusta, has built a community of menstruators (Gaybor 2020). The free bleeding movement is another group practicing feminist body politics. These menstrual activists do not use menstrual products and post pictures of their blood-stained clothes and bodies on social media in order to challenge menstrual stigma and lobby for free menstrual products for menstruators in school. Kiran Gandhi became an icon of the movement when she ran the London Marathon in 2015 while free bleeding (Gaybor 2021, 148). Menstrual activism also uses art campaigns and performances on social media (blogs, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram). The Canadian artist poet Rupi Kaur’s photos on Instagram of her blood-stained pyjamas and bed sheets heralded a vibrant form of menstrual activism through political art. The photos were twice taken down by Instagram to wide outcry (Kaur 2015). Another (less controversial) use of Instagram is by trans man Cass Clemmer who used Instagram posts to open up menstrual health discussions with the adventures of fluffy, googly-eyed ‘toni the tampon’. This project evolved into a popular colouring book The Adventures of Toni the Tampon advertised on Amazon as a way to ‘smash the period taboo’ (Gaybor 2021, 148). Green-Cole (2020, 787) discusses the importance of menstrual art to challenge menstrual stigmatism and silence around menstruation. She argues that menstrual art ‘work against negative stereotypes and actively revalue gendered blood’ though some also mean to shock (788). She goes on to say how ‘the ultimate transgression is the use of menstrual blood as medium … as autobiography or personal expression’ (789) and are now a field in contemporary art. Globally, menstrual activism has been taken up by the UN-led Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) unit (Bobel et al. 2020), which has been active in promoting access to menstrual products for poor girls and women as part of ‘empowerment’ programmes in the Global South. WASH responds to feminist organisations’ advocacy by taking up the menstrual health agenda as part of period politics, or what has been described as ‘menstrual justice’ (Bobel et al. 2020). Such institutionalised menstrual activism fights the deep stigmatisation of menstrual bodies within religious, social and cultural arenas at a policy level. WASH policy for gender equity and health integrates menstrual technologies, menstrual hygiene and health as part of sexual reproductive health goals. As a result, many government ministries are endorsing the move from stigma to openness (Patkar 2020, 502). These policies underline ‘period poverty’ – in other words, that poor girls require menstrual pads and sanitary facilities to attend school (with sponsorship by different femcare industries). 118

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As these diverse practices show, menstrual activism differs according to country and context in vibrant and challenging ways, as menstruators seek to ‘manage’ and ‘know’ their own bodies rather than be ‘managed’ and be told by medical and social institutions how they should feel and behave. From social media icons to menstrual health advocacy to end period tax, and online menstrual health discussion groups, menstrual activism has become part of everyday body politics that is challenging menstrual taboos and globally transforming the lived experience of the gendered body.

CONCLUSION Naked protest and menstrual activism are part of current and emerging forms of feminist body politics, where people use their bodies as intimate vehicles of protest against power, challenging cultural, economic and social practices. These practices are not only contextualised in relation to patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism in complex ways, as protest and resistance, but also use sexualised images and products when speaking to power. Naked protest in Africa builds on a collective tradition where the female body at its most intimate carries social meanings – of maternity, of sexuality – to the public as an act of defiance where vulnerability is made political as an exposé of injustice. In naked protests, women who are voiceless in traditional politics come together and their actions are read as powerful political statements forcing men to turn away in shame and to consider the demands. Menstrual politics also mounts political challenges at both the private and public level in order to end stigma and restrictions. The rights of menstruators are heard in various political sites, from the UN and governments to medical centres, on social media and at contemporary art galleries. As these examples of feminist body politics show, women (and other genders) have found creative and successful ways to use the power of their bodies to unsettle and ultimately change the gender social order.

Discussion questions 1. Choose one of the examples in the chapter of feminist body politics or one that you know from your own context. Look for more information online about the struggle. What is it that these activists are trying to change? 2. Read the introduction to the Handbook of Menstrual Studies (2020) by Bobel et al. (It is available open access online). How do the authors frame menstruation as a political concept? 3. What are some of the differences between the naked protests in sub-Saharan Africa and the provoking protests of FEMEN and SlutWalks? 119

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Notes 1. In Southern and Eastern African contexts, it is considered a curse to see the naked body of your mother or grandmother or elder women in your community, hence the term ‘genital cursing’. 2. The gender-neutral term ‘menstruator’ was coined by menstrual activists in order to recognise that trans people also menstruate and challenge a normative understanding of sexual difference (Guilló-Arakistain 2020, 874).

Further reading Ebila, Florence and Aili Mari Tripp. 2017. “Naked Transgressions: Gendered Symbolism in Ugandan Land Protests.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 5 (1): 25–45. Gaybor, Jacqueline. 2020. “Everyday (Online) Body Politics of Menstruation.” Feminist Media Studies 20 (1): 1–16. Guilló-Arakistain, Miren. 2020. “Challenging Menstrual Normativity: Nonessentialist Body Politics and Feminist Epistemologies of Health”. In The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, edited by Chris Bobel et al., 869–884. London: Palgrave Macmillan O’Keefe, Theresa. 2014. “My Body is My Manifesto! SlutWalk, FEMEN and Femmenist Protest.” Feminist Review 107: 1–19. Young, Sandra. 2020. “Feminist Protest and the Disruptive Address of Naked Bodies.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 32 (2): 158–167. References Alijani, Ershad. 2015. “Kabul Woman Wears Armour to Protest Sexual Harassment.” The Observers. France 24 Hours, 5 March 2015. https://observers.france24.com/en/20150305-kabul-woman-armorsexual-harassment Anumo, Felogene and Awuor Onyango. 2020. “Embodying Protest: Feminist Organising.” In Gender Protests and Political Change in Africa, edited by Ocech Awino, 201–224. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Baksh, Rawwida and Wendy Harcourt. 2015. “Introduction.” In The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements, edited by Rawwida Baksh and Wendy Harcourt, 1–50. Oxford: OUP. Bobel, Chris. 2020. “Introduction: Menstruation as Lens – Menstruation as Opportunity.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, edited by Chris Bobel et al. London: Palgrave. Bobel, Chris, Inga T. Winkler, Breanne Fahs, Katie Ann Hasson, Elizabeth Arveda Kissling and Tomi-Ann Roberts (eds). 2020. The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Channell, Emily. 2014. “Sextremism the New Feminism? Perspectives from Pussy Riot and Femen.” The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 42 (4): 611–614. Connell, Raewyn. 2012. “Transsexual Women and Feminist Thought: Toward New Understanding and New Politics.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37 (4): 857–881. Desai, Manisha. 2015. “Critical Cartography, Theories, and Praxis of Transnational Feminisms.” In The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements, edited by Rawwida Baksh and Wendy Harcourt. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199943494.001.000. Oxford: Oxford University Press Ebila, Florence and Aili Mari Tripp. 2017. “Naked Transgressions: Gendered Symbolism in Ugandan Land Protests.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 5 (1): 25–45. Ekine, S. 2001. Blood Sorrow and Oil: Testimonies of Violence from Women of the Niger Delta. Oxford: Centre for Democracy and Development. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Gaybor, Jacqueline. 2018. “Menstrual Politics in Argentina and Diverse Assemblages of Care.” In Feminist Political Ecology and the Economics of Care: In Search of Economic Alternatives, edited by Christine Bauhardt and Wendy Harcourt, 230–246. London: Routledge. Gaybor, Jacqueline. 2019. “Empowerment, Destigmatization and Sustainability: The Co-Construction of Reusable Menstrual Technologies in the Context of Menstrual Activism in Argentina.” Gender, Technology and Development 23 (2): 111–129. Gaybor, Jacqueline. 2020. “Everyday (Online) Body Politics of Menstruation.” Feminist Media Studies 20(1): 1–16. Gaybor, Jacqueline. 2021. “The Body Politics of Menstruation: Technologies, Sustainability and Destigmatization.” PhD Thesis. International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Graham-Harrison, Emma. 2015. “Afghan Artist Dons Armour to Counter Men’s Street Harassment.” The Guardian, 12 March 2015. https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/12/afghan-artist-armourstreet-harassment-walk-kubra-khademi-kabul Green-Cole, Ruth. 2020. “Painting Blood: Visualizing Menstrual Blood in Art.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, edited by Chris Bobel et al., 787–802. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Guilló-Arakistain, Miren. 2020. “Challenging Menstrual Normativity: Nonessentialist Body Politics and Feminist Epistemologies of Health”. In The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, edited by Chris Bobel et al., 869–884. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Harcourt, Wendy. 2009. Body Politics in Development: Critical Debates in Gender and Development. London: Zed Books. Kaur, Rupi. 2015. “Period.1.” https://rupikaur.com/photo-album/

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Krishnan, Murali. 2020. “Sabarimala Verdict on Entry of Women Not the Last Word, Says Chief Justice Bobde.” Hindustan Times, 2 August 2020. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/sabarimala-verdicton-entry-of-women-not-the-last-word-says-chief-justice-bobde/storyzydWjpsamcTYzlh94mnfnN.html Laquer, Thomas. 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Liberian Observer. 2014. “Widows Stage Naked Protest.” Liberian Observer, 28 May 2014. https://www.liberianobserver.com/news/widows-stagenaked-protest-at-capitol/28 May 2014. Malm, Sara. 2016. “Female Protesters Strip Off and Take to the Streets Across South America to Demand Legalising Abortions and an End to Domestic Violence as Part of International Women’s Day.” Daily Mail, 9 March 2016. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3483825/ Women-strip-streets-South-America-demand-legalising-abortionsend-domestic-violence.html Manorama, Swatija and Radhika Desai. 2020. “Menstrual Justice: A Missing Element in India’s Health Policies.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, edited by Chris Bobel et al. London: Palgrave. Martin, Emily. 1987. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (2): 499–535. Nagarajan, Chitra. 2013. “Femen’s Obsession with NudityFeeds a Racist Colonial Feminism.” The Guardian, 11 April 2013. https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/11/femen-nudity-racistcolonial-feminism. Nyanzi, Stella. 2020. “Personal Narrative: Bloody Precarious Activism in Uganda.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, edited by Chris Bobel et al., 551–559. London: Palgrave. O’Keefe, Theresa. 2014. “My Body is My Manifesto! SlutWalk, FEMEN and Femmenist Protest.” Feminist Review 107: 1–19. Patkar, Archana. 2020. “Policy and Practice Pathways to Addressing Menstrual Stigma and Discrimination.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, edited by Chris Bobel et al. London: Palgrave. Reame, Nancy King. 2018. “The Legacy of Tampon-Related Toxic Shock Syndrome: Feats, Failures, and Future Challenges for Women’s Health Scholars.” Women’s Reproductive Health. 5 (4): 250–261. Reame, Nancy King. 2020. “Toxic Shock Syndrome and Tampons: The Birth of a Movement and a Research ‘Vagenda’.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, edited by Chris Bobel et al., 687–704. London: Palgrave. Sandler, Joanne. 2015. “The ‘Warriors Within’: How Feminists Change Bureaucracies and Bureaucracies Change Feminists.” In The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements, edited by Rawwida Baksh and Wendy Harcourt, 188–214. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 122

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Stein, Elissa and Susan Kim. 2009. Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Taylor, Vivienne. 2015. “Human Rights and Human Security: Feminists Contesting the Terrain.” In The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements, edited by Rawwida Baksh and Wendy Harcourt, 346–366. Oxford: Oxford University Press Thomas, Sonja. 2019. “The Women’s Wall in Kerala, India, and Brahmanical Patriarchy.” Feminist Studies 45 (1): 253–263. Tibbetts, Alexandra. 1994. “Mamas Fighting for Freedom in Kenya.” Africa Today 41 (4): 27–48. Urdinola, Jessica Castaño and Milton Andrés Salazar. 2017. “La Marcha de Las Putas: Seculaidad, Control Y Resistencias. (Slutwalk: Sexuality, Control and Resistances).” Cuestiones de género: de la igualdad y la diferencia 12: 201–219. Valenti, Jessica. 2011. “Slutwalks and the Future of Feminism.” Washington Post, 3 June 2011. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/slutwalksand-the-future-of-feminism/2011/06/01/AGjB9LIH_story.html Young, Sandra. 2020. “Feminist Protest and the Disruptive Address of Naked Bodies.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 32 (2): 158–167. Women’s Voices. 2018. “Menstrual Care Products 2018 Testing Results.” https://www.womensvoices.org/menstrual-care-products/whats-inyour-tampon/

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Care Work Christina Gabriel Feminists have approached questions of care from various perspectives. The movement of care workers, who are mainly women, across borders has in particular focused scholarly attention on the global frame. In this chapter, I map the linkages between care and migration by examining the concept of care and the feminisation of migration. I then identify some key scholarly contributions that have been developed to understand the dynamics of transnational care worker migration through a gender lens. These insights provide a starting point to develop a preliminary snapshot of the immediate impacts of COVID-19 on migrant care workers.

THE INTERSECTION OF CARE AND MIGRATION Migrant care work is located at the nexus of care and migration. Nevertheless, research on the global political economy, social reproduction and care labour have been seen as marginal to the productive realm and have often been sidelined by mainstream approaches insofar as these ‘presuppose male-dominated activities (paid work, the formal economy) and masculinized characteristics (autonomous, objective, rational, instrumental, competitive)’ (Runyan and Peterson 2014, 185). Within the discipline of International Relations itself, care and care ethics have not displaced traditional focuses on security, conflict analysis, and causes of war (Robinson 2018, 319). Similarly, the discipline is characterised by an inattention to migration (Hollifield and Wong 2015, 246) and interventions that address the impact of migration on international relations are produced by scholars in other disciplines (Koslowski 2005, 6). Consequently, when not assumed away, migration was largely treated as a matter of low politics, neglected in favor of more important questions such as the 124

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balance of power …. In the post-9/11 world, when IR scholars began to pay significant attention to migration, their lens for doing so was overwhelmingly one of state security and processes of securitization. (Banerjee and Smith 2020, 274–275)

Using a gender lens, feminist scholars have problematised migrant care work and in doing so have emphasised the centrality of care in our everyday lives. Care The concept of care is used so frequently that its meaning is taken for granted, or implied. Like any other concept, there is not an agreed definition of what care entails, nor its scope, and conceptions of care vary significantly (Daly 2021). That said, care has been of concern to feminist scholars for some time. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist political economists emphasised the importance of social reproduction which referred to ‘the processes involved in maintaining and reproducing people, specifically the laboring population, and their labour power on a daily and generational basis’ (Bezanson and Luxton 2006, 3). Interventions stressed the linkages between social reproduction and the productive economy pointing out that analysing the interaction was central to understanding either realm (Peterson 2003, 112). From the standpoint of social reproduction, care is seen as a particular form of labour. As Yeates states, care work ‘covers a range of tasks and activities to promote the personal health and welfare of people who cannot, or who are not inclined to, perform those activities themselves’. In her view, the definition is sufficiently broad to take into account a wide range of activities from the most ‘highly intimate social, and health and sexual care services to the less intimate ones such as cooking, cleaning, ironing and general maintenance work’ (2004, 371). Other interventions situate care within a framework of ethics as a relational practice. As Robinson puts it, a global ethic of care ‘requires examination of the contexts in which caring does or does not take place, and a commitment to the creation of more humanly responsive institutions which can be shaped to embody expressive and communicative possibilities between actors on a global scale’ (1999, 48; see also Robinson 2018). Importantly, it should be noted that the term ‘care’ emphasises the manner in which care work embraces both emotional and relational dimensions (Herrera 2020, 233). The construction of care as ‘women’s work’ rests on an understanding of a particular division of labour. Feminist have problematised the shifting division between public and private to highlight the gendered organisation of each sphere (Pateman 1989), their reciprocal nature and connection to ‘identifiable relations of power such as those based on class, gender, and race’ (Boyd 1997, 4). The dichotomy between the masculine public realm of work and politics and the feminised private space of domestic life is central to understanding how care is constructed 125

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and valued. Care work is associated with the private realm and is seen as unskilled and undervalued because it is assumed that it is ‘women’s work’ and embodies some natural feminine capacity. As such, these tasks are often rendered marginal or invisible. Early scholarly works, such as Marilyn Waring’s If Women Counted (1988) and Meg Luxton’s More Than a Labour of Love (1980) focused on women’s unpaid labour in the home, its value to the economy and the need for it to be recognised. Patterns of global migration The numbers of international migrants1 have been growing globally. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) indicates that 272 million people in 2019 were classified as international migrants, an increase from 1990 when they numbered 153 million. Particular spatial patterns mark these flows, as migrants are concentrated in particular regions and countries. For example, the largest number of international migrants are found in just 20 countries, with the greatest portion (19%) in the United States. In 2019, India was the leading country of origin with 17.5 million people living abroad. Other significant source countries were Mexico, China and the Russian Federation (UN DESA 2019, iv). The flow of people across borders is complex and differentiated, and such flows are motivated by a range of factors including, for example, economic considerations, family reunification, marriage, displacement, persecution, conflict and violence. Labour migration is a key element of these flows. ‘The International Labour Organization (ILO) defines a migrant worker as an “international migrant individual of working age and older who are either employed or unemployed in their current country of residence”’. It is estimated that migrant workers accounted for six of every ten international migrants and of this group four out of ten were women (UN DESA 2019, 51 citing ILO 2018). But how does gender matter in this process? In a useful distinction, Marchetti (2018) draws our attention to the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the term ‘feminisation of migration’. The quantitative aspect refers to the changing percentage of women in international migration: from 46.6% in 1960 (Marchetti 2018, 445) to 47.9% of all international migrants in 2019 (UN DESA 2019, 14). She acknowledges that the number is relatively stable but argues what is significant is that ‘women are increasingly migrating as solo or pioneer migrants, in long-distance movements as workers and thus with the function of breadwinner for their households’ (2018, 445). In a similar vein, de Haas, Castles and Miller (2020, 10) identify the feminisation of labour migration as one of the key trends of post-war migration primarily because of the increasing participation of women in labour migration. At the same time, as Marchetti points out, the qualitative dimension of the feminisation of migration invites a deeper and more complex understanding of gender that moves beyond asking ‘how many women migrate’. She suggests that the qualitative dimension prompts 126

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a consideration of how gender and gender roles structure migration flows. Here the key questions are ‘how does migration change gender roles, and do gender experiences affect migrants’ experiences?’ (2018, 445). Migrant care work The increasing reliance on migrant care workers, most of whom are women, to address care needs in the Global North has prompted feminists to consider the ‘global as the scale at which care is discussed’ (Kofman and Raghuram 2015, 55). While the migration of care workers across borders is not necessarily new, this type of mobility has assumed a much greater prominence as states and employers are actively engaged in recruiting workers from lower income regions to address deficits in care. In other cases, states actively promote and regulate cross-border labour migration (see Rodriguez 2010). Migrant workers provide care not only in a variety of settings within the home, as domestic workers, nannies and au pairs, but also in the public sector as personal support workers (PSWs), residential care workers and nurses. Migrant work thus spans the public and private boundaries of care (Shutes 2020, 107; see also King-Dejardin 2019, 1). While more expansive definitions of migrant care work include ‘skilled’ labour, such as healthcare professionals (see Yeates and Pillinger 2019), considerable attention has been directed at ‘low-skilled’ migrant caregivers who work in the private household. This group is referred to as ‘domestic workers’ and ‘domestic work’ is defined as ‘work performed in or for a household or households’ (ILO Convention 189). Domestic work is therefore defined according to the workplace, which is the private household. Broadly speaking, ‘domestic workers provide personal and household care’ (ILO n.d.). The ILO estimates that there are 67.1 million domestic workers worldwide, and of these 11.5 million are international migrants (ILO 2015 cited by King-Dejardin 2019, 33). The growth in migrant care work has been the focus of a rich body of feminist scholarship. Much of this work has addressed the movement of care workers from the Global South to countries in the Global North under conditions of neoliberal globalisation (Stasiulis and Bakan 2003; Parreñas 2015). For example, in the Global North, countries experienced the withdrawal or erosion of public support for care provision – including cuts to the healthcare sector, the withdrawal of elder care subsidies or the inadequate provision of childcare – as states adopted more neoliberal policies (Misra and Merz 2007, 119–120). These changes were coupled with the fact that more women were joining the labour force. The resulting deficits in care were downloaded to individuals and their families. The responsibility to care often fell to individual women who may ‘choose’ to work part-time or withdraw completely from employment. Some families can purchase care services from other women and these women may be recruited from abroad. At the same time, many countries in the Global South experienced the imposition of structural adjustment policies that greatly impacted people’s livelihoods. ‘Neoliberal strategies 127

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… create a situation in which more women are considering immigration as a means of meeting their family’s financial needs. Rather than states taking responsibilities for aiding families, neoliberal strategies have helped to create an international division of carework’ (Misra and Merz 2007, 121). Care migration is, of course, not limited to flows from the Global South to the Global North. Other interventions have drawn attention to different routes and regulations of care worker migration. In Asia, for example, Lan (2006) looks at both Taiwanese employers and migrant domestic workers from other parts of South Asia. Peng (2018) has pursued a comparative analysis of how Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore approach recruitment and regulate migrant care work. Silvey and Parreñas (2020) address the experiences of Indonesian and Filipino migrant domestic workers in the United Arab Republics and situate them within a broader global context of migration. Additionally, as Lutz (2018) points out, the focus on movements from the Global South to the Global North also does not capture the movement of care workers from Eastern Europe to the West but also East to East migration where women from countries such as Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine provide care to higher income families in Poland and the Czech Republic, while Polish women find employment in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, the UK and Austria. She states, ‘the geopolitical framing of “Global South to Global North” needs to be amended by analyzing the wide-ranging and multiple scaling of care migrations, understood as complex relations, where in each case the respective gendered, ethnic and class dimensions of the phenomenon are taken into account’ (Lutz 2018, 579).

ANALYSING MIGRANT CARE WORK The complexity of care worker migration has prompted the development of several conceptual frames that have focused on globalisation, migration and care. Two have been particularly important for feminist scholars: the global care chain framework and the transnational political economy of care approach. Global care chains In an effort to address the gender dynamics and stratifications attendant with the global transfer of care, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas developed the term ‘the international division of reproductive labour’. Drawing on her research on Filipino domestic workers in Rome and Los Angeles, Parreñas pointed out that as migrant domestic workers assume responsibility for the reproductive labour of class privileged women in higher income countries, their own care responsibilities are passed on to other women in the Philippines. In an important observation that underscores the linkages between different groups of women Parreñas states: 128

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This international division of labor refers to a three-tier transfer of reproductive labor among women in two nation-states: middle- and upper-class women in receiving countries, migrant Filipina domestic workers, and Filipina domestic workers, or poorer female relatives, in the Philippines who are often too poor to migrate. (2015, 41)

Parreñas’ insights on the international division of reproductive labour and her empirical study provided the impetus for Hochschild’s (2000) global care chain conceptualisation. This analytical frame offered a lens to consider the globalisation of migration and care. Hochschild describes the global care chain as a ‘series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid and unpaid work of caring … [that] usually start in a poor country and end in a rich one’. Each link in the chain is connected to another – ‘one kind of care depending on another and so on’ (2000, 131). Importantly, she emphasises the affective dimension of care, noting that ‘caring work touches on one’s emotions. It is emotional labour, and often far more than that’ (Hochschild 2000, 134). This framework not only prompts a consideration of the way in which care is mobile but also emphasises the way in which global asymmetries and broader social relations are implicated in transfers of care insofar as the links in the global care chain are not equivalent. ‘People lower down the class/race/nation chain do not share the “profits”’ (Hochschild 2000 134). Consequently, as one moves down the chain the value assigned to care lessens bit by bit till it is often by the end of the chain unpaid (Yeates 2012, 137). The global care chain concept has proved a significant contribution in understanding the dynamics of global transfers of care labour from poorer regions to more wealthy nations. Feminist scholars have not only used this frame to pursue particular empirical studies but have also expanded it (Yeates 2009). As Herrera explains, the concept ‘allows us to sketch a new geography of inequality … [that] reveals the hierarchal nature of caring relationships at the global level and how these hierarchies were transformed (or not) across borders’ (2020, 234). The global care chain framework and the assumptions that underpin it have also been subject to sustained scrutiny. In what she characterises as a sympathetic critique, Yeates (2012) identifies three concerns with the initial formulation of the framework. First, she points out that the global care chain analytic reinforces care work as women’s work and ‘this has channelled the focus of research into migrant women, feminized meanings and acts of (transnational) care-giving and essentialised forms of the nuclear family’ (2012, 145). Subsequent research, in her view, has sought to decentre female labour by drawing attention to other forms of care labour besides childcare and domestic care; acknowledging that not all female migrant care workers are mothers; and lastly by identifying how men are also part of care labour flows (see, for example, Scrinzi 2010). Second, Yeates observes that the global care chain concept tends to privilege certain groups, care occupations and sectors over others. While 129

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the breadth of occupations has expanded to include nurses and religious orders and different work settings, she calls for more research into other occupations and sectors. She points out that ‘much has been undertaken on global domestic care chains, but most of this has been about “interior” domestic work (childcare, care of the elderly, cleaning) rather than “exterior” housework (odd jobbing, gardening), and remarkably little of this has looked at more institutionalized work contexts in which “domestic care takes place” (for example for-profit and not-for-profit childcare centres)’ (2012, 147). Finally, she argues that, while the global care chain is useful insofar as it emphasises and highlights how the relations of care and their organisation operate across a multiplicity of scales, it is important to think about networks that do not necessarily transcend borders of a nation state. Here she points to countries such as China, India and Indonesia where internal migration is a significant phenomenon. In sum, Yeates’ critique is an effort to push the parameters of the global care chain paradigm towards a broader understanding of the global relations of care and the feminisation of migration. Transnational political economy of care approach In her work, Williams (2011, 2012, 2017) identifies a transnational political economy of care framework as critical to problematising migration and care. She points to the five different dynamics that are part of a transnational political economy of care and which inform migrant care work. They are the: 1. transnational movement of care labour – which is seen as not only specifically meeting reproductive care needs but also operating in parallel with the movement of skilled health workers from poorer regions [to] richer countries … 2. transnational dynamics of care commitments as people migrate and leave family behind 3. transnational movement of care capital – in which international corporations now dominate much care provision, driving out the smaller, more co-operatively run care homes and agencies 4. transnational governance, represented by the policies, agreements and conventions in which international organizations … have played an important role, and 5. transnational networks of care and domestic work activists (2017, 25–26). Williams has acutely observed that researchers studying migrant care work must contend with processes that range from the most personal practices within homes to the broader dynamics of globalisation (2017, 25). To capture how these multiple processes find expression, Williams identifies three interrelated levels of analysis: micro, meso and macro. At the micro level are the experiences and interactions between caregivers and 130

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their employers and/or the people who receive care. The meso layer comprises the institutional factors that are implicated in these relationships. It connects the micro and macro scale, and it is here that Williams draws attention to the interactions between different regimes in destination countries. A regime is constituted by ‘clusters of policies, practices, legacies, discourses, social relations and forms of contestation that are relevant to the particular care/migration/employment regime’ (2012, 371). She asserts that the intersection of these regimes is implicated in differences and convergences in the ways in which specific countries respond to care crises. The macro level refers to broader processes of globalisation that have engendered a global political economy of care that wraps around and frames the micro and meso level (2017, 31). Williams’ scalar analytical framework offers a way to consider the complexity of migration and care. As she points out, the global care chain tends to draw the link between the macro and micro levels (2011, 25), but her attention to the meso scale is a reminder of the importance of national contexts and national states in shaping migration and care work.

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC AND SHIFTING CONFIGURATIONS OF MIGRANT CARE WORK The COVID-19 pandemic underscored how critical care is to our lives and our economies. It made more visible the gendered division of labour as women were at the front lines of the crisis, either as primary caregivers at home and/or care workers in the public and private sector. The differential impacts of the pandemic were also more evident as intersectional inequities premised on race, gender, class, disability or migrant status came to the fore. As one UN Policy Brief pointed out ‘the pandemic is deepening pre-existing inequalities, exposing vulnerabilities in social, political and economic systems which are in turn amplifying the impacts of the pandemic’ (2020, 2). This is particularly true of migrant women workers. Many of them had moved from lower income countries to other regions to meet the care needs of more wealthy families and nations. As countries responded to the pandemic with a range of measures including travel restrictions, stricter border control, lockdown and social isolation measures, many migrant care workers experienced job losses, intensification of work, unsafe working conditions and threats to their livelihoods and status in host countries and had to contend with the stress of separation from home countries. Thus migrant care workers’ experience of the pandemic, reflecting existing gender and racial hierarchies, often differed from that of other workers in profound ways. The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in 2020. States adopted various measures to address the crisis and large segments of the world economy were affected. But as the ongoing crisis unfolded it quickly became evident that ‘care is at the pandemic’s epicentre – the global virus involves, if nothing else an avalanche of care 131

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need’ (Daly 2021, 114). Indeed, Oxfam declared ‘the global care economy is in hyperdrive’ (2020). Feminists drew attention to how the pandemic exacerbated existing gender dynamics and created new ones that disproportionately affected women migrant workers (Foley and Piper 2020, 2). The global pandemic affected the care economy and organisation of care and has significant implications for the dynamics associated with the transnational political economy of care. The contradiction between the increasing visibility of care, as expressed by the designation of workers, including migrant care workers, as ‘essential’, and their ongoing precarity has become much more evident in the context of the pandemic. Thus, domestic workers, for example, are at the same time categorised as ‘essential and expendable’ (Pandey, Parreñas, and Sabio 2021, 2). COVID-19 rendered the work of migrant care workers across the skill spectrum from ‘skilled’ professional nurses in hospitals to ‘low-skilled’ domestic workers in the home much more visible as it became obvious that migrant care labour was integral to the viability of global health and social care systems. What the pandemic reveals is the contradictions ‘between workers’ actual societal value, their assigned economic value, and their ascribed skill levels’ (Isaac and Elrick 2021, 853). Migrant care work and the health system In many countries, the majority of health workers caring for patients are female migrant workers. Foley and Piper (2020) point out that foreign-trained nurses account for 16% of nurses in OECD countries. In response to the increasing pressure on already stretched healthcare systems during the pandemic, some countries attempted to reach out to migrant workers to address increasing care deficits. The targets of these efforts were those migrant healthcare workers within countries, who had been initially categorised as unable to work, and those whose credentials were not recognised. But efforts were also made to enlist workers from abroad to alleviate the stress on national health systems. ‘Attempts to recruit additional Filipino nurses during the pandemic have sparked anger in the Philippines’ (Foley and Piper 2020, 4). The fact that nurses have been on the front lines of the pandemic in hospitals and valorised has not necessarily improved their working conditions (Foley and Piper 2020, 5). This was also true of PSWs who worked in long-term and aged care facilities. Elderly residents in these facilities were especially susceptible to COVID-19 because of their age and communal living situations. Many of them were dependent on the care labour of PSWs within the facilities. Work in this sector is often insecure insofar as it is low-paid and part-time. Workers often have to take on more than one job at different facilities in order to secure a livelihood. Public investments in this sector have also often fallen short of what is needed despite the growing care needs of ageing populations in higher income countries. In response, different states have adopted a range of measures including private ownership, mandatory insurance schemes and public investment 132

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(Gahwi and Walton-Roberts 2020, 7). Further, while the work of PSWs is frequently characterised as ‘low-skilled’, the workers are actually engaged in ‘performing complex and essential services for vulnerable populations’ (Gahwi and Walton-Roberts 2020, 5). The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated just how critical this form of labour was. But it soon became evident care workers were overworked, unable to socially distance, and did not always have adequate personal protective equipment. Migrant care work in the household: care in the time of COVID-19 The global crisis precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic also affects the experience of migrant domestic care workers within the micro scale of the household. Canada offers a case in point. Migrant domestic workers enter the country under the terms of a managed migration scheme which channels caregivers into the private households of Canadians to provide care for children and, more recently, the elderly. It is a two-step programme where migrants enter the country under a work permit. After working in the sector for a period of time, and meeting language and education criteria, domestic workers can apply for permanent residence in the country. Until recently, the programme included a mandatory live-in requirement. Various incarnations of this programme have been the subject of scrutiny and issues such as low pay, unpaid wages, unpaid overtime and poor living arrangements have been documented (Brickner and Straehle 2010; Stasiulis and Bakan 2003). The nature of the programme creates a disincentive for migrant workers to assert their rights and challenge unfair practices because it might jeopardise their precarious status and/or their ability to meet the requirements to apply for permanent status. This becomes a significant issue under the conditions of the pandemic, which is the focus of this section. In many ways, the caregiver programme conforms to the assumptions that frame the global care chain model. The programme is highly feminised and racialised. It is overwhelmingly dominated by women and these women are recruited from the Global South. Most, but not all, are from the Philippines. A recent demographic profile belies the claim that the workers are unskilled or uneducated. Women in this stream have higher levels of official language proficiency than their counterparts in other migrations pathways such as the family class or foreign-skilled worker stream. Many of them also have post-secondary qualifications (Lightman et al. 2021, 8). However, a study of their employment trajectory over a 20-year period found that ‘women who came through the LCP [Live-In Caregiver Program] made less initially and over the long term than comparable women arriving via other entry classes’ and the authors link this to a ‘care penalty’ and the devalued nature of work in ‘care’ (Lightman et al. 2021, 14). Advocacy groups have recently documented the impact of the pandemic on domestic workers by conducting a survey of 201 workers across Canada 133

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to ‘expose care worker exploitation’. This section draws directly on their report Behind Closed Doors which suggests that COVID-19 created a ‘cascade of crises’ (Caregivers’ Action Centre [CAC] et al. 2020, 6). They point to the role of institutional factors, such as immigration regulations associated with the meso scale, and demonstrate how these heightened the existing vulnerabilities of migrant domestic workers. Additionally, unlike workers in care settings such as hospitals or residential facilities, many domestic workers were isolated in their employer’s home. They were separated from their families, who were also coping with the pandemic’s effects in sending countries. In Canada, different jurisdictions adopted various types of lockdown measures that confined people to their homes in an attempt to control the spread of the virus. What did the ‘work from home’ directive mean for migrant domestic workers who were already working at home? Lockdown measures can increase the amount of care work that has to be undertaken in a household (see also Pandey, Parreñas, and Sabio 2021). According to Behind Closed Doors, many migrant domestic workers had to contend with more people at home. For example, their employers worked from home, and children did not go to school or daycare as these were closed. There was also the imposition of additional duties such as cleaning and disinfecting goods coming in and out of the house. As a result, domestic workers experienced an intensification of work and worked longer hours. Further, many workers reported they experienced wage theft because while they worked longer hours, they were not adequately compensated for the additional time (CAC et al. 2020, 16). In other instances, changes in household situation, the shift to remote work, job losses and drops in household income brought about by the pandemic may have played a role in the termination of domestic workers’ jobs. One in three workers surveyed by the Caregiver’s Action Centre experienced job loss. While many workers lost their jobs in the pandemic, migrant domestic workers were uniquely vulnerable. Since a majority of these workers lived in the homes of their employers, they had to seek alternative housing during the pandemic often with very limited resources. A third of these workers also reported problems in obtaining public income supports such as the Canada Emergency Relief Benefit or Employment Insurance because of difficulty in accessing phone lines and/or providing the correct documents (CAC et al. 2020, 17). In addition to changes in working conditions and joblessness, some workers experienced restrictions on their mobility such as not being permitted to leave the employer’s home, use public transit, buy groceries or send remittances. Others reported that surveillance cameras were used to monitor their movements. Workers who did not live in their employer’s home stated they had to move into their employer’s homes during COVID-19. ‘The racism underpinning this denial of freedom is clear: even as employers went in and out, workers – primarily South-East Asians, as well as Caribbean, African and South Asian women – were treated as vectors of disease’ (CAC et al. 2020, 23).

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To maintain their status in Canada, workers are required to have valid permits. Here among the concerns documented were delays in permit processes. The greatest concern, however, for many of the survey’s respondents (60%) was the way in which the pandemic was compromising their ability to meet the 24-month work requirement and other criteria that are necessary to secure permanent residence in Canada. While the Federal Government has recently made changes to the qualifying period, migrant worker organisations are calling for more widespread changes including that migrant care workers enter Canada as permanent residents and not temporary workers (CAC et al. 2020, 36–38). The complexity and centrality of care is illustrated by examining the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and exploring its impact on the care labour of migrant workers in receiving countries. These workers were on the front lines of the pandemic as nurses, PSW and domestic workers in the household. This put them at considerable risk. Although the demands of the pandemic brought their care labour into the spotlight, their conditions of work have not changed. In the case of domestic workers, their precarious status was accentuated, and further inequalities arose.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have focused on the intersection of care and global migration. Several key points come to the fore as we consider this intersection. First, the feminisation of migration is used to characterise the increasing importance of women in migration streams. But to think about migration as a gendered process, we need to think beyond the numbers of differently gendered people in different labour migration streams, and focus instead on how this process is shaped by the gendered divisions of labour and the manner in which different people are directed to different kinds of work. It is no accident that women predominate in care work and that this work is devalued. Second, the migration of care workers is increasingly complex and defies the usual south-north characterisation. Third, this chapter highlighted two influential approaches that feminist scholars have developed to problematise the global transfer of care: the global care chain concept; and the transnational political economy of care. These approaches draw our attention to the broader structural issues that frame the transfer of care, how regimes of care, migration and employment intersect, and how hierarchies of class, race and gender come into play. A brief case study of the conditions of domestic workers in Canada in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic is illustrative of these issues. Migrant care workers were in the front lines of the crisis and were often recognised as such, but it remains to be seen whether this translates into better working conditions and greater job security, or whether their precarious status will endure.

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Discussion questions 1. What does a gender analysis bring to the study of migrant care work? 2. Discuss the social, political and economic issues that arise with the global transfer of care. 3. In a post-pandemic world, do we need to think about migration and care in new ways? Note 1. An international migrant is defined as ‘any person who changes his or her country of usual residence’ (UN DESA 1998). Stocks are defined as ‘the total number of international migrants present in a given country at a particular point in time’ (9) cited by IOM Migration Data Portal https://migrationdataportal.org/themes/ international-migrant-stocks

Further reading Anderson, Bridget and Isabel Shutes (eds). 2014. Migration and Care Labour: Theory, Policy and Politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kofman, Eleonore and Parvati Raghuram. 2015. Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction. London: Palgrave. Romero, Mary. 2018. “Reflections on Globalized Care Chains and Migrant Women Workers.” Critical Sociology 44 (7–8): 179–189. Yeates, Nicola. 2009. Globalizing Care Economies and Migrant Work­ers: Explorations in Global Care Chains. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Yeoh, Brenda S. A., Charmian Goh and Kellynn Wee. 2020. “Social Protection for Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore: International Conventions, the Law, and Civil Society Action.” American Behavioral Scientist 64 (6): 841–848. References Banerjee, Kiran and Craig Damian Smith. 2020. “International Relations and Migration: Mobility as Norm Rather Than Exception.” In NomadState Relationships in International Relations, edited by Jamie Levin, 265–281. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Bezanson, Kate and Meg Luxton. 2006. “Introduction: Social Reproduction and Feminist Political Economy.” In Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism, edited by Kate Bezanson and Meg Luxton, 3–10. Montreal: McGill-Queens Press. Boyd, Susan. 1997. “Challenging the Public/Private Divide: An Overview.” In Challenging the Public/Private Divide: Feminism, Law and Public Policy, edited by Susan Boyd, 3–36. Toronto: University of Toronto. 136

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Brickner, Rachel K. and Christine Straehle. 2010. “The Missing Link: Gender, Immigration Policy and the Live-in Caregiver Program in Canada.” Policy and Society 29 (4): 309–320. Caregivers Action Centre, Vancouver Committee of Domestic Workers and Caregivers Rights, Caregiver Connections, Education and Support Organization, The Migrant Workers Alliance for Change. 2020. “Behind Closed Doors. Exposing Migrant Care Worker Exploitation During COVID 19.” https://migrantrights.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/ Behind-Closed-Doors_Exposing-Migrant-Care-Worker-ExploitationDuring-COVID19.pdf Daly, Mary. 2021. “The Concept of Care: Insights, Challenges and Research Avenues in COVID-19 Times.” Journal of European Social Policy 31 (1): 108–118. de Haas, Hein, Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller. 2020. The Age of Migration. 6th edition. New York: Guilford Press. Foley, Laura and Nicola Piper. 2020. COVID-19 and Women Migrant Workers: Impacts and Implications. Geneva: International Organization for Migration (IOM) and UN Migration. Gahwi, Lena and Margaret Walton-Roberts. 2020. “Migrant Care Labour and the COVID-19 Long Term Crisis: How Did We Get Here?” Issue 1 Basillie Papers. https://www.balsillieschool.ca/migrant-care-labourand-the-covid-19-long-term-care-crisis-how-did-we-get-here/ Herrera, Gioconda. 2020. “Care, Social Reproduction, and Migration.” In Routledge Handbook of Migration and Development, edited by Tanja Bastia and Ronald Skeldon, 232–241. London: Routledge. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2000. “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value.” In On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, edited by Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton, 130–146. London: Jonathan Cape. Hollifield, James F. and Tom K. Wong. 2015. “The Politics of International Migration. How Can ‘We Bring the State Back In’?” In Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines, edited by Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield, 227–288. New York: Routledge. International Labour Organization (ILO). n.d. “Domestic Workers.” https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/care-economy/domestic-workers/ lang-en/index.htm Isaac, Maike and Jennifer Elrick. 2021. “How COVID-19 May Alleviate the Multiple Marginalization of Racialized Migrant Workers.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44 (5): 851–863. King-Dejardin, Amelita. 2019. The Social Construction of Migrant Care Work. Geneva: International Labour Organization. Kofman, Eleonore and Parvati Raghuram. 2015. Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction. London: Palgrave. Koslowski, Rey. 2005. “International Migration and the Globalization of Domestic Politics: A Conceptual Framework.” In International Migration and the Globalization of Domestic Politics, edited by Rey Koslowski, 5–32. New York: Routledge. Lan, Pei-Chia. 2006. Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestic and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan. Durham: Duke University. 137

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Lightman, Naomi. Rupa Bannerjee, Ethel Tungohan, Conely de Leon and Philip Kelly. 2021. “An Intersectional Pathway Penalty: Filipina Immigrant Women Inside and Outside Canada’s Live-In Caregiver Program.” International Migration. DO1: 10.1111/imig.12851 Lutz, Helma. 2018. “Care Migration: The Connectivity between Care Chains, Care Circulation and Transnational Social Inequality.” Cur­ rent Sociology 66 (4): 577–589. Luxton, Meg. 1980. More than a Labour of Love: Three Generations of Women’s Work in the Home. Toronto: Women’s Press. Marchetti, Sabrina. 2018. “Gender, Migration and Globalisation: An Overview of the Debates.” In Handbook of Migration and Globalisation, edited by Anna Triandafylldou, 444–457. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Misra, Joya and Sabine N. Merz. 2007. “Neoliberalism, Globalization, and the International Division of Care.” In The Wages of Empire. Neoliberal Policies, Repression and Women’s Poverty, edited by Amalia L. Cabezas, Ellen Reese and Marguerite Waller, 113–126. Seattle: Paradigm Press. Oxfam. 2020. Care in the Time of Coronavirus. Oxfam International. DOI 10.21201/2020.6232 Pandey, Kritika, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas and Gianne Sheena Sabio. 2021. “Essential and Expendable: Migrant Domestic Workers and the COVID-19 Pandemic.” American Behavioral Scientist 1–15. DOI: 10.1177/00027642211000396 Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. 2015. Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work. 2nd edition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pateman, Carole. 1989. The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Peng, Ito. 2018. “Shaping and Reshaping Care and Migration in East and Southeast Asia.” Critical Sociology 44 (7–8): 1117–1132. Peterson, V. Spike. 2003. A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy. London: Routledge. Robinson, Fiona. 2018. “Care Ethics and International Relations: Challenging Rationalism in Global Ethics.” International Journal of Care and Caring 2 (3): 319–332. Robinson, Fiona. 1999. Globalizing Care Ethics, Feminist Theory and International Relations. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Rodriguez, Robyn Magalit. 2010. Migrants for Export. How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Runyan, Anne Sisson and V. Spike Peterson. 2014. Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium. 4th edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Scrinzi, Francesca. 2010. “Masculinities and the International Division of Care: Migrant Male Domestic Workers in Italy and France.” Men and Masculinities 13 (1): 44–64. Shutes, Isabel. 2020. “Gender, Migration, and the Inequalities of Care.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Migration, edited by Claudia Mora and Nicola Piper, 107–120. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 138

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Silvey, Rachel and Rhacel Parreñas. 2020. “Thinking Policy through Migrant Domestic Workers’ Itineraries.” American Behavioral Scientist 64 (6): 859–877. Stasiulis, Daiva K. and Abigail B. Bakan. 2003. Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and Global System. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. (UN DESA) 2019. “International Migration 2019: Report (ST/ESA/SER.A/438).” https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/ p opu l at io n / m i g r at io n / pu bl i c at io n s / m i g r at io n r e p o r t /d o c s / InternationalMigration2019_Report.pdf Waring, Marilyn. 1988. If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics. San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins. Williams, Fiona. 2011. “Towards a Transnational Analysis of the Political Economy Care.” In Feminist Ethics and Social Policy. Towards a New Political Economy of Care, edited by Rianne Mahon and Fiona Robinson, 39–59. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Williams, Fiona. 2012. “Converging Variations in Migrant Care Work in Europe.” Journal of European Social Policy 22 (4): 363–376. Williams, Fiona. 2017. “Intersections of Migrant Care Work: An Overview.” In Gender, Migration and the Work of Care, edited by Sonya Michel and Ito Peng, 23–37. London: Palgrave. Yeates, Nicola. 2004. “Global Care Chains. Critical Reflections and Lines of Enquiry.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 6 (3): 369–391. Yeates, Nicola. 2009. Globalizing Care Economies and Migrant Workers: Explorations in Global Care Chains. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Yeates, Nicola. 2012. “Global Care Chains: A State-of-the-Art Review and Future Directions in Care Transnationalization Research.” Global Networks 12 (2): 135–154. Yeates, Nicola and Jane Pillinger. 2019. International Health Worker Migration and Recruitment. London: Routledge.

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CHAPTER 11

Development Alba Rosa Boer Cueva Development – and as a corollary, underdevelopment – is today one of the more common imaginaries used to constitute the relationship between the Global North and the Global South. This relationship has often been structured as a dichotomy: between the West and the East or Orient; the First and Third World; the civilised and the uncivilised; and the land of the free and the land of the victims.1 In each case, gender forms a key part of the structures of power by which this concept – development – is organised and understood. And while development is not a theory or practice that has traditionally considered gender or women, feminists have been thinking about gender in development in a myriad of ways, including the goals of feminist development and the means of achieving them (Azcona and Bhatt 2020; Cornwall and Rivas 2015); the way that feminist critique provides new perspectives on development theory and practice (Kabeer 2015; Rai 2002a); the gendered values underpinning development policies and programmes and the underlying theoretical concepts that support them (Griffin 2009; Moeller 2018); what constitutes the gender and development ‘problem’ (Istratii 2017); how globalisation of production and trade has affected gendered roles and relationships (including the care economy) (Hoang and Yeoh 2011); how gender and power play out in development spaces and structures (Elias and Rai 2019; Marchand and Runyan 2012) and the gendered structural violence embedded in development processes (Benería and Roldan 1987; Braun 2010). Yet much of what has been and is written about development and gender or women focuses on the way that the Global North has interacted with the Global South through, for example, the Women in Development (WID), Women and Development (WAD) and Gender and Development (GAD) programmes (Rathgeber 1990), transnational feminist encounters (Lock Swarr and Nagar 2010; Moghadam 2005; Mohanty 2003) and governance feminism (Halley et al. 2018, 2019). This is likely because most of the writing continues to be done by people in and from the Global North (see, for example, 140

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Demeter 2019; Demeter and Istratii 2020). In a slow, but positive move, however, the dynamic has started to shift from Western ‘feminist imperialism and discursive colonisation’ (Ehlers 2016, 354; see also, Brown 2008; Galván 1995; Mendoza 2014, 2016; Mohanty 1988; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; Spivak 1988) to more self-reflexive and collaborative works (Poets 2020). In this volume, for example, all the authors are making a conscious effort to ensure diversity and inclusivity through our citation practices and use of language in order to try and overcome the dangers of reproducing existing structures of power through our writing. As a decolonial feminist with a focus on Abya Yala, 2 I believe these are valuable and worthwhile practices and goals, but I also found myself increasingly frustrated when doing background reading for this chapter for two main reasons: firstly, the continued centralisation of the Global North even in the more solidarity-driven and collaborative works on development; and, secondly, the trend to limit the already sparse citations and acknowledgement of the Global South knowledge production to a number of Southern ‘usual suspects’, perpetuating a different kind of power imbalance. As such, in this chapter, I use a decolonial feminist lens to show the ways that the development framework operates as a gendered and racialised relationship of power between the Global North and the Global South based on a set of dominant discourses, representations and practices (see also, Escobar 2012; Kapoor 2008). I do this by first examining the myth of development itself, then the construction of the category of the ‘Global South woman’, and, finally, by pointing towards the possibilities that feminist decolonialism can bring for development thinking and how we can do better as a discipline.

THE DEVELOPMENT MYTH Similarly to the dominance of the mythological ‘big bangs’ of International Relations (see, for example, de Carvalho, Leira, and Hobson 2011; Osiander 2001), development thinking – its theories, strategies and ideologies – relies on the mythological origin story of it as a benevolent enterprise established at the end of World War II (Cornwall 2020, 41). It makes sense because, as a term, ‘development’ entered the vocabulary of the West in the 1940s and 1950s (Ferreira da Silva 2015) allowing for a tacit separation and distancing from its troubled past and its continuing symbiotic relationship with the present. However, as a concept originating within the global political economy – which was itself founded through colonialism and slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries (Jones 2013) – development reaches back to 19th century policies such as those of ‘constructive exploitation’ and ‘constructive imperialism’ by the French and British governments, respectively (Rivas 2018, 167, emphasis in original). These policies were created in order to maintain power over the colonies by fostering close ‘constitutional, economic, defensive, and educational… bonds within the Empire’ (Green 1999, 347), in part by including more 141

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philanthropic programmes within its operations, such as ‘irrigation, sanitation, and railway and harbour construction projects’ (351) – which are today also known as ‘development projects’. Significantly, these colonially founded relationships and their institutions have adapted but largely remain today, supported by the logics of neoliberal economic development (Carrasco Miró 2020; Griffin 2009; Narsey 2016; Speed 2017), the extracted labour of women in the Global South and, in many cases, ‘Western model[s] of sisterhood in the global context’ (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 4). While development scholarship and practice may not have recognised gender or women’s roles until the last few decades, many women were involved in their country’s imperial projects in their roles as teachers and governesses, missionaries, nurses, settlers and explorers, and as the wives of colonisers. Individual roles aside, they were expected to perform as examples of respectability, domesticity and ladylike behaviour. No longer labelling Western imperialist actions as Christianisation or civilising missions, ‘ladylike behavior was a mainstay of imperialist civilization… meant to convince both the colonizing and the colonized peoples that foreign conquest was right and necessary’ (Enloe 1989, 112). It was this moral discourse (and its White female agents) that was then often instrumentalised to carry out policies such as the forceful removal of Indigenous children from their families. Importantly, this role was not just instrumentalised by the patriarchal colonial powers, but also by the European and United States suffrage movement to highlight White women’s reliability and service to empire (Enloe, 110; see also, Syed and Ali 2011). Ultimately it was the embedding of Western feminism within the moral discourse of imperialist civilisation that structured much of the ensuing development relationships between White women and women of colour. This relationship, based on the notion of ‘whiteliness’ (Syed and Ali 2011), then led to the various policy interventions known as WID, WAD and GAD, mentioned above, thus further perpetuating the development myth and its continued production of the Global South as underdeveloped (Escobar 2012) and its people – particularly women – as subalterns (Spivak 1988). The two main approaches used to bring this post-World War II programming about were based on welfare and efficiency. Rooted in the ‘wish to assist’, the development machine was based on the notion that some states are ‘donors’ and others are ‘recipients’ – ignoring the power relations formed and sustained as a result of these designations. Welfare programmes, while often well-intentioned and important during famine crises, for example, are essentially about treating symptoms rather than underlying problems. The programmes which involved free food or health clinics, for example, were based on White middle-class ideals of women, which made incorrect assumptions based on out-of-date ‘stereotypes about women’s domestic roles, needs, daily activities or skills’ (Tinker 1990, 37). Not only did such programmes create dependency and were detrimental for local industry, but they also perpetuated the idea of women nearly exclusively as mothers and ‘targets’ of family planning (Cornwall and Rivas 2015; Sukarieh 2015). 142

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In contrast, the self-sufficiency programmes were based on the idea of ‘self-help’ – with slogans such as ‘empower yourself’ (Batliwala 2007, 463). This brought about the rise of microenterprises and microentrepreneurship in the 1990s as pioneered by Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank (Yunus 2013), based on liberal economic theories of individual liberty, individual rights, equal opportunity and neoclassical economics (Sardenberg 2008). The rationale and part of its popularity was linked to the belief that a poor woman, for example, would experience far greater benefits in her life from having increased economic power than from unenforceable laws regarding gender equality. However, this ignores the structural barriers to women’s collective mobilisation and individual self-fulfilment (Cornwall and Rivas 2015). Furthermore, it assumes that such economic investment, which itself is built and relies on essentialist racialised and androcentric gender stereotypes, will magically eradicate the patriarchal practices embedded in the social, cultural and legal power relations that produced and sustained the subjugation that led to women’s poverty and discrimination in the first place. Other important aspects that need considering here are the type of work that these self-sufficiency microenterprise programmes are promoting for women and who exactly controls their labour. Indeed, as a result of these programmes – which were initially promoted by WID and now continue within the neoliberal hegemonic development institutions such as the International Monetary Bank (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – many women find themselves in jobs considered expansions of their domestic activities. Essentially, these programmes help women to ‘survive and fulfil their gendered roles, but they do nothing to change women’s subordination and may in fact perpetuate it’ (Tinker 1990, 50; see also, Cornwall 2016; Khader 2019; see also Chapter 15). The programmes effectively reorganise patterns of domination rather than challenge any sort of power relations (Ferguson 2004). Furthermore, many of these programmes promoted by development institutions essentially allow for ‘big government’ to ‘empower communities to look after their own affairs’ (Batliwala 2007, 558). This shows that not only is development thinking based around a myth that perpetuates the myopic idea of it as distinct and separate from colonialism; but it is also a gendered and racialised process. As I explain in the next section, the construction of the ‘Global South woman’ is an important part of this framework.

CONSTRUCTING THE ‘GLOBAL SOUTH WOMAN’ Depending on the assumptions made as to the nature and identity of ‘woman’ as a concept and the source of their inequalities and divisions, women in the Global South have been the objects of varying policy interventions. As Wendy Brown (2008, 24) states, women of colour and from the Global South ‘are not simply oppressed but produced through these discourses, a production that is historically complex, contingent, and occurs 143

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through formations that do not honor analytically distinct identity categories’ (emphasis in original). Through colonisation, the Global South woman was constructed as the quintessential signifier of difference – the Other – and, in turn, as the marker of civilisation (or lack thereof). As 19th century Enlightenment thinker James Mill (as quoted in Enloe 1989, 112) stated, ‘Among rude people the women are generally degraded; among civilized people they are exalted’. Similarly, Marx also considered ‘that the degree of advancement of a society can be measured by the status accorded to women’ (Jaquette 1982, 273). In line with this thinking, it was only through the process of colonisation that the colonised could become gendered and, in turn, civilised (Lugones 2010; Oyěwùmí 1997), thus linking the idea of progress (or development) and women (Hall 2007). This construction of the Global South woman not only produced her as subordinated and susceptible to colonial violation, but it also relegated her to the bottom of the hierarchical ladder, below native men, White women and, at the top, White men. It was the realisation that development was actually having a negative effect on women and leading to issues such as the feminisation of poverty by making them ‘overworked and underproductive’ (Tinker 1990, 35) which animated the gradual inclusion of gender and women into development theory and practice. That is, women from the Global North (primarily) advocated for the integration of women from the Global South (generally) into the global political economy and the development machinery through the policies of WID, WAD and GAD (Boserup 1970; Moser 1993; Rathgeber 1990; Sen and Grown 1988; Tinker 1990). These interventions exposed how men’s and masculine dominations over what is considered ‘economics’, and specifically ‘work’, have resulted in women’s and feminised labour being characterised as inferior and ‘not work’. As such, new studies focused on women’s marginalisation from paid labour, their unrecognised positive economic impacts and the failure of previous development policies to consider women as economic actors (Cornwall and Rivas 2015). These approaches then evolved into a ‘human-centred development’ (Stein, de Oliveira Andreotti, and Suša 2019, 283), the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 and then the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, of which goal five focuses on gender equality and empowerment. Nevertheless, as Mohanty (1988, 62) highlighted in her classic essay ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, throughout these development interventions, the identity of women in the Global South and their experiences remain routinely ‘discursively colonise[d]’ and homogenised by the Global North, including Western feminism. She criticises the idea of ‘false consciousness’ that assumes that women who find themselves in the Global South are seen as the custodians of culture and as a result are socialised to guard its laws, rituals and practices, ultimately violating their own dignity and rights as women. The outcome is the continued production of the ‘Global South woman’ who is confined to the domestic private space, a victim of culture, ignorant, poor and tied to tradition. In essence, she becomes the alter ego of the Western feminist who is liberated, autonomous, has control over her own body 144

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and sexuality, is educated and modern (Mohanty 1988, 65; see also Cornwall 2016, 140–142; McEwan 2009, 77–119).

DECOLONISING DEVELOPMENT: NEW POSSIBILITIES While there are many different versions of the different development policy interventions mentioned here, there is a common theme: the continued centralisation of the Global North. hooks (1984, n.p.) argued that this was why ‘feminists have not succeeded in creating a mass movement against sexual oppression because the very foundation of women’s liberation has… not accounted for the complexity and diversity of female experience’. Similarly, whether development theory and/or practice is critiqued or espoused, the focus is given to the intentions and motivations of the policies and the – usually White – people behind them. As Rai (2002b, 45) argued nearly 20 years ago, and I suggest is still the case, this is because ‘women in development/gender and development literature largely continue to work within the liberal framework’. But beyond that, even critical analyses of development still often centralise the Global North by making it the point of departure in their theory and practice, thereby continuing to privilege it in its discussions and remaining within a ‘modern/colonial global imaginary’ (Stein, de Oliveira Andreotti, and Suša 2019, 283) that assumes there is a universal scale of desirable social change, placing all regions somewhere along this ladder. It is because of this that the feminist decolonial development movement offers great possibilities for revolutionising the discipline. Women want to be heard, not necessarily saved (especially not by White saviours – see Cornwall 2016; Parmanand 2019); to be knowable not just known (Cooper 2016); and to be actors, not acted upon. These are common sentiments for women in the Global South, not just felt in relation to colonial patriarchy but also to Northern women, with whom they have an unequal power relationship supported by the legacy of imperialism which still tends to paint them as silent despite a strong history of local mobilisation. For example, women have had important roles during the anti-colonial struggles in India, Vietnam, Abya Yala, Africa and the Middle East (McEwan 2009, 54–55). Specifically, Indian women played an important role in the British suffragist movement (Anand 2015; Mukherjee 2011) – a fact that often remains ignored in Western circles, including in cultural representations such as the film Suffragette. In Abya Yala, women have been mobilising for decades in guerrilla movements, militant organisations, student movements, academic organisations and various political parties, facing potential exile and, in some cases, risking their lives (Neves-Xavier de Brito and Stanley 1986). Central to this feminist decolonial thought has been the critique of capitalism and colonialism to the latter’s perspective. However, as Mendoza (2016, 103) explains, decolonial feminist theories have been marginalised within mainstream feminist theories or ‘qualified as “women of color” feminisms (as opposed to feminisms proper) and segregated in ethnic studies…where they have 145

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largely been ignored or appropriated’. As such, a feminist decolonisation of development means not only recognising the marginalisation that Mendoza talks about, but also decentring the Global North and the scholarship immersed within the liberal framework. This has the potential to transform the structures of power that currently frame development and its subjects as silent, listless and homogenous women, into a collaborative theory and practice that listens to and recognises women’s complex, layered and inextricably co-constitutive identities and varied forms of agency. As opposed to the neoliberal framework of development underpinned by the ‘Smart Economics’ agenda (see, for example, Bergeron 2016; Chant 2016; Roberts and Soederberg 2012), feminist decolonial approaches to development instead see the possibility of women’s liberation in ‘honoring non-Western rights, non-modernist values, epistemologies, cosmologies, knowledges, lifestyles, and stories…without assigning rank or evolutionary potential’ to them (Carrasco Miró 2020, 3). It also includes countering other hegemonic narratives, including that women in the Global South do not already work (and, in turn, that paid work will provide them with power and freedom); that they are oppressed and relegated to the private sphere by Southern men; and that only through the subversion of local norms and values will they experience true agency (Istratii 2017; Khader 2019). Feminist decolonial development, then, makes visible women’s agency and their political relationships to structures of power even when they do not fit into Northern conceptualisations of women’s liberation and empowerment, such as the Argentinian Madres de la Plaza de Mayo and the Colombian conflict victims’ movement (Krystalli 2021). Finally, it is also about transgressing, negotiating and expanding the bounds of knowledge production in development thinking in order to bring about structural changes to the kinds of policies that are implemented, the types of questions that are asked and the indicators used to evaluate their impact.

CONCLUSION Development thinking has not always thought about gender or women but, as this chapter demonstrates, both have constituted key organisational principles in the structures of power that have dominated development scholarship and practice since its inception. Importantly, development language may have evolved following World War II, but its roots lie in the colonisation and settlement of the Global South at the hands of the Global North. This is crucial to understand because, while development aims to make positive changes, the idea that it is distinct and separate from the colonial policies of previous centuries obscures its racialised and gender/ ed/ing foundations, which are then perpetuated through neoliberal institutions and its programmes. Feminist interventions into the global political economy and the development frameworks (falling primarily under the labels of WID, WAD and GAD) worked to expose how ‘gendered

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inequalities and divisions are a fundamental feature of dominant models of export-led economic development’ (Elias as quoted in Griffin 2010, 2643); but they have largely failed to acknowledge the racialised dynamics that have constructed the ‘Global South woman’ as a victim in need of saving. Furthermore, women and feminism’s role in development’s imperialist foundations also remains obscured by the homogenising idea of universal sisterhood. As such, decolonial feminism creates the possibility of not only moving beyond the binaries of the Global North and South, and of developed and underdeveloped, but to bring fundamental changes to the current gender/ed/ing and racialised structures of power that dominate the current neoliberal development framework. Discussion questions 1. Who are the relevant actors in development spaces and how does their labelling influence their experiences? 2. How can we link development and feminism together without integrating them into a hierarchical framework that homogenises women’s identities and experiences? 3. How have the development myth and the construction of the ‘Global South woman’ influenced the discipline of development today? Notes 1. For a recent example of the West/rest dichotomy, think back to the reaction of USA leadership following the storming of the Capitol on 7 January 2021, calling the actions of the perpetrators ‘3rd world style anti-American anarchy’ (Rubio 2021) and similar. 2. Abya Yala means ‘land in full maturity’ in the language of the Indigenous Kuna people of Panamá and Colombia, and was used to refer to what is now known as Latin America prior to the Spanish invasion in 1492 (see, for example, Icaza 2018; Walsh 2016). However, others, such as Sharon Speed (2017), argue that it can also refer to the entire Americas.

Further reading Chowdhury, Elora Halim. 2016. “Development Paradoxes: Feminist Solidarity, Alternative Imaginaries and New Spaces.” Journal of Inter­ national Women’s Studies, 17 (1): 117–132. Cornwall, Andrea. 2014. “Taking Off International Development’s Straight­ jacket of Gender.” The Brown Journal of World Affairs 21 (1): 127–139. Robinson, Lindsay. 2021. “Learning Development Through the Girl Rising Curriculum: Discursive Colonialism and Subversive Poten­tials.” Inter­ national Feminist Journal of Politics. doi: 10.1080/14616742. 2021.1897474.

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Saffari, Siavash. 2016. “Can the Subaltern Be Heard? Knowledge Production, Representation, and Responsibility in International Development.” Transcience Journal 7 (1): 36–46. https://www2.huberlin.de/transcience/vol7_no1_36_46.pdf Tanyag, Maria. 2017. “Invisible Labor, Invisible Bodies: How the Global Political Economy Affects Reproductive Freedom in the Philippines.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 19 (1): 39–54. doi: 10.1080/ 14616742.2017.1289034. References Anand, Anita. 2015. Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Azcona, Ginette and Antra Bhatt. 2020. “Inequality, Gender, and Sus­tain­able Development: Measuring Feminist Progress.” Gender & Development 28 (2): 337–355. doi: 10.1080/13552074.2020.1753390. Batliwala, Srilatha. 2007. “Taking the Power Out of Empowerment – An Experiential Account”. Development in Practice 17 (4): 557–565. doi: 10.1080/09614520701469559. Benería, Lourdes and Martha Roldan. 1987. The Crossroads of Class and Gender: Industrial Homework, Subcontracting, and Household Dynamics in Mexico City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bergeron, Suzanne. 2016. “Transgressing Gender and Development: Rethinking Economy beyond ‘Smart Economics’.” In Social Sciences for an Other Politics: Women Theorizing without Parachutes, edited by Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, 65–77. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Boserup, Ester. 1970. Woman’s Role in Economic Development. London: George Allen and Unwin. Braun, Yvonne A. 2010. “Gender, Large-Scale Development, and Food Insecurity in Lesotho: An Analysis of the Impact of the Lesotho Highlands Water Projects.” Gender & Development 18 (3): 453–464. doi: 10.1080/13552074.2010.522028. Brown, Wendy. 2008. “The Impossibility of Women’s Studies.” In Women’s Studies on the Edge, edited by Joan Wallach Scott, 17–38. Durham: Duke University Press. Carrasco Miró, Gisela. 2020. “Decolonizing Feminist Economics: Interrogating the Women’s Economic Empowerment and Gender Equality Development Framework.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society. doi: 10.1093/sp/jxaa033. Chant, Sylvia. 2016. “Galvanizing Girls for Development? Critiquing the Shift from ‘Smart’ to ‘Smarter Economics’.” Progress in Development Studies 16 (4): 314–328. doi: 10.1177/1464993416657209. Cooper, Brittney. 2016. “Intersectionality.” In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, edited by Lisa Dish and Mary Hawkesworth, 385–406. New York: Oxford University Press. Cornwall, Andrea. 2016. “Save Us from Saviours: Disrupting Development Narratives of the Rescue and Uplift of the ‘Third World Woman’.” In 148

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Voice Matter: Communication, Development and the Cultural Return, edited by Oscar Hemer and Thomas Tufte, 139–154. Göteborg: Nordicom. Cornwall, Andrea. 2020. “Decolonizing Development Studies: Pedagogic Reflections.” Radical Teacher 116: 37–46. doi: 10.5195/rt.2020.540. Cornwall, Andrea, and Althea-Maria Rivas. 2015. “From ‘Gender Equality’ and ‘Women’s Empowerment’ to Global Justice: Reclaiming a Transformative Agenda for Gender and Development.” Third World Quarterly 36 (2): 396–415. doi: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1013341. de Carvalho, Benjamin, Halvard Leira, and John M Hobson. 2011. “The Big Bangs of IR: The Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You about 1648 and 1919.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39 (3): 735–758. doi: 10.1177/0305829811401459. Demeter, Márton. 2019. “The World-Systemic Dynamics of Knowledge Production: The Distribution of Transnational Academic Capital in the Social Sciences.” Journal of World-Systems Research 25 (1): 112–144. doi: 10.5195/jwsr.2019.887. Demeter, Márton and Ronina Istratii. 2020. “Scrutinising What Open Access Journals Mean for Global Inequalities.” Publishing Research Quarterly 36: 505–522. doi: 10.1007/s12109-020-09771-9. Ehlers, Nadine. 2016. “Identities.” In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, 346–366. New York: Oxford University Press. Elias, Juanita and Shirin Rai. 2019. “Feminist everyday political economy: Space, time, and violence.” Review of International Studies 45 (2): 201–220. doi: 10.1017/S0260210518000323. Enloe, Cynthia. 1989. Bananas, Beaches and Bases. London: Pandora Press. Escobar, Arturo. 2012. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World: With a New Preface by the Author. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ferguson, Ann. 2004. “Can Development Create Empowerment and Women’s Liberation?” 2004 Center for Global Justice Workshop ‘Alternatives to Globalisation’. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. 2015. “Globality.” Critical Ethnic Studies 1 (1): 33–38. doi: 10.5749/jcritethnstud.1.1.0033. Galván, Sergia. 1995. “El Mundo Étnico-Racial Dentro del Feminismo Latinoamericano.” La Mujer Negra: Special Issue of Fempress 19: 33–37. Green, E.H.H. 1999. “The Political Economy of Empire, 1880-1914.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume III: The Nineteenth Century, edited by Andrew Porter, 346–370. New York: Oxford University Press. Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan. 1994. “Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity.” In Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, edited by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, 1–32. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 149

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Griffin, Penny. 2009. Gendering the World Bank: Neoliberalism and the Gendered Foundations of Global Governance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Griffin, Penny. 2010. “Gender and the Global Political Economy.” In The International Studies Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Denemark, 2631–2650. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Hall, Catherine. 2007. “Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century.” In Gender and Empire, edited by Philippa Levine, 47–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Halley, Janet, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché, and Hila Shamir. 2018. Governance Feminism: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Halley, Janet, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché, and Hila Shamir. 2019. Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hoang, Lan Anh and Brenda S.A. Yeoh. 2011. “Breadwinning Wives and ‘Left-Behind’ Husbands: Men and Masculinities in the Vietnamese Transnational Family.” Gender & Society 25 (6): 717–739. doi: 10.1177/0891243211430636. hooks, bell. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Icaza, Rosalba. 2018. “Social Struggles and the Coloniality of Gender.” In Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics, edited by Olivia U. Rutazibwa and Robbie Shilliam. Milton: Routledge. Istratii, Ronina. 2017. “Mainstream Gender and Development Concepts and Theories at the Interface with Local Knowledge Systems: Some Theoretical Reflections.” The Journal of Development Practice 3: 1–13. Jaquette, Jane S. 1982. “Women and Modernization Theory: A Decade of Feminist Criticism (Book Review).” World Politics 34 (2): 267–284. doi: 10.2307/2010265. Jones, B.G. 2013. “Slavery, Finance and International Political Economy: Postcolonial Reflections.” In Postcolonial Theory and International Relations, edited by Sanjay Seth, 49–69. London: Routledge. Kabeer, Naila. 2015. “Gender, Poverty, and Inequality: A Brief History of Feminist Contributions in the Field of International Development.” Gender & Development 23 (2): 189–205. doi: 10.1080/ 13552074.2015.1062300. Kapoor, Ilan. 2008. The Postcolonial Politics of Development. Oxon: Routledge. Khader, Serene J. 2019. Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic. New York: Oxford University Press. Krystalli, Roxani. 2021. “Narrating Victimhood: Dilemmas and (In)dignities.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 23 (1): 125–146. doi: 10.1080/14616742.2020.1861961. Lock Swarr, Amanda and Richa Nagar (eds). 2010. Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Lugones, María. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25 (4): 742–759. doi: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01137.x. Marchand, Marianne H., and Anne S. Runyan, eds. 2012. Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resistances. 2nd edition. Oxon: Routledge. McEwan, Cheryl. 2009. Postcolonialism and Development. Oxon: Routledge. Mendoza, Breny. 2014. “La Epistemología del Sur, la Colonialidad del Género y el Feminismo Latinoamericano.” In Tejiendo de Otro Modo: Feminismo, Epistemología y Apuestas Descoloniales en Abya Yala, edited by Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Diana Gómez Correal and Karina Ochoa Muñoz, 91–104. Popayán, Colombia: Editorial Universidad del Cauca. Mendoza, Breny. 2016. “Coloniality of Gender and Power: From Postcoloniality to Decoloniality.” In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, 100–121. New York: Oxford University Press. Moeller, Kathryn. 2018. The Gender Effect: Capitalism, Feminism, and the Corporate Politics of Development. Oakland: University of California Press. Moghadam, Valentine M. 2005. Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1988. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review (30): 61–88. doi: 10.2307/1395054. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour. 2nd edition. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Moser, Caroline O.N. 1993. Gender Planning and Development: Theory, Practice and Training. London: Routledge. Mukherjee, Sumita. 2011. “Herabai Tata and Sophia Duleep Singh: Suffragette Resistances for India and Britain, 1910–1920.” In South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858–1947, edited by Rehana Ahmed and Sumita Mukherjee, 106–120. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Narsey, Wadan. 2016. British Imperialism and the Making of Colonial Currency Systems. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Neves-Xavier de Brito, Angela, and Charlotte Stanley. 1986. “Brazilian Women in Exile: The Quest for Identity.” Latin American Perspectives 13 (2): 58–80. doi: 10.1177/0094582X8601300204. Osiander, Andreas. 2001. “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth.” International Organization 55 (2): 251–287. doi: 10.1162/00208180151140577.

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Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. 1997. The Investion of Women: Making an African sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Parmanand, Sharmila. 2019. “The Philippine Sex Workers Collective: Struggling to be Heard, not Saved.” Anti-Trafficking Review 12: 57–73. doi: 10.14197/atr.201219124. Poets, Desirée. 2020. “Failing in the Reflexive and Collaborative Turns: Empire, Colonialism, Gender and the Impossibilities of North-South Collaborations.” In Fieldwork as Failure: Living and Knowing in the Field of International Relations, edited by Katarian Kušić and Jakub Záhora, 102–115. Bristol: E-International Relations Publishing. Rai, Shirin M. 2002a. Gender and the Political Economy of Development: From Nationalism to Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rai, Shirin M. 2002b. Transgressing Gender and Development: Rethinking Economy Beyond ‘Smart Economics’. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rathgeber, Eva M. 1990. “WID, WAD, GAD: Trends in Research and Practice.” The Journal of Developing Areas 24: 489–502. Rivas, Althea-Maria. 2018. “The Everyday Practices of Development.” In Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics, edited by Olivia U. Rutazibwa and Robbie Shilliam, 166–178. Milton: Routledge. Roberts, Adrienne, and Susanne Soederberg. 2012. “Gender Equality as Smart Economics? A Critique of the 2012 World Development Report.” Third World Quarterly 33 (5): 949–968. doi: 10.1080/01436597. 2012.677310. Rubio, Marco. 2021. Twitter, accessed 8 January. https://twitter.com/ marcorubio/status/1346909901478522880. Sardenberg, Cecília. 2008. “Liberal vs. Liberating Empowerment: A Latin American Feminist Perspective on Conceptualising Empowerment.” IDS Bulletin 39 (6): 18–27. doi: 10.19088/1968-2016.115. Sen, Gita, and Caren Grown. 1988. Development, Crises and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives, edited by for Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN). London: Earthscan. Speed, Shannon. 2017. “Structures of Settler Capitalism in Abya Yala.” American Quarterly 69 (4): 783–790. doi: 10.1353/aq.2017.0064. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? Basingtoke: Macmillan. Stein, Sharon, Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, and Rene Suša. 2019. “‘Beyond 2015’, Within the Modern/Colonial Global Imaginary? Global Development and Higher Education.” Critical Studies in Education 60 (3): 281–301. doi: 10.1080/17508487.2016.1247737. Sukarieh, Mayssoun. 2015. “The First Lady Phenomenon: Elites, States, and the Contradictory Politics of Women’s Empowerment in the Neoliberal Arab World.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35 (3): 575–587. doi: 10.1215/1089201X-3426421. Syed, Jawad, and Faiza Ali. 2011. “The White Woman’s Burden: From Colonial Civilisation to Third World Development.” Third World Quarterly 32 (2): 349–365. doi: 10.1080/01436597.2011.560473.

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CHAPTER 12

Digital Politics William Clapton In many (though not all) parts of the world, cyberspace and digital domains are central to collective advocacy, activism and debate. Social media, for example, has become an important (though often toxic) site at which politics plays out. Just as gender matters to the offline or physical world of politics, so too is it fundamental to digital politics. The digital realm has become an important site of feminist organisation and activism. The #MeToo movement is a clear example of the use of digital platforms to organise and advance a movement against sexual violence, abuse and harassment and to give voice to victims who have for too long been silenced. More broadly, in the contemporary era of so-called identity politics, social media and other digital arenas have been crucial to organising and promoting resistance to a variety of established structures of marginalisation and oppression based upon gender, sex, sexuality, race and class. However, just as digital platforms have provided an important resource for feminist activists and those resisting gendered and racialised violence and abuse, so too has it allowed groups who benefit from, and seek to reproduce, existing structures of power and marginalisation to organise and ‘fight back’ against ‘woke’ ‘Social Justice Warriors’ (SJWs). A variety of explicitly anti-feminist, racist, and anti-PC (political correctness) groups and individuals have organised on several different platforms, from the more ubiquitous sites such as Twitter and Facebook, to the less overt, darker corners of the internet populated by sites such as 8kun (what used to be known as 8chan). These latter sites are bastions of misogyny, racism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry and discrimination. They host content that is often informed by toxic, hegemonic masculinity (Chess and Shaw 2015). As Ging (2019, 640) highlights, since the emergence of social media, we have witnessed the spread of new forms of toxic masculinity and anti-feminism loosely united by the so-called Red Pill concept. This suggests that men need to be awoken from their brainwashing and liberated from feminist oppression and misandry, which refers to contempt 154

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for and ingrained discriminatory attitudes against men (Ging 2019, 640). Despite this, Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) and other groups espousing toxic masculinity and anti-feminism are predicated less on men’s emancipation and more on the maintenance of White, patriarchal structures of domination and control. All of this is to say, as this chapter argues, that gender matters to digital politics. The gendered foundations of politics find ready and clear expression in the digital domain. Gendered power structures are actively challenged and (re)produced by groups of actors who have proven adept at using digital forms of communication and engagement to advance their agendas. Yet these power structures, and by extension the gendered foundations of digital politics, exist not only in the sorts of advocacy, activism, contestation and debate that we can see online. They are also a key part of the production and maintenance of digital spaces and platforms themselves. When we consider the sorts of bodies and voices that find expression in the production of social media platforms, websites, gaming and artificial intelligence (AI), even the casual observer would note that AI, IT and games development are heavily male-dominated industries. These industries continue to reflect significant imbalances in the representation of women and people of colour compared with White men. This, in turn, shapes the sorts of products that these industries produce, who they make them for, and how they function. At worst, these industries are complicit in the reproduction of structures of marginalisation and discrimination. The remainder of the chapter proceeds as follows. First, it explores feminist activism within digital domains, employing the #MeToo movement as a brief case study of issues of representation and accessibility within online feminist movements. The second section focuses on MRAs and toxic masculinity online. Finally, the chapter concludes by considering the gendered and racialised foundations of digital platforms.

DIGITAL POLITICS AND FEMINIST ACTIVISM The advent of Web 2.0 and social media platforms has led to the emergence of various forms of digital feminist activism, or what some have labelled ‘hashtag feminism’ (Bennett 2014). The precise functions, effects and consequences of digital feminist politics, however, remain contested. Does, for example, digital activism represent an entirely new phase of feminism? Are we witnessing the early years of a fourth wave of feminism? For some, the answer is yes – a fourth wave has emerged, defined in part by its reliance on digital and online advocacy as a way of reaching across populations, cultures and borders (Looft 2017, 894). Others, however, suggest that no new wave of feminism has emerged. RodinoColocino (2014, 1113) argues that, rather than a new wave of feminism, tweets (and digital feminist activism more broadly) signify ‘an enduring mobilizing issue – sexual violence – and problematize grounding feminist solidarity in white, middle-class, US-centric, heteronormative privilege’. 155

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Whatever one’s position on this debate regarding the categorisation of feminist waves, it is important to also look at the practical consequences of digital platforms and politics, and what they have disabled, enabled or otherwise changed when it comes to everyday feminist advocacy and activism ‘on the ground’. Here, there has been significant discussion and emphasis on the ability of social media in particular to generate greater awareness of feminist movements, create transnational, crossborder linkages and give voice to marginalised communities of women who have traditionally not been strongly represented in mainstream feminism. As Kaba et al. (2014) suggest: Social media and online platforms have empowered the voices that were, for far too long, overlooked by so-called ‘mainstream’ feminism…Women of color, queer women, working class women, transgender women are all finding ways to insert ourselves into the feminist conversation…

Digital spaces can therefore offer important avenues and opportunities for marginalised communities to participate in feminist activism and have their voices heard. Mendes, Ringrose and Keller (2018) highlight the complexity and nuances of digital feminist activism and politics. They highlight that survivors sharing stories as part of the #BeenRapedNeverReported hashtag found the process of doing so variously triggering, confronting, comforting and affirming. Networks and solidarity were constructed between participants, which then translated into greater awareness of rape and sexual violence as a structural problem rather than only an individual one (Mendes, Ringrose and Keller 2018, 238). However, there are problems too – for example, the labour involved in running and maintaining online feminist campaigns is often unpaid. As Mendes, Ringrose, and Keller (2018, 239) argue, this work is affective, precarious and exploitative. Further, while digital platforms can make it easier to reach out, generate attention, network and mobilise, they also more readily expose campaigners and activists to opponents and critics lurking online. A significant part of the labour that must be undertaken in online feminist activism, then, is dealing with online abuse, threats and harassment. There is also the issue of the circulation of what Kanai (2020) terms ‘feminist knowledge cultures’ in the everyday, which is facilitated by digital domains. Digital platforms have become important sites of learning, meaning-making and knowledge construction. Blogs, videos, social media and popular culture are all important in the articulation, representation and (re)production of ideas and meaning. However, Kanai (2020, 2) highlights the problematic ways in which the concept of intersectionality is circulated online and re-theorised, often in ways very distinct from its original meaning (also see Cho, Crenshaw and McCall 2013). Kanai (2020, 15) found that, online, everyday re-theorisations of intersectionality ‘…provided a lens for envisioning problematic white femininity mainly elsewhere, rather than a tool for seeing the whiteness of everyday practices’. 156

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A final issue here regarding digital politics and feminist activism is a practical one: of who can access the internet and the online spaces where such activism and advocacy are located. Mendes, Ringrose and Keller (2018, 243) note that participants in online campaigns find Twitter and other social media sites to be both safer and easier than engaging and mobilising offline. This, however, only applies to those who actually can participate digitally, and there are significant racial, cultural and class structures that produce and facilitate unequal and inequitable patterns of internet accessibility. To the extent that we accept the claim that online feminist activism is safer and easier, it might also be the case that the most disadvantaged and marginalised communities of women are left to do the harder and more dangerous work of offline activism. It is these communities of women whose voices potentially remain unheard on digital platforms. In looking at a famous recent example of online feminist protest – the #MeToo movement – we will see that these questions of accessibility and representation were important. The term ‘Me Too’ was coined in 2006 by Tarana Burke, an AfricanAmerican activist who works with young women of colour who are survivors of sexual assault. Burke has worked to empower and give voice to marginalised women who have faced endemic levels of sexual violence. The contemporary #MeToo movement began in October 2017 when actor Alyssa Milano used the hashtag in a tweet asking women to share their experiences of sexual harassment and assault so that people might become aware of the magnitude of the issue. This was within the context of allegations made by Milano and others of sexual misconduct by producer Harvey Weinstein (who is currently serving a 23-year prison sentence in New York after being convicted of rape and criminal sexual assault).1 While the #MeToo movement arose in the US, it has had impacts in different areas of the world. Lin and Yang (2019), for example, highlight the impacts and effects of the #MeToo movement in China. Despite the Chinese authorities tightly controlling the internet and actively censoring social media, the #MeToo movement has still been taken up there; Lin and Yang (2019, 118) highlight six outcomes of #MeToo in China beyond more generally giving voice to survivors of sexual assault and harassment, including raising awareness, identity reconstruction, selfrescue, online interpersonal support, offline group action and challenges to systems of power. Yet care must be taken when describing #MeToo as a ‘global’ movement, as some accounts and studies of #MeToo have done. The danger here is that we fall into the (rather clichéd) trap of assuming that Western = Global. #MeToo has generated awareness and empowerment across Western countries and in countries such as India and China. However, as Ajayi (2018) asks, ‘how global is a Western-derived movement that purports to save women everywhere without understanding fully the intersections and narratives that embody their diverse experiences and positionalities, both within and across countries?’ One of the problems that Ajayi (2018) highlights with Western-led transnational movements and activism such as #MeToo is that they often 157

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result in the elision of efforts to address the same issues in other parts of the world. Ajayi (2018) highlights the examples of #NakedProtests, #BeingFemaleinNigeria and #WomenMarchUG. These are examples of online activism in response to, respectively, universities’ inaction regarding on-campus rapes and high levels of sexual and gender-based violence in South Africa; everyday experiences of sexism in Nigeria; and sexual violence, murder and kidnapping of women in Uganda. Again, even in the US, there remains concern that #MeToo, as an expression of White feminism, reflects the longstanding exclusion and marginalisation of women of colour (Onwuachi-Willig 2018, 107). What this highlights overall is a need for intersectional approaches to issues such as gendered violence and sexual assault that centre local contexts, experiences and positionalities. Digital technologies offer a way of identifying and recognising parallel movements, generating genuine transnational activism and solidarity and ensuring that movement origins are properly acknowledged to avoid appropriation (Ajayi 2018).

MRAs, TOXIC MASCULINITY AND MISOGYNY ONLINE The open and ubiquitous nature of digital domains has offered a ready platform for a variety of different groups to pursue their political ambitions and ends. This includes those dedicated to fostering hate against targeted enemies and entrenching bigotry and discrimination. Often these groups are reactionary, acting out against perceived grievances and victimisation. They have become adept at using digital platforms to spread their message and recruit. While there are unfortunately many different online groups and platforms dedicated to spreading hate and bigotry against a variety of marginalised peoples, the focus here is on the constellation of ‘Manosphere’ groups that populate the dark (and not so dark) corners of the internet. Coined by Ian Hardwood, the ‘Manosphere’ encompasses a variety of groups, including MRAs, ‘Pick Up Artists’, ‘Wise Old Men’ or ‘Alpha Dads’. As Tomkinson, Harper, and Attwell (2020, 154) note, to this, we might add ‘Incels’ (involuntary celibates) as well. The shift of Manosphere groups to online platforms represents more than a simple movement from offline to online activism. As Ging (2019, 639) suggests: ‘…these assemblages demonstrate a radical shifting of the parameters of antifeminism, which is not accounted for by current writing on men’s rights politics’. Social media and digital platforms more broadly have become key sites of organisation and activism for the Manosphere. This has led to significant shifts in the discourses, representational practices and communicative politics of Manosphere groups, generally resulting in the articulation of more extreme discourses and positions (Ging 2019, 639). Often, individuals and groups within the Manosphere are less interested in effective mobilisation and advocacy than they are engaging in crude, abusive and personalised attacks on individual feminists (Ging 2019, 646). Such attacks, however, also extend beyond feminist activists to any women who are perceived to 158

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have said or done something objectionable, particularly those with a public profile. Yet, while these groups and individuals may be stridently anti-feminist, gender is still at the heart of their specific political projects, ambitions and ideologies. They are united by a belief in feminist misandry and the suppression and oppression of men and masculinities. What we see here, therefore, is the centrality of gender yet again to the performance of digital politics. Importantly, these online associations and expressions of hate and misogyny have led to violent and abusive real-world or offline incidents. For example, in 2018, Alek Minassian drove a van into pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10 and injuring 16. He posted a message on Facebook stating that the ‘Incel Rebellion’ had begun and referred to ‘Supreme Gentleman’ Elliot Rodger, another Incel who in 2014 killed 6 and injured 14 (Tomkinson, Harper and Attwell 2020, 152). Another example of online misogyny affecting people offline is the infamous Gamergate incident. While I discuss the gaming industry further below, it can be noted here that, to put it bluntly, gaming is largely dominated by men, both in terms of the people making the games and who games are made for and targeted at. As Griffin (2015, 80) notes, ‘…video games designed specifically with a male player in mind are almost as often played by a female, although game producers and designers continue to assume a particular (white, male) audience’. The male domination of the video games industry is coupled with a generally strong sense of what Kimmel (2013) terms an ‘aggrieved entitlement’ in gaming communities, a form of male behaviour in which hegemonic masculinity is asserted and the privileges and spaces seen as rightfully belonging to men are reclaimed (Braithwaite 2016, 7). Feminist critiques of video games, gamers and gaming sub culture, for example, have provoked often violent backlashes and led to a sense among many gamers that they – both individually and as a community – are under attack. Within this context, Gamergate began in August 2014 when Eron Gjoni published a blog about games developer Zoe Quinn, with whom he had recently broken up, on 4Chan and other sites (Salter 2017, 6). In the article, Gjoni levelled numerous accusations against Quinn, including that she had traded sexual favours in return for positive reviews in video games publications (Noyes 2014). Despite Gjoni’s claims being disproven, it was taken as evidence by some of ‘corruption’ in video games reporting and journalism (Massanari 2017, 334), part of a larger conspiracy in which SJWs were colluding with video games journalists to destroy games and gaming subculture (Salter 2017, 7). Some argued that the relationship between developers and online gaming sites had become ‘too close’, leading to conflicts of interest, and that the ‘online gaming press focuses too much on feminism and the role of women in the industry, to the detriment of coverage of games’ (Van Der Werff 2014). The issue was picked up by several prominent right-wing figures, such as actor Adam Baldwin (Mortensen 2018, 4–5), who coined the term ‘Gamergate’ in a tweet on 27 August 2014 in which he shared links to a YouTube video about Quinn. This provided further impetus 159

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to the campaign, and Gamergate went viral on Twitter and other social media platforms (particularly Reddit). Despite the claim that Gamergate was about ‘ethics in video games journalism’, Noyes (2014) notes that it was essentially about misogyny. Gamergate was a targeted campaign of harassment, intimidation, threats of violence and abuse of Zoe Quinn, her allies, feminist video games critics and journalists. Quinn received rape and death threats and was forced to leave her home and stay with friends after she was ‘doxxed’ and her personal information released online (Jason 2015; Salter 2017, 7). Others, such as Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian, were forced to cancel several public engagements due to death threats. As Ging (2019, 645) notes, Gamergate drew support from a variety of Manosphere groups despite significant differences between them. Hatred, misogyny and anti-feminism have been, and continues to be, reinforced in the interactions of these groups, again despite the differences that distinguish them. Combatting the circulation of dangerous ideas regarding women, sexuality and heterosexual couples (whom Incels have targeted for attack) has become an incredibly difficult undertaking. Unfortunately, these ideas continue to find purchase. Virulent, and often vicious, forms of toxic masculinity, informed by regressive understandings of gender and gender relations, along with a strong resentment towards women and especially feminists, find expression and are reproduced across a wide variety of different digital spaces and platforms.

THE GENDERED AND RACIALISED FOUNDATIONS OF DIGITAL PLATFORMS Digital platforms have undoubtedly become important sites of gendered politics. But what of these platforms themselves? Where we do politics is just as political as anything else. Social media and other digital platforms are not somehow ‘neutral’, divorced from the world that we inhabit. Rather, they are fundamentally enmeshed in it, shape it and are shaped by it. Digital platforms and spaces do not appear out of thin air. They are products, creations of specific groups of people. It is precisely the questions of who does the creating and distribution of digital platforms, who is involved in their conception and inception and whose voices are amplified and whose are not heard that reveal the gendered foundations of digital worlds. It might not come as a surprise to hear that industries such as AI, IT, gaming, software development or Big Tech are male dominated. Women working in technology or computing industries have long documented the consequences of working in a male-dominated industry, including endemic sexism, workplace harassment and hostility, and the generally dismissive way in which some male colleagues regard their work and professional expertise (Mundy 2017). Major companies such as Meta, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Apple and Twitter, for example, have acknowledged the lack of diversity in their workforces 160

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and have released an annual employee diversity report since 2014 (Rooney and Khorram 2020). Companies such as Intel have also provided significant funding to initiatives related to diversity and cultural reform, along with tying executive bonuses to diversity hiring targets (Mundy 2017). However, despite these efforts, there generally have not been significant changes in the diversity of the workforces of tech companies and more work remains to achieve greater representation and inclusion of historically underrepresented communities. The same is true of workforces involved in designing and implementing AI. Those involved in designing AI technologies are not reflective of a diverse population (Collett and Dillon 2019, 5). There is a significant body of evidence that demonstrates that there is a strong lack of gender and racial diversity in AI workforces (Stathoulopoulos and MateosGarcia 2019, 5). In terms of gender, recent reports have found that 80% of academics working in AI at leading US universities were men. In industry, 71% of applicants for AI jobs in the US in 2017 were men (Stathoulopoulos and Mateos-Garcia 2019, 5). As Collett and Dillon (2019, 25) suggest: ‘The current pipeline does not promise a better balance in the future. Gender and ethnic minorities are still not balanced in STEM subjects at school or university’. The implications of gendered and raced imbalances in the AI development sector can have serious consequences (see, for example, Algorithmic Justice League 2021; Noble 2018; Raji and Buolamwini 2019). For example, Klare et al. (2012) have demonstrated the ways in which facial recognition systems suffer from significantly worse accuracy when identifying and matching women, people of colour, and those that are young compared to older White men. This can pose a threat to civil rights and liberties, especially when AI and other digital technologies are deployed in tasks such as border control, surveillance and deception detection. As Sanchez-Monedero and Dencik (2022, 9) note in the context of deception detecting AI, there are problems associated with the assumption that deception can be universally detected across gender, race, ethnicity, age and neurodiversity. The outcome here can be inaccurate results which only further marginalise already disadvantaged communities. The use of biased datasets in AI based upon small samples (often largely White men) can lead to the problem of ‘runaway feedback loops’ in which the training of AI using past data corrupted by subjective biases only generates further bias and discrimination. This then feeds back into the original datasets used to train AI, deepening and increasing existing structures of marginalisation (Gebru 2020, 256–257). The White- and male-dominated nature of the AI industry is also apparent in the video games industry and gamer communities. The latter have a long and infamous history of sexism and at times virulent misogyny (and racism and imperialism, see Salter 2017). As Chess and Shaw (2015, 208–209) note, while every person involved in the video games industry or gaming communities is not necessarily sexist, systemic sexism structures the industry to a significant degree. Video game developers have long positioned White, heterosexual men as their core audience 161

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(Braithwaite 2016, 1), underscoring the fundamental ways in which various forms of identity (and identity politics) intersect and coalesce to constitute games, gamers and gaming culture as a White male endeavour. This is reflected in all aspects of game design and production, including the largely White male characters that populate video games, the specific tropes that position many female game characters as either damsels in distress or heavily sexualised background objects, and the problematic narratives and representations offered in many video games (Braithwaite 2016; Shaw 2011). It is important to consider what the gendered nature and lack of diversity in digital, tech and computing industries means for end users of digital spaces and platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. That these companies continue to employ workforces that are predominantly White and male means that they will produce products that reflect certain views, perspectives and biases. This can significantly impact on the types of content that users are exposed to when using these sites. YouTube’s algorithm, for example, has been criticised for prioritising abusive, violent, misleading and explicitly racist, misogynist and anti-feminist content (Donaldson 2019). Such content can appear in video recommendations or play automatically via autoplay, even when it is not closely related to the content the user was initially viewing. This can lead to the radicalisation of users and the circulation and reproduction of problematic ideas and narratives (Donaldson 2019). More fundamentally, it raises serious concerns regarding the ability of these companies to deal with the toxicity, misogyny, racism and abuse on their platforms. Again, we need a gendered lens through which to understand not only digital politics, but also the operations and hiring practices of the companies who create digital spaces and the functioning of these spaces themselves.

CONCLUSION Like offline politics, digital politics are gendered. While digital domains do have the potential to enable and empower truly transnational feminist movements, they do not automatically or naturally do so, nor do they automatically disrupt gendered hierarchies and structures of violence and marginalisation. Digital domains are contested spaces, and their consequences and effects will, like many things, depend on what we make of them, how we use them and, most importantly, who gets to use them and whose voices are heard. There remain significant inequities and inequalities, both broadly in terms of who can access the resources and infrastructure necessary to get online or who is employed and enabled to create online spaces; and more specifically with regard to the issue of representation within online feminist movements. Understanding the gendered dimensions of digital (and offline) politics requires an intersectional approach that openly and critically considers individuals’ lived, embodied and everyday experiences and contexts.

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Discussion questions 1. What are the challenges and opportunities associated with engaging in online feminist activism, advocacy and mobilisation? 2. How have digital and online spaces affected the spread, beliefs and behaviour of Manosphere groups? 3. How does gender help us to explain the development and maintenance of digital platforms? How does this affect digital politics on these platforms? Note 1. It is important to be clear on the distinctions here. While Milano was made aware of the previous coining of the term by Burke and credited her for it, the #MeToo campaign is very different from the work Burke had been doing long before the hashtag went viral. Burke has long done the difficult, largely quiet and private work seeking to address sexual violence against women of colour and the racialised and gendered power structures informing it

Further reading Collett, Clementine, and Sarah Dillon. (2019). “AI and gender: four proposals for future Research.” The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. http://lcfi.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/AI_and_Gender_4_ Proposals_for_Future_Research.pdf. Ging, Debbie. 2019. “Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorising the Masculinities of the Manosphere.” Men and Masculinities 22 (4): 638–657. Lin, Zhongxuan, and Liu Yang. 2019. “Individual and Collective Empowerment: Women’s Voices in the #MeToo Movement in China.” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 25 (1): 117–131. Massanari, Adrienne. 2017. “#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures.” New Media and Society 19 (3): 329–346. Onwuachi-Willing, Angela. 2018. “What about #UsToo?: The Invisibility of Race in the #MeToo Movement.” The Yale Law Journal Forum 128: 105–120. References Ajayi, Titilope F. 2018. “#MeToo, Africa and the Politics of Transnational Activism.” Africa is a Country, 7 June 2018. https://africasacoun try.com/2018/07/metoo-africa-and-the-politics-of-transnationalactivism. Algorithmic Justice League. 2021. https://www.ajl.org/.

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Bennett, Jessica. 2014. “Behold the Power of #Hashtag Feminism.” Time, 10 September 2014. https://time.com/3319081/whyistayed-hashtagfeminism-activism/. Braithwaite, Andrea. 2016. “It’s About Ethics in Games Journalism? Gamergaters and Geek Masculinity.” Social Media + Society 2 (4): 1–10. Chess, Shira, and Adrienne Shaw. 2015. “A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying About #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 59 (1): 208–220. Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. 2013. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Application, Praxis.” Signs 38 (4): 785–810. Collett, Clementine, and Sarah Dillon. 2019. “AI and Gender: Four Proposals for Future Research.” The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. http://lcfi.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/AI_and_ Gender_4_Proposals_for_Future_Research.pdf. Donaldson, Kayleigh. 2019. “Youtube’s Algorithm is Bad for Women.” Syfy Wire. 4 May 2019. https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/ youtubes-algorithm-is-bad-for-women. Gebru, Timnit. 2020. “Race and Gender.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI, edited by Markus D. Dubber, Frank Pasquale, and Sunit Das, 253–270. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ging, Debbie. 2019. “Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorising the Masculinities of the Manosphere.” Men and Masculinities 22 (4): 638–657. Griffin, Penny. 2015. Popular Culture, Political Economy and the Death of Feminism: Why Women are in Refrigerators and Other Stories. Abingdon: Routledge. Jason, Zachary. 2015. “Game of Fear: What if a Stalker had an Army? Zoe Quinn’s Ex-Boyfriend was Obsessed with Destroying Her Reputation – And Thousands Were Eager to Help.” Boston Magazine. 28 April 2015. https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2015/04/28/ gamergate/. Kaba, Mariame, Andrea Smith, Lori Adelman, and Roxane Gay. 2014. “Where Twitter and Feminism Meet.” The Nation. https://www. thenation.com/article/where-twitter-and-feminism-meet. Kanai, Akane. 2020. “Intersectionality in Digital Feminist Cultures: The Practices and Politics of a Travelling Theory.” Feminist Theory (online): 1–18. doi:10.1177/1464700120975 701. Kimmel, Michael. 2013. Angry White Men. American Masculinity at the End of an Era. New York: Nation Books. Klare, Brendan F., Mark J. Burge, Joshua C. Klontz, Richard W. Vorder Bruegge, and Anil K. Jain. 2012. “Face Recognition Performance: Role of Demographic Information.” IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 7 (6): 1789–1801. Looft, Ruxandra. 2017. “#girlgaze: Photography, Fourth-Wave Feminism, and Social Media Advocacy.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 31 (6): 892–902. 164

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Lin, Zhongxuan, and Liu Yang. 2019. “Individual and Collective Empowerment: Women’s Voices in the #MeToo Movement in China.” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 25 (1): 117–131. Massanari, Adrienne. 2017. “#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures.” New Media and Society 19 (3): 329–346. Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller. 2018. “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture Through Digital Feminist Activism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25 (2): 236–246. Mortensen, Torill Elvira. 2018. “Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate.” Games and Culture 13 (8): 787–806. Mundy, Liza. 2017. “Why is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/whyis-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/. Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press. Noyes, Jenny. 2014. “Here’s Everything You Need to Know About ‘Gamergate’.” Sydney Morning Herald. 31 October. https://www. smh.com.au/lifestyle/heres-everything-you-need-to-know-aboutgamergate-20141030-11ecyj.html. Onwuachi-Willing, Angela. 2018. “What about #UsToo?: The Invisibility of Race in the #MeToo Movement.” The Yale Law Journal Forum 128: 105–120. Raji, Inioluwa Deborah, and Buolamwini, Joy. 2019. “Actionable Auditing: Investigating the Impact of Publicly Naming Biased Performance Results of Commercial AI Products.” Proceedings of the 2019 AAAI/ ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society January 2019: 429–435. doi:10.1145/3306618.3314244. Rodino-Colocino, Michelle. 2014. “YesAllWomen: Intersectional Mobilization Against Sexual Assault is Radical (Again).” Feminist Media Studies, 14 (6): 1113–1115. Rooney, Kate, and Yasmin Khorram. 2020. “Tech Companies Say They Value Diversity, but Reports Show Little Change in Last Six Years.” CNBC. 12 June. Accessed 24 February 2021. https://www.cnbc. com/2020/06/12/six-years-into-diversity-reports-big-tech-has-madelittle-progress.html. Salter, Michael. 2017. “From Geek Masculinity to Gamergate: The Technological Rationality of Online Abuse.” Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal 14 (2): 247–264. Sánchez-Monedero, Javier, and Lina Dencik. 2022. “The Politics of Deceptive Borders: ‘Biomarkers of Deceit’ and the Case of iBorderCtrl.” Information, Communication & Society 25 (3): 413–430. Shaw, Adrienne. 2011. “Do You Identify as a Gamer? Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Gamer Identity.” New Media & Society 14 (1): 28–44. Stathoulopoulos, Konstantinos, and Juan C. Mateos-Garcia. 2019. “Gender Diversity in AI Research”. 29 July 2019. https://ssrn.com/ abstract=3428240. 165

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Tomkinson, Sian, Tauel Harper, and Katie Attwell. 2020. “Confronting Incel: Exploring Possible Policy Responses to Misogynistic Violent Extremism.” Australian Journal of Political Science 55 (2): 152–169. Van Der Werff, Todd. 2014. “#Gamergate: Here’s Why Everyone in the Video Game World is Fighting.” Vox. 13 October 2014. https://www. vox.com/2014/9/6/6111065/gamergate-explained-everybody-fighting.

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Disability Ana Bê The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that about 15% of the world’s population is disabled, while other statistics estimate this number might be closer to 20%.1 If you take into account the variations between countries, the possibility that people may prefer to not identify as disabled, and the fact that invisible impairments may not be counted (as often more traditional understandings of disability prevail), this number is likely to be even more substantial. Some see disability as an issue that pertains to a small minority of people and something with which the rest of society does not need to concern itself. This is clearly not the case: disability is everywhere, and it pertains to every aspect of our society as well as all areas of knowledge. This will be made clear throughout the chapter. Although, arguably, some feminists have become more aware of disability than in previous times (Fine and Asch 1985) and feminist disability studies has provided major contributions to this area of knowledge (Garland-Thomson 2002, 2005), there is still much work to do to make sure disability is being included in activism and scholarship, including in the study of how gender operates in world politics. The WHO estimates tell us that there is a significant number of people who identify as disabled, and therefore potentially a significant number of people whose experiences are being left out of world politics scholarship. Just like gender or race, it is impossible to have a neutral stance on disability (Barnes 2012). If disability is being ignored altogether then that tells us something important about who is unaccounted for in world politics and whose experiences are presumed to matter. If disability is only constructed through the lens of what is happening in someone’s body or mind (Mallet and Runswick-Cole 2014, 3), without a recognition of the wider structural context that may affect someone’s life, this tells us something important about whose dominant understanding of disability is being used. As of the time of writing, disability is notoriously absent from many of the key International Relations (IR) texts in existence, and DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-15

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there seems to be little scholarship that engages with this topic. This is puzzling, given that so many topics commonly discussed within IR relate to disability: the role of nation-states, international politics and imperialism, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), war and peace, migration and displacement, and so on. Yet, it is not really surprising. Disability is often like a shadow: it is present everywhere, but we seldom notice it, except in particular circumstances. Many of those outside of disability studies understand disability from the perspective of the dominant discourse, which is mostly influenced by biomedicine and allied professions. This discourse sees disability as a personal problem anchored in the body or mind of an individual person and sees disability as a kind of tragedy to be overcome by the individual alone. Seen from this dominant perspective, it may seem like nation-states, non-governmental organisations and other key players in society have little to do with disability, but just as this book more broadly argues that gender matters in IR, in this this chapter, I argue that disability matters in feminist IR. I begin the chapter by introducing key ideas regarding disability. This is followed by a discussion on ableism and rights-based models of disability. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of nation-states and organisations in constructing impairment.

CONTEXTUALISING DISABILITY Disability is a fundamental part of the human condition and should be understood as a type of human variation. Disability is actually the only category that a person can enter into at any time in their lives. This is because all of us have the potential to become disabled at some stage in our lives, especially if we live long enough. For others, the harshness of living conditions may mean they become disabled earlier on or never live long enough to be old. As the World Report on Disability illustrates, disability prevalence increases with age (WHO 2011). This should not be read as something negative, but rather as a fundamental part of the human experience (McRuer 2006). Only about 20% of disabled people are born with their impairment (Siebers 2006). This means that the vast majority of disabled people acquire their impairment through the life course: through accidents, illness, loss of function or a myriad of other circumstances (including avoidable circumstances, as I discuss below). Most impairments, including long-term conditions, come about as a result of old age; because women live longer than men, this affects women in particular (WHO 2011, 28). It is therefore misguided to assume this will be an issue that one does not have to concern oneself with. Disability can also be a category inhabited only temporarily by some people – it is possible to experience impairment for a limited amount of time and then regain a sense of normalcy due to medical intervention or cure; however, such an experience might still be significant enough for a person to understand the barriers someone with an impairment might experience. There are also people, like me, who live with fluctuating 168

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impairments, such as debilitating chronic conditions, whose experience of impairment will fluctuate from day to day, meaning it is unpredictable. It is therefore important to challenge the idea that somehow disability is purportedly a fixed and stable category. Many people also have impairments that may not be perceptible to others and it is important to challenge the stereotypical idea that disability is always something that can be immediately identified or detected by others. People can live with a range of different impairments such as autism or mental health distress that may not be visible to others at all. Disability has never been a neutral experience. There have been a number of frameworks offered to understand disability throughout history: mythology and religion, for example, each provided particular understandings of why someone might become disabled. However, since the dawn of modernity, disability has been viewed primarily through the dominance of biomedicine and allied professions, which have pathologised this experience. This dominant perspective – what disabled people have termed the ‘medical model’ of disability – is still very much the dominant way of understanding disability in most societies (Mallet and Runswick-Cole 2014). This view is influenced by biomedicine’s understanding of disability as a functional and medical matter that is anchored in individual bodies. From this perspective, disability is thus seen primarily as an individual issue and something that the person has the responsibility to deal with or ‘overcome’. This discourse is so predominant that it is common to find conceptualisations of disability that frame it as a tragedy and a loss or a life not worth living. It is frequent that representations of disability on film, TV and popular culture reflect this view (Bolt 2012). Within this dominant discourse, there is often no recognition of the wider factors that shape a disabled person’s social existence. Furthermore, bodies are seen as sites of intervention and rehabilitation, with the role of biomedicine seen as ‘fixing’ these bodies so they can fit into existing societal norms. While medical intervention might often be necessary, this perspective leaves little room for the subjectivity of bodies which have historically been forced to do things they may not be comfortable with. For example, Deaf people2 have been forced to speak orally and forbidden to use sign language, with no recognition of the significance of this type of epistemic violence (Bauman and Murray 2009), while other people have been forced to use prosthetics to adjust their appearance in line with normative expectations of bodily presentation. The medical model and its focus on the individualisation of impairment thus leaves no room to consider the role of society in structuring inequality when it comes to disability. While the medical model remains dominant, disabled people have fought and organised since the 1970s to change the locus of disability from the body to society (Barnes and Mercer 2003). The disabled people’s movement has offered the idea that although bodyminds3 (Price 2015) may have impairments that can, of course, cause unpleasant, challenging, and difficult symptoms, the real site of disabled people’s oppression is in society. This idea that arose from the disabled people’s movement (UPIAS 1976) is 169

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called the ‘social model’ of disability. Disabled people argued that the way society is organised creates innumerable barriers for them, which range from actual physical barriers (for instance, no access to all or parts of a building), discrimination and lack of reasonable adjustments in employment and events (for instance, refusal to accommodate someone’s adjustments so they can work on equal par with others, or a lack of interpretation or description at events), to attitudinal barriers (the prejudice experienced by disabled people that stems from non-disabled people’s attitudes and interactions with them). Furthermore, bodyminds are bio-social in nature – if a person with an energy impairment is made to work a 12-hour day, it will impact negatively on their physical and mental well-being, for instance, their pain levels. Their bodymind is thus responding to surrounding circumstances and not acting independently of this. Although we may not be able to change impairment effects (Thomas 1999, 2007), we can change society.4 This political understanding is also reflected in terminology: disability was firmly conceptualised by UPIAS as a form of social oppression akin to that experienced by other oppressed groups in society. While impairment refers to functional limitations in someone’s body or mind, disability is a process that occurs when someone with an impairment encounters a disabling society that does not meet that person’s needs. 5 This conceptualised disability as a social, relational process and not an individual problem. Understanding disability from this perspective allows us to focus on how society needs to be changed and adapted to welcome the vast array of bodyminds that are part of the human experience. Although disabled people have fought (and continue to fight) very hard for their rights to be improved, we still live in a society that privileges normative understandings of bodies and minds and sees these as superior and desirable (Davis 2006). Consequently, most social structures and institutions continue to cater only for a very narrow percentage of bodyminds, while the others are left out – for instance, the assumption that everyone can walk, see or is the same height (Pritchard 2021) as others. This means disabled people’s access needs are often neglected, poorly understood or not even considered in the first place. This has political and material consequences for the lives of disabled people. In the UK, for example, it was found that people with learning difficulties were much more at risk of dying from COVID-19; in early 2021, COVID accounted for 65% of their deaths, compared to 39% of the general population (Tapper 2021). However, many people with learning difficulties were not prioritised in the vaccination strategy and had, in fact, disproportionately been asked to sign Do Not Resuscitate orders (Tapper 2021). How we understand disability matters and has real consequences for people.

UNDERSTANDING ABLEISM In order to develop an intersectional analysis of gender in IR, it is important to understand theories of ableism. The concept of ableism refers to the structures, cultural norms and beliefs that frame disability as inferior 170

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and lacking (with its associated consequences of devaluing the lives of disable people) and construct ability and normalcy as desirable and hierarchically superior (Bê 2012, 2019; Campbell 2009; Goodley 2014). These norms can be implicit or explicit, but they have a bearing on our understandings of disability and they privilege normative understandings of ability. In this sense, ableism is a similar framework to patriarchy and whiteness, with disablism being the forms of discrimination experienced by disabled people as a result of ableist beliefs and attitudes. Ableist ideas circulate in our culture (in the way we negatively represent disability in cultural artefacts, for example), shape our practices (for instance, through inaccessible architecture and workplaces), and relate to one another (such as people’s uneasiness regarding how to relate to disabled people). These are also present in scholarship, either by omission or reinforcement of ableist ideas; IR scholars, including feminist IR scholars, are not immune to this. For instance, Stephen Michael Christian has produced a thorough analysis of how ableism is present in IR scholarship, using the example of how autism metaphors are used in this area (Christian 2018). He argues that autism is often used a negative metaphor for a disease that needs to be cured, with IR scholars drawing acritically from common stereotypes about this label in their writing. He concludes that: IR scholars, existing and acting within ableist societies, have internalized and often unconsciously projected an ideology of ability that devalues disabled people. When scholars fail to acknowledge this and amend their behavior accordingly, they further an ideology that justifies a system of violence that oppresses [disabled] people. (Christian 2018, 484)

It is therefore important to continue to challenge ableist views that propagate ideas of disability which can have a material effect on the communities impacted. A recent example of how ableism permeates our thinking with material consequences for disabled people is related to many people’s responses to perceived vulnerability during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was commonly argued by some that the virus only posed a risk of death to the elderly or those with underlying health conditions and that healthy people were supposedly unaffected; thus, measures such as lockdown were disproportionate. This argument is inherently ableist: it assumes that the lives of disabled and elderly people are less important than others, and that it is of little significance if the virus affects them mostly (which is also not the case) or if they are the only ones to die. Some went further to argue that elderly and vulnerable people ought to be segregated from the rest of society in order to allow so-called ‘healthy’ people to continue to go about their lives. This argument presents disabled people as being not just less worthy but also almost as an impediment to the lives of others, as if disabled and ill people were to blame for how the virus was affecting everyone, and somehow, they were the ones that needed to be 171

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managed and removed. This demonstrates a lack of understanding of how public health works – the fact that people affect each other, and their actions have repercussions on others. It also ignores the fact that we are all much more interdependent than we seem to like to recognise. It is, however, paradigmatic of how ableism infiltrates our thinking.

THE IMPORTANCE OF A RIGHTS-BASED APPROACH TO DISABILITY Having explained the political and material context of disability, it is important to briefly consider the role of non-governmental organisations and other key players in creating conditions where disabled people can thrive and in removing the necessary barriers so that disabled people can participate fully. This work can only be done by including disabled people and their organisations. A maxim of the disabled people’s movement across the world has always been ‘nothing about us without us’. Yet, it is still far too common to see non-disabled people making important decisions on behalf of disabled people and for disabled people to be excluded from the decision-making process. The predominance of a medical model view in such institutions often means that professionals are seen holding the expertise on disability, instead of disabled people themselves being given the opportunity to decide on their own lives. The charity sector is big business and has a key involvement in disability issues, with many understanding disability as a charitable cause to be addressed. There are several issues with this model. Firstly, institutions, charities and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that try to address the issues faced by disabled people are often led by non-disabled people and are made up of structures that, more often than not, fail to centre disabled people and their concerns (Taylor 2008). Therefore, the decisions made and strategies defined continue to be shaped mostly by non-disabled people and often by a medical model understanding of disability which can be detrimental to disabled people’s rights as it can focus only on helping the individual person instead of changing the structural conditions that affect disabled people’s lives. Secondly, charities can contribute to magnifying existing stereotypes about disability (Taylor 2008). The charity sector relies heavily on traditional notions of disability in order to encourage supporters to donate to its causes (Hevey 1992; Taylor 2008; Waltz 2012). Therefore, charity adverts often portray disabled people as pitiful and in need of rescue. Stereotypes associated with particular impairments (for instance, helplessness in the case of visually impaired people) are often utilised as a way to sensationalise or present disabled people as dependent and without agency. These negative disability portrayals or stereotypes elicit particular emotions in non-disabled people which drive them to donate. Hevey and Waltz argue that the use of pitiful or frightening images works because charity adverts sell fear, in contrast to commercial advertising, 172

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which sells desire (Hevey 1992; Waltz 2012). The affective reactions people have to these portrayals represent a response to deeply embedded ideas about disabled people being helpless, in need of rescue and a burden (Waltz 2012). One of the issues with this strategy is that adverts fail to challenge the existing misconceptions and stereotypes about disability; in fact, they often reinforce them in ways that can undermine disabled people. Research has shown that damaging representations in advertising can affect disabled people themselves in negative ways (Houston 2019). It is important that charities that focus on disabled people try and identify as well as challenge the barriers that exist for disabled people in society. This means moving away from a model that focuses on what is wrong with the person to a model that focuses on the aspects in society that require change. There are similar patterns here between representations of disability and the representations of gender stereotypes, with which feminist IR scholars are familiar. Grau and Zotos (2016, 763) have found in a metanalysis of literature on the topic that ‘recent research shows that, in general, gender stereotyping in advertising still exists and is prevalent in many countries around the world’. Gender stereotypes often present in advertising can be equally problematic in the message they pass, and research has linked an improvement in advert representations around gender in certain countries ‘to gender-related developments and value changes in society rather than the other way around’ (Eisend 2010, 418) This very much suggests that advertising is influenced by cultural norms and perceptions and, until these shift, representations will not change. It is essential for international non-governmental organisations that specialise in disability to be attentive to the issues discussed above. They may also export Western models and ways of thinking about disability that may not always be the most appropriate for local populations (Ghai 2002). Often the knowledge and know-how used can be Eurocentric in nature and can presume that what serves the needs of European populations also meets the needs of developing countries (Meekosha and Soldatic 2011). This can be problematic because it is crucial to try to understand the needs of local people and listen to their expertise. In many cases, people can be seen as passive recipients of aid (Shivji 2010). For instance, while providing wheelchairs may be important, in some contexts, the infrastructure may not be present for people to use wheelchairs or they may require additional infrastructure.

NATION-STATES AND THEIR ROLE IN CREATING IMPAIRMENT People can become disabled for a variety of reasons but there are many instances where policies or the role of nation-states can actively generate impairment for people (Oliver 1990). It is important to, therefore, recognise that disability is by no means just something accidental that 173

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happens to unfortunate individuals. Nation-states have a particular role in potentiating the well-being of their citizens and can, by action or omission, affect the citizens of other states. War continues to be a major cause of impairment for people. The types of casualties generated by war are immense and reverberate deeply in a society. Although the literature on war casualties fails to agree on exact numbers or ratios, it recognises that war has an impact on both military forces as well as civilians (Roberts 2010). Available data on violent deaths ‘confirm that men are more often victims of violence during wartime, whereas several studies that also take into consideration the post conflict period report a high number of female deaths after the conflict is officially over’ (Ormhaug, Meier, and Hernes 2009, 3). Overall, both military and civilian populations are affected in significant and enduring ways. Civilian populations affected by war can experience traumatic physical injuries, but the psychological injuries caused by war can also be everlasting and difficult to address. The emotional impact of trauma can continue to affect people in significant ways long after the events (Hanson and Vogel 2012). Physical injury and trauma also affect those who are part of the armed forces or militia taking part in operations (Clarke, Gregory, and Salomon 2015). While trauma is, again, often perceived as an individual issue, I argue that it is important to understand the cultural and social conditions that allow trauma to happen in the first place – the example of war and armed conflict is paradigmatic in this sense when we realise that the types of impairment and trauma effects that military and civilian populations tend to experience could be entirely avoided. In this sense, trauma can be generated through the consequences of imperialism, ableism, patriarchy and other systems of domination which generate particular forms of violence. Furthermore, war and conflict affect those who are already disabled in particular as they may be unable to move to safety. Disabled people might be left behind because families have no safe way of taking them and they are, therefore, more likely to be exposed to violence. Recent research by Human Rights Watch conducted in the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Iraq, Myanmar, South Sudan and Yemen found that disabled people in situations of armed conflict have faced a myriad of barriers, including violent attacks, forced displacement and serious neglect in humanitarian responses to civilians affected by fighting. There are examples of disabled people being abandoned in their homes or left alone in villages for days or weeks with little or no access to food or water. Many disabled people perished because they could not flee attacks. When they are able to reach places for displaced people or refuges, there are numerous barriers such as difficulty accessing food, sanitation and medical support (Human Rights Watch 2018). The experience of forced migration can similarly cause impairment or intensify barriers for disabled people who find themselves in this situation. The majority of forced migrants originate from the Global South and are often hosted by the poorest countries. In situations of displacement, ‘the

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rights and needs of disabled people are often pushed to the periphery, their voices largely unheard, their rights ignored’ (Pisani and Grech 2015, 436). In certain situations, disabled people may not be able to understand, hear or see crucial information about food distributions and facilities. Families need to make decisions about what to leave behind and assistive devices may be too heavy to take (Shivji 2010). Infrastructure and services available in contexts of displacement are also often inadequate for disabled people. Disabled women and children are also often more vulnerable to forms of abuse and neglect (Reilly 2010). Essential goods such as food or medication often do not meet the needs of disabled people (Reilly 2010). The design of water points or wash areas may impede disabled people from using such facilities (Shivji 2010). The importance of these issues needs to be taken much more into account.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have demonstrated that disability is an important category to consider and include for feminists in IR. I provided an introduction to the topic from a disability rights perspective and challenged the reader to consider that there can be no neutral stance on disability. I offered examples of key topics where disability is not just present but at the heart of discussions in IR such as the role of nation-states in issues of war and displacement and the role of charities and NGOs. When a disability lens is omitted, that does not mean disabled people are not affected, it simply means we are missing or ignoring them. It is important to comprehend how ableism frames our understanding of key issues because this is still a dominant and largely unchallenged vista in our society. Disability pertains to all areas of life and it is particularly relevant for debates in IR; therefore, this should be a perspective that is more fully incorporated into the discipline.

Discussion questions 1. Have the topics you have learned about in IR so far included disabled people and their lives? If not, what does this leave out? 2. Consider an issue you are interested in relating to feminism or IR; how does an understanding of disability help you perceive this issue differently? What does it add to it and what new things would you have to bear in mind? 3. How can you consider disabled women in the context of IR debates? Think of a couple of examples and reflect on how focusing on this population can help you identify aspects you may have not taken into account before.

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Notes 1. It should be noted, however, that international statistics on disability can be problematic – approaches to measuring its prevalence can vary from country to country, and different researchers may use different methodologies and classifications (WHO 2011). 2. The capitalisation of Deaf indicates that we are discussing culturally Deaf people, who see themselves as a linguistic minority. 3. I use Margaret Price’s concept of bodymind here to refute the Cartesian dualism of body and mind. 4. The models of disability remain a useful introduction to a disability rights framework, but further conceptualisations and developments have taken place in the area of disability studies and in disability activism which I invite the reader to explore further. 5. This terminological shift was offered by the British disabled people’s movement and is not universally shared. In other countries and contexts, impairment and disability are often conflated, such as in the phrase ‘people with disabilities’. However, all disability rights perspectives share the understanding that disability is about social oppression.

Further reading Bê, Ana. 2020. “Feminism and Disability: A Cartography of Multiplicity.” In Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, 2nd edition, edited by Nick Watson and Simo Vehmas, 2nd edition, 421–435. London: Routledge. Goodley, Dan. 2011. Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. London: SAGE. Mallett, Rebecca and Katherine Runswick-Cole. 2014. Approaching Disability: Critical Issues and Perspectives. Approaching Disability: Critical Issues and Perspectives. Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/ 10.4324/9781315765464. Meekosha, Helen and Karen Soldatic. 2011. “Human Rights and the Global South: The Case of Disability.” Third World Quarterly 32 (8): 1383–1397. Pisani, Maria and Shaun Grech. 2015. “Disability and Forced Migration: Critical Intersectionalities.” Disability and the Global South 2 (1): 421–441. References Barnes, Colin. 2012. “Understanding the Social Model of Disability: Past, Present and Future.” In Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, edited by Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone, and Carol Thomas. London: Routledge. Barnes, Colin and Geoff Mercer. 2003. Disability. Cambridge: Polity Press. 176

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Bauman, Dirksen and Joseph Murray. 2009. “Reframing: From Hearing Loss to Deaf Gain.” Deaf Studies Digital Journal Fall (1): 1–10. http:// dsdj.gallaudet.edu. Bê, Ana. 2012. “Feminism and Disability: A Cartography of Multiplicity.” In Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, edited by Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone and Carol Thomas, 363–375. London: Routledge. Bê, Ana. 2019. “Ableism and Disablism in Higher Education: The Case of Two Students Living with Chronic Illnesses.” ALTER - European Journal of Disability Research/Revue Européenne de Recherche Sur Le Handicap 13 (3): 179–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alter.2019. 03.004. Bolt, David. 2012. “Social Encounters, Cultural Representation and Critical Avoidance.” In Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, edited by Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone and Carol Thomas. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203144114.ch21. Campbell, Fiona Kumari. 2009. Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Christian, Stephen Michael. 2018. “Autism in International Relations: A Critical Assessment of International Relations’ Autism Metaphors.” European Journal of International Relations 24 (2): 464–488. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1354066117698030. Clarke, Philip M., Robert Gregory and Joshua A. Salomon. 2015. “LongTerm Disability Associated with War-Related Experience among Vietnam Veterans.” Medical Care 53 (5): 401–408. https://doi.org/ 10.1097/MLR.0000000000000336. Davis, Lennard J. 2006. “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteeth Century.” In The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J Davis, 2nd edition, 3–16. New York: Routledge. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ ecip0610/2006007500.html. Eisend, Martin. 2010. “A Meta-Analysis of Gender Roles in Advertising.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 38 (4): 418–440. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s11747-009-0181-x. Fine, Michelle and Adrienne Asch. 1985. “Disabled Women: Sexism without the Pedestal.” In Women and Disability: The Double Handicap, edited by Mary Jo Deegan and Nancy A Brooks, 6–23. New Brunswick: Transaction Books. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2002. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” NWSA Journal 14 (3): 1–32. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2005. “Feminist Disability Studies.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30 (2): 1577–1587. Ghai, Anita. 2002. “Disability in the Indian Context: Post-Colonial Perspectives.” In Disability/Postmodernity; Embodying Disability Theory, edited by Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare. London: Continuum. Goodley, Dan. 2014. Dis/Ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism. New York: Routledge. 177

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Grau, Stacy Landreth and Yorgos C Zotos. 2016. “Gender Stereotypes in Advertising: A Review of Current Research.” International Journal of Advertising 35 (5): 761–770. https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.2016.1 203556. Hanson, Elaine and Gwen Vogel. 2012. “The Impact of War on Civilians.” In Trauma Counselling: Theories and Intervention, edited by Lopez Lisa Levers, 412–433. New York: Springer Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1891/9780826106841.0024. Hevey, David. 1992. The Creatures Time Forgot: Photography and Disability. London: Routledge. Houston, Ella. 2019. “The Impact of Advertisements on Women’s Psychological and Emotional States: Exploring Navigation and Resistance of Disabling Stereotypes.” Media, Culture and Society 41 (6): 791–807. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718813484. Human Rights Watch. 2018. “UN: War’s Impact on People with Disabilities.” 2018. https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/12/03/un-warsimpact-people-disabilities. Mallet, Rebecca and Katherine Runswick-Cole. 2014. Approaching Disability: Critical Issues and Perspectives. London: Routledge. McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. Cultural Front. New York: New York University Press. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip064/2005035209.html. Meekosha, Helen and Karen Soldatic. 2011. “Human Rights and the Global South: The Case of Disability.” Third World Quarterly 32 (8): 1383–1397. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2011.614800. Oliver, Michael. 1990. The Politics of Disablement. London: Macmillan Education. Ormhaug, Christin, Patrick Meier and Helga Hernes. 2009. “Armed Conflict Deaths Disaggregated by Gender: A Report for the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” http://www.prio.no. Pisani, Maria and Shaun Grech. 2015. “Disability and Forced Migration: Critical Intersectionalities.” Disability and the Global South 2 (1): 421–441. www.dgsjournal.org. Price, Margaret. 2015. “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia 30 (1): 268–284. https://doi.org/doi:10.1111/hypa.12127. Pritchard, Erin. 2021. Dwarfism, Spatiality and Disabling Experiences. London: Routledge. Reilly, Rachael. 2010. “Disabilities among Refugees and Conflict-Affected Populations.” Forced Migration Review July (35): 8–10. Roberts, Adam. 2010. “Lives and Statistics: Are 90% of War Victims Civilians?” Survival 52 (3): 115–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/003963 38.2010.494880. Shivji, Aleema. 2010. “Disability in Displacement.” Forced Migration Review July (35): 4–7. Siebers, Tobin. 2006. “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” In The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J Davis, 2nd edition, 173–184. New York, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 178

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Tapper, James. 2021. “Fury at ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ Notices given to Covid Patients with Learning Disabilities | Coronavirus | The Guardian.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/13/new-donot-resuscitate-orders-imposed-on-covid-19-patients-with-learningdifficulties. Taylor, Margaret. 2008. “Disabled in Images and Language.” In Disability on Equal Terms, edited by John Swain and Sally French. London: SAGE. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446213261.n4. Thomas, Carol. 1999. Female Forms: Experiencing and Understanding Disability. Buckingham: Open University Press. Thomas, Carol. 2007. Sociologies of Disability and Illness: Contested Ideas in Disability Studies and Medical Sociology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. UPIAS. 1976. “Fundamental Principles of Disability.” London: Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation. Waltz, Mitzi. 2012. “Images and Narratives of Autism within Charity Discourses.” Disability & Society 27 (2): 219–233. https://doi.org/10.1 080/09687599.2012.631796. WHO. 2011. “World Report on Disability.” https://www.who.int/teams/ noncommunicable-diseases/disability-and-rehabilitation/worldreport-on-disability.

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CHAPTER 14

Ecology/Environment Emma Foster Ecologism and Environmentalism1 are social/political movements that have as their main objective the protection of the natural environment. As such, ecologists/environmentalists (also known as ‘greens’), to varying degrees, seek to challenge existing economic, political and social organisation in favour of more environmentally friendly ways of living. It is commonly believed that the movement originated in the 1960s, with the publication of the marine biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). However, while this may be true of green politics in the West, aspects of what could be described as ecologism have been central to religious and spiritual traditions that have a much longer history (Yang and Huang 2018). These traditions, such as Daoism and Buddhism, focus on the interconnectedness of nature and humans; seeking harmony and equilibrium that equates to an ecological sensibility. In contrast, in the West, it was not until the 1970s that environmental concerns became prominent when the (social) scientific community started to consider the rate of economic and population growth in light of the world’s finite resources. Overall, regardless of its origins, ecologism/environmentalism is predominantly concerned with the relationship between humankind and the natural environment, even though the character of that relationship is defined in culturally and historically specific ways. Feminist, gender and queer theorists engaged in environmental politics and ethics have sought to demonstrate the ways that these human-nature relationships are gendered and/or mediated through logics of sex, love and (biological) reproduction. With that in mind, this chapter maps various contributions made by those who approach ecologism/environmentalism through the lens of gender and/or sexuality. In so doing, I primarily focus on (eco)feminism and queer theory/ecology in relation to green scholarship, activism and (international) politics. First, I discuss the link made between women and nature by green theorists and activists in general and ecofeminists 180

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in particular. I then turn to the United Nations’ rhetoric around sustainable development and how this has (ostensibly) been informed by ecofeminism. I also trouble the assumptions that arise from the woman-nature nexus by exploring the interventions made by queer ecologists. By mapping this debate, I demonstrate the tension that exists between an essentialist ecofeminist perspective and an anti-essentialist queer ecological approach, which continues to dominate gender/sexuality/ ecologism/environmentalism scholarship and activism. Finally, the chapter reviews how this tension is playing out in contemporary scholarship and activism by examining feminist and queer perspectives of the Anthropocene and climate justice.

GREEN POLITICS, ECOFEMINISM AND QUEER ECOLOGY Nature has long been personified as feminine, most often in a maternal form. The Roman and Greek civilisations worshipped the female deities Terra and Gaia respectively, both of which are considered to be early personifications of Mother Earth, with the latter being re-imagined in 1970s radical green philosophy through what was termed the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ (Lovelock 1979). The personification of nature as a mother or a goddess can also be seen in non-Western cultures, such as the Pachamama in Andean culture and Bhumi in Hindu culture. As such, this idea of Mother Earth, of a feminised Nature, has been entrenched into the popular imaginary for a long time. Given the cultural currency of the concept of Mother Earth, many ecologists and environmentalists have fairly uncritically embraced the personification as a framework to pursue their objectives. For example, the well-known radical environmentalist group Earth First! uses the idea of defending Mother Earth as their primary ‘mission statement’, while radical ecologist James Lovelock put forward the Gaia Hypothesis in 1979. Indeed, even more contemporary activist groups, like Greenpeace (Weyler 2019) and Extinction Rebellion (Scialom 2020) commonly, and often casually, invoke the imagery of Mother Earth as part of their campaigns. However, while gender has been used, somewhat symbolically, to pursue green causes, gender/sexuality has not been adequately theorised or

The Gaia Hypothesis by James Lovelock (1979) ‘The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts … [Gaia can be defined] as a complex entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and soil; the totality constituting a feedback of cybernetic systems which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.’ (1979, 9).

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considered in mainstream green scholarship or reflexively considered in activism and policy (MacGregor and Lee 2010). Similarly, despite the repeated invocation of earth mothers and Mother Earth, feminists in general have not really had much to say about the environment (with the exception of ecological feminists – or ‘ecofeminists’). Popularised in the late 1970s and peaking in the late 1980s/early 1990s, ecofeminism is a fractured and diverse movement. Early ecofeminism somewhat replicates the divisions within feminism, largely forming around the radical and socialist strands. Closely associated with radical feminism, affinity ecofeminists consider women to hold a privileged standpoint and relationship with the natural world which they argue is a consequence of women’s essential/biological roles, most notably because of childbirth and motherhood. In light of this, affinity ecofeminists point to masculine-driven social, political and economic traditions (patriarchy) as being accountable for environmental degradation (see, for example, Griffin 1978). Similarly, socialist or social ecofeminists (see, for example, Mies and Shiva 1993) recognise patriarchy as foundational to environmental ills. However, they tend to focus on economic inequalities, highlighting both capitalism and patriarchy as the dual systems which depend upon the joint exploitation of the environment and women. As such, socialist/social ecofeminists regard the relationship between women and nature as rooted in their joint oppression under systems of patriarchal capitalism and, thus, extend their analysis to include issues of class. Despite these differences, ecofeminism, which generally speaking tends to focus on women’s relationship with nature, recognises that gendered domination is inextricably linked to the exploitation of nature and envisions women playing a key role in solving environmental problems. While ecofeminists have been critical of other green scholars and activists for their interpretations of a feminised nature, arguing that it reproduces gender logics where macho protectors are called into action to protect a fragile Mother Earth (Collard and Contrucci 1988), sometimes in a militaristic way (Seager 1999), ecofeminists have themselves celebrated the supposed relationship between women and nature. This celebration, however, has attracted criticism from some feminists, including other ecofeminists, who take issue with the idea that women and nature are essentially or biologically connected (Leach 2007; Plumwood 2002). Broadly speaking, (eco)feminists critical of the dominant ecofeminist position present three main arguments. First, they recognise that the supposed relationship between nature and women has historically led to women being excluded from the public sphere. For example, women have historically been thought of as too close to nature (read: primitive and emotional) to participate in politics and the public sphere more broadly (Plumwood 2002). Second, they argue that links drawn among femininity, motherhood and nature function to suggest that women have a set of ‘essential’ characteristics (for a good summary of essentialist understandings of gender see Chapter 6). In other words, it suggests that women are naturally more caring due to their biological/reproductive role as mothers 182

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and therefore best placed to ‘save the natural world’ from environmental degradation and destruction (Braidotti et al. 1994). Essentialism is problematic as by casting gendered behaviour as natural or biological, gendered bodies are constrained and constructed to behave in particular ways or risk marginalisation. Moreover, a behaviour which is constructed as biological is rendered immutable; therefore, the social relations which have been derived from these discourses of natural gendered behaviour, whereby women, by and large, have been subordinated, are also considered to be part of the natural order. Finally, essentialism works to over-generalise the experiences of women, which leads to the third critique, which is the charge of universalism. The argument that women have a special bond with the natural world disregards other identity intersections such as culture, age, sexuality, class and geographical location and implies that men do not have the same propensity to care for the natural world (Leach 1992). Ecofeminism and international environmental politics in the 1990s Despite the arguments outlined above, international environmental governance has occasionally courted the ostensibly ecofeminist idea that women have a special bond with nature (for a good summary of ecofeminism and policy see Buckingham 2004). In 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) was held. This conference (commonly referred to as the Rio Earth Summit after the city where it took place) was something of a landmark. It was here that the concept of sustainable development was formally adopted by the international community. Numerous policy-informing documents were produced as a result of this summit, including The Rio Declaration and Agenda 21, both of which remain relevant today. Women’s involvement in the preparatory process leading up to UNCED was fairly substantial. For example, in preparation for UNCED and underpinned by the ecofeminist informed Women, Environment, Development (WED)2 approach, the World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet was held in Miami. In addition, synchronous with UNCED itself, women organised the separate forum Planeta Femea; where attendees presented a summary of the Women’s Action Agenda 21. This document highlighted that women are the main victims of poverty and environmental degradation, that industrialisation has affected the health of women and their families, that free market capitalism is the root of environmental damage and that the relationship between developmental and environmental crises was a consequence of militarism, nuclear threat, growing economic inequalities, violation of human rights and the subordination of women (Braidotti et al. 1994, 5). Critics have argued that the WED and ecofeminist activities prior to and during UNCED were problematic in that they upheld dualistic gender binaries and universalised ‘women’s concerns’, along the normalised lines of (earth) mothers and pacifists. This is notable through the separation 183

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Rosi Braidotti et al.’s comments on Planeta Femea Involved in the processes leading up to the 1992 UN Conference, Rosi Braidotti et al. commented: As the UNCED process unfolded the two of us who attended the global forum … became convinced that even though the women participating had achieved and unprecedented common position critical to the dominant development model and visions for the future, at Planeta Femea they did not always avoid the dangers of reproducing patterns of domination, dualism and the reversal of old hierarchies in the process. (1994, 5)

And that: … there was a masked tendency to emphasize commonalities between women, resulting in an implicitly essentialist position – women as closer to nature than men – as the basis for a collective decision. Some women did see themselves as better environmental managers than men, and as privileged knowers about the environment, but this position was not propagated in a naive way, rather there was a more or less tacit assumption that women see themselves as nurturers of the planet, as people who ‘care’. (1994, 104)

between the ‘male-stream’- and ‘female’-derived Agenda 21 documents and conferences surrounding the sustainable development debate. Discourses that valorised the women/nature relationship, typified through WED and the ecofeminist approach, were common during UNCED itself. Indeed, introducing the conference, then-Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, Maurice Strong, commented on the ‘special relationship’ women have with the environment (Bretherton 1998, 89), reinforcing the idea that women have a particular understanding of, and higher propensity to care for, the natural world. This special position vis-à-vis the environment has been reinforced at various points throughout UN sustainable development discourses since UNCED in 1992. Echoing the sentiments of ecofeminists, one reading of ‘special’ concerns a fundamental assumption that women have a privileged knowledge of the natural world due to their ‘natural’ inclination towards motherhood or their specific forms of labour, such as farming, which have traditionally led them to work more closely with nature. For example, throughout the sustainable development discourses, women’s participation is called for on the basis that they have particular knowledge regarding environmental issues and can, thus, offer crucial insights into sustainability. Overall, it is difficult to say the extent to which (eco)feminists influenced the sustainable development policy agenda since the early 1990s. At a superficial level, ecofeminist sentiments were undeniably loud and clear. However, this acknowledgement of women in environmental management may well have more to do with the fact it reinforces already established gender ideologies (namely the woman-nature nexus) rather than as a result of the efforts of feminist lobbyists. It is also important to note that – even 184

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Examples of UN policy which highlights women as crucial to sustainable development • • •

•

Women have a vital role in environmental management and development. Their full participation is therefore essential to achieve sustainable development (UNCED 1992). Young people and women around the world have played a prominent role in galvanizing communities into recognizing their responsibilities to future generations (United Nations General Assembly 1997). We are committed to ensuring that women’s empowerment, emancipation and gender equality are integrated in all the activities encompassed within Agenda 21, the Millennium Development Goals and the Plan of Implementation of the Summit (Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development 2002). Goal 5: Achieve Gender Equality and Empower All Women and Girls (Sustainable Development Goals 2015).

though Agenda 21 explicitly noted that women should be involved in environmental decision-making, and despite wider gender mainstreaming efforts in the UN – women continue to be underrepresented in environmental decision-making roles (Terry 2009) and in policy-informing organisations like the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (Women Environment and Development Organisation [WEDO] 2013). Queer ecology With gendered and sexualised discourses so influential in shaping both non-feminist and explicitly feminist environmentalism/ecologism, it is unsurprising that gender and sexuality scholars have sought to nuance and critique green approaches. One avenue for this has been queer ecology. Queer ecology is an approach that looks at the relationship between the organisation of sexuality and ecology, arguing that processes of naturalisation and eroticisation are crucial to reinforcing all kinds of discrimination. For example, like critical ecofeminists, queer ecologists such as Gaard (1997) highlight the ways in which the construction of women and people of colour as closer to nature works as a barrier to citizenship and justice. Queer ecologists also highlight that, somewhat paradoxically, the construction of sexual minorities as against nature similarly works as a barrier to citizenship and justice. Finally, queer ecologists demonstrate that the eroticisation of the nature (in other words, seeing nature as akin to wild and untamed sexuality) has justified the colonisation of spaces and acquisition of resources under the guise of various ‘civilising missions’. Even though nature is presented in these incoherent ways, the ideology of nature, according to queer theorists, works to entrench the marginalisation and exploitation of certain groups as well as nature itself, while reproducing White cis-gender male and heterosexual privilege. Queer ecologists also argue that the continued exploitation of nature is located within heteronormativity, as concepts of love and care are 185

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restrained to heterosexual kinship ties. They problematise the justifications for protecting the environment that resort to encouraging individuals to preserve (some of) the natural world for their children and their children’s children. Queer ecologists argue that undermining this heteronormative justification for protecting the planet would work to extend an ethic of care to those not biologically related or even species related. For example, queer ecologist Sandilands (1997, 2002, 2005) equates the care for those with HIV/AIDS to a potentially more effective ecological sensibility. Noting that care for those suffering from HIV/AIDS is often undertaken by those who belong to the LGBTQIA+ community rather than by biologically associated family members, Sandilands (2005) argues that this form of care can be transposed to environmental illness/degradation. This ethic of care is denaturalised and can therefore extend beyond those entities that are genetically related.

CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS As noted above, and elsewhere (Foster 2021), feminist and gender-based interventions in environmental politics and ecology have wavered between, and been troubled by, profound questions relating to gender essentialism. This tension has been central to these debates since at least the 1990s, as feminist and gender scholars and activists played, often strategically (Braidotti 1994; MacGregor 2017), with essentialising constructions of women as special knowers of nature, to make a case for women’s meaningful inclusion in environmental decision-making. As a result, interventions from feminist and gender scholars on environment/ ecology have tended towards either reproducing gender ideologies that present women as closer to nature or, conversely, challenging these essentialist assumptions. The latter, then, has found a green expression in queer ecology where multiple oppressions, including the oppression of what is perceived as natural world, are inextricably linked through the ideology of Nature (Gaard 1997). This tension continues to work as a marker distinguishing contemporary trends in gender/sexuality and environmental/ecological debates. Most notably, two emerging trends in recent environmental and ecological politics – namely the Anthropocene and climate justice – are illustrative of this tension, with the former becoming a focal point for queer interventions at the conceptual level and the latter tending towards more binary gender logics in its campaigns. It is to these two trends that this chapter now turns. The Anthropocene To mark the 20th anniversary of UNCED, in 2012, the UN hosted the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (more commonly referred to as Rio+20). Although widely publicised and much 186

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anticipated, Rio+20 was widely regarded as a disappointment, not least by the Women’s Major Group for sustainable development (2012). It was felt that Rio+20 was short on new ideas and only regurgitated what was set out in Agenda 21 (Clemoncon 2012). However, while Rio+20 arguably lacked innovation, there was one demonstrable shift in the framing of sustainable development. This was most prominently captured through the short film used to open the conference, Welcome to the Anthropocene (anthropocene.info 2012). The Anthropocene, a term coined by scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer at the turn of the millennium, refers to the idea that humans have had such a profound impact on the planet that there is a case for the species to be considered a significant geological force in its own right. In casting humans as a geological force, akin to volcanoes or meteor strikes, culpable for ecological destruction, the concept of the Anthropocene arguably blurs the distinction between humans and nature while, simultaneously, responsibilising the human species in an effort to encourage a more developed environmental consciousness and better environmental management (Dalby 2015). In other words, by classing humans as a geological force, conceptualising the Anthropocene arguably erodes the distinction between nature and culture that so many environmentalists and ecologists, including some ecofeminists and queer ecologists, have problematised. It also squarely places the blame for environmental degradation, and the salvation of the planet, in the hands of the human species: ‘you did this, so you clean it up’. But, who is ‘you’ in this appeal? It is here that feminist and queer scholars have offered a number of interesting interventions. For example, Braidotti (2016) presents the creative ways that the Anthropos is called into question when we conceptualise the Anthropocene. Braidotti argues that identifying the Anthropos – not insignificantly gendered as ‘Man’ – as the culprit for environmental degradation exposes ‘Man’ ‘as the representative of a hierarchical and violent species’ (2016, 25). Simultaneously, the ‘crisis of the Anthropos’ results in a blurring of the human and other-than-human where the former is now characterised as a destructive, but natural, force and the latter as an overt extension of the political arena (traditionally the reserve of the ‘Man’). Braidotti recognises the blurring of the boundaries as a decentring of the Anthropos with the potential to enlist, and empower, the other-thanhuman in future (political) projects. Similarly, Gibson-Graham (2011) considers the Anthropocene as an ‘experiment’ where it is necessary to think beyond hierarchically organised binary dualisms like human/ non-human and economy/ecology, to include other-than-humans in politics, policy and planning as a response to the ecological emergency (2011, 1). While some feminist and queer scholars embrace the Anthropocene as an opportunity for reflection and change, others are critical of its implications. For example, Crist (2013) and Bauman (2015) argue that rather than displacing the Anthropos, the concept actually places humans front and 187

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centre. Crist (2013) notes how Anthropocene thinking presents humans as the cause and solution to environmental ills and remarks that these ‘solutions’ only go so far as adapting to climate change with a view to sustaining human enterprise (rather than human and other-than-human well-being). This centralisation, according to Crist, encourages rather than challenges the human domination of nature. Bauman (2015) similarly highlights that the Anthropocene constructs a narrative of human mastery over nature, which she identifies as the very assumption that has led to the exploitation of what is perceived nature/natural. Further, Bauman suggests that this mastery was only ever a myth that humans were able to construct while the environment remained hospitable (namely during the short period of the Holocene). In the absence of an accommodating environment, as has been the case more often than not throughout geological history, it is impossible to conjure this notion of human dominion. In light of this, Bauman similarly calls for a queer decentring of the human species in favour of acknowledging the natures’ agency, although unlike Braidotti and Gibson-Graham, she sees this as call as being distinct from, and a rejection of, the Anthropocene narrative. Further, moving beyond acknowledging the anthropocentrism of the Anthropocene, scholars such as Todd (2015) importantly highlight the Anthropocene as a universalising and hegemonic discourse embedded in, and sustained by, White privilege. Todd argues that Anthropocene thinking, at least in current form, presents a narrow and racialized lens to project outrage over environmental degradation (also see Pulido [2018] on racism and the Anthropocene). Instead, she proposes that multiple lenses are necessary to make sense of social-ecological dynamics; recognising that ‘Indigenous thought and practice – including art – as critical sites of refraction of the current whiteness of Anthropocene discourses’ (252). A further, largely queer and post-humanist, intervention into the Anthropocene debates seeks to move beyond the term altogether. Most prominently, Haraway (2015) argues that our main task should be to make the Anthropocene era as short as possible and, as such, concepts that go further than describing the current epoch, instead imagining the future, are necessary. The concept she puts forward is the Chthulucene, which she describes as ‘entangl[ing] myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in – assemblages – including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as – humus’ (2015, 160). Haraway posits ‘Make Kin Not Babies!’ as the slogan for the Chthulucene to acknowledge the potential of recognising kinship apart from biological and species ties to include ‘all critters’. Contemporary feminists, she argues, having been central to denaturalising the supposed links between ‘sex and gender, race and sex, race and nation, class and race, gender and morphology, sex and reproduction, and reproduction and composing persons’, are best placed to now ‘exercise leadership in imagination, theory, and action to unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species’ (2015, 160).

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Climate justice Climate justice is about acknowledging and rectifying injustices that emerge in relation to climate change. It seeks both distributive justice, so the costs and benefits of climate change and climate policy are equitably shared, and procedural justice, in that participation and leadership in environmental decision-making is representative and fair (Perkins 2018, 349). However, while climate justice is presented as a framework to help realise the social dimensions of climate change and related initiatives, gender justice has only been a marginal concern for many climate justice scholars, advocates and activists (Terry 2009, 6). Similar to the broader environmental justice approach, climate justice tends to be understood in terms of the environmental inequities that arise in relation to race and poverty. This is largely due to the socio-spatial methods used by scholars to (literally) map climate and environmental injustices. As different income and racial groups tend to be geographically segregated, environmental inequities are geographically visible. However, as women are more likely to experience environmental injustices at the level of the household or the body, they are not easily mapped or accounted for (Bell 2016, 2; Buckingham and Kulcur 2009). This has meant that, by and large, gender has historically been neglected in climate and environmental justice activism and practice. Many feminists have sought to rectify this, recognising gender justice to be not just an important component of climate justice, but also a requisite for climate justice. For example, at the 2007 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, the Gender and Climate Change Network presented a position paper entitled ‘No Climate Justice, Without Gender Justice’ (Terry 2009). In this spirit, feminist and gender-based work in this area offers three main contributions. First, these feminists acknowledge that the consequences of climate change are experienced unevenly and often disproportionately affect women (Bell 2016; Terry 2009). Second, they recognise the importance of considering gender when making climate-related policies (Bell 2016). Third, feminist scholars have tended to highlight the importance of intersectionality in achieving climate justice, not solely in terms of rectifying inequalities intensified and caused by climate change, but actually as key to mitigating climate change (Perkins 2018). Taking each of these points in turn, a climate justice approach that pays attention to gender is based on the assumption that vulnerabilities and risks associated with environmental degradation are gendered. This is, in part, related to the vulnerabilities and risks that are a consequence of poverty. The poorer people are, the less able they are to protect themselves against climate change threats, due to limited resources, less access to insurance and restricted mobility. As poor women tend to be the ‘poorest of the poor’, their vulnerability is more pronounced than their male counterparts. In addition, culturally defined gender norms also result in inequities in bearing the burden of climate change and environmental

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degradation. To name a few, the gendered divisions of labour, norms around access to public space and mobility may all lead to gender specific vulnerabilities (Terry 2009, 7). For example, where a norm operates to limit women’s access to public space, they are less likely to remove themselves from environmentally degraded areas or sacrifice zones and are therefore more likely to experience the health and economic costs of having to stay in an area experiencing degradation. As well as acknowledging the gendered dimensions of climate change risks and burdens, a feminist approach to climate justice relatedly highlights the importance of considering gender when developing climate change policy and initiatives. This is because perceptions of the environment and environmental needs are mediated through gendered experiences. To borrow Bell’s (2016) example, in places where women are more likely to use public transport than men, green policies to improve public transport provision are much more useful than those that aim to green the private car industry. In addition, gender identity can influence how climate change risks are perceived. Terry (2009, 8), for instance, draws attention to a study of South African farmers that showed most women farmers were concerned about heavy rain, while most male farmers were concerned about drought. This was due to the way farming practices were divided along gender lines within the study community, with women being primarily involved in agriculture and men in livestock cultivation. It is reasonable to assume that this differential in understanding risks would lead to differentiated policy priorities and, as such, if women are underrepresented in decision-making, it will likely have serious consequences in relation to women’s livelihoods and well-being. Finally, many feminists involved in climate justice emphasise the importance of intersectionality. This is perhaps unsurprising given the wealth of work developed to explore and problematise the racial and income-related inequities related to climate change. Feminists contributing to this field do not see gender as trumping other identity intersections, but rather as another social aspect of climate change that must not be ignored (Perkins 2018). This intersectional approach seeks to achieve acknowledgement and reparation for the inequitable distributions of risks and burdens associated with climate change, which bears in mind multiple identity intersections. However, as well as this, it also takes into account women’s situated experiences and cultural expertise as a way to better protect the environment for all its inhabitants.

CONCLUSION Environmentalism/ecologism has become increasingly prominent within international policy-making activity. The environmentalism adopted at the international level, notably though sustainable development and more recently the Anthropocene, has brought with it gender logics that feminise the Earth and make assumptions about the relationships women (and, often in absence, men) have with the natural environment. 190

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This chapter has mapped interventions that highlight the ways in which these logics are problematic, even when they are used to justify women’s participation as crucial to environmental decision-making. To that end, the chapter traced the interventions made by feminists and queer theorists in relation to green politics since the 1970s, ending with a discussion of the emerging scholarship on the Anthropocene and climate justice. These two trends demonstrate that the issue of essentialism continues to underpin gender/sexuality and environment scholarship and activism. While debates around the Anthropocene have tended towards a posthumanist and queer approach, scholarly work on gender and climate justice has, conversely, been more akin to the traditional ecofeminist approaches outlined at the beginning of the chapter. For example, reminiscent of the WED interventions in the 1990s, climate justice scholars and activists work very much in the language of men and women as two distinct and fairly coherent categories, where the latter is particularly vulnerable to the climate emergency and, sometimes, demonstrates a special set of skills to mitigate or adapt to climate and environmental degradation. On the other hand, those scholars animated by the Anthropocene critically explore Anthropocene logics to challenge the categories of, and distinctions between, humans and other-than-humans from an anti-essentialist perspective. The project, for these scholars, is to trouble common assumptions about ‘humans’ and ‘nature’, opening up multiple paradigms as a basis for a more radical and diverse environmental politics.

Discussion questions 1. What is the value, if any, of associating women with nature in relation to environmental politics and policy-making? 2. What are the main fault lines between ecofeminist and queer ecology approaches to the environment/ecology? 3. How far is a queer ecology approach useful for re-contextualising relations between humans and the natural environment? Notes 1. Throughout this chapter, I have used the terms ecologism and environmentalism interchangeably. However, it is important to note that, although they share much in common, they are distinctive in a number of ways. Most notably, ecologism more often relates to demands for radical changes in order to preserve the natural environment whereas environmentalism tends to be more reformist and conservative in its environmental agenda. 2. The Women and Development (WED) approach is a feminist approach to development. Feminist approaches to development include the Women in Development approach (WID), the Women and Development (WAD) approach, and the Gender and Development (GAD) approach – amongst others. The WED 191

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approach, unlike the others listed, sought to look at the environment and development specifically in the context of increasing concerns about environmental degradation in the 1980s and 1990s.

Further reading Buckingham, Susan. 2004. “Ecofeminism in the Twenty-First Century.” The Geographical Journal 170 (2): 146–154. Haraway, Donna. 2015. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (1): 159–165. Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2011. “A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 18 (1): 1–21. Leach, Melissa. 2007. “Earth Mother Myths and Other Ecofeminist Fables: How a Strategic Notion Rose and Fell.” Development and Change 38 (1): 67–85. Perkins, Patricia. E. 2018. “Climate Justice, Gender and Intersectionality.” In The Routledge Handbook of Climate Justice, edited by Tahseen Jafry, 349–358. Abingdon: Routledge. References anthropocene.info. 2012. “Welcome to the Anthropocene.” Film. http:// vimeo.com/39048998 Bauman, Whitney. A. 2015. “Climate Weirding and Queering Nature: Getting beyond the Anthropocene.” Religions 6 (2): 742–754. Bell, Karen. 2016. “Bread and Roses: A Gender Perspective on Environmental Justice and Public Health.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 13 (10): 1–18. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. London: Cambridge University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2016. “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism.” In Anthropocene Feminism, edited by Richard Grusin, 21–48. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Braidotti, Rosi, Ewa Charkiewicz, Sabine Hausler and Saskia Wieringa. 1994. Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis. London: Zed Books. Bretherton, Charlotte. 1998. “Global Environmental Politics: Putting Gender on the Agenda?” Review of International Studies 24 (1): 85–100. Buckingham, Susan. 2004. “Ecofeminism in the Twenty-First Century.” The Geographical Journal 170 (2): 146–154. Buckingham, Susan and Rakibe Kulcur. 2009. “Gendered Geographies of Environmental Injustice.” Antipode 41 (4): 659–683. Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. 192

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Clemoncon, Raymond. 2012. “From Rio 1992 to Rio 2012 and Beyond: Revisiting the Role of Trade Rules and Financial Transfers for Sustainable Development.” Journal of Environment and Development 21 (1): 5–14. Collard, Andre and Joyce Contrucci. 1988. Rape of the Wild. London: The Women’s Press. Crist, Eileen. 2013. “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature.” Environmental Humanities 3 (1): 129–147. Dalby, Simon. 2015. “Framing the Anthropocene: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” The Anthropocene Review 3 (1): 33–51. Foster, Emma. 2021. “Ecofeminism Revisited: Critical Insights on Contemporary Environmental Governance.” Feminist Theory 22 (2): 190–205. Gaard, Greta. 1997. “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism.” Hypatia, 12 (1): 114–137. Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2011. “A Feminist Project of Belonging for the Anthropocene.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 18 (1): 1–21. Griffin, Susan. 1978. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books. Haraway, Donna. 2015. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (1): 159–165. Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development. 2002. https:// w w w.un.org /esa /sustdev/documents/ WSSD_ POI _ PD/ English / POI_PD.htm Leach, Melissa. 1992. “Gender and the Environment: Traps and Opportunities.” Development and Practice 2 (1): 12–22. Leach, Melissa. 2007. “Earth Mother Myths and Other Ecofeminist Fables: How a Strategic Notion Rose and Fell.” Development and Change 38 (1): 67–85. Lovelock, James E. 1979. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. New York: Oxford University Press. MacGregor, Sherilyn. 2017. “Gender and Environment: An Introduction.” In Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, edited by Sherilyn MacGregor. London: Routledge. MacGregor, Sherylin and Yoke-Lian Lee. 2010. “Plus Ça (Climate) Change, Plus C’est la Même (Masculinist) Chose: Gender Politics and the Discourses of Climate Change.” In The Politics of Gender: A Survey, edited by Yoke-Lian Lee, 83–101. London: Routledge. Mies, Maria and Vandana Shiva. 1993. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books. Perkins, Patricia. E. 2018. “Climate Justice, Gender and Intersectionality.” In The Routledge Handbook of Climate Justice, edited by Tahseen Jafry, 349–358. Abingdon: Routledge. Pulido, Laura. 2018. “Racism and the Anthropocene.” In Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, edited by Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero and Robert S. Emmett, 116–128. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 193

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Sandilands, Catriona. 1997. “Mother Earth, the Cyborg and the Queer: Ecofeminism and (More) Questions of Identity.” NWSA Journal 9 (3): 18–40. Sandilands, Catriona. 2002. “Lesbian Separatist Communities and the Experience of Nature: Toward a Queer Ecology.” Organisation and Environment 15 (2): 131–163. Sandilands, Catriona Mortimer. 2005. “Unnatural Passions?: Notes Toward a Queer Ecology.” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 9. www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue9/ sandilands. Scialom, Mike. 2020. “Multiple Arrests at Extinction Rebellion’s Oily Hands Day of Action in Cambridge with Mother Earth.” Cambridge Independent, 30 August. https://www.cambridgeindependent.co.uk/ news/multiple-arrests-at-extinction-rebellion-s-oily-hands-day-ofaction-in-cambridge-with-mother-earth-9121272/. Seager, Joni. 1999. “Patriarchal Vandalism: Militaries and the Environment.” In Dangerous Intersections, edited by Jael Silliman and Ynestra King, 163–188. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Sustainable Development Goals. 2015. ‘Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.’ https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda. Terry, Geraldine. 2009. “No Climate Justice Without Gender Justice: An Overview of the Issues.” Gender & Development 17 (1): 5–18 Todd, Zoe. 2015. “Indigenizing the Anthropocene.” In. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment and Epistemology, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, 241. London: Open Humanities Press. United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). 1992. “Agenda 21.” http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/ documents/Agenda21.pdf United Nations General Assembly. 1997. A/RES/S-19/2. See https://www. un.org/esa/dsd/dsd_aofw_mg/mg_integovedeci.shtml United Nations Women’s Major Group. 2012. “Final Statement on Rio+20 by Women’s Major Group.” http://uncsd2012.org/index.php? page=view&nr=1307+type=230&menu=38 Weyler, Rex. 2019. “Gaia: Everything on Earth is Connected.” Greenpeace. https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/24978/gaia-ecologyearth-is-connected-rex-weyler/ Women Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO). 2013. “Women’s Participation in UN Climate Negotiations: 2008–2012.” ht t p: //w w w.wedo.org /w p - content /uploads / WomenU N FC C C Participation2008-2012FINAL2013.pdf Yang, Yu and Shizhi Huang. 2018. “Religious Beliefs and Environmental Behaviors in China.” Religions 9 (3): 72–84.

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Global Governance Penny Griffin It is almost impossible to think about key elements of world politics without at least some engagement with the concept of ‘governance’. An awful lot of discussion about how the world does or should work (at multiple levels) depends on knowledge of how key ideas about, for example, development, peace, security, conflict, environmental change and so on can be captured and reproduced across local, regional and global spaces. If ‘governance’ is not in question, for example, it is not clear what can be known, realistically, about local and global practices of medical research and knowledge dissemination, peacebuilding and post-conflict recovery, labour standards, migration, climate change mitigation, human rights, preventing violent extremism or the breakdown of supply chains during a global pandemic. These each require an engagement with, and an understanding of, the governing logics of contemporary economic discourse and practice at community, national, regional and global levels. It is also difficult to ask meaningful questions about the governance of human, non-human and artificial life in the world today without some idea of what gender means in, and does to, our social, economic, political, environmental and cultural relationships. Gender and governance are intertwined at every level: gender shapes how decisions are made, who makes the decisions, who is the target of decision- and policy-making and how change is created and sustained in this world, and perhaps others. Although work on gender and global governance is extensive, both scholarly and policy-based engagements with global governance have often chosen to ignore the role that gender plays as a key feature of global governance. This chapter looks closely at gendered global governance, focusing especially on the necessary feminist work of understanding the embodied effects of power ‘within practices of governance’ (Hudson et al. 2017, 4, emphasis added). This requires understanding power as diffuse and entangled across a wide array (everyday, household, workplace and non-governmental) of governance practices, strategies and their effects. DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-17

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WHO/WHAT ACTS IN GLOBAL POLITICS AND HOW IS THIS GENDERED? The question of who or what ‘acts’ across the spaces of global governance is one not only of outlining who/what has agency in global politics, but also of deciding how human behaviour is shaped, and through what discursive constraints. A range of ‘instruments’ in contemporary global governance can be considered potential actors therein, including more intangible elements of human life, such as discourses, ideas, norms and values. As a concept but also a set of practices, the popularity and increased usage of the term ‘governance’ cannot be disconnected from the efforts of Global North actors, especially intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), to regulate corruption, especially the perceived corruption of governments in the Global South (Parpart 2007, 207). If the so-called Washington Consensus introduced developing countries to the dictates of ‘first generation’ neoliberal reform in the late 1970s (see below), the concept of ‘good governance’ has undoubtedly been the rallying cry of second generation, ‘Post-Washington Consensus’ governance discourse and practice since the 1990s. To use governance as a ‘thing’ defined by the Global North which is to be done better by the Global South is, of course, highly problematic. ‘Global governance’ as a term is, and has always been, intrinsically connected to the operations, practices and policy-making initiatives of international development, and it is worth noting how extensively, and hotly, debated the meanings, design and execution of governance have been over the years. While academic scholarship has interrogated the meanings and effects of global governance extensively and through a variety of perspectives, in policy-making circles, ‘“governance” has also emerged as a technical-cum-managerial discourse of international organisations and other policy coordination bodies’, with the makers of global public

Key instruments of global governance Intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) Civil society organisations (CSOs) Private actors Firms States Markets Institutions (physical and ideational) Communities Expert groups and fora Social movements Individuals Things we can’t touch: discourses, ideas, assumptions, beliefs, norms, values

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Key global governance organisations This is by no means an exhaustive list. Many, but not all, of the actors listed below are intergovernmental organisations (IGOs). Each has a specific remit and purpose and no organisation, forum or group works in the same way. •

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

The ‘development banks’, for example: the African Development Bank (ADF), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the China Development Bank (CDB), the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB), the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) and the New Development Bank (NDB). The European Union (EU) The Group of Seven (G7) The Group of Twenty (G20) The International Criminal Court (ICC) The International Labour Organization (ILO) The International Monetary Fund (IMF) The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) The United Nations: in particular, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), General Assembly Committees, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Millennium Project, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the World Food Programme. The World Bank Group The World Health Organisation (WHO) The World Trade Organisation (WTO)

policy often fixated on ‘efficient problem solving, transparency and (more latterly) stakeholder accountability’ (Brassett and Tsingou 2011, 2). The development of gendered neoliberal governmentality in contemporary global governance Much debate surrounds the meanings, uses and perceived impacts of the term ‘neoliberalism’. Neoliberalism is so significant in thinking about global governance today because it has come to dominate the economic, administrative and ideational practices of a variety of governance actors in the 20th century and beyond. A slippery concept, as Springer et al. note, neoliberalism is often used indiscriminately and pejoratively (but without great clarity) to identify a ‘seemingly ubiquitous set of marketorientated policies’ responsible for ‘a wide range of social, political, ecological and economic problems’ (2016, 27–28). A biopolitical approach articulates neoliberalism as thought practice and emphasises the ways in which technologies of discipline and regulation are experienced by bodies (see, for example, Dean 2014; Griffin 2020; Richter 2018). These ‘technologies’ might be discourses, markets, laws, institutions and/or organisations. They might also be particular ideas about ‘development’, ‘security’, ‘peace’ and ‘knowledge’, which come to form a ‘common sense’, or a set of assumptions, about what people can and should be expected to achieve, or 197

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how they should behave under conditions of market capitalism. Different regimes, locations, actors and/or practices of governance adopt neoliberal measures in varying and distinct ways. Feminist work has been particularly effective in highlighting, and challenging, the gendered governmentality of neoliberal discourses as they work across and through global governance structures, practices and mechanisms. Neoliberal governmentality, which is the embodiment and reproduction of practices of neoliberal governance, cannot be assumed to be evenly spread throughout the world but is undoubtedly widespread, commonplace and impactful. Neoliberal discourse, as a descendant of a tradition of Western classical and neoclassical economic thought, is highly culturally specific, predicated on the expansion of Western capitalism through the ‘opening’ of national economies to the global monetary flows of Western financial capitalism under the guise of ‘globalisation’ (or, more accurately, neoliberal globalisation). Some of the key voices in the neoliberal globalisation thesis have included key multilateral organisations (such as the World Bank, the OECD, the WTO, the IMF and the UN), private actors and corporations (Goldman Sachs, Nike and the Gates Foundation, for example), national governments and non-governmental organisations. Neoliberal actors regularly present the ‘liberalisation and integration of global markets as “natural” phenomena that advance individual liberty and material progress in the world’ (Steger 2004, 5). In particular, the liberalisation of trade and the opening of development economies to global finance have been advocated as emancipatory for poor people (particularly across Post-Washington Consensus governance discourse, discussed below, with regard to the emancipatory opportunities presented for poor women).

Neoliberalism: a pervasive set of ideas, or discourse, informing development economics and policymaking, based on the assumed centrality of marketisation, privatisation, deregulation and flexibilisation. Although there is little definitional agreement, neoliberalism today has come to represent a socioeconomic, political fusion of liberal government with capitalism and the primacy of market institutions. Neoliberal globalisation: a type of (pro) globalisation discourse and also a way of seeing the world based on the assumed centrality of the ‘opening up’ (through marketisation, liberalisation and industrialisation) of national economies to world monetary flows. Neoliberal globalism: the dominant ideology of neoliberal globalisation discourse, presenting globalisation’s ‘triumphs’ (the liberalisation and integration of world markets) as ‘natural’ and progressive phenomena. As espoused by global governance actors, neoliberal discourse draws from neoclassical economic theory and revolves around four central ideas: • A confidence in the market (marketisation) as the mechanism by which societies should be made to distribute their resources (although market imperfections may hamper distributive patterns – remove these and the ‘allocative efficiency’ of the market is restored). • The use of private finance (in place of public spending) in public projects (privatisation). • Deregulation, such that the removal of tariff barriers and subsidies ensures that the market is freed from the potential tyranny of nation state intervention and capital is granted optimal mobility. • A commitment to flexibilisation, which refers to the ways in which production is organised in mass consumption societies (that is, dynamically and flexibly).

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A post-Second World War liberal international order was built, ostensibly, to mitigate the incentives for conflict and disarray in global politics: as the history of contemporary global governance shows, global peace, security and economics are never easily separated, and the instrumentalisation of global security has also required the embedding of the liberal development of poorer countries. In many ways, international ‘development’ and its operations, which can be argued to be about alleviating the potential security threats posed by unstable, ‘underdeveloped’ countries through ‘development assistance’ (see Duffield 2002 in Khalid 2016), have constituted the guiding force of global governance in the 20th century and beyond. As feminist scholars have noted, while gender is rarely ‘officially’ articulated as a central category in the design of 20th century liberal and neoliberal economic restructuring, (racialised) gender features heavily across discourses of ‘good governance’ and ‘development’, guiding ideas about, for example, ‘appropriate’ political order, ‘progress’ and ‘good’ governance. At the same time, the universalising of particular political and economic systems has privileged certain knowledges, and bodies, over others (see, among others, Agathangelou and Ling 2004, 2009, Khalid 2016, 2017). From Washington to Post-Washington Consensus A notable feature of the global economic/development order created in the 20th century has been the creation and imposition of economic restructuring programmes across developing countries, under the guise of the so-called Washington Consensus. This is both a form of development strategy and a body of so-called instruments for economic policy-making that emerged during the late 1970s, constituting the primary policymaking strategy for economic ‘development’ and the economic ‘common sense’ of its era. It is named the ‘Washington’ Consensus because, rightly or wrongly, it is perceived to have been designed from the location of the US Treasury and other US economic agencies, US-based think tanks and key policy-makers in the central Washington development organisations, and the IMF and World Bank (though Latin American policy-makers also played a major role in designing economic reform in this era). The Consensus itself was concerned with ensuring macroeconomic stabilisation and growth and was focused on embedding the market, in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), in liberalising trade and in and contracting the state and its machinery across national economies. Policy prescriptions included, for example, economic deregulation, trade liberalisation, the privatisation of formerly state-owned enterprises, and the reduction and/or redirection of public spending. Although economists have debated the ‘neoliberalism’ of the Washington Consensus (see, for example, Williamson 2002), the term has become synonymous with free market fundamentalism and policy rigidity. The structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that this period produced have also been heavily criticised for their damaging gendered 199

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effects (see, for example, Ali 2003; Elson 1995; Sadasivam 1997; Tsikata 1996). While the governance of development has, since the early 1990s, undergone some significant changes, it would be a mistake to assume that the foundational neoliberal rationality informing the Washington Consensus has failed or disappeared. The second-generation reform of the so-called Post-Washington Consensus (PWC), taking shape most clearly in the early to mid-1990s, has perhaps taken better care to integrate the social and economic dimensions of development (in many cases by focusing on the concept of ‘inequality’). No less market-centred than its predecessors, PWC global governance has been more concerned to acknowledge and remedy the so-called market imperfections that have exacerbated (or created, as some might argue) various forms of social inequality. Feminists note, however, the persistence of ‘stereotypical depictions of gender relations and non-western cultures’ reproduced across PWC discourse, with social concerns ‘either pushed to the margins’, or defined as ‘constraints’ on governance policy (Bergeron 2003, 415).

GENDER AND THE WHO/WHAT/HOW OF (GLOBAL) GOVERNANCE As Rai notes, approaching and engaging with the concept of ‘governance’ requires not only a commitment to engendering our analyses, but also to paying ‘close attention to issues of South/North inequalities’ (2008, 19). As such, it is especially important for feminist approaches that they think about ‘governance’ differently to mainstream accounts, including those who focus only on certain types of actors (states and organisations) and the influence they exert. By unabstracting governance through centring the (frequently unacknowledged) role of both gender and women (often colonised, raced women) at the heart of global systems of capitalism, feminists have paid very close attention to a huge array of governance concerns and practices. Today, feminist research on global governance represents a truly expansive and diverse body of scholarship, and feminist engagements with who or what acts in global politics have drawn from a number of, often intersecting, methods and approaches. These have included empirical, historical, critical, poststructural, queer and postcolonial perspectives.1 By engaging critically with the normative and discursive contestations that animate different thematic and issue areas, feminist research has also generated purposive strategies for influencing instruments of global governance (Rai 2008, 24). In ‘analysing the constitutive parts of governance’, feminist analyses ‘deepen, historicise and engender’ debates on global governance, such as the governance of markets or the changing role of the state (Rai 2008, 24). Early feminist analyses of governance emerged, Rai and Waylen argue, to map how women’s activism was engaging, and changing, institutions of governance, and with what policy outcomes (2008, 4). Here, researchers looked especially at women 200

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within and outside governance organisations and examined struggles both around gender-based policy and gendered policy exclusions (Griffin 2019, 638–639. For an excellent collected analysis of strategies for advancing feminist agendas in and across global governance, see also Caglar et al. 2013). Much feminist research retains this commitment to understanding and articulating strategies for resisting and challenging the inequalities embedded in uneven political, economic and social relations and the systems of governance these support and sustain. (Gendered) governance as embodied practice Gender matters in and to the politics of global governance not least because, although often described in the slightly limiting terms of international cooperation and multilateralism, global governance – its structures, actors, processes and practices – are always embodied. This means that global governance has real, tangible and practical effects on people’s lives. Outside of feminist research, however, academic and policy engagements with ‘governance’ have often ignored ‘both gender and power’, perpetuating a general failure to interrogate ‘the gendered, complex and fluid nature of governance’ (Parpart 2007, 207). The ‘official’ discourses of many IGOs have remained resoundingly ungendered, referring to ‘gender’ only where easily quantified gains in women’s formal sector ‘productivity’ can be calculated and ascertained (Griffin 2010, 88). Economic development policy-making, for example, is produced along governance chains of command (often bureaucratically embedded) and disseminated to ‘developing country’ governments and communities. Developing country governments themselves frequently play a significant part in policy design, as was the case with structural adjustment policymaking in the 1980s, although community ‘buy-in’ to this policy-making cannot be assumed. The policies produced contain certain expectations about what behaviour is desirable and advantageous for the progress of a nation-state (assuming one exists) or particular project. The neoliberal revolution also ensured that a fairly limited set of policy parameters are currently available to economists and bureaucrats, who are very often trained in the methods and practices of Economics departments in the Global North. Development projects are nearly always evaluated according to their success in generating economic growth, understood along neoclassical economic theory lines as infinitely possible and desirable. Today, successful development strategy and its assessment is almost always measured in terms of national economic growth, which is itself a measure of market productivity. A national economy’s growth, in the conventional sense, is signalled by increases in the value of the production of economic goods and services. This is, of course, also premised on a model of energy-intensive forms of production and distribution and works alongside the assumption of ‘ever increasing levels of consumption’ (Gill 2015, 15). While ecological evidence shows that this model is unsustainable (Gill 2015, 16), neoliberal governance has been relentless 201

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in its promotion of a conventional economic growth model. This deceptively simple economic growth logic forms the very basis of how neoliberal governance mechanisms (and the policy-making they produce) understand policy success. In 2021, the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), an independent grouping within the World Bank Group, 2 published its ‘Project Performance Assessment Report’ on ‘First, Second, and Third Poverty Reduction Support Credits’ in Côte d’Ivoire (IEG 2021). This was a project initiated in 2013 ‘to support a balanced reform program that would strengthen public sector governance and administration and facilitate private sector-led growth’ in a country marked by ‘political instability and civil strife’, especially from the late 1990s (IEG 2021, vii). The three ‘pillars’ of the policy were: (1) ‘good governance, transparency, and enhanced public financial management’; (2) ‘improvement of the business climate and higher private investment’ and; (3) ‘strengthening potential economic growth sectors, focusing on energy and several agricultural subsectors (cocoa, cashews, and rice)’ (IEG 2021, vii). The report notes Côte d’Ivoire’s ‘underlying issues of inequality and political tension’, while the project itself prioritised fiscal and economic pillars alone. ‘Gender’, the report notes, ‘was addressed only via one indicator’, which was related to the ‘formation of women’s cooperatives’ under the third pillar of the project and ‘unrelated to any prior actions’ (IEG 2021, 32–33, 76). The ‘assumption that enhanced growth in agricultural crops would benefit lower-income rural areas was implicit’ but was not demonstrated in the project’s results (IEG 2021, 33, 76). This incidental approach to gender in global governance is especially noteworthy because feminist work has shown how often women in development are assumed to benefit from the economic growth generated from project policy-making, while policy-making itself does not systematically engage with or account for local level inequalities. Gendered questions of access to economic and market resources, infrastructure, education and community support are wide-reaching, affecting people, communities and economies in profound and ongoing ways. The central position allocated to economic growth in governance discourse, achievable through market liberalisation and expansion, sits uncomfortably against the exploitation of bodies on which economic growth often depends. Cheap, highly flexibilised, gendered and racialised labour remains the fuel to the market fire on which massive rates of global production and consumption depend. Thus, a significant casualty of the contemporary global political economy has been the human rights of its most expendable bodies. Where ‘the agendas of regulation and rights conflict, as in other areas of international governance, rights tend to be subordinated to market imperatives’ (Benería et al. 2012, 26), and so the expansion of capitalism and liberalisation of trade have integrated economies ‘without protecting local production, people’s livelihoods, gender equality, and human rights’ (True 2012, 77). Feminists have revealed the extent to which conventional development discourse and strategy (including economic policy-making, poverty 202

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alleviation strategy, project lending, public-private partnerships, and the policies and practices of debt management) might be built to engineer apparently value neutral market growth but depend on gendered foundations (extracting maximum benefits from market participants, to borrow Benería et al.’s wording, in gendered ways and through gendered assumptions). Common strategies and assumptions include relying on women to lift impoverished households out of poverty through taking on menial, low-paying, highly insecure jobs (in the case of Côte d’Ivoire, through employment in the cashew sector) while also undertaking the bulk of household and caregiving labour. Or assumptions like those made in forming World Bank Côte d’Ivoire policy that generalised, ungendered, policies on ‘good governance’ and fiscal management are enough to generate growth for everyone, and that the reproductive/household/caring economy will take care of itself. Similarly, assumptions that the state and its apparatus are not somehow gendered formations, characterised by unequal relations of power, and that markets somehow avoid rewarding hierarchies of power and privilege, operating according to gender-neutral patterns of access and competitiveness, remain widespread. Racialised, gendered (neoliberal) global governance Asking who, or what, decides whether and how certain expectations are formed, decisions are taken or rejected, practices reproduced, marginalised or ignored, and on whom they are enforced, requires thinking about gendered meaning: specifically, the racialised, gendered meanings that result in, for example, some bodies being considered more productive, reliable, rational or flexible than others, including across practices of development, security, peace and conflict resolution. It is certainly the case that the racialised aspects of gendered meaning have not always been well considered by Northern feminists; further, as postcolonial and decolonial feminists have argued, ‘race is always already gendered’ (Wilson 2021). Postcolonial and decolonial feminists have been pivotal in revealing the gendered, racial foundations from which the discourses and practices of global governance have been built. Their work has also focused, unlike many traditional accounts of global governance, on the intersections of economic, political and racial marginalisation for women in both Global South and North. Governance discourses and practices have depended, and still depend, upon various and historically ongoing strategies of othering, where the ‘modern’, ‘liberal’ and ‘rational’ worldview reproduced by the post-industrial, ‘civilised’ Global North has produced a kind of ‘liberal triumphalism’ (Rai 2004, 580, see also Khalid 2016, 2017) that affords Western knowledges and cultural practices a particular racialised, discursive privilege across global governance. This is especially evident across neoliberal governmentality. Postcolonial and decolonial feminist approaches to global politics have focused on how cultural, exclusionary and racist productions of European/Western knowledge have been advanced through the 203

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masculinised, ‘modern’ and liberal foundations of Western political thought and practice (see, for example, Charusheela and Zein-Elabdin 2003; Kabeer 1994; Mies and Shiva 2014; Mohanty 2002; Nair 2018; Wilson 2012, 2017, 2021). Such analysis has shown how intersections of race and gender (within and among other relations) are central to the formation and reproduction of material and discursive identity in global politics, including practices of global governance. Inequality, power, identity and access to resources each condition how, and where, human life is positioned, in intimate and pervasive ways. For postcolonial/decolonial feminists, marginality, and the positioning of human subjects that comes from this marginality, is always embedded in histories of imperialism and colonisation (Nair 2018, 50). The processes of economic exchange lying at the heart of neoliberal globalisation are considered intrinsically exploitative (Mohanty 2002, 509), from a postcolonial/decolonial view, because capitalism and liberal democracy cannot be separated from the centuries of racist oppression and gender exploitation through which they have been enabled. Postcolonial and decolonial feminists have both revealed and contested the various realities and lived experiences through which governance strategies have made sense of the world, showing how ongoing colonial legacies (in thought and in practice) continue to create ‘specific understandings of gender that enable the disappearance of the colonial/raced woman from theoretical and political consideration’ (Bhambra 2014, 119). Colonial and imperial histories have left gendered, racialised legacies of power and identity, which find themselves embodied in governance discourse and practice at multiple levels: in the neoliberal governance of development and assumptions about the value of economic growth at all costs; in assumptions about types of ‘rational’ economic practice; in distinctions between productive and reproductive labour and; and in expectations about the ‘nimble’, gendered bodies best suited to the transnational production structures of post-industrial capitalism.

CONCLUSION This chapter has shown that feminist approaches offer multiple tools and perspectives with which to engage global governance, addressing many of the intricate and intractable questions posed by complex relationships in global politics. Feminists have worked to understand the broadest possible intersections of human identity, intersections that leave certain bodies more exposed, and more vulnerable, to, for example, exclusion, violence, poverty and disenfranchisement. The differences that feminist approaches bring to the studies and practices of global governance are important, and this chapter has engaged with some of these to show that thinking about global governance means thinking about power and explicitly gendered relations of power, as plural and diverse. It is never incidental to global politics to ask how actors, discourses and strategies of governance make possible certain practices, ideas and policies, and how this is gendered. 204

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The drafting of governance measures, the outcomes of governance evaluations and the further interventions these legitimate and reproduce, take shape in an environment always already structured by pre-existing, gendered and racialised expectations of what bodies in the Global South (and North) are, do and (should) respond to. There is an inescapable tension between wanting to increase the amount of ‘gender’ on the political radar of governance strategy and policy-making, and understanding how little governance actors and agencies understand their core work (and own views) as gendered and racialised (as in being shaped by pre-existing gendered, racialised norms, assumptions and practices). Social concerns that clearly impact on market efficiency have increasingly fallen under the scrutiny of governance organisations and agencies, with social operations much broader in scope than, say, 30 years ago. Many international organisations do also, of course, operate ‘gender mainstreaming policies’, which are designed to streamline gender analysis into the lending, analytical and advisory ‘products’ that they offer (see, for example, ADB 2003, 2013; World Bank 2002, 2015). Yet consideration of gender remains only inconsistently ‘mainstreamed’ across development policy. Whether neoliberal governance actors, agencies and their strategies possess the tools to solve problems beyond the thinking that has created them remains unclear. Perhaps feminism’s wide-reaching focus on transformation holds one possible answer. Discussion questions 1. What have been some of the key elements of feminist engagements with global governance? 2. What examples can you produce to show the gendered, racialised ‘operation[s] and effects of power within practices of governance’ (Hudson et al. 2017, 4)? 3. What strategies might address the implications and lived effects of global governance as gendered and racialised?

Notes 1. Examples here include extended engagements with the gendered, racialised writing of global development history and policy-making (see, for example, Charusheela and Zein-Elabdin 2003; Kabeer 1994; Khalid, 2016, 2017; Wilson 2012, 2017, 2021), the gendered power and effects of programs of global restructuring (see, for example, Bakker 2003; Bergeron 2004; Marchand and Runyan 2011; Peterson 2010; Peterson and Runyan 2014; True 2012), the complex relationships between gender, economy and environmental resources (see, for example, Agarwal 2010; Arora-Jonsson 2013; Clement et al. 2019; Foster 2021; Mies and Shiva 2014; Sen 2005; Tanyag and True 2019; Zein-Elabdin 1996), the ambiguous and much-debated ‘business’ of women’s empowerment, economic access and market participation (see, for example, 205

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Bexell 2012; Chant 2016; Elias 2013; Lingam 2008; Tornhill 2019; Zulfiqar 2017), the dismissal of social reproduction as a legitimate economic measurement of activity (see, for example, Hoskyns and Rai 2007, Rai et al. 2014), and the institutionalisation and effects of globalised, racialised and gendered markets and the divisions of labour they depend on (see, for example, Benería et al. 2012; Elias 2005; Gunawardana 2018; Kabeer 2021; LeBaron 2013). 2. The World Bank, as a group, is a major source of development project lending and is widely considered a ‘thought leader’ in and of global development. It is composed of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the International Development Association (IDA), the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) and the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). The IEG is a group within the Bank, independent of World Bank management, and reporting directly to the Bank’s Executive Board (composed of Country Directors, and separate to the bureaucratic staff of the Bank).

Further reading Bakker, Isabella and Stephen Gill (eds). 2003. Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/security in the Global Political Economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kunz, Rahel, Elisabeth Prügl and Hayley Thompson. 2019. “Gender Expertise in Global Governance: Contesting the Boundaries of a Field.” European Journal of Politics and Gender 22 (1): 23–40. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1332/251510819X15471289106112 Rai, Shirin M. and Georgina Waylen (eds). 2008. Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Wilson, Kalpana. 2012. Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice. London and New York: Zed Books. Young, Brigitte, Isabella Bakker and Diane Elson (eds). 2011. Questioning Financial Governance from a Feminist Perspective. London and New York: Routledge. References Agarwal, Bina. 2010. Gender and Green Governance: The Political Economy of Women’s Presence Within and Beyond Community Forestry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Agathangelou, Anna M. and L.H.M. Ling. 2004. “Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence and Desire from September 11.” International Studies Quarterly 48 (3): 517–538. doi: https://doi. org/10.1111/j.0020-8833.2004.00313.x Agathangelou, Anna M. and L.H.M. Ling. 2009. Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds. London and New York: Routledge.

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Ali, Khadija. 2003. “Gender Exploitation: from Structural Adjustment Policies to Poverty Reduction Strategies.” The Pakistan Development Review 42 (4): 669–691. doi: 10.30541/v42i4IIpp.669-694 Asian Development Bank (ADB). 2003. Policy on Gender and Development. Manila: Asian Development Bank. Asian Development Bank (ADB). 2013. Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Operational Plan, 2013–2020 Moving the Agenda Forward in Asia and the Pacific. Mandaluyong City: Asian Development Bank Bakker, Isabella. 2003. “Neo-liberal Governance and the Reprivatization of Social Reproduction: Social Provisioning and Shifting Gender Orders.” In Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/ security in the Global Political Economy, edited by Isabella Bakker, 66–82. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Benería, Lourdes, Carmen D. Deere and Naila Kabeer. 2012. “Gender and International Migration: Globalization, Development, and Governance.” Feminist Economics 18 (2): 1–33. doi: https://doi.org/10. 1080/13545701.2012.688998 Bergeron, Suzanne. 2003. “The Post-Washington Consensus and Economic Representations of Women in Development at the World Bank.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 5 (3): 397–419. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1080/1461674032000122759 Bergeron, Suzanne. 2004. Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan. Bexell, Magdalena. 2012. “Global Governance, Gains and Gender: UN-Business Partnerships for Women’s Empowerment.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 14 (3): 389–407. doi: https://doi.org/10.10 80/14616742.2012.659855 Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2014. “Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues.” Postcolonial Studies 17 (2): 115–121. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/136 88790.2014.966414 Brassett, James and Eleni Tsingou. 2011. “The Politics of Legitimate Global Governance.” Review of International Political Economy 18 (1): 1–16. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2010.495297 Caglar, Gülay, Elisabeth Prügl and Susanne Zwingel (eds). 2013. Feminist Strategies in International Governance. London and New York: Routledge. Chant, Sylvia. 2016. “Women, Girls and World Poverty: Empowerment, Equality or Essentialism?” Independent Development Planning Review 38 (1): 1–24. doi: https://doi.org/10.3828/idpr.2016.1 Charusheela, S. and Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin. 2003. “Feminism, Postcolonial Thought, and Economics.” In Feminist Economics Today: Beyond Economic Man, edited by Julie A. Nelson and Marianne A. Ferber, 175–192. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Clement, Floriane, Wendy Harcourt, Deepa Joshi and Chizu Sato. 2019. “Feminist Political Ecologies of the Commons and Commoning.” International Journal of the Commons 13 (1): 1–15. doi: http://doi. org/10.18352/ijc.972

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from Africa and South Asia, edited by Kate Grantham, Gillian Dowie and Arjan de Haan. London and New York: Routledge. Khalid, Maryam. 2016. “Gender and Racialized Logics of Insecurity, Development and Intervention.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice, edited by Wendy Harcourt, 463–475. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Khalid, Maryam. 2017. Gender, Orientalism, and the ‘War on Terror’: Representations, Discourse, and Intervention in Global Politics. London and New York: Routledge. LeBaron, Genevieve. 2015. “Unfree Labour Beyond Binaries: Insecurity, Social Hierarchy and Labour Market Restructuring.” International Feminist Jounal of Politics 17 (1): 1–19. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/14 616742.2013.813160 Lingam, Lakshmi. 2008. “Limits to Empowerment: Women in Microcredit Programs, South India.” In Beyond States and Markets: The Challenges of Social Reproduction, edited by Isabella Bakker and Rachel Silvey, 72–89. London and New York: Routledge. Marchand, Marianne H. and Anne S. Runyan. eds. 2011. Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites, and Resistances. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge. Mies, Maria and Vandana Shiva. 2014. Ecofeminism. 2nd edition. London and New York: Zed Books. Mohanty, Chandra T. 2002. “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (2): 499–535. doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/342914 Nair, Sheila. 2018. “Postcolonial Feminism.” In Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender, edited by Juanita Elias and Adrienne Roberts, 50–60. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Parpart, Jane. 2007. “Gender and Global Governance.” In Globalization, Development and Human Security, edited by Anthony McGrew and Nana K. Poku. 207–219. Cambridge: Polity Press. Peterson, V. S. 2010. “Informalization, Inequalities and Global Insecurities.” International Studies Review 12: 244–270. Peterson, V. Spike and Anne S. Runyan. 2014. Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium. 4th edition. London and New York: Routledge. Rai, Shirin M. 2004. “Gendering Global Governance.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 6 (4): 579–601. doi: https://doi.org/10. 1080/1461674042000283345 Rai, Shirin M. 2008. “Analysing Global Governance.” In Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Shirin M. Rai and Georgina Waylen, 19–42. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Rai, Shirin M., Catherine Hoskyns and Dania Thomas. 2014. “Depletion: The Cost of Social Reproduction.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 16 (1): 86–105. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2013.789641 Richter, Hannah (ed.). 2018. Biopolitical Governance: Race, Gender and Economy. Washington, DC: Rowman and Littlefield. Sadasivam, Bharati. 1997. “The Impact of Structural Adjustment on Women: A Governance and Human Rights Agenda.” Human Rights Quarterly 19 (3): 630–665. doi: 10.1353/hrq.1997.0031 209

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Sen, Gita. 2005. Neolibs, Neocons and Gender Justice: Lessons from Global Negotiations. UN Research Institute for Social Development, UNRISD(05)/G325/no.9. Geneva: UNRISD. Springer, Simon, Kean Birch and Julia MacLeavy (eds). 2016. Handbook of Neoliberalism. London and New York: Routledge. Steger, Manfred (ed.). 2004. Rethinking Globalism. Rowman and Littlefield. Lanham, MD: USA. Tanyag, Maria and Jacqui True. 2019. “Gender Responsive Alternatives on Climate Change from a Feminist Standpoint.” In Climate Hazards, Disasters, and Gendered Ramifications, edited by Catarina Kinnvall and Helle Rydström, 29–47. London and New York: Routledge. Tornhill, Sofie. 2019. The Business of Women’s Empowerment: Corporate Gender Politics in the Global South. Washington, DC: Rowman and Littlefield. True, Jacqui. 2012. The Political Economy of Violence against Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsikata, Dzodzi. 1996. “Effects of Structural Adjustment on Women and the Poor.” Third World Resurgence, 61/62. Available at Third World Network Berhad, https://www.twn.my/title/adjus-cn.htm Williamson, John. 2002. “Did the Washington Consensus Fail?” Speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC, 6 November, https://www.piie.com/commentary/speeches-papers/ did-washington-consensus-fail#:~:text=The%20purpose%20was%20 to%20frame,policy%20agenda%20for%20Latin%20America Wilson, Kalpana. 2012. Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice. London and New York: Zed Books. Wilson, Kalpana. 2017. “Re-Centring ‘Race’ in Development: Population Policies and Global Capital Accumulation in the Era of the SDGs.” Globalizations 14 (3): 432–449. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/1474773 1.2016.1275402 Wilson, Kalpana. 2021. “Race, Imperialism and International Development.” In The SAGE Handbook of Marxism, edited by Beverley Skeggs, Sara R. Farris, Alberto Toscano and Svenja Bromberg. London: Sage. World Bank. 2002. Integrating Gender into the World Bank’s Work: A Strategy for Action. Washington DC: World Bank. World Bank. 2015. World Bank Group Gender Strategy (FY16–23): Gender Equality, Poverty Reduction and Inclusive Growth. Washington, DC: World Bank. Zein-Elabdin, Eiman O. 1996. “Development, Gender, and the Environment: Theoretical or Contextual Link? Toward an Institutional Analysis of Gender.” Journal of Economic Issues 30 (4): 929–947. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/00213624.1996.11505859 Zulfiqar, Ghazal. 2017. “Does Microfinance Enhance Gender Equity in Access to Finance? Evidence from Pakistan.” Feminist Economics 23 (1): 160–185. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2016.1193213

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Global Health Sara E. Davies Humans have experienced spectacular achievements in global health over the last century. Global life expectancy doubled in the 20th century. Infectious disease eradication was achieved. Smallpox was eradicated through an international vaccination programme that was created and rolled out across the world in the midst of the Cold War. People are gaining more control over their fertility, and we have seen a global reduction in infant mortality: 10,000 children have been saved from preventable disease every day in the past 40-year period. But at the same time, when it comes to health, it may be the best of times and the worst of times (Gates Foundation 2017). Deaths due to infectious diseases – the kinds that occur due to cramped, crowded unsanitary and impoverished conditions – have been declining, with chronic diseases – heart disease and stroke – now the leading cause of death. Life expectancy may have increased in low-, middle- and high-income countries (UNDP 2021), but maternal mortality rates have stagnated and, in some countries, such as the United States of America, have become worse. A thousand women die every day from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. HIV infections are rising in some key population groups, including young girls and women, men who have sex with men, transgender and sex workers. Mortality rates of children under the age of five in low-income countries are 14 times the average rate in highincome countries. The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to have negatively impacted on the fragile gains in global health outcomes: in 2020, 70 countries experienced disruption of childhood immunisation programmes and it is expected disease eradication programmes for malaria and tuberculosis will have reversed (UNDESA 2021). In this chapter, I examine the conceptual evolution of ‘global health’ and its gendered practices. The chapter unfolds in three parts. First, the chapter traces the transition from ‘international’ to ‘global’ health. Second, I explore the agenda setting practices in the contemporary global health DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-18

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era (the Millennium Development Goals 2000–2015 and Sustainable Development Goals 2015–2030). Finally, I examine the gendered practices of global health (and their consequences), with the example of the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate the primary and secondary harms as a result of the neglect of gender knowledge from the global health agenda. The chapter concludes by identifying emerging opportunities to challenge the global health status quo of silence and neglect.

FROM ‘INTERNATIONAL HEALTH’ TO ‘GLOBAL HEALTH’ International health accurately describes the post-World War II, Bretton Woods institutional era, where the World Health Organization (WHO) was created to manage and coordinate member states’ agreement on international health standards, regulations and practices. Infectious disease outbreak notifications, vaccination certificates, nutrition measures, standardised drug testing practices – these were the technical functions of the WHO. Fast forward to the end of the Cold War, and international health was slowly metamorphosing into a hybrid technical and political system. Public-private partnerships among pharmaceutical companies, states and international organisations including WHO had grown through partnership for vaccines (GAVI) and HIV research and treatments (UNAIDS). Civil societies were powerful forces in the health space, demanding access to essential medicines (Health Action International) and lobbying for regulations on private companies seeking to exploit new economies with breastmilk formula substitutes and cigarettes (Sikkink 1986; Taylor and Roemer 1996). Health is defined in Article 1 of the 1948 World Health Organization Constitution as the absence of disease as well as a complete state of physical, mental and spiritual well-being (WHO 1948). Today, health is also understood to be determined by biological conditions (sex, hormones and genetics) as well as social determinants (the economic and social conditions that determine individual and group health outcomes). Medical interventions are primarily technical and reactive to disease, while public health interventions are designed to consider the complete state of well-being and focus on preventative care. The question, then, is: where does the state’s responsibility for an individual’s health care begin and end? Should the state always provide free health care to its population? If so, should that give the state the right to determine whether an individual should smoke or not? Lose weight or not? Have unprotected sex or not? The consequences of smoking, obesity and sexually transmitted disease could be that some individuals require more healthcare services than other individuals; an individual’s ‘burden’ on the state, depending on their life choices, is potentially higher. Introducing regulations protects individual health while also protecting the state’s health budget. The opposing argument to this position is that if individuals do not wish to have their freedoms curtailed then the health system should be liberated from state control. 212

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In this case, a ‘user pays’ system would be seen as a fairer way of providing people with liberties. Now imagine a multiplicity of states debating the perfect health system design and the affordability of this design, and arguing over which diseases, drugs, tests and vaccines should be privatised (where the user pays) versus publicly provided at low cost (or free). This is what it is like to work for the WHO and advise its 194 member states. Member states meet annually at the World Health Assembly, and every year, there is a plurality of debates over funding and priority health agendas for the WHO. The divisions can sometimes be economic: donor states tend to want the prioritisation of vertical disease programmes (where the investment is short-term and there are clear key performance indicators – like vaccines distributed to a population), while donor recipient states may want programmes that strengthen health system to be prioritised (for example, the training of healthcare staff and building of medical clinics). The debates can also be rooted in social and cultural divisions: the inclusion of abortion as an essential medical service, for example, or advice on restrictions concerning access to tobacco, alcohol or recreational drug use. The international health agenda also has a history of imperialism and colonialism. Harms have been perpetrated under the banner of ‘international health’ to gain access to Indigenous lands and waters for exploitation and gain, meaning that the term itself needs careful reflection. In the 1800s, international health diplomacy was discussed amongst a small number of imperial governments and independent states, primarily concentrated on infectious disease eradication and control (Fidler 2001). This was at least partly to protect the flow of trade and people, which was vital during this phase of imperial growth and colonial expansion (Bashford 2006). The key debate among the European, North American and a small number of Asian countries concerned the degree and form of restrictions recommended during epidemic outbreak events (which, at the time, were primarily cholera, yellow fever and plague). Infectious disease outbreak control and mitigation has been the primary driver for international health cooperation throughout the 20th century. The eradication of smallpox, which occurred during the Cold War, became the (one) example of how international health could overcome political differences if the focus was on scientific and technical cooperation. However, near the end of the Cold War, the inequalities fuelled by this narrow international health agenda became impossible to ignore. Millions of children were dying every year due to preventable disease caused by a collective failure to secure international cooperation around vaccine production and roll-out immunisation programmes (Thomas 1989). There were notable push backs on the health-technical agenda including from the WHO Director-General Halfdan Mahler, who presented a ‘Health for All by 2000’ Declaration (known as the Alma Atta Declaration) to member states in 1978. Mahler’s position was that the WHO had been too focused on infectious disease eradication initiatives, and the organisation needed to strengthen health systems – including primary health care, training and 213

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wages for healthcare workers, reduction in healthcare user-fees, affordable access to medicines and the inclusion of civil society (Fleck 2008). Civil society organisations were also emerging as challengers to the structural design of international health. One issue that civil society lobbied against was the development and production of expensive pharmaceuticals in wealthy countries, which were then sold for high prices to low-income countries. An attempt to end this exploitation led to the campaign for access to essential medicines agenda initiated by Health Action International in 1981 (Sridhar 2008). Civil society actors also fought against the exploitation of new markets in developing countries where breastmilk formula substitutes and cigarettes were being increasingly sold with few regulations in place (Sikkink 1986; Taylor and Roemer 1996). There was also the proliferation of private actors in the international health space, including philanthropic actors such as Rotary International, which started the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 1979. The multiplicity of actors in the international health space – from pharmaceutical companies to civil society organisations – was effecting change on international public health policy and health goods (such as vaccines and drugs); these new agendas, actors and interests led to the emergence of the term ‘global health’ and ‘global health governance’ (Lee et al. 2002; Ng and Ruger 2011).

GLOBAL HEALTH AGENDA SETTING The 1990s saw debates about health inequality and health inequity intensify. The global health governance debate broadened the scope of international health from a technical health delivery focus (more training, more drugs, more medical skill, for example) to identify the social, political and economic conditions that improve health outcomes. Sen’s (2002) capabilities approach argued that health equity is an outcome of fairness and justice in social arrangements, including economic and human rights. His argument not only gained popularity; it also made economic sense. By this point, the overseas development aid project had been in place for four decades. The results coming in by region and wealth quartiles were not showing what the modernisation theorists had predicted in the 1960s. Health outcomes were not improving with wealth creation. While rural populations consistently experienced higher mortality rates than urban populations, urban slum populations had worse health outcomes than rural areas. Bangladesh, Costa Rica and Cuba had better health outcomes despite lower levels of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), compared to Russia, South Africa and Pakistan. There was no strong correlation, for example, among low income, low immunisation rates and low childhood mortality. While it was proving true that those with the greatest health needs were less likely to receive the care that they needed (known as the inverse care law – see Hart 1971), social and political factors were also playing a role in access to and distribution of health care, as well as life expectancy outcomes (Subramanian et al. 2002). 214

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The Millennium Summit was hosted by the United Nations in September 2000. The Summit formally adopted the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which aimed to halve poverty by 2015. Out of the eight goals, three were health related: reduction of child mortality (Goal 4), reduction of maternal mortality (Goal 5) and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases (Goal 6). While the articulation of the goals did lead to higher volumes of donor investment, development assistance and government action (Dieleman et al. 2015), in practice, the goals were not met consistently or evenly. Mortality rates under Goal 4 and 5 were to be reduced by two-thirds by the end of 2015. In 2015, the final MDG report card was that global rates had been reduced by half for Goals 4 and 5 (Marten 2019). However, there were significant gaps in the quality of data available to measure national performance against the MDGs, especially across sub-Saharan Africa (Jacob 2017). Even seemingly similar countries saw uneven outcomes: Viet Nam met Goals 4 and 5, for example, while Indonesia did not, despite similar annual GDP growth for both countries over that period, hovering around 6 per cent (International Monetary Fund 2018; World Bank 2019). Goal 6 was meant to direct all efforts to stop rates of infection and reverse the spread of HIV and malaria. In some countries, including South Africa, Botswana and Mozambique, HIV/AIDS (not COVID-19) remained the leading cause of death in 2020 (and has been the leading cause of death for a number of years now). The 15–49 years age group, followed by children under the age of 5, are especially vulnerable to HIV infection (Roser and Ritchie 2019). At the time, despite growing evidence that HIV infections were having a disproportionate impact on women, Goal 6 did not refer to women nor gender (Türmen 2003). Goal 4 was strikingly gendered in that it only referred to the role of ‘mothers’ to support its goal: ‘Children of mothers with secondary or higher education are almost three times as likely to survive as children of mothers with no education’ (UN n.d.). Meanwhile Goal 3, promote gender equality and empower women, left out ‘just about all the issues needed to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment’, including linkages to Goals 4, 5 and 6 (Ford 2015). Meanwhile, an increase in temperature, rainfall and humidity due to warming climates is impacting on the gains made in reducing malaria transmission. While Europe announced the eradication of malaria from its region in 2015, the eradication of this disease from other parts of the world is proving difficult (Boseley 2019; WHO 2016), particularly in tropical climates that support the survival of a greater variety of mosquitoes. The health targets in the MDGs, while not universally met, revealed that specific targets can produce political and donor momentum. However, as already indicated, progress in global health gains has been selective. The first set of barriers was funding. The 2000–2015 MDG period saw investment in the health aid sector increase: the problem was that the investment was quite selective. In 2014: ‘$23 billion out of a total of $36 billion of Development Assistance for Health was directed towards MDGs Four, Five, and Six whereas only $611 million 215

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was directed towards NCDs [non-communicable diseases]’ (Marten 2019, 585). Money was being spent but it was simply not enough to reach the level of investment required. A second problem with the MDGs was that it kept the ‘taboo’ topics off the agenda. States were identified as aid partners to reach poverty reduction targets. This partnership worked fine if the state had no policy or practices that denied healthcare access and treatment to particular groups. It became more complicated if a state was reaching a Goal 4 or 5 target with the majority of its population, but marginalised groups continued to experience far worse health outcomes. In this example, a country may have met its MDG target but denied the rights of a minority population to such an extent that this minority population cannot access health care without experiencing discrimination. Another example would be a country not meeting its maternal mortality reduction target due to the continued criminalisation of abortion (see Singh et al. 2018). Under the MDG 5, there was no target included to call for the decriminalisation of abortion. The MDG goal language, aid programme and reporting processes tended to keep the ‘difficult’ topics off the agenda (Buse and Hawkes 2015). As the MDGs neared a close by 2015, the debate turned to the benefit of defining health as a ‘global good’. What had worked and what had failed during the MDG experience? In Politics in the Corridor of Dying, Jennifer Chan quotes an individual discussing their contribution to (one of the targets within) MDG 6 – reducing HIV infection: We often work with marginalized subsectors of civil society. Drug users, people living with AIDS, sex workers. Even within civil society, these are groups with relatively little political power and public sympathy. You could make the argument — and we wrestle with this — that what we do is create islands of empowerment without restructuring the sea … In our discussions around prisons, we don’t want to just improve HIV treatment in prisons, we want to have people not in prison. For public health and harm reduction programs, the overall question is: What do you hope to get done? (Chan 2015, 181, emphasis added)

The health-related MDGs and their specific focus on disease reduction targets had created islands of success without restructuring the sea. The widening of the health goals and the inclusion of ‘taboo topics’, however, raises more questions. Are health improvement discussions best located back amongst local communities where knowledge, ownership and community participation are understood and, perhaps, more valued? Should it be at the state level where the government, ultimately, determines spending and priorities? Or should health interventions and programmes still exist at the global level, where common challenges might transcend location or context, and value is drawn from pooling in financial and technical resources? The transition from the end of the MDGs to the introduction of ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) (2015–2030) created a wave of debate about the scope and targets that should be adopted to achieve 216

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‘global health’. This debate has been defined by Buse and Hawkes (2015) as a paradigm shift for the SDGs, as it shifts global health towards a more holistic vision of health and well-being. At the end of the MDGs in 2015, 194 member states adopted the ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ (2015–2030). This transition created a wave of debate about the scope and targets that should be adopted to achieve ‘global health’, arguably shifting it to a more holistic vision of health and well-being (Buse and Hawkes 2015). Of the 17 goals that make up the SDGs, one focuses specifically on health: ‘Goal 3: good health and well-being’. A high-level panel, led by the Presidents of Indonesia and Liberia and Prime Minister of United Kingdom, was appointed in 2013 to oversee the construction of SDG Goal 3. Working papers were drafted and presented in over 80 countries for two years to reach the language in SDG 3.

A description of the nine indicators and three aspirations under SDG3: Good health and well-being How is health defined in SDG 3? 3.1 By 2030, reduce the global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births. 3.2 By 2030, end preventable deaths of newborns and children under 5 years of age, with all countries aiming to reduce neonatal mortality to at least as low as 12 per 1,000 live births and under-5 mortality to at least as low as 25 per 1,000 live births. 3.3 By 2030, end the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and neglected tropical diseases and combat hepatitis, water-borne diseases and other communicable diseases. 3.4 By 2030, reduce by one-third premature mortality from non-communicable diseases through prevention and treatment and promote mental health and well-being. 3.5 Strengthen the prevention and treatment of substance abuse, including narcotic drug abuse and harmful use of alcohol. 3.6 By 2020, halve the number of global deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents. 3.7 By 2030, ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive healthcare services, including for family planning, information and education and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programmes. 3.8 Achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential healthcare services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all. 3.9 By 2030, substantially reduce the number of deaths and illnesses from hazardous chemicals and air, water and soil pollution and contamination. 3.10 Strengthen the implementation of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in all countries, as appropriate. 3.11 Support the research and development of vaccines and medicines for the communicable and non-communicable diseases that primarily affect developing countries, provide access to affordable essential medicines and vaccines, in accordance with the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, which affirms the right of developing countries to use to the full the provisions in the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights regarding flexibilities to protect public health, and, in particular, provide access to medicines for all. 3.12 Substantially increase health financing and the recruitment, development, training and retention of the health workforce in developing countries, especially in least developed countries and small island developing States. Source: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/health/ © United Nations

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The single goal of SDG 3 is: ‘Ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages’. This agenda is ‘relevant to current, emerging and predicted health burdens in the global North and South’ (emphasis added, Buse and Hawkes 2015, 5). The nine targets and four mechanisms included in SDG 3 address burdens of illness neglected by the MDGs – disability, neglected diseases, mental illness — and call for investment in the mechanisms required for implementation. In contrast to the vertical, islands of excellence and disease-specific targets that characterised the MDGs, SDG 3 has been promoted as a ‘wide and deep’ or broad-based intervention that targets diseases and the health system requirements to support these target reductions. While the first six targets of the SDG 3 are quite similar to the language of MDG 4, 5 and 6, there is also access and justice language within the SDG 3. SDG 3.7, for example, includes a specific reference to ‘universal’ access to sexual and reproduction health care; 3.8 includes the target of ‘universal’ health coverage, including ‘essential medicines and vaccines for all’. Deaths due to environmental exposure are included, as is the need to introduce mechanisms that increase funding, financing and training of healthcare workers. SDG 3 is broader in scope. This language is important – not because states will automatically implement the nine targets and four mechanisms immediately – but because the language in the SDGs supports the advocacy and demands for public health reform and provision. Global health advocates, civil society and rights defenders across the UN system and beyond can point to a state’s commitment to SDG 3 as leverage (Hoffman and Cole 2018, 13). The SDGs have not fixed some of the problems of the MDGs; indeed, the discrete disease targets in MDG 4, 5 and 6 are still in SDG 3. There remains the risk the specific targets will achieve more funding than the non-specific targets (Brolan et al. 2017). Similar to the MDG experience, targets attract health donors (not only donor states but also philanthropic actors like the Rockefeller Foundation, Rotary International and the Gates Foundation) who appreciate the value for money that comes with vertical disease programmes (Sridhar 2008). Others challenge the criticism of targeted funding and argue that as long as health is being prioritised in high-level international forums investments it will benefit health systems, in general, because even disease-specific investments take the stress and strain out of one system which frees up investment in another. Diseasespecific investments can also address the structural discrimination and inequalities in some health-care systems. HIV is presented as an example of this. If a country introduces a universal health-care coverage scheme (SDG Target 3.8), technically, HIV treatment and prevention programmes should fall under the new state-managed plan. Civil society advocacy and delivery has been essential in the HIV field, to access high-risk infection groups who may be reluctant to present themselves to state-managed clinics. Sex workers, drug users, men who have sex with men (where it remains illegal in some countries) – these populations require care and treatment that they may not be able to freely and affordably access under a country’s universal health-care plan (Ooms and Kruja 2019). 218

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SDG 5, gender equality, is primarily focused on targets that address women and girls’ economic, social, political, legal and reproductive inequalities. Unlike MDG 3, this goal links gender empowerment with health, notably in the areas of sexual and reproductive health and female genital mutilation. These inclusions are significant. Meeting both of these targets requires states to commit to legislative, public health and economic reforms and empowers educators, civil society and parliamentarians to demand reforms. Achieving these targets also requires, as noted by Powell and Mwangi-Powell (2017), addressing community-level norms held by men and women. The danger of SDG 5, like the MDGs (remember Goal 4 above?), is that responsibility rests with women and girls alone. Men and women, boys and girls, have equal responsibilities and rights in reproductive and sexual health (Regan 2018: 5). Equally, it is important to be attentive to SDG 5 programmes, especially health-related programmes, that reinforce cisgender norms and exclude non-binary people (whose presence is entirely absent from the SDGs – see Matthyse 2020). Abimbola (2019) argues that what has been lost in the global health governance debates is the voices of the intended ‘beneficiaries’ of these programmes. As the HIV case above reveals, how often in global health forums are the people with the poorest health outcomes asked to contribute to the debate about funding, priorities and interventions? As Matthyse (2020, 126) reveals in her/their study of SDGs and transgender equality: across the world medical professionals witness the violence and loss of life that gender-diverse persons’ experience every day but the SDGs and the World Health Organization are practically silent on gender-affirming healthcare models that criminalise and/or institutionalise trans people. There is inequity embedded in the global health system. Quite simply, the global health sector can be an unjust environment where prestige and affiliation are heard over lived experience. In this final section, we examine the consequence of a global health system not set up to recognise the gendered experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 PANDEMIC: REVEALING INEQUITY AND UNSUSTAINABLE PRACTICES In 2008, the WHO commissioned a report on the social determinants of health (Marmot et al. 2008). This report disaggregated health data by dimensions of inequity to understand the implementation barriers. The report argued that ‘social injustice is killing people on [a] grand scale’. Put another way, Alicia Ely Yamin argued that: ‘We [public health] so frequently focus on biological or behavioral factors that we can easily overlook the social, political, economic and cultural factors that shape the resources and barriers – the opportunity structures – that people have to take account of with respect to their health’ (2016, 75). In 2016, Sophie Harman argued that the global health system suffered from an acute case of gendered blindness and male bias. In her examination 219

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of the global health system’s response to the health emergency caused by the outbreak of Ebola virus in West Africa in 2014, Harman argued that global health needs to render women more visible in policy and practice, and confront the free gendered labour that women provide in the global healthcare space. Her examples in the article were of exploitation: the majority of health care provided during the Ebola outbreak was by local healthcare workers who were working for minimal wages or volunteering (due to the state having no funds to pay wages); the majority of home care was provided by women – at great personal risk to their own health; and the majority of the risk communication tasks – the behaviours people needed to adopt to prevent the spread of Ebola – were messaged directly to women. Her examples were also of discrimination and deprivation: women were economically hardest hit by the outbreak (due to loss of income from informal jobs such as market stalls, cleaning and street selling); they were hardest hit healthwise with the closure of maternal and sexual health services leading to higher rates of maternal mortality, preterm complications and unwanted pregnancies; and they were hardest hit in their physical safety – with high; rates of domestic and sexual violence being committed during the lockdown (Harman 2016). Remarkably, despite this, little reform took place amongst global health institutions, including the WHO, to address the risk of gender exploitation and discrimination in future health emergencies (Davies and Bennett 2016). Fast forward to 2020 and the outbreak of SARS-CoV2 which led to the first global pandemic since the 1918 Spanish Influenza. The outbreak of SARS-CoV2, the virus that caused the disease COVID-19 in humans, was first identified in China in December 2019. By the end of January 2020, this virus had spread via the movement of humans as they travelled across countries around the world. This outbreak was declared by the WHO Director-General as a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’ on 30 January 2020. Eventually, by March 2020, the extensive spread of contagion would lead to this outbreak being declared a pandemic. What was the status of global health and gender at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic? In 2019, The Lancet published a Special Issue: Advancing Women in Science, Medicine, and Global Health. In this issue, an article was published titled: ‘Why it Must Be a Feminist Global Health Agenda’ (Davies et al 2019). The author of this chapter was also one of the authors of this article. In the piece, we presented the argument that global health has a gender problem. Specifically, global health is blinded by sex and the presumption that biology determines behaviour and experience in health care, treatment and policy. In the article, we argued that the absence of gendered knowledge and gendered logic from global health thinking would endanger health gains. Our criticism of global health thinking was four-fold. First, representation is often confused with inclusion. Global health, after the Ebola experience in West Africa, slowly began to realise the exploitation of women healthcare providers in that crisis. However,

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the global level petition was for more women leaders in global health programmes and institutions. Representation is vital, but few women will reach Geneva or New York to be heard. The change that needs to be supported is in the creation of health programmes – ensure gender aware training of healthcare workers, build gender analysis into health programmes and ensure gender-specific funds are dedicated to health emergency responses. This criticism has held up, unfortunately, during the COVID-19 pandemic. There has been much discussion about women’s inclusion in COVID-19 national response committees and women’s leadership but the jury is ‘still out’ as to whether the focus should be on representation (women vs men leadership) or whether, in fact, the (toxic) gendered representations of masculine and feminine locked people into particular dangerous roles at the onset of this pandemic which affected infection control behaviours, care roles and personal safety (Aldrich and Lotito 2020; Bauer et al. 2020; Reny 2020). Our second concern was the absence of gender diversity and intersectionality within global health institutions. Despite the lessons from the WHO Social Determinants of Health study in 2008, there are few global health programmes promoting the collection of intersectional data to improve the social justice and outreach of programmes. At the onset of the outbreak of COVID-19, less than 50 countries were collecting data on the sex and age disaggregation of infection and deaths (Global Health 5050 2020). One year on, and the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that the collection of sex disaggregated data and, ideally, intersectional disaggregated data is vital to understand the complex relationship among sex, biology, behaviour and gender. In the United States, for example, while more men than women have died from COVID-19, people of colour populations are at higher risk of infection and death than White populations (Boulicault et al. 2020). Clearly, biology alone cannot explain these risks. A social determinant lens prioritises the collection of data on race, age and sex because public health interventions should not be about what an individual did or didn’t do; but what resources that individual had and the barriers they faced in society to prevent their infection and risk of death. Our third concern in the paper was the hidden gendered burdens of care that global health institutions tend to ignore. These ranged from who takes the notes and drives the cars for global health aid programmes to who will be asked to keep the house clean and ensure there is access to clean water and soap in risk communication messages. Health risk communication messages need to be culturally appropriate and sensitive; but they can also reinforce gender norms that perpetuate discrimination and, in health emergencies, apportion blame or create dangerous environments for marginalised groups (Wenham et al. 2021). In the case of COVID-19, tropes and stereotypes were often used to explain the data: men don’t wash their hands; men smoke in higher numbers; men don’t get medical help soon enough; and men have lower immune systems than women. These messages were clearly gendered and potentially harmful (Reny 2020).

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Finally, feminist methods are often absent from global health research. What we mean here is that public health and medicine adopt hierarchies of knowledge and data that may not reflect the lived experiences or priorities of the bodies they seek to treat. A tragic example of this is the public health recommendations for ‘lockdown’ when there are communitylevel surges of COVID-19 infection. To protect hospitals from being overwhelmed, and to reduce rates of infection, people are advised to stay home and keep socially distanced for ‘lockdown’ periods. However, what is an individual supposed to do if home is not a safe place? Around the world, social distancing advice was issued with very little recognition that home is not safe for many women and girls (Fawole et al. 2021). Discussions then ensued about best practice for data collection and response to track the rates of violence being committed in lockdown, versus the unintended harm and risks that may come to individuals who answer these phones or online surveys (Peterman et al. 2020). The tragedy was that, despite previous health emergencies illustrating the high risk of escalating violence at home, there was little advice on the steps that needed to be adopted to prevent a rise in this violence at the onset of COVID-19. The public health advice that is issued from the WHO, scientific expert committees, political leaders and academic scientists presents a public health story that attributes much responsibility to the individual. If an individual is infected with COVID-19, they have been in the wrong place, not adhered to the rules, ignored public health advice or acted with disregard for the safety of others. If we go back to the social determinants of health, however, we start to see that individual choices – even in a pandemic – are not solely determined by biology and individual behaviour. Choices are determined by the social, economic and political context in which an individual lives; and social factors (education, age, gender and race) determine choices as much as biology and behaviour.

CONCLUSION The emergence of global health from international health was a political mobilisation against the monopoly of states over all healthcare decisions. There were multiple players engaging in health research, activism and financing across multiple levels. The ‘global’ refers to the multiplicity of actors: states, international organisations, civil societies, universities, pharmaceutical companies and individuals, in the health sector. However, global health is not a democratic institution. The programmes and institutions can be gendered and racist; where agency and power are diffused according to hierarchies of knowledge and income that favour some groups over others. Global health institutions can perpetuate these inequalities; they also have immense power to address social injustices and demand a fair distribution of care. 222

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Discussion questions 1. Why is there a descriptive distinction between international and global health? 2. What are the advantages, and disadvantages, of setting global targets for population health outcomes? 3. How can gender stereotypes be dangerous to individuals in public health programmes? Further reading Abimbola, Seye. 2019. “The Foreign Gaze: Authorship in Academic Global Health.” BMJ Global Health 4: e002068. Davies, Sara E., Sophie Harman, Rashida Manjoo, Maria Tanyag, and Clare Wenham. 2019. “Why It Must Be a Feminist Global Health Agenda.” The Lancet 393 (10171): 601–603. Dionne, Kim Yi and Turkmen, Fulya Felicity. 2020. “The Politics of Pandemic Othering: Putting COVID-19 in Global and Historical Context.” International Organization, 74 (S1): E213–E230. doi:10.1017/ S0020818320000405 Harman, Sophie. 2016. “Ebola, Gender and Conspicuously Invisible Women in Global Health Governance.” Third World Quarterly 37 (3): 524–541. Rushton, Simon. 2011. “Global Health Security: Security for Whom? Security from What?” Political Studies 59 (4): 779–796. References Abimbola Seye. 2019. “The Foreign Gaze: Authorship in Academic Global Health.” BMJ Global Health 4: e002068. doi: 10.1136/bmjgh-2019002068 Aldrich, Andrea S., and Nicholas J. Lotito. 2020. “Pandemic Performance: Women Leaders in the Covid-19 Crisis.” Politics & Gender 16 (4): 960–967. doi:10.1017/S1743923X20000549. Bashford, Alison. 2006. “Global Biopolitics and the History of World Health.” History of the Human Sciences, 19 (1): 67–88. doi:10.1177/ 0952695106062148. Bauer, Nichole M., Jeong Hyun Kim, and Yesola Kweon. 2020. “Women Leaders and Policy Compliance During a Public Health Crisis.” Politics & Gender 16 (4): 975–982. doi:10.1017/S1743923X20000604. Boseley, Sarah. 2019. “‘Malaria Will Not Be Eradicated in Near Future’ Warns WHO.” The Guardian, 23 August 2019. https://www.theguard ian.com/world/2019/aug/23/malaria-will-not-be-eradicated-in-nearfuture-warns-who. Boulicault, Marion, Ann Caroline Danielsen, Joseph Bruch, Amelia Tarrant, Alexander Borsa and Sarah Richardson. 2020. “Socially 223

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Relevant Variables in US State COVID-19 Surveillance Reporting: A Report Card.” Health Affairs, July 14 2020. https://www.healthaffairs. org/do/10.1377/hblog20200710.964611/full/. Brolan, Claire E., Vannarath Te, Nadia Floden, Peter S. Hill, and Lisa Forman. 2017. “Did the Right to Health Get Across the Line? Examining the United Nations Resolution on the Sustainable Development Goals.” BMJ Global Health 2 (3): 1–7. Buse, Kent, and Sarah Hawkes. 2015. “Health in the Sustainable Development Goals: Ready for a Paradigm Shift?” Globalization and Health 11 (13): 18. Chan, Jennifer. 2015. Politics in the Corridor of Dying: AIDS Activism and Global Health Governance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Davies, Sara E. and Belinda Bennett. 2016. “A Gendered Human Rights Analysis of Ebola and Zika: Locating Gender in Global Health Emergencies.” International Affairs 92 (5): 1041–1060. Davies, Sara E. Sophie Harman, Rashida Manjoo, Maria Tanyag, and Clare Wenham. 2019. “Why It Must be a Feminist Global Health Agenda.” The Lancet 393 (10171): 601–603. Dieleman, Joseph, Christopher J. L. Murray, Annie Haakenstad, Casey Graves, Elizabeth Johnson, Tara Templin, Maxwell Birger, Lavania Singh, and Katherine Leach-Kemon. 2015. “Financing Global Health 2014: Shifts in Funding as the MDG Era Closes.” Report, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Seattle, WA, June. http://www.healthdata.org/policy-report/ financing-global-health-2014-shifts-funding-mdg-era-closes. Fawole, Olufunmilayo I., Omowumi O. Okedare, and Elizabeth Reed. 2021. “Home Was Not a Safe Haven: Women’s Experiences of Intimate Partner Violence during the COVID-19 Lockdown in Nigeria.” BMC Women’s Health 21 (1): 1–7. Fidler, David P. 2001. “The Globalization of Public Health: The First 100 Years of International Health Diplomacy.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization: The International Journal of Public Health 79 (9): 842–849. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/74977. Fleck, Fiona. 2008. “Primary Health Care Comes Full Circle. An Interview with Dr Halfdan Mahler.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 86 (10): 747–748. Ford, Liz. 2015. “What Is the Millennium Development Goal on Gender Equality All About?’ The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ global-development/2015/mar/26/millennium-development-goalthree-gender-equality-explainer Gates Foundation. 2017. “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: The Best of Times, Worst of Times by Vice Media.” The Drum. https://www.the drum.com/creative-works/project/vice-media-bill-and-melinda-gatesfoundation-the-best-times-worst-times. Global Health 5050. 2020. “Gender and Sex-Disaggregated Data: Vital to Inform an Effective Response to COVID-19.” Issue Brief, with ICRW (International Center for Research on Women) and APHRC (African Population and Health Research Center), September. 224

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Harman, Sophie. 2016. “Ebola, Gender and Conspicuously Invisible Women in Global Health Governance.” Third World Quarterly 37 (3): 524–541. Hart, Julian Tudor. 1971. “The Inverse Care Law.” The Lancet 297 (7696): 405–412. Hoffman, Steven J. and Clarke B. Cole. 2018. “Defining the Global Health System and Systematically Mapping its Network of Actors.” Global Health 14 (38): 1–19. doi.org/10.1186/s12992-018-0340-2. International Monetary Fund. 2018. ASEAN Progress Towards SDGs. Paris: IMF. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/Policy-Papers/Issues/ 2018/11/07/pp101118asean-progress-towards-sdgs Jacob, Arun. 2017. “Mind the Gap: Analyzing the Impact of Data Gap in Millennium Development Goals’ (MDGs) Indicators on the Progress toward MDGs.” World Development 93: 260–278. Lee, Kelley, Suzanne Fustukian, and Kent Buse. 2002. “An Introduction to Global Health Policy.” In Health Policy in a Globalising World, edited by Kelley Lee, Kent Buse, and Suzanne Fustukian, 3–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marmot, Michael, Sharon Friel, Ruth Bell, Tanja A. J. Houweling, and Sebastian Taylor. 2008. Closing the Gap in a Generation — Health Equity Through Action on the Social Determinants of Health. Report, World Health Organization. csdh_finalreport_2008.pdf (who.int). Marten, Robert. 2019. “How States Exerted Power to Create the Millennium Development Goals and How This Shaped the Global Health Agenda: Lessons for the Sustainable Development Goals and the Future of Global Health.” Global Public Health 14 (4): 584–599. Matthyse, Liberty. 2020. “Achieving Gender Equality by 2030: Transgender Equality in Relation to Sustainable Development Goal 5.” Agenda 34 (1): 124–132. Ng, Nora Y. and Jennifer Prah Ruger. 2011. “Global Health Governance at a Crossroads.” Global Health Governance: The Scholarly Journal for the New Health Security Paradigm, 3 (2): 1–37. https://www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3983705/. Ooms, Gorik and Krista Kruja. 2019. “The Integration of the Global HIV/ AIDS Response into Universal Health Coverage: Desirable, Perhaps Possible, But Far from Easy.” Globalization and Health 15 (1): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-019-0487-5. Peterman, Amber, Amiya Bhatia, and Alessandra Guedes. 2020. “Remote Data Collection on Violence Against Women During COVID-19: A Conversation with Experts on Ethics, Measurement & Research Priorities (Part 1).” UNICEF, Office of Research. https://www.unicef-irc. org/article/1997-remote-data-collection-on-violence-against-womenduring-covid-19-a-conversation-with.html. Powell, R.A. and Faith N. Mwangi-Powell. 2017. “Female Genital Mutilation and the Sustainable Development Goals: The Importance of Research.” Health Care for Women International, 38(6): 521–526. Regan, Lesley. 2018. “Addressing Unmet Needs In Global Women’s Health.” British Medical Association. https://www.bma.org.uk/ media/2117/bma-womens-global-health-report-aug-2018.pdf. 225

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Reny, Tyler T. 2020. “Masculine Norms and Infectious Disease: The Case of Covid-19.” Politics & Gender 16 (4): 1028–1035. Roser, Max and Hannah Ritchie. 2019. “HIV/AIDS.” OurWorldInData. org, November. https://ourworldindata.org/hiv-aids. Sen, Amartya. 2002. “Why Health Equity?” Health Economics 11: 659–666. Sikkink, Kathryn. 1986. “Codes of Conduct for Transnational Corporations: The Case of the WHO/UNICEF Code.” International Organization 40 (4): 815–840. Singh, Susheela, Lisa Remez, Gilda Sedgh, Lorraine Kwok, and Tsuyoshi Onda. 2018. Abortion Worldwide 2017: Uneven Progress and Unequal Access. Report, Guttmacher Institute, New York. https://www.gutt macher.org/report/abortion-worldwide-2017. Sridhar, David. 2008. “Improving Access to Essential Medicines: How Health Concerns can be Prioritised in the Global Governance System.” Public Health Ethics 1 (2): 83–88. doi: 10.1093/phe/phn012. Subramanian, Sankaran Venkata, Paolo Belli, and Ichiro Kawachi. 2002. “The Macroeconomic Determinants of Health.” Annual Review of Public Health 23 (1): 287–302. Taylor, Allyn L. and Ruth Roemer with World Health Organization. 1996. “Programme on Substance Abuse.” In International Strategy for Tobacco Control by Allyn L. Taylor and Ruth Roemer. World Health Organization. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/61186. Thomas, Caroline. 1989. “On the Health of International Relations and the International Relations of Health.” Review of International Studies 15 (3): 273–280. Türmen, T. 2003. “Gender and HIV/AIDS.” International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics 82 (3): 114–118. UNDESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs). 2021. “Ensure Healthy Lives and Promote Well-Being for All at All Ages.” Sustainable Development. https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal3. UNDP (United Nations Development Program). 2021. “Goal 3 Targets.” https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-develop ment-goals/goal-3-good-health-and-well-being/targets.html. Wenham, Clare, Camila Abagaro, Amaral Arévalo, Ernestina Coast, Sonia Corrêa, Katherine Cuéllar, Tiziana Leone, and Sandra Valongueiro. 2021. “Analysing the Intersection Between Health Emergencies and Abortion During Zika in Brazil, El Salvador and Colombia.” Social Science & Medicine 270: 1–10. WHO (World Health Organization). 1948. “Constitution of the World Health Organization.” couvarabe.indd (who.int). WHO (World Health Organization). 2016. “History of Malaria Elimination in the European Region.” Fact Sheet, WHO, Copenhagen, April 20. https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/307272/Facsheetmalaria-elimination.pdf. World Bank. 2019. GDP Growth (annual %) – Vietnam and Indonesia. https:// data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=VN-ID Yamin, Alicia Ely. 2016. Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity: Human Rights Frameworks for Dignity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 226

CHAPTER 17

International/Global Political Economy V. Spike Peterson Globalisation can be understood in many ways, but in this chapter, the objective is to describe the political economy of globalisation. This means that we will not simply describe ‘political’ decision-making or ‘economic’ phenomena at the global level but consider how political and economic dimensions of globalisation interact and are co-determined. For example, we typically think of government officials and policy-makers as ‘political’ agents and bankers and business owners as ‘economic’ agents. But the government cannot maintain power and implement policies without economic resources, and businesses require the legal and physical infrastructure that governmental power makes possible. Through a political economy lens, we examine how states and markets – or politics and economics – are never categorically separate but are rather continuously interactive and mutually determining. Some scholars use international political economy (IPE) and global political economy (GPE) interchangeably. ‘IPE’ is typically preferred by those who see it as a subfield of IR, while ‘GPE’ tends to be used by those who emphasise transnational processes and transdisciplinary perspectives. I prefer GPE and will use it throughout this chapter. A distinction that does matter in this chapter concerns the difference between gender as empirical and gender as analytical. When gender is used empirically, it typically refers to embodied (bio-physical) male-female sex difference (the dimorphism discussed in Chapter 6). In this sense, we examine how women and men differently shape, and are differently affected by, globalisation processes. For example, women appear to be entering the paid work force in ever increasing numbers, while men in many places face un- or under-employment as a result of neoliberal globalisation. As we will see throughout this chapter, DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-19

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research based on gender as an empirical variable provides important data for analysing GPE, especially in terms of revealing who does what kind of work, under what conditions, and with what compensation and status. But we will also see the importance, and pervasive influence, of gender understood analytically (conceptually) as a relation of power. This refers to how gender operates discursively, as a governing code that conceptual­ ises gender as differentiating hierarchically between masculinised and feminised identities, qualities or characteristics (the gender ‘logic’ discussed in Chapter 6). The claim here is that gender pervades language and meaning systems, ‘ordering’ how we think (and hence shaping how we act) by privileging that which is associated with masculinity (not all men or only men) over – and at the expense of – that which is associated with femininity (because for masculinity to have more value, femininity has less value). Research based on analytical gender reveals how important gender coding is systemically, and in GPE in particular it reveals how gendering constitutes differential valuing. As we will see throughout this chapter, ideas, skills, work and activities that are masculinised are more likely to be valued than those that are feminised: they are more likely to be seen as ‘real’ work and be taken seriously in terms of both symbolic status and material compensation.

GENDER MATTERS IN ECONOMIC THEORY Mainstream approaches ignore how gendered bodies and gendered codes shape how we think about and practice ‘economics’. Orthodox theory focuses on the formal (recorded, regulated) economy and male-dominated ‘productive’ activities, thereby excluding women’s domestic, reproductive and caring labour (DeRock 2021; Waring 1999). Similarly, ‘women’s work’ and feminised qualities are devalued: deemed economically irrelevant, characterised as subjective, ‘voluntary’, ‘natural’ and ‘unskilled’, and either poorly paid or not paid at all. At the same time, most economists assume that social reproduction occurs through heteronormative families and non-conflictual intra-household dynamics; alternative household forms and the rising percentage of female-headed and otherwise ‘unconventional’ households are rendered deviant or invisible.1 Feminist research addresses and attempts to ‘correct’ these biases and omissions in several ways. A familiar starting point is ‘adding women’, which may seem methodologically simple but often produces surprising results. For example, Esther Boserup’s pioneering research (1970) on women’s experiences in non-industrialised countries revealed the oftendeleterious effects of modernisation policies and undercut orthodox claims that development benefitted everyone. Subsequent ‘women in development’ (WID) studies documented both how policies and practices marginalised women and how women’s exclusion jeopardised development objectives (see Chapters 11 and 15).

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Numerous later and ongoing studies demonstrate how a focus on women and gender improves our knowledge of economics more generally (Harcourt 2016; Peterson 2003; Seguino 2020). For example, feminists produce more accurate accounts of intra-household labour and resource allocation, move beyond quantitative indicators to enhance measurements of human well-being and document the centrality of ‘women’s work’ to development, long-term production of social capital and more accurate national accounting. And women in the Global South especially demonstrate the importance of local, Indigenous and colonised people’s agency in identifying problems and negotiating remedies (see Baliamoune-Lutz and McGillivray 2015; Bandara 2015; Bhattacharyya 2018; Khera 2016; Mohanty 2003). While WID’s focus on empirical gender prompted policies to include WID, this failed to address significant problems: the devaluation of feminised labour, the structural privileging of men and masculinity and the depoliticisation of women’s subordination in the family and workplace. As feminists queried underlying assumptions (Elson 1991), the liberal, modernist inclinations of WID approaches lost ground to more constructivist, critical starting points of gender and development (GAD) orientations. Understanding gender analytically enabled GAD scholars to problematise the meaning and desirability of ‘development’, interrogate the definition of work and how to ‘count it’, examine gender ideologies to explain unemployed men’s reluctance to ‘help’ in the household, challenge constructions of feminism imposed by western elites and criticise narratives of victimisation for denying agency and resistance (see, for example, Benería 2003; Bergeron 2001; Rai 2002). In the 21st century, feminists continue to expose masculinist bias and its effects on the theory/practice of political economy, and to expand the evidence corroborating – and complicating – early feminist critiques. Their research extends from more obviously gender-differentiated effects of microeconomic phenomena to less visible, indirect effects of macroeconomic policies and global financial markets. Recent feminist work explores the political economy of intimacy, sex, gender and sexualities (Bedford 2009; Bergeron 2009; Smith 2020). Feminists engaging postcolonial and decolonial perspectives expose histories and political economies of racialisation that shape stark inequalities and global crises (Bhambra 2020; Bhattacharyya 2018; Peterson 2021; Tilley and Shilliam 2018). Feminists are also engaged in examining alternatives and generating economic visions that include ethical, more humane concerns (BennholdtThomsen, Faraclas and Von Werlholf 2001; Braunstein, van Steveren and Tavani 2011; Dickinson and Schaeffer 2001; Weeks 2011). In particular, many feminists abandon masculinist models and priorities in favour of a more relevant and responsible model of ‘social provisioning’ (Power 2004). The remainder of the chapter draws on this and additional research to provide a ‘big picture’ analysis of GPE that takes both empirical and analytical gender seriously.

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GENDER MATTERS IN GPE 2 Since approximately the 1970s, economic restructuring has been propelled by neoliberal policies favoured by geopolitical elites (see Chapter 15 for a further discussion of development institutions and neoliberal policies). Deregulation has permitted the hyper-mobility of (‘foot-loose’) capital, induced phenomenal growth in crisis-prone financial markets and increased the power of private capital interests. Liberalisation is selectively implemented: powerful states continue to foster their interests while developing countries have limited control over protecting domestic industries, goods produced and jobs provided. Privatisation has entailed the loss of nationalised industries in developing economies and a decrease in public sector employment and provision of social services worldwide. While the results of restructuring are complex, uneven and controversial, evidence increasingly suggests expanding inequalities, and, indeed, a polarisation (gap between top and bottom) of resources within and between countries. Globalisation is a gendered process that reflects both continuity and change. Men, especially those who are economically, ethnically, racially and geopolitically privileged, continue to dominate institutions of authority and power worldwide. Masculinist assumptions and objectives continue to dominate economic and geopolitical thinking, with the effect of policy-making that is top-down, formulaic and over-reliant on growth and quantifiable indicators – rather than focused on provisioning, human well-being and sustainability. But globalisation is also disrupting gendered patterns by altering conventional beliefs, roles, livelihoods and political practices worldwide. While some changes are small and incremental, others challenge our deepest assumptions (for example, male breadwinner roles) and most established institutions (such as heteropatriarchal families/ households). Feminists argue that not only are the benefits and costs of globalisation unevenly distributed between males and females, but that masculinist bias in theory/practice exacerbates inequalities manifested in differently constructed but intersecting hierarchies of race/ethnicity, class and nation.3 To make better sense of how these hierarchies intersect, I argue that the devalorisation of feminised qualities – constituted by the governing code, or logic, of gender – systemically affects how we ‘take for granted’ (normalise and depoliticise) the devalorisation of feminised qualities, bodies, identities and activities. This has obvious relevance for analysing GPE, where assessments of ‘value’ constitute the field of inquiry. In effect, casting subordinated individuals as feminine devalorises not only the (empirical gender) category of ‘women’ but also sexually, racially, culturally and economically marginalised ‘men’ (for example, ‘lazy migrants’, ‘incompetent natives’, ‘effeminate gays’). That is, while structural hierarchies vary by reference to the ‘difference’ emphasised and modalities of power involved, they typically share a common feature: the devalorisation of feminised qualities attributed to those who are subordinated (lacking reason, agency, control, skills and so on). Moreover, 230

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when we understand gender analytically – not only as gendered bodies but also as gendered concepts – styles, ‘ways of knowing’, music, hobbies, skills, jobs and nature, to name just a few, can be feminised, with the effect of reducing their legitimacy, status and value. This devalorisation is simultaneously ideological (discursive, cultural) and material (structural, economic). Consider again how ‘women’s work’ – whether done by women or men – is poorly paid, or frequently not paid at all, and we hardly notice, in part because the depreciation of feminised activities is so taken for granted. Oppressions differ, as do attempts to explain and/or justify them. Hence, feminisation is not the only ‘normalising’ ideology in operation. I argue, however, that what distinguishes feminisation and renders it so ideologically powerful is the unique extent to which it invokes a deeply internalised and naturalised binary – the dimorphism of ‘sex difference’ – which is then ‘available’ to naturalise diverse forms of structural oppression. To clarify: even as sex and gender are increasingly ambiguous to some, most people most of the time take a categorical, essentialised distinction between male and female completely for granted: as biologically ‘given’, reproductively necessary and psychosocially ‘obvious’. Yet history indicates not only that sex difference itself is produced – through contingent, socially constructed practices and institutionalisations – but that it is inextricable from masculinism as a system of asymmetrical power. That is, the deeply sedimented concept of sex difference and historically institutionalised practices of gender hierarchy are mutually constituted. As one effect, the ‘naturalness’ of sex difference is generalised to the ‘naturalness’ of masculinist (not necessarily male) privilege, so that both aspects become normalised ‘givens’ of social life (Runyan 2019). The point of arguing that feminisation devalorises is neither to explain how different inequalities are historically produced, nor to claim that gender hierarchy is the ‘primary’ oppression overshadowing race, class or sexuality. The point is rather to suggest how gender operates across hierarchies: if the sex binary normalises gender hierarchy such that feminised qualities are deemed ‘naturally’ inferior, those who are attributed such qualities can be rendered ‘naturally’ inferior as well. This does the political work of making the limited options and precarious lives of subordinated groups seem somehow inevitable rather than unconscionable.

A FEMINIST GPE FRAMEWORK – PRODUCTIVE, REPRODUCTIVE AND VIRTUAL ECONOMICS To provide a ‘big picture’ analysis that genders GPE, I move beyond a narrow definition of economics and develop an alternative analytical framing of reproductive, productive and virtual economies (abbreviated as ‘RPV’). This refers not to conventional but Foucauldian economies: mutually constituted (therefore coexisting and interactive) systemic sites through and across which power operates. These sites involve conceptual 231

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and cultural dimensions that are inextricable from – are indeed mutually constituted by – material effects, social practices and institutional structures. Here I review some major trends in each economy, emphasising not only how they are gendered, but also how gendered inequalities intersect with other hierarchies. The productive economy I begin with what is most familiar: the ‘productive economy’ understood as ‘formal’ – regularised and regulated – economic activities identified with primary, secondary and tertiary production. Restructuring variously complicates these sectoral distinctions, especially as information and communication technologies (ICTs) alter what is produced and how. The first trend is a dramatic decline in world prices of and demand for (non-oil) primary products. This has been devastating to ‘Third World’ economies where primary production dominates: unemployment problems are exacerbated, ability to attract foreign investment is reduced and debt dependency may be increased. In response, countries may encourage foreign investment by advertising the availability of ‘cheap’ labour and unregulated, non-unionised worksites. Or they might experience people migrating elsewhere in search of work. Second, ‘de-industrialisation’ is most prominent in advanced economies and major cities. It involves two shifts: first, from traditional material-based manufacturing (such as refrigerators) to informational and knowledgebased manufacturing (for example, computer games), and second, a decline in previously well-paying (masculinised) jobs, manifested variously through outsourcing, downsizing, loss of skilled and often unionised positions, growth in low-wage, semi-skilled and unskilled jobs and relocation of production to lower wage areas. Like agricultural production in the past, manufacturing remains important but declines in value relative to the higher status and earnings of ICT-based work. In overlapping ways, job security is additionally eroded for all but elite workers due to a third trend, ‘flexibilisation’ (see Chapter 15). This characterises how production processes shift: to spatially dispersed networks (the global assembly line, subcontracting), to increasingly casualised (non-permanent, part-time) and informalised (unregulated, non-contractual) jobs, to small batch, ‘just in time’ (short term rather than long term) production planning and to avoidance or prohibition of organised labour. These changes tend to increase un- and underemployment (especially of men) and, coupled with erosion of union power, translate into a decline in ‘real’ incomes and household resources. Fourth, the most significant job growth is in services, which accounts for 50–70% of the workforce in advanced economies and is increasing rapidly in developing countries. This growth is due in part to the shift from material- and labour-intensive production to ICT-based production. For instance, the material and labour costs of producing microchips are only a fraction of the knowledge-based (research and development) costs. 232

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Polarisation of incomes is exacerbated insofar as service jobs tend to be either skilled or high-waged (professional-managerial jobs; read ‘masculinised’) or semi-skilled, unskilled and poorly paid (personal, cleaning, retail and clerical services; read: ‘feminised’). Hence, this shift also favours countries with developed technology infrastructures and relatively skilled workers. The fifth trend is feminisation of employment, understood simultaneously as a material, embodied transformation of labour markets (increasing proportion of women in paid work) and a conceptual characterisation of deteriorated and devalorised labour conditions (less desirable, meaningful, safe or secure). As flexibilisation becomes the norm, employers seek workers who are perceived to be undemanding (unorganised), docile but reliable, available for part-time and temporary work, and willing to accept low wages. Gender stereotypes depict women as especially suitable for these jobs and gender inequalities render women especially desperate for access to income. In short, as more jobs are casual, irregular, flexible and precarious (in other words, feminised), more women – and devalorised men – are doing them (Peterson 2012). In general, elite, educated and highly skilled women benefit from this trend, and employment in any capacity arguably benefits women in terms of access to income and the personal and economic empowerment this affords. Women, however, continue to earn 20–40% less than men worldwide, and most women are entering the workforce under adverse structural conditions: available work is often tedious, physically demanding and sometimes hazardous, with negative effects on women’s health and long-term working capacity.4 Sixth, globalisation increases flows of people: to urban areas, export processing zones, seasonal agricultural sites and tourism locales. Migrations are not random. They are shaped by colonial histories, geopolitics, capital flows, state policies, labour markets, cultural stereotypes, skill attributions, kinship networks and identity markers. Consistent with structural vulnerabilities and the nature of ‘unskilled’, poorly valued jobs that are most frequently available, migrant worker populations are especially marked by gender, class and race/ethnicity. Moreover, being on the move – for work, recreation or escape – affects personal and collective identities and cultural reproduction. Not least, traditional family forms and divisions of labour are disrupted, destabilising men’s and women’s identities and gender relations more generally. Shifting identities have complex effects on imagined communities, whether expressed in antiimmigrant racism, nationalist state building, ethno-cultural diasporas, ethnic cleansing or patriarchal religious fundamentalisms (Peterson 2021). The uneven and gendered effects of these trends are most visible in relation to production processes and working conditions. For the majority of families worldwide (approximately one-third of which are femaleheaded), restructuring has meant declining household income, reduced access to safe and secure employment and decreased provision of publiclyfunded social services. These trends not only differentially affect women, men and feminised ‘others’ but are also shaped by masculinist ways of 233

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thinking in regard to how ‘work’ is defined, who should do what kinds of work and how different activities are valued. The effects are especially stark when we consider the reproductive economy. The reproductive economy Conventional – and continuing – neglect of the reproductive economy exemplifies masculinist and modernist bias and reflects habitual thinking that values the (masculinised) public sphere of power and formal (paid) work, at the expense of the marginalised (feminised) family/private sphere of emotional, domestic and caring (unpaid) labour. There are, however, important reasons for taking the reproductive economy seriously; I note especially the politics of socialisation, social reproduction and informalisation in GPE. Socialisation teaches us how to think and behave according to the codes of our particular culture; it is literally indispensable for the survival – the social reproduction – of individuals and groups. Subject formation begins in the context of family life and the coding we learn early on is especially influential. This is where we first observe and internalise sex/gender differences, their respective identities and divisions of labour. Moreover, gender acculturation is inextricable from beliefs about race/ ethnicity, age, class, religion, nationality and other axes of ‘difference’. Effective socialisation matters structurally for economic relations. It produces individuals who are then able to ‘work’ and this unpaid reproductive labour (done primarily by women) saves capital the costs of producing key inputs. Socialisation also instils attitudes, identities and belief systems that enable societies to function. Capitalism, for instance, requires not only that ‘workers’ accept and perform their role in ‘production’, but that individuals more generally accept hierarchical divisions of labour and their corollary: differential valorisation of who does what kind of work. And most people internalise the ideology of masculinist states, religions and heteropatriarchal families that insists ‘real’ men are self-confident, successful breadwinners, while ‘real’ women are devoted service providers, disproportionately responsible for the emotional and physical health of family members. In spite of romanticised motherhood and a great deal of pro-family rhetoric, neoliberal globalisation generates a ‘crisis in social reproduction’ (Bakker 2007) by depleting (Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas 2014) the emotional, cultural and material resources necessary for the wellbeing of most women and families. Privatisation reduces public spending; when social services are cut, women are disproportionately affected because they are more likely to depend on secure government jobs and on public resources in support of reproductive labour. When economic conditions deteriorate, women are culturally expected to fill the gap, in spite of fewer available resources, more demands on their time and minimal increases in men’s caring labour. Effects include more women working a ‘triple shift’, the feminisation of poverty worldwide, and both short- and 234

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long-term deterioration in female health and human capital development. The effects are not limited to women because the increased burdens they bear are inevitably translated into costs to their families, and hence to societies more generally. As a survival strategy, women especially rely on informal work to ensure their own and their family’s well-being (Sassen 2000). Informal activities fall outside of ‘formal’ (contractual, regulated) work arrangements; they vary from caring and domestic work in the household to street vending, under-the-counter payments and black market transactions on a global scale (Peterson 2013). They demand our attention because of their explosive growth worldwide (constituting perhaps half of all economic output), and how they blur licit-illicit, paid-unpaid and public-private boundaries. In general, informal work is polarised between a small, highly skilled group able to take advantage of and prosper from deregulation and flexibilisation and the majority of the world’s (feminised) workers who participate less out of choice than necessity (see Figure 17.1). Women, migrants and the poor constitute the vast majority of informalised workers and they also do the informal work that is least valued and often the most precarious. This is due in part to stereotypes of feminised work and the extent of informal activities that are situated in the home. There are also race/ethnicity, class and national patterns in terms of which households engage in which forms of informal labour (for example, childcare, domestic labour, food vending, petty trade). The salience of structural hierarchies is also due to patterns regarding what types of work are available (such as cleaning, care-taking, maintenance, food provisioning,

Figure 17.1  The gendered ‘iceberg’ of (licit) informal economic activities. Source:  Adapted from Chen (2005).

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personal services), where informalisation is concentrated (as is the case for many poor and working class families worldwide, as well as migrant labour in rural agriculture and global cities) and who is most likely to be available for and willing to undertake informal activities (particularly women, migrants and economically marginalised populations) (Chant and Pedwell 2008). Interpreting informalisation is controversial. Some individuals prosper in a less regulated environment. This is especially evident in microenterprises (favoured by neoliberals) where innovation may breed success and multiplying effects, in tax evasion and international pricing schemes that favour larger operations, in developing countries where informal activities are crucial for income generation and in criminal activities that are ‘big business’ worldwide. Critics, however, argue that informalisation favours capital over labour and that avoidance of regulations is directly and indirectly bad for wages, workers, the environment and long-term prospects for societal and global well-being. Feminists expose both the role of informalisation in devaluing women’s labour and its increasing salience as a household survival strategy. Whether viewed positively or negatively, the scale and ‘irregularity’ of informal activities matter systemically and must be taken seriously. The virtual economy My reference to ‘virtual’ is not intended to separate the virtual from the material but to probe the relationship between materiality and the increasing dimension of non-materiality in the global economy: the exchange of symbolic money, the centrality of information and communication and the role of signs and ‘virtual reality’ in aesthetics and consumption. I focus here on the virtual economy of global finance, which increasingly shapes the gender (and race) of winners and losers in GPE – as is starkly demonstrated in economic crises (Floro and Dymski 2000; Griffin 2013; Young and Schuberth 2010). Since the 1970s, floating exchange rates, reduced capital controls, offshore transactions, new financial instruments and the rise of institutional investors have interacted to amplify the speed, scale and complexity of global financial transactions. In general, the allure of financial trading exacerbates the devalorisation of manufacturing and encourages shortterm over long-term investments in industry, infrastructure and human capital. The expansion, complexity and non-transparency of global financial transactions make money laundering easier, which enhances opportunities for illicit financial trading, as well as organised crime, and decreases tax contributions that underpin public welfare. Access to credit becomes decisive for individuals and states and is deeply structured by familiar hierarchies. Increasing urgency in regard to ‘managing money’ and investment strategies shifts status and decision-making power within households, businesses, governments and global institutions. These changes disrupt conventional identities, functions and sites of authority, especially as 236

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pursuit of profits displaces provisioning needs, and governments compete for private capital at the expense of public welfare. Moreover, the instability of financial markets increases risks that are socialised (hurting public welfare) and when crises ensue, the costs are gendered: loss of secure jobs and earning capacity due to women’s concentration in precarious forms of employment; lengthened work hours for women as they ‘cushion’ the impact of reduced household income; decreased participation of girls in education and worsened health conditions for women; expanded child labour and women’s licit and illicit informal activities and even increased acts of violence against women. And the effects are long term: girls and women are less able to participate as full members of society, have fewer skills required for safe and secure income generation and the intensification of women’s work with fewer resources imperils social reproduction more generally. Boys and men have fewer and less favourable ‘formal’ work opportunities, less likelihood of skilled, long-term employment and the disruption of masculine breadwinner roles, which deepens personal insecurities, with often devastating effects. Finally, entire societies are affected as deteriorating conditions of social reproduction, health and education have long-term consequences for collective well-being and national competitiveness in the new world economy (depicted in the cartoon in Figure 17.2).

CONCLUSION This chapter offered a wide-ranging survey of how gender matters in GPE. For reasons of space, it has neglected many important issues, not least the agency and resistance of women and other feminised groups (although certain of these are discussed elsewhere in this volume). While these certainly ‘matter’ for analysing global politics, I have focused instead on an overview of global power relations as these structure the political economy of neoliberal globalisation. A brief survey indicated how feminists deploy gender empirically and analytically to examine restructuring through a variety of theoretical orientations. The RPV analytics of three interacting ‘economies’ revealed how major trends tend toward a polarisation of income and status between masculinised elites and feminised ‘others’. This ‘big picture’ analysis also exposed how the cultural code of feminisation naturalises the economic (material) devaluation of feminised work, whether that work is done by women or men who are culturally, racially and/or economically marginalised. In this crucial sense, the chapter not only describes how ‘gender matters’. It also argues that gender is not only about women and men, but about qualities, skills, ideas, identities and practices that are devalued by being feminised. These are key points for understanding the political work that ‘gender’ does, how feminisation links and ‘naturalises’ multiple hierarchies and how gender ‘matters’ for sustaining and obscuring global inequalities. 237

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Figure 17.2  Lurie’s ‘Foreign Affairs’ Source:  © Ranan Lurie for Foreign Affairs. Reproduced by kind permission.

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Discussion questions 1. How is gender both an empirical and analytical category? How has the distinction shaped analyses of GPE? Which understanding of gender do you think is more important for understanding global politics, and why? 2. What is meant in this chapter by ‘intersectionality’? How does understanding ‘feminisation as devalorisation’ advance intersectional analyses? How are racialised inequalities shaping and shaped by GPE? 3. What does ‘crisis of social reproduction’ refer to? How is global climate change affecting processes of social reproduction? Can you identify features of a crisis of social reproduction in your own family, community and nation? Notes 1. For general feminist critiques, see Cook et al (2000), Peterson (2003), Ferber and Nelson (2003), Barker, Bergeron and Feiner (2021), Marchand and Runyan (2011). 2. For reasons of space, in the remainder of the chapter, I cite only key references not already identified; for elaboration of argumentation and extensive citations, see Peterson (2003, 2005). 3. I understand intersectionality as an ‘analytic sensibility’ that reclaims an initial emphasis on ‘structures of power and exclusion’; hence, not as a reference to identity categories but to historically contingent, mutable and interactive ‘political and structural inequalities’ (Cho, Crenshaw and McCall 2013, 795, 797). Intersectionality gained momentum and circulation after the Combahee River Collective’s Statement (1977/1979) and accelerated with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s pioneering work (1988, 1991). Among a now vast literature, see Hill Collins (2000), Brah and Phoenix (2004), Yuval-Davis (2006). 4. Neate (2018) reports that ‘on average women across the world are paid just 63% of what men earn. There is not a single country where women are paid as much as men’, At this rate, it will take 202 years to close the global gender wage gap.

Further reading Bhattacharyya, Gargi. 2018. Rethinking Racial Capitalism. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Elias, Juanita and Adrienne Roberts (eds). 2018. Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Figart, Deborah M. and Tonia L. Warnecke (eds). 2013. Handbook of Research on Gender and Economic Life. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Marchand, Marianne H. and Anne Sisson Runyan (eds). 2011. Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resistances. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. 239

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Rai, Shirin M. and Georgina Waylen (eds). 2014. New Frontiers in Feminist Political Economy. London and New York: Routledge. References Bakker, Isabella. 2007. “Social Reproduction and the Constitution of a Gendered Political Economy.” New Political Economy 12 (4): 541–556. Baliamoune-Lutz, Mina and Mark McGillivray. 2015. “The Impact of Gender Inequality in Education on Income in Africa and the Middle East.” Economic Modelling 47: 1–11. Bandara, Amarakoon. 2015. “The Economic Cost of Gender Gaps in Effective Labor: Africa’s Missing Growth Reserve.” Feminist Economics 21 (2): 162–186. Barker, Drucilla, Suzanne Bergeron and Susan Feiner. 2021. Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization. 2nd edition. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bedford, Kate. 2009. Developing Partnerships: Gender, Sexuality and the Reformed World Bank. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benería, Lourdes. 2003. Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered. New York: Routledge. Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika, Nicholas G. Faraclas and Claudia von Werlholf (eds). 2001. There is an Alternative: Subsistence and Worldwide Resistance to Corporate Globalization. London: Zed Books. Bergeron, Suzanne. 2001. “Political Economy Discourses of Globalization and Feminist Politics.” Signs 26 (4): 983–1006. Bergeron, Suzanne. 2009. “An Interpretive Analytics to Move Caring Labor Off the Straight Path.” Frontiers 30 (1): 55–64. Bhambra, Gurminder. 2020. “Colonial Global Economy: Towards a Theoretical Reorientation of Political Economy.” Review of International Political Economy 28 (2): 307–322. Bhattacharyya, Gargi. 2018. Rethinking Racial Capitalism. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Boserup, Esther. 1970. Women’s Role in Economic Development, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Brah, Avtar and Ann Phoenix. 2004. “Ain’t I A Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 5 (3): 75–86. Braunstein, Elissa, Irene Van Steveren and Daniele Tavani. 2011. “Embedding Care and Unpaid Work in Macroeconomic Modeling.” Feminist Economics 17 (4): 5–31. Chant, Sylvia and Carolyn Pedwell. 2008. “Women, Gender and the Informal Economy: An Assessment of ILO Research and Suggested Ways Forward.” Geneva: ILO. Chen, Martha (2005) “Rethinking the informal economy” in Rethinking Informalization, edited by Neema Kudva and Lourdes Benería. Cornell University Open Access Repository. Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/ 1813/3716. 240

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Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. 2013. “Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory.” Signs 38 (4): 785–810. The Combahee River Collective. 1979/1977. ‘A Black Feminist Statement’. In Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah Eisenstein, 362–372. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Cook, Joanne, Jennifer Roberts and Georgina Waylen (eds). 2000. Towards a Gendered Political Economy, London: Macmillan. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1988. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” The University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–167. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43: 124–129. DeRock, Daniel. 2021. “Hidden in Plain Sight: Unpaid Household Services and the Politics of GDP Measurement.” New Political Economy 26 (1): 20–35. Dickinson, Torry D. and Robert K. Schaeffer. 2001. Fast Forward: Work, Gender, and Protest in a Changing World. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Elson, Diane (ed.). 1991. Male Bias in the Development Process. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ferber, Marianne A. and Julie A. Nelson (eds). 2003. Feminist Econo­mics Today: Beyond Economic Man, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Floro, Maria and Gary Dymski. 2000. “Financial Crisis, Gender, and Power: An Analytical Framework.” World Development 28 (7): 1269–1283. Griffin, Penny. 2013. “Gendering Global Finance: Crisis, Masculinity, and Responsibility”, Men and Masculinities 16 (1): 9–34. Harcourt, Wendy (ed.) 2016. Palgrave Handbook on Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice. London: Palgrave. Hill Collins, Patricia. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consci­ous­ ness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. Khera, Purva. 2016. “Macroeconomic Impacts of Gender Inequality and Informality in India.” IMF Working Paper WP/16/16, IMF. Marchand, Marianne and Anne Sisson Runyan (eds). 2011. Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resistances. London: Routledge. Mohanty, Chandra T. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press. Neate, Rupert. 2018. “Global Pay Gap Will Take 202 Years to Close Says World Economic Forum”, The Guardian, 18 December 2018. https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/18/global-gender-pay-gapwill-take-202-years-to-close-says-world-economic-forum. Peterson, V. Spike. 2003. A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive, and Virtual Economies. London: Routledge. 241

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Peterson, V. Spike. 2005. “How (the Meaning of) Gender Matters in Political Economy.” New Political Economy 10 (4): 499–521. Peterson, V. Spike. 2012. “Rethinking Theory: Inequalities, Informalization and Feminist Quandaries.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 14 (1): 1–31. Peterson, V. Spike. 2013. “Gendering Insecurities, Informalization and ‘War Economies’.” In Gender, Violence and Human Security: Critical Feminist Perspectives, edited by A. M. Tripp, M. Marx Ferree and C. Ewig, 50–75. New York: New York University Press. Peterson, V. Spike. 2021. “State/Nation Histories, Structural Inequalities and Racialised Crises.” New Political Economy, 26 (2): 291–301. Power, Marilyn. 2004. “Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics.” Feminist Economics 10 (3): 3–20. Rai, Shirin. 2002. Gender and the Political Economy of Development. Cambridge: Polity. Rai, Shirin, Catherine Hoskyns and Dania Thomas. 2014. “Depletion: The Cost of Social Reproduction.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 16 (1): 86–105. Runyan, Anne Sisson. 2019. Global Gender Politics. 5th edition. New York: Routledge. Sassen, Saskia. 2000. “Women’s Burden: Counter-Geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival.” Journal of International Affairs 53 (2): 503–524. Seguino, Stephanie. 2020. “Engendering Macroeconomic Theory and Policy.” Feminist Economics 26 (2): 27–61. Smith, Nicola. 2020. Capitalism’s Sexual History. New York: Oxford University Press. Tilley, Lisa and Robbie Shilliam. 2018. “Raced Markets: An Introduction.” New Political Economy 23 (5): 535–543. Waring, Marilyn. 1999. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth. 2nd edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work. Durham: Duke University Press. Young, Brigitte. and Helene Schuberth. 2010. “The Global Financial Meltdown and the Impact of Financial Governance on Gender.” GARNET Policy Brief Number 10. Paris: Science Politique. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2006. “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 13 (3): 193–209.

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CHAPTER 18

International Law Sara Bertotti Introductory textbooks define international law as the set of laws regulating the ‘interrelationships of sovereign states and their rights and duties to one another’ with increasing attention paid to the role of actors other than states, including individuals, international organisations and armed groups (Henriksen 2019, 1). International law students learn that, given that the world lacks an overarching sovereign, a global legislature or a constitution, international law is made through decentralised processes, mainly treaties and the development of international legal custom.1 These traditional sources exist within a larger network of international institutions, debates and relationships which also contribute to the making of international law (Boyle and Chinkin 2007; Roberts and Sivakumaran 2018). Over the years, international law has developed into distinct specialist regimes, such as international human rights law and international criminal law (ICL), each with their related institutional structures and sub-disciplinary expertise.2 What might not immediately emerge from mainstream accounts is a critical appraisal of the origins of international law. The gloss of objectivity and neutrality attached to international law – as law – has obscured the gendered and colonial origins of the discipline. Thinking about international law through a feminist lens has required noting that, historically, the power of the state – central in traditional accounts of international law – has been theorised in foundational texts in analogy with the power of the patriarch (Kinsella 2006). Early feminist approaches to international law critiqued the mainstream understandings of core disciplinary concepts. For instance, Charlesworth (1997) challenged understandings of statehood as a neutral concept through ‘sexing the state’; that is, studying the criteria for statehood encoded in Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention as the ‘reproductive mechanism’ of international law.3 Her research has revealed, for instance, how ‘territory’ – one of the criteria for statehood – mirrors the ‘characteristics of the person of Anglo-Australian DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-20

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criminal law’ in that it is understood as ‘bounded, self-contained, closed, separate’ (Charlesworth 1997, 259; Charlesworth and Chinkin 2000; Naffine 1997). This understanding has become such a defining aspect in international law that entities which ‘cannot assert control over a coherent unified territory, such as many indigenous minority peoples, do not qualify as full subjects’ and, as such, have been confined to ‘the margins of international law’ (Charlesworth 1997, 259). More recently, from a queer feminist standpoint, Otto (2018, 239) has counterposed the ‘narrow and racially imbued band of “natural” reproductive ties’ characterising the nation-state, to queer transnational alliances which instead offer ‘nonstate-centred’ modes of kinship carrying the hope of laying ‘the foundation for an international community based on forms of kinship and human interconnection other than militaristic nationalism’. While international law is often seen as a way of preventing and condemning violence (for instance, through the prohibition of the threat and use of force enshrined in the UN Charter), international law’s fraught relationship with violence – including colonial, gendered and epistemic violence – deserves further attention. Though mainstream scholarship pushed the role of colonialism to the margins of the discipline, postcolonial approaches have shown how the colonial project was central to international law and to some of its core notions, including sovereignty (Anghie 2005, 2006). In this context, feminist scholars have looked for how discourses and practices in international law can be understood as the legacy of the law’s civilising mission challenging interventions which, while framed as liberatory for women, result in the reiteration of imperial logics (Nesiah 2010; Orford 2002). Kapur, for instance, has illustrated the inclination ‘in the international human rights arena, as well as in parts of the postcolonial world’ to centre a singularising image of the ‘Third World woman’ as the ‘authentic victim subject’ which has reinforced – instead of disrupting – civilisational hierarchies between the Global South and the Global North (Kapur 2005, 95, 115; Mohanty 1988). Historically, international law has relied on and reinforced a narrow, gendered distinction between ‘war’ and ‘peace’, simplistically understanding all law outside the laws of war as the law of peace (Chinkin 2004a, 2004b, 228). This account, however, did not reflect the complex reality of peace and conflict. Harm cuts across the formal status of ‘peace’ and ‘conflict’, especially for those who sit at the wrong end of the power spectrum. More is required for living in peace than the mere absence of war, and anti-militarist feminist perspectives have stressed the continuities of violence and harm noting how conflict is often produced in peacetime and peace can be built during conflict (Cockburn 1998, 2004, 2012; Otto 2020; see also Chapters 21 and 23). While international law no longer relies on these crude divisions, it still largely works as ‘a discipline of crisis’, entangled in limited gendered binaries in its understanding of peace and security, and unable to adequately address inequalities and unbalanced power relations which continue to generate violence both at the macro level and at the level of everyday life (Charlesworth 2002). 244

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Against this disciplinary background, in the past 20 years, feminist approaches to international law have explored and pushed the ‘boundaries’ of the discipline (Charlesworth and Chinkin 2000), navigated tensions ‘between resistance and compliance’ (Kouvo and Pearson 2011) and searched for freedom outside the liberal ‘fishbowl’ (Kapur 2018a). Reflecting on the achievements and limitations of the growing feminist scholarship and activism in the international arena in these two decades, feminist scholars have noted that not all contributions have impacted in the same manner on the structures of international law and politics. While to the mainstream international lawyer gender remains confined to designated spaces within international law (usually around women’s rights and conflict-related sexual violence), there has been a growing attention to women’s rights and equality as well as gender ‘mainstreaming’. Nevertheless, while giving rise to talk of feminist successes, a closer examination suggests a thin mainstream engagement with richer feminist critiques and struggles (Heathcote 2019). To make sense of this, Charlesworth (2011) has proposed a distinction between, on the one hand, feminist ‘messages’ and, on the other hand, feminist ‘methods’ in international law. While feminist messages have been ‘influential in rhetorical terms’ on the discipline and its institutions, feminist methods have been altogether ‘ignored’ (32). Furthermore, the messages that have been taken up at the level of international institutions and international law appear to have remained impermeable to the more critical and non-Western strands of feminist thought (Heathcote 2019). In particular: the message/method distinction embeds specific knowledge projects within international law, in particular with regard to civilising impulses, the reproduction of a racialised, able-bodied, and heteronormative status quo, as well economic hierarchies within international law through gender law reforms. (Heathcote 2019, 4)

This means that, unless attention is paid to feminist methods, the risk is that the pre-existing structures of international law – through the legacies of their gendered and colonial origins – will take up only a few, amenable messages which will be unable to radically change said structures and might in fact risk reinforcing them under a different guise. Against this backdrop, this chapter reviews some of the developments in international law around women and gender highlighting key related feminist critique in order to foreground the necessity of having a methodologically informed reflection on the use of international law to further feminist objectives.

FEMINIST CONVERSATIONS ON INTERNATIONAL LAW An area which has received abundant feminist attention, and which might provide a familiar starting point for students of global politics, is the set of resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council on Women, Peace and 245

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Security (WPS). These resolutions are not legally binding instruments per se but, as non-binding normative instruments, they are generally understood as ‘soft law’ (Bertotti et al. 2021, 19; cf Appiagyei-Atua 2011; on soft law: Boyle and Chinkin 2007). Resolution 1325 was adopted in October 2000 thanks to the leading role of women’s rights and feminist organisations building on the long history of women’s peace activism (Costin 1982; Ruby 2014). Since resolution 1325, nine further resolutions have been adopted under this agenda.4 Of these nine, five focus on conflict-related sexual violence and four present a wider focus. Extensive feminist writing on WPS has developed since the adoption of 1325, forming an ever-growing body of knowledge and discussion on the agenda’s opportunities and limitations (see, for example, Basu, Kirby, and Shepherd 2020; Bell and O’Rourke 2010; Chinkin 2021; Davies and True 2019; Heathcote 2018; Hendricks 2015; Otto 2010a; Shepherd 2008, 2010b, 2011). These resolutions have provided a tool for women’s groups to reclaim a space in peace processes and have triggered the adoption of policies and National Action Plans, though their overall impact remains subject to debate. Critical voices have pointed out how the agenda is reflective of ‘heteronormative assumptions’ (Hagen 2016) and, more generally, of only dominant strands of feminist thought, in particular of liberal and radical feminism. Drawing on attempts to subsume WPS concerns within the Security Council counter-terrorism agenda (Ní Aoláin 2016), Parashar (2019) has observed that the agenda displays a thin understanding of the legacies of the colonial encounter in the Global South in its failure to centre the Global South as an appropriate site of knowledge. Kapur (2018a, 104) has even argued that the agenda is, in fact, a manifestation of governance feminism, showing how the ‘international legal order is increasingly receiving feminists into its power elites and that feminist law reform is emerging there as a formidable new source of legal ideas’ (Halley et al. 2006, 419 as quoted in Kapur). At the same time, the argument can also be made that the extensive focus on WPS of feminist writers in recent years has left large areas of international law under-scrutinised (Bertotti et al. 2021, 19). The recent 20th anniversary of resolution 1325 has renewed the ongoing debates over the legacies and the future of the agenda. In the run up to the anniversary, feminist commentary concentrated on the political undermining and pushbacks within the WPS agenda, including against previously agreed language on sexual and reproductive health as part of wider responses to conflict-related sexual violence. While these events highlighted some of the risks of entrusting the agenda to the Security Council, deeper factors continue to hamper progress on issues related to WPS. Considering these underlying factors provides a useful inroad to understand – from a feminist perspective – the limitations of international law as an instrument for feminist gains. For instance, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s (WILPF) analysis – based on the perspectives of women peace activists – focuses extensively on militarism and militarisation as a factor hindering the full realisation of the agenda: 246

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There is a double face approach at play within the UNSC [UN Security Council] where states continue to reaffirm the importance of implementing WPS commitments while also spending tens or hundreds of billions per year on their militaries, producing and exporting arms, resisting ratifying arms control treaties, and taking contradictory actions on denuclearisation. This approach has increasingly turned Resolution 1325 into a framework that is utilised to make war and conflict safe for women rather than preventing or ending war and conflict. (Kaptan 2020, 9)

This selective Security Council approach, which feminist efforts have so far been unsuccessful in reversing, has been present since the inception of the agenda when the decision was taken to avoid including language on disarmament and anti-militarism in resolution 1325 to both render it more acceptable to states and in order to present a unified NGO front (Otto 2010a, 255). Indeed, through the WPS agenda, the Council enhanced its ‘gender legitimacy’ without having to promote or undertake significant changes around conflict, militarism and armaments in the international sphere (Otto 2010a). This discussion points to the difficulty of altering the gendered logics of militarism and militarised understandings of security through messages such as those delivered through the WPS agenda. The resistance of international institutions to embrace feminist ideas that radically challenge the status quo is further illustrated by WILPF withdrawing from the UN Conference on Disarmament in 2015. As their statement upon withdrawal noted: This is a body that has firmly established that it operates in a vacuum. That it is disconnected from the outside world. That it has lost perspective of the bigger picture of human suffering and global injustice. Maintaining the structures that reinforce deadlock has become more important than fulfilling the objective for which it was created—negotiating disarmament treaties. 5

The reluctance of states to challenge militarism even when apparently working towards peace and security is a useful springboard to talk about the relationship between law and violence from a feminist perspective. While law, through its discursive association with justice and peace, is often uncritically assumed to be a useful tool to advance change, its association with violence is rarely scrutinised as a relevant factor to understand the limits of its progressive change potential (but see Bertotti 2021; Butler 2020; Hamzić 2018). For instance, looking at the relationship between law and violence is useful in the analysis of the system of collective security from a feminist point of view. When peace-oriented feminist and deconstructive methodologies are applied to the law on collective security, they highlight the inherent contradiction between the UN Charter’s promise to maintain peace and security and the fact that the system of collective security de 247

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facto pivots on Chapter VII resolutions authorising force as the ultimate means to ‘resolve’ conflict (Bertotti et al. 2021, 49–50).6 According to Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, all members of the UN ‘shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations’. However, one of the two key exceptions made in the Charter to the prohibition on the use of force encoded in Article 2(4) allows forcible actions authorised by the Security Council under the system of ‘collective security’.7 The collective security provisions are contained in Chapter VII of the UN Charter: if the Council determines ‘the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression’ it can, among other options, authorise measures involving the use of force under Article 42. A peace-oriented feminist and deconstructive analysis would note how, though the Charter system was put in place to achieve peace, a duplicity lies at the heart of the system: ‘through Article 2(4) states committed to renounce violence as a method of international dispute settlement while at the same time agreeing to a collective structure that uses force to resolve disputes’ (Bertotti et al. 2021, 51). This analysis triggers questions, including how far is the Charter’s promise to maintain international peace and security undermined by the fact that collective security is grounded in the legally sanctioned deployment of military force as an ultimate response to threats or breaches of peace? Which violence is identified as such and which escapes scrutiny through this system? What kind of peace can be delivered through the system as it is? Can this system ever displace force as a means to solve disputes? After all, though the violence authorised becomes legal violence, this does not change its lethality and its limitations and long-lasting (gendered) consequences as a means to ‘solve’ conflict and achieve ‘peace’ – as opposed to, for instance, working towards the reduction of inequalities as a method of conflict prevention (Heathcote 2015). Thinking about international law through a feminist lens also raises difficult questions about international humanitarian law (IHL) or jus in bello. This is the legal regime that regulates the conduct of hostilities as well as the protection to which specific categories of people are entitled during armed conflict. Mainstream accounts present IHL as ‘an inherently pragmatic discipline that accepts that war is a recurring feature of human existence’ even arguing that it plays a vital role ‘for the maintenance of peaceful and well-organised relations among states’ (Henriksen 2019, 279–280). Feminist scholars have questioned these portrayals probing standard assumptions about this regime. For instance, the works of Gardam (1997; see also Gardam and Jarvis 2001) and Kinsella (2006, 2011) have scrutinised the gendered and civilisational discourses at the heart of key IHL subjects and principles, such as the principle of distinction between combatants and civilians. Further, while IHL provides some important guarantees, even in the most stringent of interpretations, it accepts as legal certain loss of life as well as certain damage to civilian objects. For instance, the principle of military necessity – which has 248

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been interpreted to justify a variety of acts without considering their longer term consequences on civilians (Heathcote 2012, 106) – accepts that measures ‘necessary’ to reach a legitimate military objective can be legally carried out. That the jus in bello aims at rendering conflict more ‘bearable’ and more ‘humane’ has been identified as a particularly problematic conundrum (Kennedy 2012), because in so doing the law provides an aura of legitimacy and acceptability to the violence of conflict as a method of dispute resolution, and both IHL and conflict carry and reproduce gendered frames. An area which has seen a concentration of feminist law reform projects is international criminal law (ICL). ICL is the branch of international law which provides for individual accountability for the commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity, the crime of genocide and the crime of aggression. While feminist scholarship and activism in these areas has been instrumental in expanding the legal canon to include gender-related crimes, others have been extremely critical of the hyper-focus generated specifically around conflict-related sexual violence (see, for example, Engle 2005, 2008; Halley 2008). Calls to attend to gendered harm in conflict have directed a spotlight on sexual violence that has, however, left in the dark much of the other gender-related harm in war and has re-enforced discourses of feminised victimhood while ignoring the different experiences and roles assumed by women in conflict (Labenski 2021) as well as sexual violence against men and boys (Zalewski et al. 2018). The focus on the criminalisation of conflict-related sexual violence was premised on arguments that such an enterprise was urgent and necessary (see, for example, MacKinnon 1993, 1994). Nevertheless, I suggest that – in addition to this – there might be a further layer to take into account which questions the extent to which law is able to support broader feminist change. One of the reasons for the concentration of feminist work on ICL has been because ‘lawyers feel at home in a judicial system’ and ‘because that space gives feminist scholars legitimacy precisely because it has a court system’ (Charlesworth, Heathcote, and Jones 2019, 85, 86). A key question remains how far law – understood as the specific form that law assumed through modernity in the West which was then spread around the globe through colonial and other subtler forms of diffusion – is amenable to feminist projects which transcend narrower liberal or radical feminist objectives (Bertotti 2021). This is a question which embraces Charlesworth’s (2011) argument about the lack of attention to feminist methods and re-centring feminist analysis of key characteristics of the legal form, such as the legal subject and law’s relationship with violence, in order to understand which projects are more or less amenable to this kind of law. How can the legal form – centred as it is around the male subject of enlightenment rationality and the quintessential capitalist actor, and around its characterising dichotomies (such as legal/illegal, victim/ perpetrator) – be an adequate tool to support feminist goals grounded in intersectionality and in the need to overcome gendered dichotomies? Applied to ICL, with its structural need for specific legal determinations and its understanding of justice as punishment – it is clear how messages of 249

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advocating for the writing into law of sexual violence crimes (for example, on genocidal rape see MacKinnon 1994) are more amenable to the legal form than the wider, more complex objectives of structural change. Focusing on law and intersectionality provides another useful inroad into reflecting on law as a tool for promoting feminist goals. Indeed, the difficulty of law to reflect interlocking experiences of marginalisation was the focus of Crenshaw’s (1989) article on intersectionality. This concept, with roots in Black feminist scholarship and activism, has become a key interdisciplinary analytical tool to show how gender is only one of many interlocking power relations determining privilege and oppression (Combahee River Collective [1977] 1995; Crenshaw 1991; Hill Collins and Bilge 2016; Nash 2008; Yuval-Davis 2006). Within international human rights law, an interesting example of the potential and the limitations entailed in the legal form to translate feminist objectives is illustrated by debates around intersectionality and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).8 The CEDAW is the key international treaty on women’s rights. It currently has 189 state parties and its implementation is presided over by a body of independent experts, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee). The text of the CEDAW focuses primarily on the elimination of discrimination against women and on achieving equality, omitting, for instance, any mention of violence against women and is underpinned by a type of woman ‘assumed to be heterosexual, able-bodied, married (or likely to marry), and to have, or want, children’ (Banda 2019, 268). Nevertheless, the CEDAW Committee has, over time, developed a much wider approach than the letter of the treaty. This approach has revolved around the issuing of General Recommendations from the Committee on how states should interpret the treaty and report on their obligations, the Committee’s jurisprudence and its periodic review of states’ obligations. Through these instruments, the Committee has discussed the situation of, amongst others, disabled women, rural women and women in armed conflict, attracting praise for developing an intersectional approach (Banda 2019; Campbell 2015). Importantly, in its General Recommendation 28 the CEDAW Committee stated that the ‘discrimination of women based on sex and gender is inextricably linked with other factors that affect women, such as race, ethnicity, religion or belief, health, status, age, class, caste and sexual orientation and gender identity’.9 Nevertheless, there remains a tension between the more integrated approach symbolised by General Recommendation 28 and the ‘continued segmenting of intersectional harm (into specific categories of women)’ exemplified by the specific recommendations on categories of women which risks ‘collapsing into identity categories’ (Heathcote 2019, 62). Arguably, this tension can be retraced, at least in part, to the structure of law which has historically struggled to read and address interlocking power and privilege tending to rely on additive identity categories which are more amenable to its structure. The CEDAW Committee has been navigating the tension between a more rigid liberal understanding of identity, ingrained in the text of the 250

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CEDAW itself, and more fluid and plural understandings underpinned by intersectionality through what Heathcote (2019, 63) has called a ‘conscious “misreading”’ of the text of the CEDAW treaty. Still, even in this framing, a key question would then become how far does the letter of the treaty – which is hard law and the obligations to which the state parties signed up for – and the wider, pre-existing context of liberal rights and equality in which the CEDAW exists, permit the achievement of feminist objectives that go beyond and indeed challenge these models? A key accusation of the human rights framework from postcolonial feminist approaches lies in the prevalently liberal and homogenising force it fosters onto precisely the people it purports to emancipate (Kapur 2018a, 2018b). Through her study of the debates around the veil and the tensions between queer liberation and LGBT rights projects, Kapur has argued that while human rights cannot be abandoned, they cannot offer the pathway to freedom feminists and marginalised people hoped for. For Kapur, liberation cannot be found within the parameters of liberal legalism which scholarship has critiqued but also usually restated and recuperated from a standpoint which continues to foreground the liberal, Western episteme. As such, Kapur (2018a, 10) has argued for the urgent need to look for freedom beyond the liberal episteme, or ‘fishbowl’, and to venture into alternative understandings of the subject (Kapur 2020). Similarly, Tamale (2020) has challenged the usefulness of the notion of gender ‘equality’ towards liberation noting its roots in Western patriarchal-capitalistic frames and arguing for the concept of Ubuntu – emphasising reciprocity and interrelatedness – as a possible transformative alternative for African women towards gender justice. When reflecting on whether ‘mainstream doctrines such as equality’ can be recuperated and transformed towards gender justice, Tamale firmly responds, ‘I think not’ (211).

CONCLUSION When feminist approaches to global politics come to international law, it is often in search for a tool to enact ‘solutions’ or for the sense of authority that is associated with law. In reviewing some key feminist debates about international law, this chapter has shown the complexity and some of the pitfalls related to law as an instrument to support feminist change. International law’s gendered and colonising origins and legacies have been noted, as well as law’s indissoluble association with violence. Though law has drawn authority from its positioning as a neutral and impartial force and its association to justice, law cannot be separated from the networks of power in which it is embedded. As Otto notes: The law can be, and usually is, part of the problem. Our quest as feminists relies on not vesting too much power in the law as against other means of struggling for social justice and the dismantlement of entrenched and naturalized hierarchies of privilege. Yet I also think that law has a role to play 251

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in the realization of a peaceful and equitable global community, especially in holding those who exercise economic, military and governmental power accountable. (Otto and Grear 2018, 360)

When deciding to resort to the use of international law and therefore contributing to the production of knowledge and discourses on the use of law for feminist change, the legacy of its gendered and colonial origins must be understood through a prior methodological analysis of the legal form as well as law’s inherent limits as an instrument for the eradication of violence in the global order. For which overall objectives and through which accompanying discourses in international law resorted to as an instrument of feminist change? Is the reliance on mainstream concepts and law undermining longer term transformative objectives (Knox 2010)? Which subject positions and wider power systems are reinforced, and which are silenced? What other instruments beside, or altogether instead of, international law can better be used to achieve social justice? These questions are vital to advancing a feminist vision of international law. Discussion questions 1. What key insights do feminist perspectives on international law offer? Is it possible to talk about a single feminist perspective on international law? 2. Why is it important for students of world politics to engage with feminist approaches to international law? 3. Do you think international law can or should be used to reach feminist objectives? Explain your answer. Notes 1. Conventionally, the sources of international law are encapsulated in Article 38(1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. There has been, however, increasing attention to how the classical sources operate in practice and at other possible sources of international law (see Roberts and Sivakumaran 2018). 2. The development of sub-disciplines is usually referred to as the ‘fragmentation debate’ (Koskenniemi and Leino 2002; for a feminist take see Heathcote 2019). 3. Convention on Rights and Duties of States (26 December 1933) 165 LNTS 19 (Montevideo Convention) art 1. The four criteria are: (a) permanent population; (b) defined territory; (c) government; (d) capacity to enter into relations with other states. 4. UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (31 October 2000) UN Doc S/RES/1325; UN Security Council Resolution 1820 (19 June 2008) UN Doc S/RES/1820; UN Security Council Resolution 1888 (30 September 2009) UN Doc S/RES/1888; UN Security Council Resolution 1889 (5 October 2009) UN Doc S/RES/1889; UN Security Council Resolution 1960 (16 December 2010) UN Doc S/RES/1960; UN Security Council Resolution 2106 (24 June 2013) UN Doc S/RES/2106; UN 252

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Security Council Resolution 2122 (18 October 2013) UN Doc S/RES/2122; UN Security Council Resolution 2242 (13 October 2015) UN Doc S/RES/2242; UN Security Council Resolution 2467 (23 April 2019) UN Doc S/RES/2467; UN Security Council Resolution 2493 (29 October 2019) UN Doc S/RES/2493. 5. WILPF, International Women’s Day Statement to the Conference on Disarmament, 10 March 2015. Available at: https://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/ documents/Disarmament-fora/cd/2015/statements/part1/10March_WILPF.pdf 6. On law and violence see, among others, Derrida (1992) and Hamzić (2018). 7. The other exception is the right to self-defence (Article 51, UN Charter). For a feminist discussion, see the work of Heathcote (2012). 8. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (adopted 18 December 1979, entered into force 3 September 1981) 1249 UNTS 13. 9. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, ‘General Recommendation No. 28 on the core obligations of States parties under article 2 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women’ (16 December 2010) UN Doc CEDAW/C/GC/28.

Further reading Bertotti, Sara, Gina, Heathcote, Emily, Jones and Sheri, Labenski. 2021. The Law of War and Peace: A Gender Analysis: Volume 1. London: Zed Books. Heathcote, Gina. 2019. Feminist Dialogues on International Law: Successes, Tensions, Futures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kapur, Ratna. 2018a. Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl. Northampton: Edward Elgar. Otto, Dianne (ed.). 2018. Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks. Abingdon: Routledge. Tamale, S. 2020. Decolonization and Afro-Feminism. Ottawa: Daraja Press. References Anghie, Antony. 2005. Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anghie, Antony. 2006. “The Evolution of International Law: Colonial and Postcolonial Realities.” Third World Quarterly 27 (5): 739–753. Appiagyei-Atua, Kwadwo. 2011. “United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security–Is It Binding?” Human Rights Brief 18 (3). https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/ hrbrief/vol18/iss3/1. Banda, Fareda. 2019. “The Limits of Law: A Response to Martha C. Nussbaum.” In The Limits of Human Rights, edited by Bardo Fassbender and Knut Traisbach, 267–279. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Basu, Soumita, Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd. 2020. New Directions in Women, Peace, and Security. Bristol: Bristol University Press. 253

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Bell, Christine and Catherine O’Rourke. 2010. “Peace Agreements or Pieces of Paper? The Impact of UNSC Resolution 1325 on Peace Processes and Their Agreements.” International & Comparative Law Quarterly 59 (4): 941–980. Bertotti, Sara. 2021. “Between Law and Peace: A Critical Study of the Relationship between Peace Agreements, Law and Socio-Political Change.” PhD Diss. SOAS University of London. Bertotti, Sara, Gina Heathcote, Emily Jones and Sheri Labenski. 2021. The Law of War and Peace: A Gender Analysis: Volume 1. London: Zed Books. Boyle, Alan and Christine Chinkin. 2007. The Making of International Law. Foundations of Public International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butler, Judith. 2020. The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. London: Verso. Campbell, Meghan. 2015. ‘CEDAW and Women’s Intersecting Identities: A Pioneering New Approach to Intersectional Discrimination’. Direito GV Law Review 11 (2): 479. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1808-2432201521. Charlesworth, Hilary. 1997. “The Sex of the State in International Law.” In Sexing the Subject of Law, edited by Ngaire Naffine and Rosemary J. Owens, 251–268. North Ryde: LBC. Charlesworth, Hilary. 2002. “International Law: A Discipline of Crisis.” Modern Law Review 65 (3): 377–392. Charlesworth, Hilary. 2011. ‘Talking to Ourselves? Feminist Scholarship in International Law’. In Feminist Perspectives on Contemporary International Law: Between Resistance and Compliance?, edited by Sari Kouvo and Zoe Pearson, 17–32. Oxford: Hart. Charlesworth, Hilary and Christine Chinkin. 2000. The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Analysis. Melland Schill Studies in International Law. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Charlesworth, Hilary, Gina Heathcote and Emily Jones. 2019. “Feminist Scholarship on International Law in the 1990s and Today: An InterGenerational Conversation.” Feminist Legal Studies 27 (1): 79–93. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-018-9384-1. Chinkin, Christine. 2004a. “Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Rehabilitation.” In Peace Work: Women, Armed Conflict and Negotiation, edited by Radhika Coomaraswamy and Dilrukshi Fonseka, 208–236. New Delhi: Women Unlimited. Chinkin, Christine. 2004b. “The Continuum of Violence: A Gender Perspective on War and Peace.” In Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones, edited by Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chinkin, Christine. 2021. Women, Peace and Security and International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cockburn, Cynthia. 1998. The Space between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict. London: Zed Books. Cockburn, Cynthia. 2004. The Line: Women, Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus. London: Zed Books.

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Cockburn, Cynthia. 2012. Antimilitarism: Political and Gender Dynamics of Peace Movements. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Combahee River Collective. 1995. “A Black Feminist Statement.” In Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall, 232–240. New York: The New Press. Costin, Lela B. 1982. “Feminism, Pacifism, Internationalism and the 1915 International Congress of Women.” Women’s Studies International Forum 5 (3/4): 301–305. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” The University of Chicago Legal Forum 1: 139–167. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–1299. Davies, Sara E. and Jacqui True (eds). 2019. The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’”. In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson. New York: Routledge. Engle, Karen. 2005. “Feminism and Its (DIS)Contents: Criminalizing Wartime Rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” American Journal of International Law 99 (4): 778–816. Engle, Karen. 2008. “Judging Sex in War.” Michigan Law Review 106 (6): 941–961. Gardam, Judith. 1997. “An Alien’s Encounter with the Law of Armed Conflict.” In Sexing the Subject of Law, edited by Ngaire Naffine and Rosemary J. Owens, 233–250. North Ryde: LBC. Gardam, Judith and Michelle Jarvis. 2001. Women, Armed Conflict and International Law. The Hague: Kluwer Law International. Hagen, Jamie J. 2016. “Queering Women, Peace and Security.” International Affairs 92 (2): 313–332. Halley, Janet. 2008. “Rape at Rome: Feminist Interventions in the Criminalization of Sex-Related Violence in Positive International Criminal Law.” Michigan Journal of International Law 30 (1): 1–123. Halley, Janet, Prabha Kotiswaran, Chantal Thomas and Hila Shamir. 2006. “From the International to the Local in Feminist Legal Responses to Rape, Prostitution/Sex Work and Sex Trafficking: Four Studies in Contemporary Governance Feminism.” Harvard Journal of Law & Gender 29 (2): 335. Hamzić, Vanja. 2018. “International Law as Violence: Competing Absences of the Other.” In Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks, edited by Dianne Otto, 77–90. Abingdon: Routledge. Heathcote, Gina. 2012. The Law on the Use of Force: A Feminist Analysis. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Heathcote, Gina. 2015. “Feminist Perspectives on the Law on the Use of Force.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Use of Force in International Law, edited by Marc Weller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heathcote, Gina. 2018. “Security Council Resolution 2242 on Women, Peace and Security: Progressive Gains or Dangerous Development?” Global Society 32 (4): 374–394. Heathcote, Gina. 2019. Feminist Dialogues on International Law: Successes, Tensions, Futures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hendricks, Cheryl. 2015. “Women, Peace and Security in Africa.” African Security Review 24 (4): 364–375. Henriksen, Anders. 2019. International Law. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill Collins, Patricia and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity. Kaptan, Senem. 2020. UNSCR 1325 at 20 Years: Perspectives from Feminist Peace Activists and Civil Society. New York: Women’s Inter­ national League for Peace and Freedom. Kapur, Ratna. 2005. Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism. London: Glasshouse Press. Kapur, Ratna. 2018a. Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl. Northampton: Edward Elgar. Kapur, Ratna. 2018b. “The (Im)Possibility of Queering International Human Rights Law.” In Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks, edited by Dianne Otto, 131–147. Abingdon: Routledge. Kapur, Ratna. 2020. “On Violence, Revolution and the Self.” Postcolonial Studies 24 (2): 251–269. Kennedy, David. 2012. “Lawfare and Warfare.” In The Cambridge Companion to International Law, edited by James Crawford and Martti Koskenniemi, 158–183. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kinsella, Helen. 2006. “Gendering Grotius: Sex and Sex Difference in the Laws of War.” Political Theory 34 (2): 161–191. Kinsella, Helen. 2011. The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Knox, Robert. 2010. “Strategy and Tactics.” Finnish Yearbook of International Law 21: 193–229. Koskenniemi, Martti and Päivi Leino. 2002. “Fragmentation of International Law? Postmodern Anxieties.” Leiden Journal of International Law 15 (3): 553–579. Kouvo, Sari and Zoe Pearson (eds). 2011. Feminist Perspectives on Contemporary International Law: Between Resistance and Compliance? Oxford: Hart. Labenski, Sheri. 2021. Female Defendants in International Law: Feminist Dialogues. Abingdon: Routledge. MacKinnon, Catharine. 1993. “Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace.” UCLA Women’s Law Journal 4 (1): 59–86. 256

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MacKinnon, Catharine. 1994. “Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights.” Harvard Women’s Law Journal 17: 5–16. Mohanty, Chandra. 1988. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review 30 (1): 61–88. Naffine, Ngaire. 1997. “The Body Bag.” In Sexing the Subject of Law, edited by Ngaire Naffine and Rosemary J. Owens. North Ryde: LBC. Nash, Jennifer. 2008. “Re-Thinking Intersectionality.” Feminist Review 89: 1–15. Nesiah, Vasuki. 2010. “From Berlin to Bonn to Baghdad: A Space for Infinite Justice.” In Fault Lines of International Legitimacy, edited by Hilary Charlesworth and Jean-Marc Coicaud, 146–172. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ní Aoláin, Fionnuala. 2016. “The ‘War on Terror’ and Extremism: Assessing the Relevance of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda.” International Affairs 92 (2): 275–291. Orford, Anne. 2002. ‘Feminism, Imperialism and the Mission of International Law’. Nordic Journal of International Law 71 (2): 275–296. https://doi.org/10.1163/157181002761931387. Otto, Dianne. 2010a. “The Security Council’s Alliance of Gender Legitimacy: The Symbolic Capital of Resolution 1325.” In Fault Lines of International Legitimacy, edited by Hilary Charlesworth and Jean-Marc Coicaud, 239–276. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Otto, Dianne. 2018. “Resisting the Heteronormative Imaginary of the Nation-State: Rethinking Kinship and Border Protection.” In Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks, edited by Dianne Otto, 236–257. Abingdon: Routledge. Otto, Dianne. 2020. “Rethinking ‘Peace’ in International Law and Politics from a Queer Feminist Perspective.” Feminist Review 126 (1): 19–38. Otto, Dianne and Anna Grear. 2018. “International Law, Social Change and Resistance: A Conversation Between Professor Anna Grear (Cardiff) and Professorial Fellow Dianne Otto (Melbourne).” Feminist Legal Studies 26 (3): 351–363. Parashar, Swati. 2019. “The WPS Agenda: A Postcolonial Critique.” In The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security, edited by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roberts, Anthea and Sandesh Sivakumaran. 2018. “The Theory and Reality of the Sources of International Law.” In International Law, edited by Malcom D. Evans. 5th edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ruby, Felicity. 2014. “Security Council Resolution 1325: A Tool for Conflict Prevention?” In Rethinking Peacekeeping, Gender Equality and Collective Security, edited by Gina Heathcote and Dianne Otto, 173–184. Thinking Gender in Transnational Times. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Shepherd, Laura J. 2008. “Power and Authority in the Production of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325.” International Studies Quarterly 52 (2): 383–404. 257

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Shepherd, Laura J. 2011. “Sex, Security and Superhero(in)es: From 1325 to 1820 and Beyond.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 13 (4): 504–521. Tamale, Sylvia. 2020. Decolonization and Afro-Feminism. Ottawa: Daraja Press. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2006. “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 13 (3): 193–209. Zalewski, Marysia, Paula Drumond, Elisabeth Prügl and Maria Stern. 2018. Sexual Violence against Men in Global Politics. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Land, Water and Food Monika Barthwal-Datta and Soumita Basu Gender is linked to, and fundamentally shapes, resource politics in a number of complex ways. Feminist activists have long pointed to ideological linkages between gendered identities, particularly feminine identities, on the one hand, and nature, on the other, through the concept of ‘ecofeminism’ (see Chapter 14). More recently, others have emphasised the need to understand the relationships people share with the environment as ‘rooted in their material reality, in their specific forms of interaction with the environment’ (Agarwal 1992, 126). Indeed, as Michelle Leach points out, women’s apparently timeless “special relationship with the environment” is actually shaped by specific social and economic processes; and changes in the character of their work and responsibilities may have important consequences for their management and use of natural resources (1992, 15)

At the same time, the ways in which historical material developments at the global and local levels (for example, capitalism, globalisation, industrialisation and urban development) determine and shape these interactions, with different social, political and economic consequences for different groups, are also highlighted. Feminist perspectives therefore not only help illuminate, among other things, how ideational structures such as patriarchy have helped construct women and nature as organically subordinate to men, but also how our gendered experiences of and relationships with the environment – depending on our specific position in different socio-economic and political hierarchies (such as class, caste, ethnicity and religion) – influence and shape our responses to environmental exploitation and degradation (Agarwal 1992). Feminists also use gender as an analytical category ‘to study how masculinity and femininity – gender understood as a meaning system – produce, and are produced by, political economy [and indeed other spheres]’ (Peterson 2005, 499). DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-21

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Writing on ‘gender, property rights, and natural resources’, MeinzenDick et al (1997, 1304) note that, ‘given the enormous diversity in property regimes, gender relations, cultural and environmental conditions, it may be heroic – or indeed foolhardy – to assume that we can identify patterns of resource use that apply beyond a specific case’. Faced with a similar dilemma in writing this chapter, we follow the strategy of Meinzen-Dick et al (1997): we first identify the conceptual linkages between gender and natural resources from a political economy perspective and highlight common trends across resources and regions (such as the impact of development projects, globalisation and corporate capital) that help demonstrate these linkages. We then provide an overview of the ‘gender gap’ in assets (mainly land and water) that exists in agriculture in countries in the Global South, its consequences and the factors facilitating the former. The concluding section examines a range of policy and activist responses that seek to respond to some of the issues identified in the chapter.

GENDER AND NATURAL RESOURCES: CONCEPTUAL INSIGHTS Land, food and water form the very basis of all our lives. In light of this, questions regarding ownership of and access to land and water, and availability of affordable and nutritious food, are pertinent. Along with factors such as class and geographical location, the gender identity of a person, whether they identify as women, men or otherwise, lends meaning to these questions. Women, for instance, did not traditionally inherit land in most societies, an issue that continues to be on the contemporary feminist agenda (see Agarwal 1994; Deere and Leon 2003). A gender analysis of resource politics does much more than shed light on gender-based inequalities. It highlights the ways in which the interplay of masculinities and femininities – embodied by individuals and institutions – is integral to the prevalent economic system, and the impact of these on the access to and management of resources. The growing trend of privatisation of water, for example, not only adversely affects rural women, who are traditionally responsible for collection of water for domestic consumption in rural households, but also reproduces the masculinity of water management which, as Juana Vera Delgado and Margreet Zwarteveen discuss in the context of Peru, ‘was not just something that only men did, but also something that culturally belonged to the male domain and that was associated with perceptions of masculinity’ (2007, 504). The latter arguably reinforces women’s unpaid labour in the collection of water. Gendering resource politics In The Death of Nature, by Carolyn Merchant (1980), the dominant masculinity of industrial capitalism – led by scientific revolution and European Enlightenment ethics, and characterised by ‘mechanistic, rationalized, [and] competitive’ values (Sturgeon 2005, 806) – is drawn up as pitted 260

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against the environment, a feminine construct. Directed towards controlling nature, especially its propensity to exploit natural resources, capitalist economy is tied to the environment in a masculine–feminine binary relationship. This relationship, which has also been explored by other scholars besides Merchant (see, for instance, Mies and Shiva 1993), has been an important component of gender analysis of resources. It provides the leitmotif for feminist explorations into the significance of colonialism, the ‘development’ discourse, globalisation and corporatisation vis-à-vis the global political economy of resources. Vandana Shiva, for instance, argues that the ‘scientific management’ of forests – or ‘reductionist masculinist forestry’ – introduced in India during the British colonial period had a different economic perspective to that of the Indigenous ‘alternative feminine forestry science’: In a shift from ecological forestry to reductionist forestry all scientific terms are changed from ecosystem-dependent to ecosystem-independent ones. Thus while for women, tribals and other forest communities a complex ecosystem is productive in terms of water, herbs … fuel, fibre and as a genepool, for the forester, these components are useless, unproductive waste and dispensable. Two economic perspectives lead to two notions of ‘productivity’ and ‘value’ … [I]n reductionist commercial forestry, overall productivity is subordinated to industrial use, and large biomass to species that can be profitably marketed. (Shiva 1988, 61)

Contributions to the women in development (WID) literature (see Chapter 11) have also highlighted these and other ways (such as granting ownership of land to men) through which women – and their productive role – were sidelined in colonial governance (see Boserup 1970). In the postcolonial period, the ‘development’ discourse also privileged, and came to be dominated by, the notion of ‘productivity’ emerging from the reductionist economic perspective, as described by Shiva above (see Shiva 1988, 3). While the role of women as protectors of environment eventually began to be reiterated at this time, it is worth noting that policy documents such as Our Common Future, the report from the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987), which proposed the influential concept of ‘sustainable development’,1 also presented ‘women as problem’ (Bretherton 2003). Specifically, women’s reproductive capacity was seen to put pressure on environmental resources through population growth. This was a ‘problem’ that had to be controlled or managed through targeted policies such as women’s education and reproductive healthcare. In the 20th century, natural resources were increasingly drawn into global market economies. The trend of delocalisation of natural resources gathered pace, with trade liberalisation being a crucial factor. The structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) of the 1980s, initiated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), forced farmers in a large number of countries in the developing world to change their production 261

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patterns and focus on cash crops for world markets. This globalised and market-oriented production took multiple forms: ‘extractive activities of various kinds, the expansion of large-scale commercial production of industrial crops such as oil palm, or the incorporation of smallholder producers into global markets through the production of cash crops such as coffee or cocoa’ (Elmhirst and Resurreccion 2008, 9). More recently, there has been large-scale corporatisation of farmlands, forestlands, rivers and other natural resources worldwide. As with international trade liberalisation, states have largely bowed down to capitalist logic with erstwhile commons being handed over to transnational corporations (TNCs). The physical distance between corporate managers and the resource, and the former’s ideological distancing from the latter, has led to widespread overexploitation of natural resources, often destroying the fine balance of sustenance and protection that had traditionally existed between communities and their local environment. Echoing Shiva, Nandita Ghosh notes, ‘environmentally, global capital is predatory in its enclosure of commons such as privatizing water supply from a river, thus depleting its resources, degrading the livelihoods of inhabitants along the banks and possibly jeopardizing an entire eco-system’ (2007, 447). In the remaining part of this section, we introduce some key elements of contemporary resource politics relevant for underprivileged rural women in the developing world. This not only partly reflects a major empirical concern demonstrated in the feminist literature on the subject but also serves to provide background to the next section that undertakes a broad feminist analysis of the political economy of agriculture – especially, the ‘gender gap’ in access to and control of land and water resources in countries in the Global South. Women and natural resources in rural areas Empirical observations from across the world point to the important role that women play in both productive and reproductive components of rural economies, contributing to activities such as subsistence production, income generation as well as domestic tasks like cooking, childrearing and caregiving (see, for instance, Agarwal 1994; Croll 1981; Sachs 1996). Here, while it is important to acknowledge the severely undervalued reproductive work done by women, it is also worth noting that ‘the separation between productive and reproductive activities is often artificial, symbolised, perhaps, by a woman carrying a baby on her back while working in the fields’ (Benería and Sen 1981, 292; see also Storeng et al. 2013). In order to carry out all these responsibilities, women have a direct stake in the availability of and access to natural resources (Leach 1992, 13). The more recent ‘feminisation of agriculture’ (see, for instance, Vepa 2005) has added to this burden. It involves the mass migration of (working age) men to urban centres in search of work, leaving women behind as heads of rural households who often bear the sole responsibility of tending to the family farm or engaging in commercial farming. 262

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However, despite taking up roles that have tied women closely to nature, their access and rights relating to natural resources remain fragile. For example, in many countries in South and Southeast Asia, Africa and South America, women – irrespective of their social status, unlike men – continue to face relatively limited access to land. This is usually due to factors such as discriminatory inheritance laws and deeply entrenched patriarchal social norms, and serves to severely undermine the livelihood and welfare opportunities for women. In the widespread absence of private ownership of resources, the rural poor – a large proportion of whom are women – have traditionally relied on common property resources for their subsistence and livelihood. As Agarwal (1992, 129) points out, however: the availability of the country’s natural resources to the poor is being severely eroded by two parallel, and interrelated trends – first, their growing degradation both in quantity and quality; second, their increasing statization (appropriation by the state) and privatization (appropriation by a minority of individuals), with an associated decline in what was earlier communal.

While the nationalisation (or ‘statisation’) of natural resources may have weakened access to communal resources for the poor, large-scale

Gendered dimensions of extractive industries The setting up of extractive industries usually entails human resettlements, and consequently loss of traditional livelihoods, along with more long-term implications for the environment. The gendered dimensions of such activities have received significant attention in policy and scholarly literatures, and cut across a number of themes. We examine mining as an illustrative case here to consider both its gendered impacts as well as the role and agency of women in this industry. First, women play a critical role in rural economies, both in terms of productive and reproductive labour. The feminisation of agriculture has increased this burden on rural women, who rely on common property resources for their livelihoods and meeting the food security needs of their families. As rural communities are forcibly displaced and resettled away from the agricultural resources they depend upon in the face of large-scale mining projects, it is typically women who are more adversely affected (Macdonald 2017, 7; also see Lozeva and Marinova 2010). They are also undermined by their lack of (adequate) access to ‘alternative incomes and the ability to move to other locations to seek alternative and often better opportunities’ that are available to men (Macdonald 2017, 7). Lahiri-Dutt (2015, 523) notes, however, that the ‘archetypically hypermasculine’ mining industry is now undergoing a process of feminisation with ‘the informal involvement of rural women in mineral-extractive practices in order to survive, as well as the growing visibility of women in mining industries’, including ‘in policy-making processes and civil society actions around mining’. This relates to the second point about women’s role and agency in the mining industry. Studies on formal involvement of women in this industry point to workplace discrimination and harassment, reflecting women’s experiences in other sectors. More broadly, however, it is limiting to disconnect such gendered experiences ‘from the rest of the problems associated with the social and environmental impact of mining’ (Lozeva and Marinova 2010). The complex interplays of power networks have been examined, for instance, in scholarship that has focused on the agency of Indigenous women in negotiating mining agreements. Based on her study of a number of negotiations between Indigenous peoples and mining companies in Australia and Canada, Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh (2013, 1802) writes, ‘indigenous women’s participation and the world view they bring to negotiations is reflected in the content of the agreements … and in the distribution of benefits from them’. As mining activities intensify in different parts of the world, paying attention to the gendered dimensions of this industry and indeed other extractive projects is necessary for both human security and environmental sustainability.

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privatisation of resources in recent decades has perhaps posed a more serious threat. The commodification of natural resources has highly restricted access among the rural poor, and has negatively affected the lives of rural women in particular (see Meinzen-Dick et al. 1997, 1308–1309). For instance, as mentioned earlier, the privatisation of water tends to affect women adversely. It does so by increasing their unpaid labour involved in the collection of water – ‘for example, Water Policy International has estimated that South African women collectively walk the equivalent of going to the moon and back 16 times daily in their search for fresh water’ (Roberts 2008, 549). These negative trends in resource politics have been resisted both at the local and transnational levels by women’s and gender advocacy groups, among others. The activist and policy responses, along with the range of alternatives to the prevalent system of resource management proposed by them, are discussed in the concluding section.

AGRICULTURE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH: GENDER CONCERNS In the majority of developing countries around the world, agriculture remains the single most important source of livelihoods and a key driver of economic growth. In parts of Asia and Africa, for example, up to 70% of domestic populations continue to live in rural areas, and agricultural activities such as farming, fishing, livestock rearing and forestry not only form the main source of income and food security, but also constitute their traditional way of life. In this respect, it becomes important to consider the multifunctionality of agriculture whereby it is not only the site of economic activity, but also the source of a variety of social, cultural and ecological benefits and services (IAASTD 2008). This discussion on agriculture, however, has to be placed within the context of the current global food economy, which has emerged against the backdrop of accelerated and uneven agricultural trade liberalisation (Clapp 2013). As indicated earlier, the latter was facilitated by the SAPs of the World Bank and the IMF in the late 20th century, and further accelerated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) with the 1994 Agreement on Agriculture (McMichael 2009; McMichael and Schneider 2011). As a result of these and other relevant policy developments (for example, the deregulation of the financial sector in the United States at the turn of the century), poor small food producers in developing agricultural economies have found themselves seriously disadvantaged in competing with the domestic influx of cheap and heavily subsidised food from developed countries (Pritchard 2009, 97). Indeed, a large number have been forced to abandon agriculture as it is no longer a viable means of living for them. The growing presence of TNCs in agriculture and land consolidation for the monocropping of export crops has also served to undermine small farmer access to agricultural land (McMichael and Schneider 2011). Farming practices such as multicropping and crop rotation that are more 264

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environment friendly have been marginalised, and women and men who demonstrate a more symbiotic relationship with natural resources are subjugated within contemporary capitalist economies. Further, the participation of TNCs in agriculture is strongly characterised by dominant masculinities associated with farming, such as ‘control over the land and environment’, use of machines, display of physical strength and, more recently, ‘managerial and entrepreneurial activity’ (Little 2002, 667). The above discussion illustrates how policies and practices related to the ownership, use and management of natural resources are gendered in nature and impact. Given the scale and extent of discrimination that women in agriculture continue to be subjected to in many countries in the Global South, it is also useful to examine gender as a variable – thus focusing on different experiences of women and men – in the study of resource politics. Women have traditionally played a central role in agriculture in developing countries, where, on average, they form over 40% of the agricultural labour force. In many parts of Asia and Africa, this proportion is as high as 50% (FAO 2011). Yet, despite their significant, and in many cases growing, presence in agriculture, women continue to face serious inequalities and constraints in their ability to access agricultural resources, such as land, fresh water and forestlands. Compared to their male counterparts, female rural agricultural producers also lack sufficient access to other important resources such as markets, technology, financial support (such as credit and insurance services), education and skills training and extension support. This ‘gender gap’ in agriculture means that, in general, women lack sufficient means to maintain or boost their incomes by way of raising agricultural productivity (see, for instance, Pande 2000). This has welfare implications for female agricultural producers and their families, including food insecurity, as well as wider socio-economic fallouts given the importance of agriculture to economic growth in developing countries. Access to agricultural land Among all agricultural resources, land is the most highly valued. As the FAO points out, ‘[a]ccess to land is a basic requirement for farming and control over land is synonymous with wealth, status and power in many areas’ (2011, 23). In many developing countries, inadequate access to land and tenure insecurity remain serious issues affecting the agricultural productivity, livelihoods and food security of small farming households that comprise the majority of rural populations in such places. In parts of South Asia (such as Bangladesh, Nepal and India) and Southeast Asia (including Cambodia and the Philippines), landlessness is widespread, and large numbers of agricultural households lack titles to land they have lived and worked on for long periods of time. Without land titles, rural households are highly vulnerable to unfair or forced land evictions, often facilitated by state agencies in favour of private investment interests. At the same time, when agricultural households 265

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lack security of tenure, they tend to invest less in agricultural practices that may help boost productivity and involve the sustainable use and management of natural resources. This is because they are uncertain of their ability to reap the benefits of such investment in the medium to long term. Both male and female agricultural producers are affected by inadequate access to land and tenure insecurity in developing countries. There are, however, deep inequalities with respect to the extent to which each group experiences these challenges. Moreover, as indicated previously, intersections between gender, on the one hand, and factors such as class, caste, ethnicity and religion on the other, also have a bearing on access to land and tenure security among both men and women in developing societies. Nonetheless, the glaring gap in access to land between men and women in general in a large number of developing countries has led analysts to point to a number of wider issues to help understand this gender gap.

Factors underlying the gender gap in access to land Several social, economic and political factors have been cited as driving the gender gap that exists in developing countries in terms of access to land. In South America, for example, the gender gap relating to access to land has historically been attributed to social norms such as the preference of men as the inheritors of private property, and men being privileged over women in marriages (Deere and Leon 2003). At the same time, gender bias at the community and state level against women in programmes of land distribution also plays a role, as does the fact that land markets in the region remain largely biased against women (Deere and Leon 2003). In the case of South Asia, Agarwal points out that in the majority of countries in the region, laws around the inheritance of private property acknowledged independent property rights for women as early as in the 1950s. Nonetheless: [I]n development policy governing the distribution of public land, the issue of women’s land rights was not discussed … till the 1980s. Hence the redistributive land reform programmes of the 1950s and 1960s in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and of the 1970s in Bangladesh, continued to be modelled on the notion of a unitary male-headed household, with titles being granted only to men, except in households without adult men where women (typically widows) are clearly the heads. This bias was replicated in resettlement schemes, even in Sri Lanka where customary inheritance systems have been bilateral or matrilineal. (Agarwal 1994, 8–9)

Even today, in countries such as Bangladesh, national policies continue to discriminate against women as heads of households unless they are divorced or widowed (Kashyap 2012). This means that despite state guarantees of benefits to rural agricultural workers such as credit facilities, subsidies and 266

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loans for farm inputs such as fertilisers, these benefits do not always reach female agricultural workers. This has real implications for the financial status of female agricultural producers as well as the socio-economic welfare of households where females are engaged in agricultural production while male members may be employed in other sectors. Where land titles exist, the omission of names of female members of rural farming households from these documents remains a serious problem. It not only severely undermines the ability of female agricultural producers to access credit facilities and take out loans but also jeopardises their ability to protect their interests in the face of forced or unfair land acquisitions. In countries such as the Philippines, India and China, for example, land documentation generally remains incomplete, and in many areas, the names of women also continue to be largely excluded from landuse certificates, despite their having the same land rights as men (BarthwalDatta 2014). Access to water for irrigation Lack of access to agricultural land is often the reason behind a lack of access to water resources for irrigation. It is therefore not surprising that women in many countries in the Global South also experience the latter disproportionately. In most of South America, for example, access to water is premised on land ownership (UN-Water 2006, 4). As discussed earlier, there is a significant gender gap in land ownership. Often the same factors underlying this gap may be responsible for lack of access to water for irrigation. Despite women being water users and managers for both domestic and productive purposes, it is rural men who are seen to ‘best represent the water related interests and needs of the household at the level of the community, and complete congruence of interests between men and women is assumed’ (Goetz, cited in Meinzen-Dick and Zwarteveen 1998, 339). This understanding reflects the arbitrary separation of the public and the private, a matter of persistent concern for feminists, wherein ‘the paradigmatic subject of the public and economic arena is male, where that of the domestic arena is female’ (Goetz, cited in Meinzen-Dick and Zwarteveen 1998, 339). As with national land-related policies, irrigation management schemes often do not consider women as legitimate heads of households unless they are widowed or divorced. Consequently, they are not sufficiently (if at all) consulted or included in decision-making processes and implementation programmes related to these schemes (Ray 2007). Similarly, the monetisation of water for irrigation, to give another example, not only discriminates against the rural poor (the majority of whom are women)2 who are unable to pay for it; but it also does not take into account the benefits of irrigation for the purposes of poverty reduction and the environment (Zwarteveen 1998, 303). The literature on gender and access to water for irrigation highlights three main concerns (Ray 2007, 431–433): first, women’s access 267

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to irrigation water is often indirect (in other words, mediated by male members of household) and affects their overall income level – although formal allocation of irrigation rights is neither sufficient nor necessary to bring about a positive change in this respect. Second, irrigation management policies that are participatory in nature (as in those that directly include women) may not have a beneficial impact on women’s access to water unless they take note of the different roles played in agriculture by men and women. As Zwarteveen (1997, 1337) points out, preferences of men and women with respect to irrigation (such as quantity and timing) may be influenced by specific on-farm tasks being performed by them (for example, men and women share the job of transplanting rice in farms in Nepal, but women are responsible for weeding that is affected by the level of water in the paddy field) and ‘gender-specific crop choices’; yet, gender differences in actual use of water are not a good guide for determining genderdifferentiated water needs. This is because ‘where women use water differently than men this is more likely to be caused by the fact that women have less access and rights to water, than by women having different water needs’ (Zwarteveen 1997, 338). It therefore becomes more important to focus on the unequal power relations that constrain access to and control of water in the first place, rather than designing policies solely around existing patterns of use. Finally, while access to water for irrigation may enhance the welfare of women by boosting household incomes, this may involve an increase in their overall workload without an accompanying increase in their ability to control the additional income generated (Ray 2007, 433). Although agricultural policies in the last few decades have become far more cognisant of the links between gender and access to natural resources such as land and water, the design, implementation and evaluation of such policies in many developing countries continue to be gender biased. Societal norms around land ownership and inheritance, for example, remain deeply entrenched, and ‘base inequalities in power that include sexism, patriarchy, racism, and class’ continue to prevail and undermine access to agricultural resources (Patel 2010, cited in Wittman 2011, 96). At the same time, corporate acquisition of agricultural land continues to be widely and often indiscriminately endorsed by policymakers despite the serious environmental and welfare costs to local communities. This, as discussed earlier, serves to reinforce dominant masculine values that celebrate the subjugation of nature for the sake of progress and development. It results in a gendered form of violence against all – nature as well as people.

POLICY AND ACTIVIST RESPONSES In the last 50 years, women and gender advocacy groups have galvanised around concerns regarding the sustainability of natural resources against the backdrop of the environmental fallouts of industrial development, 268

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population growth and urbanisation. Beginning in the 1970s, there was a groundswell of local women’s movements across the world including the Chipko movement in India, the Women’s Greenbelt Movement in Kenya and women’s activism in response to the Three Mile Island accident in the United States (Johnson 1999, 222). While the impact of these and other movements has varied over time and geographical location, the relevance of women’s environmental activism, including towards the protection of natural resources, is widely recognised (see Chapter 14). International policymaking has also taken account of gender and resource politics. The influential Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, recognised barriers to women’s access to land and water in spite of their role in food production, and called on policymakers to factor in women’s needs and interests and to increase their participation in management of resources (1987). Agenda 21, the declaration of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, built on these linkages in the quest for sustainable development. It advocated, for instance, ‘strengthening/developing legal frameworks for land management, access to land resources and land ownership – in particular, for women – and for the protection of tenants’ (UN 1992). The Beijing Declaration (1995) of the Fourth World Women’s Conference also recognised the importance of ensuring women’s access to resources such as land and water. However, the scope of such international policies, both in terms of provisions and implementation, has been stymied by the parallel growth of the more powerful and insidious force of neoliberal capitalism that privileges the interests of corporate capital above all. As Roberts (2008, 548) points out with regard to the privatisation of water, TNC representatives work actively to secure their interests in global water organisations such as Global Water Partnership, the World Water Council and the World Commission on Water. Partly in light of the inherent limitations of these global policy mechanisms, pitched against the growing corporatisation of resources and supported by the increasing role of non-state actors in global politics, new transnational movements also emerged connecting local initiatives for resource management. The transnational peasant movement La Via Campesina, for instance, has led the way in developing the concept of ‘food sovereignty’ since the 1990s as an alternative to the prevailing, tradebased approach to food security, driven mainly by liberalised agricultural trade and industrial agriculture (Windfuhr and Jonsén 2005, 24). Although there is no single agreed definition of food sovereignty, its core principles are widely agreed. In essence, food sovereignty refers to ‘the rights of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture system’ (Via Campesina 2007; Windfuhr and Jonsén 2005). It focuses on power relations within food systems that disadvantage or marginalise small farming households or peasants, fisherfolk, Indigenous peoples, pastoralists among others. Alternative approaches to food that share concerns with food sovereignty 269

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include food justice movements (for example, see Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Gottlieb and Joshi 2010) and the Right to Food movement (for example, see Patel 2012; Ziegler et al. 2011). Gender was not immediately foregrounded in the food sovereignty movement, but the interests of women farmers and the need to have gender-sensitive agricultural policies have been increasingly recognised within the movement (Desmarais 2003). Food sovereignty critiques those masculine values seen as undermining food systems – such as an overwhelming emphasis on industrial agriculture, a neoliberal international agricultural trade regime, rampant privatisation of natural resources and their (over)exploitation – in favour of approaches that are associated with more feminine values such as environmental sustainability, communal use and management of natural resources and agroecological farming practices. Further, it has come to recognise the ways in which ‘women and girls are disproportionately disempowered through current processes and politics of food’s production, consumption, and distribution’ (Patel 2012).

CONCLUSION The gendered nature of resource politics, especially the specific concerns of women regarding access to and management of natural resources, has been recognised at the global level by intergovernmental as well as non-governmental organisations. However, the dominance of neoliberal capitalism is such that it constrains the range of possibilities available for addressing issues such as the ‘gender gap’ in access to land, food and water. For instance, legal mechanisms may be used to guarantee land rights to women, but better prices offered by TNCs make the lease or purchase of land by individuals and communities more expensive, potentially eroding local ownership and leading to negative consequences – such as overexploitation of land – for both the resource and the community. In light of this, it is imperative that gender concerns vis-à-vis land, water and food are understood within a complex web of social and environmental justice issues (such as peasants’ rights) that have emerged from the overwhelming capitalist hold over natural resources today. Discussion questions 1. In what ways does the concept of gender help explain contemporary resource politics? 2. What do you understand by the term ‘gender gap’ as it relates to access to agricultural land and water? To what extent is it prevalent in the Global South, and why? 3. How is food sovereignty a gendered approach to tackling food insecurity?

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Notes 1. ‘Sustainable development’ is described as the ‘process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are made consistent with future as well as present needs’ (WCED 1987, 17). 2. Although, as Zwarteveen (1998, 303) points out, ‘access to water in public irrigation systems may be heavily dependent on access to male dominated and politically influenced social networks and administrative structures … money may be a more neutral and accessible way for women to access water’.

Further reading Agarwal, Bina. 1994. A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clapp, Jennifer. 2013. Food, Cambridge: Polity Press. Cruz-Torres, María Luz and Pamela McElwee (eds). 2012. Gender and Sustainability: Lessons from Asia and Latin America, Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Jackson, Cecile. 2003. “Gender Analysis of Land: Beyond Land Rights for Women?’ Journal of Agrarian Change 3 (4): 453–480. Ray, Isha. 2007. “Women, Water and Development.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 32: 421–449. References Agarwal, Bina. 1994. A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Agarwal, Bina. 1992. “The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India.” Feminist Studies 18 (1): 119–158. Alkon, Alison Hope and Julian Agyeman (eds). 2011. Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Barthwal-Datta, Monika. 2014. Food Security in Asia. London: International Institute for Strategic Studies. Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995) Available from https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/pdf/BDPfA%20E.pdf Benería, Lourdes and Gita Sen. 1981. “Accumulation, Reproduction, and ‘Women’s Role in Economic Development’: Boserup Revisited.” Signs 7 (2): 279–298. Boserup, Ester. 1970. Woman’s Role in Economic Development. London: George Allen & Unwin. Bretherton, Charlotte. 2003. “Movements, Networks, Hierarchies: A Gender Perspective on Global Environmental Governance.” Global Environmental Politics 3 (2): 103–119. Clapp, Jennifer. 2013. Food. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Croll, Elisabeth J. 1981. “Women in Rural Production and Reproduction in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and Tanzania: Socialist Development Experiences.” Signs 7 (2): 361–374. Deere, Carmen Diana and Magdalena Leon. 2003. “The Gender Asset Gap: Land in Latin America.” World Development 31 (6): 925–947. Delgado, Juana Vera and Margreet Zwarteveen. 2007. “The Public and Private Domain of the Everyday Politics of Water: The Constructions of Gender and Water Power in the Andes of Peru.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 9 (4): 503–511. Desmarais, Annette Aurélie. 2003. “The Via Campesina: Peasant Women on the Frontiers of Food Sovereignty.” Canadian Woman Studies 23 (1): 140–145. Elmhirst, Rebecca and Bernadette P. Resurreccion. 2008. Gender, Environment and Natural Resource Management: New Dimensions, New Debates. London: Earthscan. FAO. 2011. “The State of Food and Agriculture 2010–11: Women in Agriculture: Closing the Gender Gap.” http://www.fao.org/docrep/013/ i2050e/i2050e.pdf. Ghosh, Nandita. 2007. “Women and the Politics of Water: An Introduction.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 9 (4): 443–454. Gottlieb, Robert and Anupama Joshi. 2010. Food Justice. Cambridge: MIT Press. International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). 2008. “Agriculture at a Crossroads: Global Report.” http://www.unep.org/dewa/agassessment/ reports/ I A AST D/ EN/Agriculture%20at%20a%20Crossroads _ Global%20Report%20(English).pdf Johnson, Stephanie Hallock. 1999. “An Ecofeminist Critique of the International Economic Structure.” In Gender Politics in Global Governance, edited by Mary K. Meyer and Elisabeth Prügl, 221–229. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Kashyap, Aruna. 2012. “‘Will I get my dues before die?’: Harm to Women from Bangladesh’s Discriminatory Laws on Marriage, Separation, and Divorce.” Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/report/ 2012/09/17/will-i-get-my-dues-i-die/harm-women-bangladeshsdiscriminatory-laws-marriage Lahiri-Dutt, Kuntala. 2015. “The Feminization of Mining.” Geography Compass 9 (9): 523–541. Leach, Melissa. 1992. “Gender and the Environment: Traps and Opportunities.” Development in Practice 2 (1): 12–22. Little, Jo. 2002. “Rural Geography: Rural Gender Identity and the Performance of Masculinity and Femininity in the Countryside.” Progress in Human Geography 26 (5): 665–670. Lozeva, Silvia and Dora Marinova. 2010. “Negotiating Gender: Experience from Western Australian Mining Industry.” Journal of Economic & Social Policy 13 (2): 123–145.

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Macdonald, Catherine. 2017. “The Role of Gender in the Extractive Industries.” WIDER Working Paper 2017/52. https://www.wider.unu. edu/sites/default/files/wp2017-52_0.pdf Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S., Lynn R. Brown, Hilary Sims Feldstein and Agnes R. Quisumbing. 1997. “Gender, Property Rights, and Natural Resources.” World Development 25 (8): 1303–1315. Meinzen-Dick, Ruth S. and Margreet Zwarteveen. 1998. “Gendered Participation in Water Management: Issues and Illustrations from Water Users Associations in South Asia.” Agriculture and Human Values 15 (4): 337–345. Mies, Maria and Vandana Shiva. 1993. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books. Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper Collins. McMichael, Philip. 2009. “A Food Regime Analysis of the ‘World Food Crisis’.” Agriculture and Human Values 26 (4): 281–295. McMichael, Philip and Mindi Schneider. 2011. “Food Security Politics and the Millennium Development Goal.” Third World Quarterly 32 (1): 119–139. O’Faircheallaigh, Ciaran. 2013. “Women’s Absence, Women’s Power: Indigenous Women and Negotiations with Mining Companies in Australia and Canada.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (11): 1789–1807. Pande, Rekha. 2000. “Globalization and Women in the Agricultural Sector.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 2 (3): 409–412. Patel, Raj. 2010. The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Reclaim Democracy. New York: Picador. Patel, Raj. 2012. “Food Sovereignty: Power, Gender, and the Right to Food.” PLoS Medicine 9 (6): e1001223. http://www.plosmedicine.org/ article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001223 Peterson, Spike V. 2005. ‘How (the Meaning of) Gender Matters in Political Economy.” New Political Economy 10 (4): 499–521. Pritchard, Bill. 2009. “The Long Hangover from the Second Food Regime: A World-Historical Interpretation of the Collapse of the WTO Doha Round.” Agriculture and Human Values 26 (4): 297–307. Ray, Isha. 2007. “Women, Water and Development.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 32: 421–449. Roberts, Adrienne. 2008. “Privatizing Social Reproduction: The Primitive Accumulation of Water in an Era of Neoliberalism.” Antipode 40 (4): 535–560. Sachs, Carolyn E. 1996. Gendered Fields: Rural Women, Agriculture, and Environment. Boulder, CO: Westview Press Shiva, Vandana. 1988. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Storeng, Katerini Tagmatarchi, Mélanie Stephanie Akoum and Susan F. Murray. 2013. “‘This Year I Will Not Put Her to Work’: The Production/ Reproduction Nexus in Burkina Faso.” Anthropology & Medicine 20 (1): 85–97.

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Sturgeon, Noël. 2005. “Review of The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution.” Environmental History 10 (4): 805–808. UN Water. 2006. “Gender, Water and Sanitation: A Policy Brief.” UN-Water and the Interagency Network on Women and Gender Equality. http://www.unwater.org/downloads/unwpolbrief230606.pdf United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. 1992. “Agenda 21.” http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/ Agenda21.pdf United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. 1995. “Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA).” http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw Ibeijing/pdf IBDPfA%2OE.pdf Via Campesina. 2007. “Nyéléni Declaration.” Sélingué, Mali: Forum for Food Sovereignty, http://www.nyeleni.org/IMG/pdf/DeclNyeleni-en. pdf Vepa, Swarna S. 2005. “Feminization of Agriculture and Marginalization of Their Economic Stake.” Economic and Political Weekly XL(25): 18–24. Windfuhr, Michael and Jennie Jonsén. 2005. Food Sovereignty: Towards Democracy in Localized Food Systems. Rugby, Warwickshire: ITDG Publishing. World Commission for Environment and Development (WCED). 1987. Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittman, Hannah. 2011. “Food Sovereignty: A New Rights Framework for Food and Nature?” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 2 (1): 87–105. Ziegler, Jean, Christophe Golay, Claire Mahon and Sally-Anne Way. 2011. The Fight for the Right to Food: Lessons Learned. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Zwarteveen, Margreet. 1997. “Water: From Basic Need to Commodity. A Discussion on Gender and Water Rights in the Context of Irrigation.” World Development 25 (8): 1335–1350. Zwarteveen, Margreet. 1998. “Identifying Gender Aspects of New Irrigation Management Policies.” Agriculture and Human Values 15 (4): 301–312.

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CHAPTER 20

Migration and Displacement Lucy Hall Gender matters in migration, and in the study of migration. Migration and forced displacement studies have conventionally assumed the migrant, or the refugee, is male, with the women left behind, or following (Kelson and De Laet 1999). The experience of migration – the decision to leave, the varying degrees of agency in the decision-making process, the process of moving, the consequences of displacement and resettlement – varies by gender. This is partly because differently gendered individuals are positioned differently in relation to many aspects or sites of migration and forced displacement. The causes of flight and decision to migrate are often a combination of the personal and the political – family politics, labour and work opportunities, border regimes, armed conflict, human rights violations, climate change, development projects and the global political economy with its increasingly globalised division of labour. This chapter is organised around the question: what difference does it make to think about migration and forced displacement as a feminist? The difference, as this chapter illustrates, is evident across all phases, types and kinds of migration and displacement. Feminist scholars of migration have demonstrated how gender underpins the laws and policies that governs migration and forced displacement, how gender constructs and reinforces categories of migration and refugeehood and how states, NGOs and international organisations interact to shape people’s lives and the decisions they make. An important theme in the study of migration and gender is agency. Put simply, agency has to do with the capacity for meaningful action. Questions of agency are essentially questions about who speaks, who is spoken to, who speaks for whom, who listens and who is taken seriously to be considered capable and responsible for making and implementing decisions. Björkdahl and Selimovic describe agency as DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-22

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‘the human capacity to act’ (2015, 170). Agency is also ‘imbricated with notions of appropriate gendered behaviours’ (Shepherd 2012, 6). Questions of agency are a priority for most (if not all) feminist thinking. In the context of migration and forced displacement, agency takes shape in relation to everyday decisions and actions such as what food is available to eat, if the water is safe to drink, where to sleep, finding lost family members, accessing adequate menstruation and sanitary products and navigating the multi-level legal and governance structures which hold decision-making powers. Placing questions of agency and gender at the centre of making feminist sense (Enloe 2000) of migration is crucial to ensure that efforts to address protection and assistance ensure people feel protected and assisted. To ignore questions of gender and agency, as Haeri and Puechguirbal (2010) write, can create or make worse already existing gendered safety and security risks. For example, if women are not consulted about the location of water points or sanitary facilities, these structures may be constructed in an area that is not safe for women and exposes them to additional risks, such as sexual violence (Haeri and Puechguirbal 2010, 106). This chapter will return to these questions of gender and agency to illustrate and link together how a feminist lens on migration and displacement can prompt not only questions of the limitations but also the possibilities of migration.

COVID-19, MIGRATION AND GENDER The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the power states hold when it comes to opening and closing borders. This continues to have an immense impact on refugees, migrant workers and internally displaced persons (IDPs) (Al-Ali 2020, 338–339). For example, during lockdowns, live-in migrant domestic workers – disproportionately women – were forced into longer hours and more intense labour because of the demands to clean and disinfect homes (Al-Ali 2020, 338). When migrant domestic workers did leave the homes in which they worked, they faced racism and xenophobia (Al-Ali 2020, 338). Refugees have also been on the frontlines of the response to the pandemic, which is an extension of a long existing trend that refugees are usually the ‘first responders’ to crises that affect their communities (Alio et al. 2020, 371). As Jane McAdam writes, because of COVID-19, much of the world is experiencing deprivations that are the ‘hallmarks of displacement’, including the inability to cross borders lawfully, loss of liberty, confinement, separation from family and friends and extreme uncertainty (2020, 362). While for many of us these deprivations will be temporary, for refugees, asylum seekers and IDPs, these temporary measures may become permanent (McAdam 2020, 364). Think, for example, about the gendered impact of stay-at-home orders, or ‘lockdowns’, and the rise in domestic violence. Or, as this chapter will explore below, the increase in cleaning and childcare work and the impact on migrant domestic workers.

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GENDER, REFUGEE PROTECTION AND SECURITISATION To understand the gendered precarity that migrants, refugees and IDPs experience, and before delving more deeply into the ways in which states, international organisations and NGOs function to manage migration and make decisions about who is ‘worthy of protection’ (Nayak 2015), it is important to first understand two convergent trends. The first of these trends is the increasing integration of gender and feminist perspectives into refugee law and policy (Edwards 2010). The second is the ‘securitisation of migration’ (Huysmans 2000, 2006), which has brought about increased deterrence and non-entrée measures. These trends have brought about a tension that has created, on the one hand, increased law and policy that anticipates and responds to the gendered nature of forced migration and refugee protection and, on the other hand, an increase in measures that deter and detain refugees, ultimately ‘diluting’ and ‘withdrawing’ rights and entitlements (Gerard 2014). First, let’s look at the increasing awareness in refugee law and policy in relation to gender. Under the 1951 International Refugee Convention, a refugee is a person unable or unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of her country ‘owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’ (Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, supra note 2, at Art. l (a). in Anker 2017, 134). Gender is not included here. In response to this omission, feminist scholars and activists in the 1980s began to question the androcentric or ‘male as norm’ basis of refugee law (Edwards 2010, 23). We can identify the androcentric or male as norm approach in case law. For example, in one claim for refugee protection made by a husband and wife, the man recounted being ‘tied to a chair and forced at gunpoint to watch his common-law wife being raped by soldiers’ (Pittaway and Bartolomei 2001, 26). Refugee protection was granted on the basis that the man had been tortured, not his partner (Pittaway and Bartolomei 2001, 26). The violation or torture was understood in the case through a masculine lens that focuses solely on the torture experienced by the husband, and not the woman who was raped. This example points to the implications of the masculine bias in law and refugee protection. It culminates in recognising some forms of violence as torture or persecution (thereby creating legal grounds for refugee protection) and ignores others, demonstrating how gender matters in how we understand violence and refugee protection, as well as the androcentric nature of refugee law and policy. Identifying and problematising the masculine bias in refugee law emerged alongside calls to consider ‘women’s rights as human rights’ (Edwards 2010, 23). The increased awareness and subsequent legal and policy developments that address the protection needs of women, emerged in conversation with developments in international law that enshrined the principle of non-discrimination in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) (Beyani 1995, 33).

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Parallel to the development of CEDAW in the early 1990s, the UN Agency for Refugees (UNHCR) also produced several policy documents specifically concerning refugee women, such as the UNHCR Policy on Refugee Women (1990), the Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women (1991) and Sexual Violence Against Refugees: Guidelines on Prevention and Response (1995) (Freedman 2010, 593). These policy developments served as a prelude to UNHCR in 2000 issuing a new series of Guidelines on International Protection concerning gender-related persecution and the meaning of gender in relation to ‘memberships of a particular social group’ (Edwards 2010, 26). These legal and policy moves have resulted in the recognition of ‘[g]ender-related forms of persecution to include, for example, domestic violence, rape and sexual violence, genital mutilation, forced marriage, trafficking, or transgressing social mores’ (Edwards 2010, 30). This indicates progress, in terms of highlighting how gender matters in relation to persecution and the interpretation of refugee law. While this account of how gender was made to matter in refugee law is highly condensed, what it does illustrate is how refugee law originally paid little or no attention to gender. Alongside broader legal and normative developments concerning women’s rights, however, we can identify important changes in refugee law and policy demonstrating that gender does matter in how discrimination and persecution are understood. While we have seen progress in law and policy relating to gender and refugee protection, the second trend mentioned above – securitisation – brings with it measures that undermine this progress or prevent asylum seekers from having their claims heard at all. To borrow from William Walters, the securitisation of migration is the social and political construction of migration as threat (2010, 218). Depending on your geographic location, you might recognise the securitisation of migration in policies and practices that construct migration as something ‘threatening’ (Huysmans and Squire 2009). The construction of migration as a security threat has prompted and legitimated an array of non-entrée measures designed to deter migrants and asylum seekers. Examples of non-entrée measures include policies designed to ‘prevent the irregular arrival of refugees and keep people remaining in countries of origin and first asylum’ (Hirsch 2017, 49). To include gender here requires asking two questions: what role does gender play in the construction of threat and securitisation of migration; and what are the gendered implications of non-entrée measures? While the construction of migration as a security threat is linked to the introduction and legitimisation of non-entrée measures, I will disentangle them here and discuss them in turn. To add gender here means to explore the ways in which the language of migration, threat and security is gendered, and to reflect on the ways in which masculinities and femininities are constructed in relation to security, risk and threat. In their analysis of the EU’s border control agency Frontex, Saskia Stachowitsch and Julia Sachseder illustrate how gendered and racialised narratives of a dangerous ‘other’ construct migrants as risky security threats and categorises them as ‘refugees, irregular migrants, terrorists, criminals, 278

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or smugglers; for assigning subject positions of protector, protected, and threat’ (2019, 109). In their analysis, they highlight the dual processes of masculinisation and racialisation that construct ‘villains’ (terrorists or criminals) and economic migrants who are not ‘real’ refugees and are instead interested in exploiting European welfare states (Stachowitsch and Sachseder 2019, 112–113). In this context, ‘migrant masculinities’ are constructed as potentially aggressive, violent and unpredictable (Stachowitsch and Sachseder 2019, 114). Similarly, Rettberg and Gajjala’s (2016) research on the portrayal of Syrian male refugees in social media further demonstrates the construction of migrant masculinities as dangerous, threatening and risky. Their analysis demonstrates that migrant masculinities are portrayed in social media either as terrorists and rapists or as cowards (2016, 180). One image in their analysis is of: [A] crowd of men in a train station, walking between two blue trains, some with their hands up in a way that looks more anxious than threatening, with the text: “2200 immigrants arrive in Munich. No women no children. Apparently only men flee ‘war zones’?” (Rettberg and Gajjala 2016, 180)

These contradictory versions of masculinity are not new, as Rettberg and Gajjala explain (2016, 180), the constructs of terrorist-rapist and coward stems from a long colonial history of positioning Middle Eastern men as both effeminate (read: cowardly) and threatening (read: potential rapists of White women and abusers of brown women). Both Rettberg and Gajjala’s (2016) analysis of social media and Stachowitsch and Sachseder (2019) analysis of Frontex illustrates that securitisation, meaning the construction of risk and threat, is linked to constructions of gender and race. As noted above, the gendered and racialised construction of risk, threat and security works to usher in and legitimise non-entrée measures. You might recognise non-entrée measures in the form of pushing back or intercepting boats or carrier restrictions. Carrier sanctions, as Asher Hirsch explains, are ‘financial penalties imposed upon airlines and ships that transport passengers who do not hold the relevant permission to enter the country’ (2017, 60). Carrier sanctions apply not only to refugees but also disproportionately impact those seeking protection (Hirsch 2017, 60). It has therefore become much more difficult to migrate and seek asylum through formal or regular channels, which means irregular or informal means of migration may be the only option for migrants and refugees, which in turn increases risk of violence and death. It is critical then to understand the ways in which exposure to violence and death is gendered. Alison Gerard and Sharon Pickering’s research shows that asylum seeker women who reach the EU experience multiple levels of direct and indirect violence in their often long, violent and precarious journeys (2014). For example, women’s experience of transit is often shaped by exposure to sexual violence, exploitation, extortion and death (Gerard and Pickering 2014, 353). Here, class and economic opportunities 279

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intersect with gender, as exposure to violence can be ‘mediated through money’ (Gerard and Pickering 2014, 347). Gender also organises economic opportunities in transit countries – like Libya, where women may be able to find work more easily than men (Gerard and Pickering 2014, 349). The stories of migrant women who do find work in Libya highlight how work opportunities are gendered (Gerard and Pickering 2014, 350). This is important because it is access to resources, work and money that can either reduce or increase exposure to gendered violence. Research on Australian immigration detention centres shows that women registered as dependent on a husband or male relative spend much shorter periods in detention than single women (Rivas and Bull 2018, 324). Lorena Rivas and Melissa Bull discuss that this is plausibly explained by variations in immigration policy that discriminate against single ‘lone’ women (2018, 324). Rivas and Bull highlight that ‘Australian immigration policy privileges the entry of women as a member of a family, who will be cared for by an economically capable man’ (2018, 324). Here again, as in the story above of the woman raped and her husband forced to watch, women’s experiences of migration are largely understood or made meaningful through their familial relationships to men. This, as Susan Kneebone has demonstrated, is because women are often represented in refugee law and migration law as mothers, wives and sisters in need of male protection (2005, 10). Through this discussion of securitization and non-entrée measures, we find ourselves circling back to an earlier point made in relation to refugee law and policy: the masculine or androcentric assumptions that construct how we understand femininity, masculinity, family, protection and how this underscores the different forms of violence people experience in transit or in immigration detention facilities. In transit, detention and in law, gender underpins how people experience and interact with borders, with states and with work and economic opportunities, and this in turn shapes the types and extent of violence people are exposed to in these settings. Discourses of securitisation erode international protection, and these discourses and their material impact are gendered, racialised and classed.

GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MIGRATION AND DISPLACEMENT So far, this chapter has focused on the ways in which refugee protection and seeking asylum are gendered, in law and policy, and in the lived experiences of torture, flight, transit and detention. The chapter has explored the ways in which the experiences of migration are structured by gender, race and class, as well as influenced by heteronormative assumptions about sexuality and ableist assumptions about bodily capability. Maintaining a focus on these intersections and how they relate to questions of agency, we now turn our attention to labour-related migration. As indicated above, it is not so easy to clearly distinguish between migration for protection 280

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reasons and migration for work. For example, the women interviewed in Gerard and Pickering’s (2014) research engaged in domestic work on their way to seeking protection in the EU. Women might migrate for work that becomes violent or face discrimination and oppression, which can create legal grounds for migration to evolve into an issue of refugee protection (see Jobe 2020). Acknowledging that it is often difficult to neatly separate migration for work from migration for protection reasons, this section discusses the ways in which the global political economy of migration reflects an increasingly globalised division of labour. The global labour market is increasingly polarised (Chang and Ling 2000). Professionals, market managers and techno-skilled workers are in demand and can move relatively freely, unlike those who are unskilled, deskilled and casualised. This latter group, however, is also increasingly feminised – more likely to be women, and/or in conditions of work traditionally associated with women. The status and occupation of migrant workers are usually conditioned by gendered expectations of their abilities (Mora and Piper 2021, 7). Migrant workers are not an incidental effect of globalisation; rather they underpin and service the flow of global capital. Saskia Sassen refers to this as the ‘feminization of survival, because it is increasingly on the backs of women that family support, business profits and government revenue are secured’ (2000, 506). The gendered, racialised and class-based patterns of survival have been further amplified throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. As discussed briefly above, lockdowns had a particularly devastating impact on migrant domestic workers who were caught between different degrees of lockdowns in their home and host states (Kabeer, Razavi and van der Meulen Rodgers highlight 2021, 12). Many migrant domestic workers were left unemployed and in a precarious legal situation; they were often unable to qualify for emergency response measures (cash or healthcare) and were unable to look for work in other countries due to travel restrictions (Kabeer, Razavi and van der Meulen Rodgers 2021, 12–13). These migrant domestic workers experienced both an increase in workload due to expectations of hygiene and cleanliness and xenophobia in public spaces (Al-Ali 2020, 338). COVID-19 also intensified the global flows of feminised care work in the domestic sector, also affecting health workers, childcare and caring for the sick and elderly. Women moving internationally for care work are, like women everywhere, caught between the public and the private, and between productive and reproductive work, where the latter is seen as women’s work, or not really work at all. Care work is also ‘deeply imbued with racial politics present and past’ (Raghuram 2019, 618). In Singapore, for example, there are around 100,000 international domestic workers (IDWs), mostly from the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. A racialised hierarchy of IDWs of nationalities is reflected in the advertisements to recruit domestic workers (Yeoh and Huang 2000). While Filipino women are more in demand and better paid and valued as good English speakers, they are also seen as more worldly and political. Indonesians are seen as hardworking and obedient, while Sri Lankans are infantilised (Pettman 2008). These images, in turn, affect the reception 281

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of women in their new states and workplaces, making them vulnerable to further racialised sexualisation. This is not to say that all migrant women in transnational care chains are exploited (although many are subject to abuse and violence). Neither is it to say that all are passive or reactive, responding only to family pressures or structural demands. Many women move to sustain their households, some move to escape abusive or dangerous homes and others move for adventure and independence. All make their way in circumstances that demand constant negotiation. Some women are politicised before they move or through the move and join local groups and NGOs to organise for their rights as women, migrants or workers (Law 2002). As Kofman and Raghuram note, ‘[i]nternational migration is deservedly a significant driver for the analysis of care regimes’ (2012, 409). The ways in which gender, race and class intersect underpins the ways in which people negotiate the intricate links among family, work and migration. It is likely that, with climate change and increasingly frequent natural disasters, these gendered, racialised and classed patterns that connect households to the global political economy are likely to intensify.

CLIMATE CHANGE, NATURAL DISASTERS AND MIGRATION This chapter has so far considered migration in relation to work and care as well as migration for protection reasons. Turning now to the impact of climate change and natural disasters, we will examine the amplification of precarity faced by migrants and refugees due to climate change and the increasing frequency of natural disasters. As Namrata Chindarkar writes, ‘[c]limate change-induced migration, both voluntary and forced, is a gendered and socially embedded process’ (2012, 3). Therefore, adapting and responding to increasingly frequent natural disasters are gendered. While it is unclear how many people are displaced across borders due to the impact of climate change and natural disasters, an average of 24 million new displacements a year were recorded between 2008 and 2018 (representing people displaced within states) (IDMC 2019, 6). This is three times the figure for people displaced by conflict and violence (IMDC 2019, 6). As Maria Tanyag writes, the impact of natural disasters and climate change does not discriminate across populations; however: Women and girls distinctly endure long-term or gradual harms while in displacement, such as heightened risks of sexual and gender-based violence, including sexually transmitted infections and HIV/AIDS, maternal mortality, and forced or unwanted pregnancies. (Tanyag 2018, 564)

While the gendered impact of climate change and disaster-induced migration is clear both in the short, medium and long-term, law and policy is slow to catch up. 282

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Cross-border displacement due to climate change and natural disaster represents a normative gap in existing international law that governs forced migration (McAdam 2012, 1). While people may speak of ‘climate refugees’, legally this is not a recognised category. Questions also remain about whether populations from low-lying island states who are forced to move because of rising sea levels would be considered stateless (or not) (Park 2011). New Zealand has, for example, taken steps to address this normative gap. Although there is no legal framework in New Zealand under which people can claim refugee status because of climate change (Cass 2018, 142), there have been steps taken to develop an experimental humanitarian visa for people displaced by the impact of climate change in the Pacific (Kawajiri 2018, 23). Limits remain in terms of understanding how these new proposals to address climate-induced migration are gendered. As Gioli and Milan (2018) highlight, despite the research on gender and migration and gender and climate change, there has been very little ‘cross fertilisation’ between these two bodies of research to explore the intersections of gender, migration and climate change (see also Lama, Hamza and Wester 2021). If gender matters in terms of how we make feminist sense of migration, and gender matters in how we make feminist sense of climate change, asking feminist questions will be critical to developing further research on the gendered implications of climate change-induced migration.

CONCLUSION This chapter has discussed the development of feminist interpretations of refugee law and policy, considered the gendered nature of securitisation and implications of non-entrée measures on women and girls, and sketched how gender matters in migration for work, care work and climate change-related movement. The chapter has noted that intersectionality matters when it comes to doing feminist research about refugee protection, securitisation, migration for (care) work and climate change; as Flora Anthias writes, ‘debates on intersectionality are central to the theorisation of gender and migration’ (2012, 106). Future research on gender and migration needs to take seriously the ways in which gender is always mediated through various axes of oppression, including race, class and sexuality. This chapter has made use of existing research that demonstrates how gender and intersectionality can be conceptualised and operationalised in research about migration, refugee protection, securitisation and climate change. In migration research, including gender has: paved the way for further analysis of understanding how intersections of gender, race, and class matter in enabling, maintaining and constricting movement in the continuing changing landscape of the globalized world. (Penttinen and Kynsilehto 2017, 13) 283

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As questions of who and how people migrate and move both within and across borders and the degree to which they choose to do so (or are forced to do so) can only be adequately understood by understanding how gender, race, class and sexuality intersect. The future of feminist research on migration and displacement pays close attention to gender, intersectionality and agency. Taking account of the ways in which gender interacts with agency illuminates the ways in which migration and displacement bring about both opportunities and obstacles to people who seek lives of dignity and fulfilment. Discussion questions 1. What might a study of gender, violence and migration tell us about how borders function in global politics? 2. What does the study of forced migration and displacement reveal about the making (construction) or performance of gender(s)? 3. Can you find examples in everyday life (newspapers, social media, museums, theatre, popular culture) that tell a story about gender, migration and displacement? Further reading Chindarkar, Namrata, 2012. “Gender and Climate Change-Induced Migration: Proposing a Framework for Analysis.” Environmental Research Letters 7 (2): 25601. Hyndman, Jennifer. 2004. “Refugee Camps as Conflict Zones: The Politics of Gender.” In Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones, edited by Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman, 193–212. Los Angeles: Berkeley. Walker Rettberg, Jill and Radhika Gajjala. 2016. “Terrorists or Cowards: Negative Portrayals of Male Syrian Refugees in Social Media.” Feminist Media Studies 16 (1): 178–181. Welfens, Natalie. 2020. “Protecting Refugees Inside, Protecting Borders Abroad? Gender in the EU’s Responses to the ‘Refugee Crisis’.” Political Studies Review 18 (3): 378–392. References Al-Ali, Nadje. 2020. “Covid-19 and Feminism in the Global South: Challenges, Initiatives and Dilemmas.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 27 (4): 333–347. Alio, Mustafa, Shaza Alrihawi, James Milner, Anila Noor, Najeeba Wazefadost and Pascal Zigashane. 2020. “By Refugees, For Refugees: Refugee Leadership During Covid-19, and Beyond.” International Journal of Refugee Law 32 (2): 370–373.

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Anker, Deborah E. 2017. “Refugee Law, Gender, and the Human Rights Paradigm.” In International Refugee Law, edited by Hélène Lambert, 237–258. London: Routledge. Anthias, Floya. 2012. “Transnational Mobilities, Migration Research and Intersectionality.” Nordic Journal of Migration Research 2 (2): 102–110. Beyani, Chaloka. 1995. “The Needs of Refugee Women: A Human-Rights Perspective.” Gender & Development 3 (2): 29–35. Björkdahl, Annika and Johanna Mannergren Selimovic. 2015. “Gendering Agency in Transitional Justice.” Security Dialogue 46 (2): 165–182. Cass, Philip. 2018. “A Plan Nobody Hopes They Will Need: New Zealand and Climate Change Migration.” Pacific Journalism Review 24 (1): 138–154. Chang, Kimberly and L.H.M. Ling. 2000. “Globalisation and Its Intimate Other: Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong.” In Gender and Global Restructuring, edited by Marianne Marchand and Anne Sisson Runyan. London: Routledge. Chindarkar, Namrata. 2012. “Gender and Climate Change-Induced Migration: Proposing a Framework for Analysis.” Environmental Research Letters 7 (2): 025601. Edwards, Alice. 2010. “Transitioning Gender: Feminist Engagement with International Refugee Law and Policy 1950–2010.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 29 (2): 21–45. Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Freedman, Jane. 2010. “Mainstreaming Gender in Refugee Protection.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 23 (4): 589–607. Gerard, Alison. 2014. The Securitization of Migration and Refugee Women. London: Routledge. Gerard, Alison and Sharon Pickering. 2014. “Gender, Securitization and Transit: Refugee Women and the Journey to the EU.” Journal of Refugee Studies 27 (3): 338–359. Gioli, Giovanna and Andrea Milan. 2018. “Gender, Migration and Global Environmental Change.” In Routledge Handbook of Environmental Displacement and Migration, edited by Robert McLeman and François Gemenne, 135–150. London: Routledge. Haeri, Medina and Nadine Puechguirbal. 2010. “From Helplessness to Agency: Examining the Plurality of Women’s Experiences in Armed Conflict.” International Review of the Red Cross 92 (877): 103–122. Hirsch, Asher Lazarus. 2017. “The Borders beyond the Border: Australia’s Extraterritorial Migration Controls.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 36 (3): 48–80. Huysmans, Jeff. 2000. “The European Union and the Securitization of Migration.” Journal of Common Market Studies 38 (5): 751–777. Huysmans, Jeff. 2006. The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU. London: Routledge.

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Huysmans, Jeff and Vicki Squire. 2009. “Migration and Security.” In The Routledge Handbook of Security Studies, edited by Myriam Dunn Cavelty and Victor Mauer, 185–195. London: Routledge. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. 2019. “Disaster Displacement: A Global Review.” https://www.internal-displacement.org/publications/ disaster-displacement-a-global-review Jobe, Alison. 2020. “Telling the Right Story at the Right Time: Women Seeking Asylum with Stories of Trafficking into the Sex Industry.” Sociology 54 (5): 936–952. Kabeer, Naila, Shahra Razavi and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers. 2021. “Feminist Economic Perspectives on the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Feminist Economics 27 (1–2): 1–29. Kawajiri, Kyoko. 2018. “Protection of Cross-Border Climate Displaced Persons in the South Pacific: Case of Tuvalu and New Zealand.” 国際 公共政策研究 22 (2): 21–43. Kelson, Gregory A. and Debra L. DeLaet. 1999. Gender and Immigration. London: Macmillan. Kneebone, Susan. 2005. “Women within the Refugee Construct: “Exclusionary Inclusion” in Policy and Practice – the Australian experience. International Journal of Refugee Law 17 (1): 7–42. Kofman, Eleonore and Parvati Raghuram. 2012. “Women, Migration, and Care: Explorations of Diversity and Dynamism in the Global South.” Social Politics 19 (3): 408–432. Lama, Phudoma, Mo Hamza and Misse Wester. 2021. “Gendered Dimensions of Migration in Relation to Climate Change.” Climate and Development 13 (4): 326–336. Law, Lisa. 2002. “Sites of Transnational Activism: Filipino NonGovernment Organizations in Hong Kong.” In Gender Politics in the Asia-Pacific Region, edited by Brenda Yeoh, Peggy Teo and Shirlena Huang. London and New York: Routledge. McAdam, Jane. 2012. Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McAdam, Jane. 2020. “A Watching Brief on the Impacts of COVID-19 on the World’s Displaced People.” International Journal of Refugee Law 32 (2): 364–366. Mora, Claudia and Nicola Piper. 2021. “An Intersectional and Global Approach to the Study of Gender and Migration.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Migration, edited by Claudia Mora and Nicola Piper, 1–16. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nayak, Meghana. 2015. Who is Worthy of Protection?: Gender-Based Asylum and US Immigration Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Park, Susin. 2011. Climate Change and the Risk of Statelessness: The Situation of Low-lying Island States. United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees Division of International Protection. https://www.unhcr. org/protection/globalconsult/4df9cb0c9/20-climate-change-risk-statelessness-situation-low-lying-island-states.html Penttinen, Elina and Anitta Kynsilehto. 2017. Gender and Mobility: A Critical Introduction. London: Rowman & Littlefield. 286

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Pettman, Jan Jindy. 2008. “International Sex and Service.” In Globalization: Theory and Practice, edited by Eleonore Kofman and Gillian Youngs. London: Pinter. Pittaway, Eileen and Linda Bartolomei. 2001. “Refugees, Race, and Gender: The Multiple Discrimination against Refugee Women.” Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees 19 (6): 21–32. Raghuram, Parvati. 2019. “Race and Feminist Care Ethics: Intersectionality as Method.” Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 26 (5): 613–637. Rettberg, Jill Walker and Radhika, R. Gajjala. 2016. “Terrorists or Cowards: Negative Portrayals of Male Syrian Refugees in Social Media.” Feminist Media Studies 16 (1): 178–181. Rivas, Lorena and Melissa Bull. 2018. “Gender and Risk: An Empirical Examination of the Experiences of Women Held in Long-Term Immigration Detention in Australia.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 37 (3): 307–327. Sassen, Saskia. 2000. “Women’s Burden: Counter-geographies of Globalization and the Feminizatioon of Survival.” Journal of International Affairs 53 (2): 503–524. Shepherd, Laura J. 2012. “Introduction.” In Gender, Agency, and Political Violence, edited by Linda Åhäll and Laura J. Shepherd. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stachowitsch, Saska and Julia Sachseder. 2019. “The Gendered and Racialized Politics of Risk Analysis. The case of Frontex.” Critical Studies on Security 7 (2): 107–123. Tanyag, Maria. 2018. “Resilience, Female Altruism, and Bodily Autonomy: Disaster-Induced Displacement in Post-Haiyan Philippines.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43 (3): 563–585. UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). 1990. UNHCR Policy on Refugee Women, 20 August 1990, https://www.refworld.org/docid/ 3bf1338f4.html UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). 1991. Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women, July 1991, available at: https://www. refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3310.html UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). 1995. Sexual Violence against Refugees: Guidelines on Prevention and Response, 8 March 1995, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b33e0.html Walters, William. 2010. “Migration and Security.” In The Routledge Handbook of New Security Studies, edited by J. Peter Burgess, 229–240. London: Routledge. Yeoh, Brenda. S. and Shirlena Huang. 2000. “‘Home’ and ‘Away’: Foreign Domestic Workers and Negotiations of Diasporic Identity in Singapore.” In Women’s Studies International Forum 23 (4): 413–429.

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CHAPTER 21

Militarism and Security Megan MacKenzie and Nicole Wegner The concepts of security and militarism are central to understanding a number of global issues, including war and political violence. Feminists have contributed to the development of these ideas in significant ways. Specifically, feminists have shown that definitions of security and militarism are shaped by gender norms and binaries. They have also pointed to the centrality of gender in understanding the structures and processes associated with security and militarism, in institutions that range from militaries themselves to university campuses. Underpinning these contributions are three claims, which we explore in greater detail throughout the chapter. The first is the claim that militarism and security are not fixed, apolitical concepts; rather, security and militarism are unfixed ideas. How these terms are defined reflects values and assumptions that have built-in gendered norms and biases. The second, related, claim is that militarism and security are inclusive concepts that are relevant to understanding everything from the interactions of warring states to decisions by universities made in the name of keeping students safe on campus. In short, feminists dispute definitions of security and militarism that focus solely on ‘hard’ security issues and ‘real’ militarist processes like war, weapons acquisition and securing national borders. Instead, feminists reflect on the relationships between, and forms of, security/insecurity and militarism/anti-militarism. Military and security politics take place across a variety of spaces from the intimate to the international. This embraces the long-standing adage that the personal is political. The third claim we make in this chapter draws on the feminist recognition that security and militarism involve processes without clear or singular goals or outcomes; the study of security and militarism requires attention to the systems, institutions and practices that sustain (but may also be used to dismantle) particular patterns of security and militarism. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the concepts of security and militarism, before exploring each of these three points in turn. 288

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SECURITY Within International Relations, Security Studies is a Western-centric sub-discipline that developed post World War II. The aim of the subdiscipline was primarily to understand how to better protect major state powers. Security Studies focused primarily on national security and use of military force to protect borders or weapons arsenals; in 1991, Stephen Walt described Security Studies as ‘the studies of the threat, use, and control of military force’ (1991, 251). Scholars in this sub-field saw relative military power, the protection of borders and sovereignty as fundamental concepts for understanding security. Such ‘traditional’ or Western-centric mainstream security approaches emphasise defence spending, military weapons acquisition and training and the protection of national borders through stringent control mechanisms. Security Studies scholars theorised security in relation to interstate war: how to anticipate it, how to prepare for it and how to mitigate it. Feminists have challenged this vision (see, for example, Hansen 2006; Hudson 2005; Peterson 1992; Sylvester 2013; Tickner 1988). In addition to drawing attention to the ways that women and girls might experience different forms of insecurity, feminists have interrogated and pushed to broaden the very definition of security. Feminists have demonstrated that there is a range of forms of threats and sources of insecurity that a state-centric analysis simply cannot capture. In short, people and their experiences matter to feminist conceptions of security. Feminists argue that security cannot simply be guaranteed by ‘guns, bombs, and fists’ (Sjoberg 2018). Military and police forces are inadequate in providing all forms of security and, in some cases, these institutions can actually be a source of insecurity. Feminist approaches to security are part of a range of perspectives that not only critique Western-centric mainstream approaches, but also offer rich, diverse theoretical, methodological and practical interventions related to the study of security. For example, the concept of human security challenged narrow, state-centric conceptions of security and provided a framework to address a range of security threats. Human security approaches claim that individuals should be free from fear and want and understand insecurity to involve issues like nutrition, health care, birth control and domestic violence. With the rise of human security as a paradigm in International Relations and as a priority of the United Nations since the 1990s, feminist scholarship has contributed to broadening the concept of ‘security’ as security of the state to security for individuals. Yet feminists also recognise that ‘“human” is a gendered concept and that human bodies have gender-distributed needs and significations’ (Sjoberg 2018, 7). Heidi Hudson reminds scholars that the potentially diverse and unequal forms of security threats to particular communities should not be masked or erased with the term ‘human’. Instead, Hudson argues that while feminist approaches are compatible with the commitments of human security, feminists should continue to draw attention

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to the ways that individuals may face multiple and overlapping forms of insecurity. Drawing on the concept of intersectionality, she encourages scholars focused on security to address ‘the politics of multiple overlapping identities’ (Hudson 2005) which can include race, class, ethnicity, nationality and gender. Such an analysis moves away from universalist categorisations and recognises that gender is not the only category that feminists should pay attention to when examining forms of insecurity.

MILITARISM AND MILITARISATION Militarism can be thought of as an ideology, where it is normatively accepted that the military holds significant value in society. Cynthia Enloe describes militarism as ‘a complex package of ideas that, together, foster military values in both military and civilian affairs [which] justifies military priorities and military influences in cultural, economic, and political affairs’ (2007, 11). Militarism is reproduced in many ways, not exhaustively including the practice of wearing a poppy on Remembrance Day in North America and the United Kingdom (Basham 2016); public commemorations of war through celebration and dance (Ahäll 2018); movements to Support the Troops (Wegner 2017, 2021a); militarythemed video games that make recruitment and service appealing to youth (Burrill 2016); military appreciation halftime shows (Schulzke 2018); and the popularised aesthetics of military attire (Shepherd 2018). Feminists have led the way in research on militarism, often by examining military processes and logics of militarism operating in potentially unexpected places with a ‘feminist curiosity’ (Enloe 2000). Feminist work on militarism includes attention to women sex workers working near military bases (Enloe 1990), women in nursing (Enloe 2019), women in female engagement teams (specialised military personnel) (McBride and Wibben 2012) or mothers actively encouraging the recruitment of young men into militaries (Eichler 2012). Militarism – the normative valuing of the military in society – is related, yet conceptually distinct, from processes of militarisation. Critical Security Studies have tended to focus on ‘militarisation’ over ‘militarism’. Militarisation can be defined as ‘the process by which more and more things are made military concern’ (Eastwood 2018, 53). It has been a focus of feminist research, with Cynthia Enloe (2000, 3) famously defining militarisation as ‘a step-by-step process by which a person or a thing gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic ideas’. Militarisation as a process has direct influence on ‘the blurring or erasure of distinctions between war and peace, military and civilian’ (Sjoberg and Via 2010, 7). Howell (2018) has critiqued the understanding of militarisation as a process, arguing that such depictions reproduce liberal ideals of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ war, which presume that liberal states are inherently peaceful. She introduces the concept of martial politics to capture the ways that liberal politics, relations and institutions are always-already 290

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‘of war’. In this argument, ‘normal politics’ is not taken over by ‘militarisation’; instead, martial relations have always been present in liberal politics. Martial politics includes the use of state military resources to exclude, control and coerce racialised, Indigenous, disabled, queer bodies who have been constituted as a threat to civil order. Martial politics as a concept can be used to better understand the ways that state and state militarised force has been the source of long-standing insecurity for many citizens. Like feminists who exposed how states are inherently insecure places for particular gendered and racialised bodies, Howell outlines martial politics through an explanation of the ways that social institutions, such as universities and police forces, have always been intimately tied to military values. While there is a conceptual distinction between militarism (the ideology that assumes the military and its practices are inherent public goods) and militarisation (the processes whereby military spending, force and legitimacy are enacted and enhanced), the operation of these concepts cannot be separated. The expansion of state military power is usually accompanied by the belief that the military should be used to achieve national interests and that the military is an inherent public good (Lutz 2002). Teaiwa (2004) used the term ‘cultures of militarism’ to illustrate the ways that logics of militarism extend beyond military institutions and are reinforced through militarised processes. Focused on Fiji, Teaiwa uses examples of sporting teams and religious institutions to illustrate the ways that militarism seeps into cultural practices and traditions. Moreover, Teaiwa notes the ways that Fiji was ‘pacified’ or demilitarised by British forces during colonisation and then (re-) militarised through colonial and neo-colonial interventions, including the establishment of military bases, nuclear testing and the recruitment of workers by private security companies. For Teaiwa, the distinction between logics of militarism and the ongoing processes of militarising cannot be separated. Militarism drives processes of militarisation, war and conflict. Cockburn (2014) suggested that wars are a continuum that begin with militarism ideologically circulating in society, contributing to processes of militarisation and war preparation, and extending to ‘hot war’ – actual fighting. War, therefore, is connected to militarism ideologically and all the various sites where militarist logics are promoted and legitimised. While militarisation’s negative effects, such as the rise of nationalist and militant fundamentalism or the increase in armies and arsenals, are troubling, feminists are also concerned with effects of militarisation that involve the ‘less visible deformation of human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality’ (Lutz 2002, 723). In short, militarisation and militarism reproduce beliefs and structures that result in inequality, conflict and domination as normal or desirable. Gender is just one facet of identity where militarism propels oppression and violence. While the processes of securitisation and militarisation have unequal effects on men and women, we must also draw attention to the ways that these processes themselves reproduce gender. 291

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CONNECTING GENDER AND MILITARISM Security and militarism are mutually reinforcing. Mainstream Westerncentric approaches to security have focused on state security and protecting the interests and citizens of a state from outside threat or interference. As with these state-centric security approaches, the logics that underpin security rationales (for example, the belief that violent conflict is inevitable between individuals and states and the belief that states must build, maintain and use militaries to protect their citizens) lie at the heart of militarism. Gender norms and logics can be used to reproduce militarism. In many societies, military service has been understood as a rite of passage into manhood and used to illustrate how cultural expectations about masculinity are linked to militarism (Whitworth 2004). Iris Marion Young (2003) examines the connection among security, militarism and gender in her articulation of the ‘logic of masculinist protection’. She theorises that masculinity has been linked to protection and the provision of security. In this ‘logic’, paternalist protection (by men, by the state) is justified because we assume that the world is full of selfish aggressors – ‘bad men’ – who lurk outside our borders with the aim to attack, invade or steal. This ‘logic’ has been embraced by many policymakers who assume that other states and other (foreign) individuals wish to infiltrate the state, and that it is their masculine duty to create policies that ‘protect’. The logic of masculinist protection assumes that strong, military force is required to prevent invasion and ‘protect’ citizens from these lurking outside threats. However, this is a distinctly gendered and racialised logic, whereby those that require protection are feminised, those who pose threats are often racialised, and the state and military actors who provide protection are represented as masculinised, reinforcing existing beliefs that security work is a male specialisation (Young 2003, 6). According to Young, the logic of masculinist protection ‘works to elevate the protector to a position of superior authority and to demote the rest of us to a position of grateful dependency’ (2003, 13). In her book, Dark Threats and White Knights: the Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism, Sherene Razack points to the ways that the logics of masculinist protection are also bound in colonial logics that cast Western militaries as the protectors and defenders of the so-called civilised world, including protecting people from presumed ‘uncivilised’ nations (often described as the South or Third World) from the ‘internal evil that threatens them’. (2004, 17). These logics can serve to justify many infringements of human rights – both domestically and internationally – in the name of ‘national security’. In addition to logics of masculinist protection, feminists have also theorised how masculinity shapes war and how war processes shape masculinity (Cockburn 2007). Feminists have examined how associations with femininity have been devalued and associations with masculinity have added value, particularly in the context of war and in military training (Peterson 2010). Broadly speaking, war is linked to masculinity(s) because the relational properties of masculinity provide ‘a framework through 292

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which war is made intelligible and acceptable as a social practice and institution’ (Hutchings, 2008, 389). In short, because association with masculinity adds value in society, and because masculinity has been culturally linked to military activities, militarism is promoted as a ‘value-added’ ideology in many societies. Feminists coined the term ‘militarized masculinities’ (Whitworth 2004) to show the ways that particular ideals are coveted in military settings, such as aggression, strength, heterosexuality, rationality and toughness. The promotion of these idealised traits in military settings is usually accompanied by the denigration of feminised traits such as compassion, empathy, nurturing or emotionality. While the association of aggressiveness is not naturally a masculine (male-sexed body) experience and all human bodies are capable and able of exhibiting this trait, it has nonetheless been coded and coveted (in the Western world and within many global militaries) as a signifier of masculinity. However, as ‘aggression’ has been a culturally valorised performative trait for male bodies (and consequently, a discouraged performative trait for female bodies), the assumed fixed nature of this quality has become embedded in social consciousness as a trait associated with an archetypal form of masculinity: the warrior. It is within this relationship that masculinity and militarism are intertwined (for more see MacKenzie 2015, Wegner 2021b). However, while masculinities and femininities are constituted through war, it is worth noting that gender constructions and practices can also drive war. Gender and war are therefore co-constitutive: gender norms drive processes of war and militarisation, and war and militarisation reinforce or challenge existing gender norms. For example, Cohn’s (1987) ethnographic research studying nuclear scientists notes the explicitly sexualised and phallic nature used to describe nuclear weapons. Phrases such as ‘it’s a boy’ for successful nuclear test detonations contrasted with ‘it’s a girl’ for failed explosives show the ‘value-added’ assumptions of masculinity in the defence industry. Cohn observed the bizarre phenomenon of nuclear scientists wanting to ‘pat’ warhead silos and notes the seemingly obvious sexualised and phallic-centric element of this practice. These practices aside, nuclear defence research and policymaking are also a largely male-occupied industry. The value-added masculinist assumptions and practices of the industry make it an environment where other perspectives and other bodies may struggle to ‘fit in’; women who work in this industry may feel pressure to conform to and ‘learn the lingo’ in order to be taken seriously. Thus, and as also discussed in Chapter 6, security practices and science are not immune from gendered influences.

WHAT CAN WE LEARN ABOUT SECURITY AND MILITARISM FROM AN ANALYSIS OF MILITARY SEXUAL VIOLENCE? Military sexual violence (MSV) is an international problem. MSV refers to unwanted sexual activity perpetrated against service members by a fellow service member or members (MacKenzie et al. 2020). In Australia, female 293

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service members have a one in four chance of being harassed or assaulted over the course of their career (Australian Human Rights Commission 2012). Between 2016 and 2018, there was a 38% increase in cases of sexual assault within the US military (Philipps, 2019), and in July 2019, the Canadian government announced that it would pay nearly $1 billion CAD to members of the military who were part of a class-action lawsuit claiming systemic and widespread sexual misconduct in the Canadian Defence Forces (Kassam 2016). There is strong evidence that available data on MSV is merely the tip of the iceberg; research from several countries indicate that over 80% of victims do not report (Mulrine 2012). How do the concepts of militarism and security help in an analysis of MSV? Feminist approaches to security encourage us to acknowledge that ‘the personal is international’; they push us to examine political phenomena and forms of insecurity that might otherwise be overlooked as domestic or private matters, including sexual violence. There is a well-established body of feminist scholarship examining the international political significance of sexual violence and violence against women (True 2012) and the use of rape and sexual violence in war (Buss 2009; Baaz and Stern 2013; Meger 2016). Feminists have led the charge in arguing that MSV is an international security issue worthy of scholarly attention. The concept of militarism is also useful in an analysis of MSV because it helps draw attention to the ways that public reverence for the military and military institutional structures and internal culture might help explain rates of, and responses to, MSV. Militaries are often considered trusted institutions of great social value. They are also institutions with high levels of secrecy and hierarchy. This can make it difficult for victims of sexual violence to speak out. Just as there is no singular feminist approach to security or militarism, feminist engagements with women and the military, including attention to MSV, varies dramatically. In this section, we outline several different feminist approaches to studying women in the military and MSV. This range of engagements helps illustrate some of the core elements of a gendered analysis of security and militarism, while also pointing to the diversity of feminist approaches in using these concepts. ‘Reformist’ feminist approaches and antimilitarist feminist approaches Some individuals that identify as feminists affirm the military as a necessary and important political institution. They argue that women’s equal access to powerful positions within the military – including being permitted to fight in combat roles – is a pathway to political equality. These feminist approaches are sometimes associated with liberal feminism, or ‘reformist’ feminism, which sees the potential for existing institutions to be inclusive and safe for men and women. Liberal reformist feminists view military service as one of the ways of exhibiting equal participation in the public sphere and earning their right to equal citizenship (Feinman 2000). Given that women are primarily the victims of MSV and men the 294

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perpetrators, such approaches constitute MSV as an obstacle to women’s full inclusion and equality within the military. In turn, addressing MSV is an important imperative in advancing women’s equal rights, and in creating a safe work environment for women to succeed in. In contrast to ‘reformist’ feminists, antimilitarist feminists see military institutions as fundamentally at odds with creating peace and sustainable social relations. Far from embracing essentialist notions that women are inherent peacemakers and men are inherent warfighters, antimilitarist feminists approach militarism from a pragmatic perspective. Antimilitarist feminists see reforming military institutions as a waste of energy that could better be diverted to building nonviolent alternative institutions or impactful social changes (Duncanson 2017; Whitworth 2004, 186). Antimilitarist feminists point to MSV as one of the many destructive effects of militarism and war. They also note other gendered and sexed physical insecurities war poses to women’s bodies – rape, sexual mutilation, increased care responsibilities during and after conflict, lack of funding and availability for health services, landmine-related injuries, absence of proper sanitation resources, forced sex work, the purposeful injection of women with HIV, exposure to biological and chemical toxins left by military encampments, involuntary illiteracy and chronic poverty. Antimilitarist feminists are wary that resources are funnelled into defence and security budgets without adequate health and social welfare resources. For some antimilitarist feminists, the role of militaries in contributing to environmental and climate crises cannot be ignored; they argue that the insecurities caused by military environmental damage must be taken seriously (Cohn 2019; Duncanson 2017; Seager 1999; Woodward 2004). These feminists are clear that the military causes great insecurity for its members, outside civilians and non-human life globally and therefore argue that gendered military reforms are not enough to address this destruction. Antimilitarist feminists have pushed back against liberal feminist views that including women within the military is an important step towards gender equality (Enloe 2000; Mesok 2016). They argue that the military is an inherently hyper-masculine, sexist and toxic institution that could never be adapted or changed in ways that would allow for the safe inclusion of women (Duncanson 2017, 53). According to this perspective, militaries are designed to enact violence and are inherently masculine and hierarchical. For antimilitarist feminists, MSV is illustrative of the inherently misogynist and violent nature of military institutions. Efforts to address inequality or reduce MSV, therefore, will always be limited. Moreover, the inclusion of women in militaries requires them to adapt and fit into the existing institution, which puts them at risk and exposes them to impossible pressures. While antimilitarist feminists argue that MSV is a symptom of systemic misogyny that cannot be addressed through small policy changes, progressive militarist feminists use the concept of ‘regendering’ to describe the potential for policy changes within militaries to result in incremental progress with regard to gender equality (Cockburn and Hubic 2002). The 295

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concept of regendering has been under-theorised and has been used in different ways by scholars (Sasson-Levy and Amram-Katz, 2007; Wilén and Heinecken, 2018). However, it is often associated with incremental policy and culture changes that can coalesce into systemic institutional change. Despite the various perspectives on MSV – reformist, antimilitarist or progressive militarist – what is clear is that there is no consistent ‘feminist’ interpretation.

CONCLUSION While militarism and security are enduring challenges in global politics, gender is key to understanding these phenomena. Militarism and security, as unfixed ideas, are made meaningful because of the ways they are reflective and reproductive of particular gender norms. National leaders may boast about the size of their militaries and their ability to protect their borders or execute violence against other states. This form of traditional, militarised security strength reflects masculine ‘value-added’ signification to states and their political leaders. Increased numbers of women serving in militaries may challenge the notion that only men serve in uniform, but yet the desirability of military service is promoted as a social good, a patriotic duty or an extreme accomplishment worth valour (Sasson-Levy 2002). Military service is viewed as an exceptional vocation, in large part because it is masculinised and because the primarily male-bodied subjects who conduct it are assigned power and prestige socially. The masculine ideals coveted in military settings – aggression, strength, toughness, rationality – may be performed by women, but women may have to try harder to ‘prove’ they meet these idealisations. In addition, the militarised masculine ideals in military settings cultivate an environment where harassment, abuse and mistreatment of employed military personnel (in particular, women and trans service members) are commonplace. While reformist and progressive militarist feminists believe this environment can be changed, antimilitarist feminists are sceptical that an institution built on hierarchy and that employs lethal force can be a stepping stone for women’s empowerment, security and well-being. Seeing militarism and security as inclusive concepts means acknowledging that these phenomena are interrelated, co-constitutive and ever-present. Both militarism and security rely on gendered logics to function. Militarism and security are ever-present concepts from which it is unlikely to fully ‘de-securitise’ or ‘de-militarise’. Militarism and security involve complex processes, which means dismantling and challenging these processes is no easy task. Those who hold power to make decisions – like political leaders and high-ranking military officials – are those who often benefit most from processes of militarisation and securitisation. It is those (often masculine) voices who dominate discussions and influence outcomes related to militarism and security. ‘Outside’ voices (often feminine, queer, Indigenous, Black, disabled or othered) are positioned as lacking sufficient knowledge, experience or expertise to ‘weigh in’ on serious issues like war and security. Yet these bodies are also the ones 296

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who suffer the most before, during and after war and conflict. For this reason, feminists have worked to show not only how war and conflict are gendered processes, but also how they are related to other gendered processes like militarism and security. To truly understand how war, conflict and global violence manifest, we must be willing to examine how gender sustains, and is sustained by, militarism and security. Discussion questions 1. What are the links between environmentalism and militarism in terms of gender relations? Can militaries be useful institutions in addressing environmental insecurity? 2. When women serve in militaries, does this help or hinder patriarchal relations? What do you think the root cause of military sexual violence is? 3. How can women’s insecurity increase under the logics of masculinist protection? Consider restrictions imposed by your government during the COVID-19 crisis: did any of these measures have the potential to increase insecurity for yourself or others? Further reading Eisenstein, Zillah. 2007. Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy. London: Zed Books. Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives. Berkeley: University of California Press. Howell, Alison. 2018. “Forget ‘Militarization’: Race, Disability and the ‘Martial Politics’ of the Police and of the University.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 20 (2): 117–136. Teaiwa, Teresia. 2004. “Articulated Cultures: Militarism and Masculinities in Fiji during the Mid 1990s.” Fijian Studies 3 (2): 201–222. Young, Marion Iris. 2003. “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State.” Signs 29 (1): 1–25. Razack, Sherene. 2004. Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. References Ahäll, Linda. 2018. “Feeling Everyday IR: Embodied, Affective, Militarising Movement as Choreography of War.” Cooperation and Conflict 54 (2): 149–166. Australian Human Rights Commission. 2012. Review into the Treatment of Women in the Australian Defence Force. https://humanrights. gov.au /our-work /sex-discrimination /report-review-treatmentwomen-australian-defence-force 297

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Baaz, Maria Eriksson and Maria Stern. 2013. Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems in the Congo and beyond. London: Zed Books. Basham, Victoria M. 2016. “Gender, Race, Militarism and Remembrance: The Everyday Geopolitics of the Poppy.” Gender, Place & Culture 23 (6): 883–896. Burrill, Derek A. 2016. “There’s a Soldier in All of Us.” In Choreographies of 21st Century Wars, edited by Gay Morris and Jens Richard Giesdorf. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI:10.1093/acprof: oso/9780190201661.003.0004 Buss, Doris E. 2009. “Rethinking ‘Rape as a Weapon of War’.” Feminist Legal Studies 17 (2):145–163. Cockburn, Cynthia. 2007. From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis. London and New York: Zed Books. Cockburn, Cynthia. 2014. “A Continuum of Violence: Gender, War and Peace.” In The Criminology of War, edited by Ruth Jamieson. London: Routledge. Cockburn, Cynthia and Meliha Hubic. 2002. “Gender and the Peacekeeping Military: A View from Bosnian Women’s Organizations.” In The Postwar Moment: Militaries, Masculinities and International Peacekeeping, edited by Cynthia Cockburn and Dubravka Zarkov, 103–121. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Cohn, Carol. 1987. “Sex and Death in the World of Rational Defense Intellectuals.” Signs 12 (4): 687–718. Cohn, Carol. 2019. “The Jig is Up: The Logics of Imperialist, Patriarchal Global Capitalism and the Death of Security.” Security Dialogue 50 (4S): 9–37. Duncanson, Claire. 2017. “Anti-Militarist Feminist Approaches to Researching Gender and the Military.” In The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military, edited by Rachel Woodward and Claire Duncanson. London: Palgrave. Eastwood, James. 2018. “Rethinking Militarism as Ideology: The Critique of Violence after Security.” Security Dialogue 49 (1–2): 44–56. Eichler, Maya. 2012. Militarizing Men: Gender, Conscription and War in Post-Soviet Russia. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 1990. Bananas, Beaches and Bases. Berkeley: University of California Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives. Berkeley: University of California Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 2007. Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link. Langham: Rowman & Littlefield. Enloe, Cynthia. 2019. “Wounds: Militarized Nursing, Feminist Curiosity, and Unending War.” International Relations 33 (3): 393–412. Feinman, Ilene. 2000. Citizenship Rites: Feminist Soldiers and Feminist Antimilitarists New York: NYU Press. Hansen, Lene. 2006. Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War. London: Routledge.

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Howell, Alison. 2018. “Forget ‘Militarization’: Race, Disability and the ‘Martial Politics’ of the Police and of the University.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 20 (2): 117–136. Hudson, Heidi. 2005. “‘Doing’ Security as though Humans Matter: A Feminist Perspective on Gender and the Politics of Human Security.” Security 36 (2): 155–174. Hutchings, Kimberly. 2007. “Making Sense of Masculinity and War.” Men and Masculinities 10 (4): 389–404. Kassam, Ashifa. 2016. “Royal Canadian Mounted Police apologies for sexual harassment.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ oct/06/royal-canadian-mounted-police-sexual-harassment-apologises Lutz, Catherine. 2002. “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis.” American Anthropologist 104 (3): 723–735. MacKenzie, Megan. 2015. Beyond the Band of Brothers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacKenzie, Megan, Eda Gunaydin and Umeya Chaudhuri. 2020. “Illicit Military Behavior as Exceptional and Inevitable: Media Coverage of Military Sexual Violence and the ‘Bad Apples’ Paradox.” International Studies Quarterly 64 (1): 45–56. McBride, Keally and Annick T.   R. Wibben. 2012. “The Gendering of Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 3 (2): 199–215. Meger, Sara. 2016. Rape Loot Pillage: The Political Economy of Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mesok, Elizabeth. 2016. “Sexual Violence and the US Military: Feminism, US Empire, and the Failure of Liberal Equality.” Feminist Studies 42 (1): 41–69. Mulrine, Anna. 2012. “Pentagon Report: Sexual Assault in the Military up Dramatically – CSMonitor.Com.” CS Monitor. https://www. csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2012/0119/Pentagon-report-Sexualassault-in-the-military-up-dramatically Peterson, V. Spike. 1992. Gendered States: Feminist (Re)visions of International Relations Theory. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Peterson, V. Spike. 2010. “Gendered Identities, Ideologies, and Practices in the Context of War and Militarism.” In Gender, War and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via, 17–29. Westport: Praeger Security International. Philipps, Dave. 2019, “‘This is Unacceptable’ Military Reports a Surge of Sexual Assaults in the Ranks.” The New York Times, 2 May 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/us/military-sexual-assault.html Razack, Sherene. 2004. Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sasson-Levy, Orna. 2002. “Constructing Identities at the Margins: Masculinities and Citizenship in the Israeli Army.” Sociological Quarterly 43 (3): 357–383.

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Sasson-Levy, Onra and Sarit Amram-Katz. 2007. “Gender Integration in Israeli Officer Training: Degendering and Regendering the Military.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33(1): 105–133. Schulzke, Marcus. 2018. “Necessary and Surplus Militarisation: Rethinking Civil-Military Interactions and their Consequences.” European Journal of International Security, 3 (1): 94–112. Seager, Joni. 1999. “Patriarchal Vandalism: Militaries and the Environment.” In Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, Environment, and Development, edited by Jael Miriam Silliman and Ynestra King, 163–188. Boston: South End Press. Shepherd, Laura J. 2018. “Militarisation.” In Visual Global Politics, edited by Roland Bleiker. London: Routledge. Sjoberg, Laura. 2018. “Feminist Security and Security Studies.” In The Oxford Handbook of International Security, edited by Alexandra Gheciu and William C. Wohlforth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sjoberg, Laura and Sandra Via (eds). 2010. Gender, War, and Militarism. Westport: Praeger Publishing. Sylvester, Christine. 2013. War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis. London: Routledge. Teaiwa, Teresia. 2004. “Articulated Cultures: Militarism and Masculinities in Fiji during the Mid 1990s.” Fijian Studies 3 (2): 201–222. Tickner, J. Ann. 1988. “Hans Morgenthau’s Principles of Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation.” Millennium 17 (3): 429–440. True, Jacqui. 2012. The Political Economy of Violence against Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walt, Stephen. 1991. “The Renaissance of Security Studies.” International Studies Quarterly 35 (2): 211–239. Wegner, Nicole. 2017. “Discursive Battlefields: Support(ing) the Troops in Canada.” International Journal 72 (4): 444–462. Wegner, Nicole. 2021a. “Ritual, Rhythms, and the Discomforting Endurance of Militarism: Affective Methodologies and Ethico-Political Challenges.” Global Studies Quarterly 1 (3), https://doi.org/10.1093/ isagsq/ksab008 Wegner, Nicole. 2021b. “Helpful Heroes and the Political Utility of Militarized Masculinities.” International Feminist Journal of Politics. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2020.1855079 Whitworth, Sandra. 2004. Men, Militarism and UN Peacekeeping. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Wilén, Nina and Lindy Heinecken. 2018. “Regendering the South African Army: Inclusion, Reversal and Displacement.” Gender, Work & Organization 25 (6): 670–686. Woodward, Rachel. 2004. Military Geographies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Young, Iris Marion. 2003. “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State.” Signs 29 (1): 1–25.

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CHAPTER 22

Nationalism and Populism Dibyesh Anand Who am I? Who are we? The answers to these questions will depend both on the context and the individual who is being asked. Our rights and access to resources will often depend on our lived and intersecting identities in a particular country. But we actually have only a limited say in shaping the collective(s) to which we are deemed to belong. For example, you may think of yourself as an opponent of national boundaries, but the state will remind you again and again of your nationality (such as when you return after travelling overseas and have to show your passport – assuming you have one and are not seen as ‘illegal’ by the state). For more than a century, national identity has been the primary form in which collective aspirations have been expressed in most of the world. Religion, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, race, caste – all these have usually taken a backseat to national identity. We only have to look at the willingness of millions to sacrifice their lives (and to take the lives of others) in the name of their nation through the armed forces to see the salience of national identity. With the rise of majoritarian nationalisms – or what many scholars refer to as ‘populism’ – in different parts of the world, the policing of identities and ideas around the ‘good/national Self’ and ‘bad/ subversive/non-national Other’ become even more endemic: whether you are included or excluded by populists speaking in the name of ‘the people’ will determine whether you are seen as ‘one of us’ or ‘an enemy of the people’. The most pervasive ideology in the 20th century was neither communism nor capitalism: it was nationalism. Wars took place, some deaths were celebrated while others were mourned, people were encouraged to look beyond their immediate family and identify with a collective, love and empathy was confined – all in the name of nationalism. However, DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-24

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while the ideal norm is of a nation with its own state, states are, in reality, mostly multinational, and it is states that often seek to create a sense of nationhood amongst its people to ensure stability. Nationalism is the primary ideology through which the state seeks to gain internal sovereignty – the authority to govern the population within a defined territory. The exact form of dominant nationalism within a state depends on many factors. The state may be successful in fostering an inclusive nationalism or it may come up with a majoritarian nationalism that excludes minorities. The latter can also take the form of populism, where a political movement deploys the rhetoric of ‘establishment vs people’, claims to speak in the name of ‘the people’, often develops a cult of personality around a strong masculinist leader who purportedly defends ‘the people’ against the ‘liberal Establishment’ that is alleged to be transnational and pro-minorities. There is no doubt that nationalism, including its populist variant, matters in global politics. But how does gender matter in nationalism, including in its populist strand? Much scholarship on nationalism and populism has largely overlooked gender as an analytical category. Where gender and nationalism have been studied, mostly by feminist scholars, research highlights the central role of women in nationalism and nationalist movements and questions whether nationalism as an ideology domesticates or emancipates women. ‘Understanding nationalism as gendered means recognising its varied impact on women and men of different social groupings’ (Puri 2004, 110). Another way of looking at how gender and nationalism intersect is to expand our focus to look at the ways in which the discourse of nationalism intersects with those of masculinities and femininities. We can investigate how gendered identity gets shaped through a nationalist discourse which, in turn, (re)produces a national identity. Gender in nationalism is almost exclusively imagined as binary – either male or female – with no space for gender queerness. Furthermore, when it comes to academic scholarship on populism, we notice an overwhelming focus on Europe, the USA and Latin America, and very limited engagement with feminism. In this chapter, I first outline the main debates around nationalism and then analyse the different ways in which gender is central to understanding nationalism. I also point to the centrality of gender in populist kinds of majoritarian nationalism, especially the pervasive right-wing forms. Finally, I offer a brief conclusion which ties together the themes of the chapter and suggests some directions for future research.

THEORISING NATIONALISM The rhetoric of nationalism often ignores the fact that the need to present one’s own community as a nation is a modern phenomenon. Nationalism is, on the one hand, an ideological movement directed towards the construction of a nation. On the other hand, it is also a product of a heightened awareness of national identity among a group of people. There are various ways in which nationalism and national identity have been 302

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perceived. First, we need to note the difference among the ideas of nation, nationalism, national identity and national culture. The term ‘nation’ implies a shared commonality that is recognisable and can be mobilised politically – around culture, common language, history, heritage, ethnicity, religion, race and so on. A sense of ‘shared history’ is crucial to the concept of the nation. Nationalism is the ideology that a nation should have a state of its own or, at the very least, have a right to self-determination. National identity refers to those aspects of culture that are seen as central to what brings people together as a nation. Similarly, national culture indicates a strong overlap between a nation and a culture. The existence of multicultural nations or multinational cultures complicate the simplistic notion of national culture; the USA can be seen as an example of the former while China can be seen as an example of the latter – though China is increasingly reframing its ‘nationalities’ as ‘ethnicities’ to bolster claims to unity. Primordialism is an umbrella theory espoused by scholars who hold that nationality is a ‘natural’ part of human beings and that nations have existed since time immemorial. Most primordialists would acknowledge that the concept of nationalism is a new phenomenon (arising in the 18th and 19th centuries) but would claim that the nation and the national culture have ancient roots. They would talk of ‘golden ages’ in the distant past, the decline since, and then a will to resurgence, but primordialists argue that nations have an essence that is historical, natural and almost unchanging. Most proponents of nationalism assert that their nation has ancient historical roots. For instance, Chinese nationalists claim that modern China has a history of 5,000 years of continuous civilisation and includes homelands not only of Han people, but also of Uyghurs, Tibetans and Mongols. On the other hand, Tibetans, too, claim independent national existence throughout history, before they were colonised by China in 1951. The main criticism of the primordialist view of nationalism is that the assumption that primordial attachments, and the cultural sources that generate them, are ‘given’ does not square with the evidence of how national cultures have evolved, and are ‘invented traditions’ (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Often it is a primordialist notion of the nation that animates majoritarian nationalisms in contemporary times – the idea that the nation state belongs to the ethnic/religious majority – operating through right-wing populism where the strong leader/party claims to ‘rescue’ the ‘people’ of the ‘nation’ from the transnational/ liberal/secular/pro-minorities elite. Take the example of Hindu nationalism in India (Anand 2011), which is based on the idea that India’s perennial Hindu status is in danger due to secularists, who are accused of patronising and appeasing Muslims, Christians and Communists. The far-right party – BJP – is presented as one that reflects the will of the nation/people against the minority-appeasing elitist Congress. That there is no connection between populist parties’ claims and the social reality of their support base does not change the fundamental fact that populist nationalists rely on fantasies of an ancient nation and silent majority. 303

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The instrumentalist, or modernist position, in contrast, holds a belief in the modernity of nations and nationalism. For modernist scholars, political elites play an important part in shaping national identities. Instrumentalist theories of nationalism argue that nationalism appears in a crisis period of transition between tradition and modernity when old ties are no longer relevant, providing stability and coherence of identity in a time of rapid change. This crisis could be due to economic, political or cultural transformations. It could be seen in terms of the massive movement of people from rural to urban areas (thus lessening the disciplining of people through church or community) due to the industrial revolution (with its new demands for workers) and the need for an ideology to ensure workers devote themselves to their work. Nationalism – which asserts, for example, that the interests of a British worker lies with their British capitalist employer and not in solidarity with a German or a French worker – can be a useful tool to ensure social order and discipline. Populist nationalism today in India similarly insists that the interests of exploited Hindu Indian workers is more closely aligned with a corporate-backed Hindu nationalist party than with other exploited Muslim Indian workers (or, for that matter, exploited Bangladeshi workers). A nation is therefore constructed as a coherent and bounded political collective that has supremacy over every other form of identity. The role of the state is crucial here. The modern state does not follow from nation but precedes it. Then there are ethnosymbolist positions taken by scholars like Anthony Smith (1991) which claim to offer a middle-way approach in the instrumentalist-primordialist debate. They suggest that, in their determination to reveal the invented character of nationalism, modernists systematically overlook the persistence of earlier myths, symbols, values and memories in many parts of the world and their ongoing significance for many people. These scholars aim to uncover the symbolic legacy of pre-modern ethnic ties for today’s nations. There are difficulties with this approach; it is somewhat conceptually confused, with the differences between modern nations and earlier ethnic communities understated. Ethnosymbolists underestimate the fluidity and malleability of ethnic identities. The relationship between modern national identities and the cultural material of the past is therefore, at best, problematic. Contrary to the contentions of primordialists, instrumentalists and ethnosymbolists, I argue that national identity is not an essence but is instead a performance, a construction, an articulation, a discourse. It is as much a process as it is a product. The performance of any national identity does not take place in a vacuum, but in a power-laden international political and cultural context. This international context, in turn, is marked by asymmetries of structural and representational power in which Western states, as well as emerging powers like China and India, are dominant. While they may contest each other geopolitically, they are the architects of the current international system that is dominated by nation states: states are key political actors in contemporary international relations, and nationalism remains a powerful ideology, often used to bolster the legitimacy of the state (if the state claims to represent a nation, it is seen as legitimate) or 304

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to challenge the legitimacy of the state (separatist nationalism would claim that the existing state does not represent their will). I have also referred to the idea of populism in this discussion. As a concept and a term, ‘populism’ has become rather prevalent in recent years but much of the scholarship around it remains focused on Europe, the USA and Latin America. There are different views about the relationship between nationalism and populism. Some scholars argue that these are different things, with nationalism being about territorially bounded identity creation while populism is an intra-nation politics of identity creation around elite-people distinction (see De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017). I suggest that populism – especially the overwhelmingly dominant rightwing variant – is another name for majoritarian nationalism. Majoritarian nationalism fuels populism as well as being fuelled by it; in fact, they are so intricately linked that it is better to consider the terms interchangeably. The ‘people’ invoked by populists is the ‘silent majority’ of the nation; the ‘elite’/‘Establishment’ are the anti-national enemies. In fact, one should ask why is there a wider acceptance of the term ‘populism’ than majoritarian nationalism? Could it be due to a hesitancy in questioning nationalism and the unconscious acceptance of populist politics as representing the silent people? You can decide for yourself whether nations are ancient or modern (or a product of both) and whether populism speaks for the people or imagines a people. My view leans towards seeing nations as a modern construction, not merely a product of modern socio-economic forces but also a discourse in itself: a discourse that is also connected to (and product and productive of) gender and race. And importantly, while there are different types of nationalism and theories that might fit in one region of the world (say Europe), they should not be seen as the model against which nations in other regions ought to be judged.

WOMEN AND NATIONALISM At the core of nationalism lie notions of camaraderie and sacrifice. Both are gendered. Often, it is homosocial bonding between cis men that is seen to strengthen the nation; nationalist myths are replete with stories of such men. The sacrifices operate along gender binaries – in a typical nationalist drama, the men prove their loyalty by their willingness to give up their life to protect their nation, while the women do so by performing their primary duty of taking care of the home front as well as supporting their menfolk. Occasionally, women ‘act like men’ and become warriors for the nation – but note that there is never a role reversal for men (that is, men are never meant to ‘act like women’). When the nation’s men are accused of violence, including sexual violence against others, the ‘patriotic’ women stand by their men. However, most of the literature on nationalism tends to ignore the gendered aspects of the phenomenon. One can read Ernest Gellner (1983), Benedict Anderson (1991), Anthony Smith (1991) and other key scholars 305

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writing on the theory of nationalism without realising that women exist as actors in political societies. Men act, but their masculinity is left unremarked. This lack of awareness of gender as a crucial dynamic in nationalism is telling of the gender-blind (where the masculinist passes off as ungendered) character of mainstream theorising of nationalism. They underestimate the role of women in nationalism movements and ignore the gendered nature of nationalist discourses. As Nira Yuval-Davis points out, the Oxford University Press reader on nationalism – a collection of key readings in the field – introduces the only extract on national and gender relations in the last section on ‘Beyond nationalism’ (cited in Yuval-Davis 1997, 3). The literature on populism similarly often proceeds with scant reference to gender as a driving force; for instance, The Oxford Handbook of Populism (Kaltwasser et al. 2017) has one chapter on ‘Populism and Gender’ by Sahar Abi-Hassan, but otherwise engages with the subject as if gender is either irrelevant or, at most, an ‘add on’. Feminist writers in recent times have highlighted the role of women and gender in the phenomenon (note that I mention both women and gender). There is also a growing awareness of the complicated and contested nature of categories of gender and sexuality and a recognition that certain versions of feminism, due to their transphobia and/or refusal to question racial or caste privileges, can end up reinforcing gender nationalism rather than subverting, queering or challenging nationalism. Nevertheless, gender is central to understanding how nationalisms operate. Despite nationalism’s ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalisation of gender difference. ‘No nation in the world gives women and men the same access to the rights and resources of the nation-state’ (McClintock 1993, 61). Nationalism projects a sense of community which demands occasional sacrifices of the individual in the greater service of the collective; however, it is a community with distinct expectations of men and women. It is not so much that women are absent in nationalist thinking, but that while they are very important symbolically, their main role is to support men as primary actors. The nation is often represented in terms of a heteronormative family, and ‘women are the symbol of the nation, men its agents, regardless of the role women actually play in the nation’ (Feminist Review 1993, 1). Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis (1992) point out that there are five major ways in which women have participated in ethnic and national process: As biological reproducers of members of ethnic collectivities As reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic/national groups As participating centrally in the ideological reproduction of the collectivity and as transmitters of its culture As signifiers of ethnic/national differences As active participants in national struggles. The primary role of women in all nationalist movements is that of mother. Nations get produced and reproduced by the bearing of children, 306

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the future carriers of national identity. This may give a certain respect and dignity to women as mothers, but it also domesticates their body. Nationalism erases transwomen and reduces cis women to their womb. But the nationalist expectation of women as mother is dependent on the context. In China, it was the national duty of most women (except some minority nationality women) to have only one child until recently. In Singapore and some European countries, the government may encourage its majority ethnic women to have at least one child (the unstated fear being that minority women have more children and may thus overtake the local population). In societies facing severe challenges, having more children could be seen as the greatest duty towards the nation. For some Palestinians in Israel or in occupied territories, having more children is seen as a resistance to the might of the Israeli state, as the following poem attests: Write down, I am an Arab! Fifty thousand is my [ID] number Eight children, the ninth will come next summer Angry? Write down, I am an Arab! (from Lustick, in Kanaaneh 2002, 65)

A child is supposed to inherit many of his values and beliefs from his upbringing within his family (I use ‘his’ deliberately here, for in the discourse of nationalism, the child as a future citizen of the nation is mostly seen as male). It is the private realm of the family that will train him to be a good citizen in the public realm, and hence it is the responsibility of the mother to ensure that her child is aware and proud of his nation. A good mother performs her duty by instilling a sense of national pride and an awareness of national and ethnic difference within a child (for example, encouraging her children to make friendships with other children from a similar national or ethnic background). Women are also seen as prime representations of their culture and nation, as vessels of their national culture. How they dress, how they behave, who they sleep with, what their aspirations are – all these are markers of difference between national cultures, and women are seen as having the primary responsibility in ensuring the perpetuation of their culture. The debate over the veiling of Muslim women is an excellent example of this. While in France or Belgium, veiling is seen as a sign of backwardness; in Iran or Afghanistan, veiling is enforced in the name of morality and piety. Are women victims or agents of nationalist ideologies? Does nationalism domesticate women by valourising their roles as mothers and wives? Or does it liberate them by offering opportunities to participate publicly in struggles? Women crying and wailing over their dead husbands and sons; pregnant Palestinian women suffering humiliating delays at security checkpoints; Kashmiri women made half-widows by the Indian state practising enforced disappearance; women as protestors, soldiers, suicide bombers and politicians; women as symbols of national honour and shame; women represented as more gender emancipated – these are some 307

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of the contradictory and diverse images that come to my mind. Thus, in nationalist movements, women are visible in all these roles: victims, agents, soldiers, mothers, traitors, perpetrators of violence, resistance against violence and so on. Thus, Anne McClintock argues that A feminist theory of nationalism might be strategically fourfold: investigating the gendered formation of sanctioned male theories; bringing into historical visibility women’s active cultural and political participation in national formations; bringing nationalist institutions into critical relation with other social structures and institutions, while at the same time paying scrupulous attention to the structures of racial, ethnic and class power that continue to bedevil privileged forms of feminism. (McClintock 1993, 63)

To rectify the gender-blind discussions on nationalism, feminist writers initially highlighted women as actors in nationalist movements. Almost all nationalist movements – but most conspicuously anti-colonial ones (Jayawardena 1986) – had a significant number of women participating in nationalist struggles. Anti-colonial nationalists used the private-public divide, with its strong gendered connotations in the modern European thinking, to assert a national difference (by reforming and buttressing the private and then using this to gain confidence to launch a wider political movement; Chatterjee 1993), but at the same time in a more advanced stage of the movement, allowed/encouraged women as public actors. It was often the case that women had more freedom during later stages of nationalist struggle than in the immediate aftermath period of national consolidation of the new postcolonial state. Algeria is a good example of a situation in which women were very active in the struggle against French colonialists, but after independence, the expectation was that they would go back to their ‘natural’ role in the private sphere. In this sense, nationalism affords freedom and agency to women but largely only insofar as it proves strategically useful. Unlike the Kurdish struggle where women’s visibility as fighters and activists is conspicuous (Dirik 2018), many contemporary anti-colonial nationalisms such as that of Tibetans, Palestinians or Kashmiris leave the ‘women question’ as secondary to the ‘national’ question, even as they struggle against masculinist patriarchal nation states that occupy them. The normative picture thus remains one of man as actor and protector, woman as supporter and protected – and individuals living beyond or outside of the gender binary do not feature at all.

GENDER, NATIONALISM, POPULISM AND THE NON-NATIONALIST OTHER A feminist investigation needs to go beyond simply identifying and highlighting the contribution and the role of women in nationalism and nationalist movements, in order to investigate the politics of gender within nationalism. Is the normative nationalist actor any man? Or any cis man? 308

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Or are they only cis men of certain kind (the attitude towards queer people in most nationalisms is a case in point)? Does the ascription of male identity to a man automatically make him an agent of nationalism, or does he first have to prove his credentials as a man (and as a nationalist man)? Clearly, nationalism (and wars and militarisation around it) offers a good opportunity for nationalised cis men to prove their masculinity and their nationalism. But if it is primarily about men, what about trans men? Does nationalism have space to be queered? Or can it, at best, offer a domestication through inclusion on partial terms as does homonationalism (Puar 2007) or femonationalism (Farris 2017)? ‘Nationalism has typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope’ (Enloe 1989, 44). Cynthia Enloe’s insight on nationalism challenges a simplistic equation of the gender question in nationalism with the role of women. Elsewhere (Anand 2008), I have argued that a close study of contemporary nationalisms (especially, but not exclusively, those that are associated with the identification of the enemies of the nation and violence against them) shows that nationalism should be conceptualised as a political move to create, awaken and strengthen a masculinist-nationalist body which is always already vulnerable to the exposure of the masculine as non-masculine. As expressions of collective politics, the international and the national cannot function without individual corporeal bodies that perform. The body is crucial to the nationalist project and performative and performing bodies in the nation-politics are predominantly, though not exclusively, cis-male-identified bodies, especially when conjured up as active agents. A focus on masculine bodies does not imply that feminine bodies are secondary (for no conception of masculine can exist without a constitutive mirror-opposite feminine). Spike Peterson is right when she argues that ‘it is women’s bodies, activities, and knowing that must be included if we are to accurately understand human life and social relations’ (1992, 11). But it is equally important that we acknowledge political movements of dominance (such as nationalism and populism) for what they first and foremost are: the construction/expression of masculinised bodies and body politics. We cannot understand nationalism unless we see it as constituted primarily through, to modify Peterson, men’s bodies, activities and knowing even while recognising that the categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ are not biologically but socially constructed. Gender and sexuality are not epiphenomenal (of secondary importance) but rather constitutive of national identity and conflicts based on these identities. Populism (and especially, though not exclusively, its right-wing variant) tends to be anti-feminist while extolling the virtues of the feminine and also selectively scavenging some aspects of feminism so long as it can be deployed to demonise ethnic and religious minorities as ‘backward’ (see Agius et al. 2020; Dietze and Roth 2020). These movements mix rhetoric of development, postcoloniality, tradition, modernity, rights and duties in ways that allow the centrality of anti-democratic leadership in the name of ‘the people’ (for a study of this in Indian context, see Kaul 2017). Populist nationalist leaders seek to mobilise followers against what they 309

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call ‘gender ideology’ or ‘the LGBTQ lobby’ and protect ‘traditional family values’ from feminists, queers, leftists and multiculturalists. As Nitasha Kaul argues, misogyny is integral to populist projects in various countries, including Turkey, the Philippines, India, the USA and Brazil, and works as an effective political strategy for these projects, by enabling a certain politics of identity to demonize opponents as feminine/inferior/ anti-national, scavenging upon progressive ideas (rather than rejecting them) and distorting them, and sustaining and defending a militarized masculinist approach to policy and delegitimizing challenges to it. (Kaul 2021, 1)

This hierarchical ordering of the Self and the Other (where the Self’s national identity is seen to be better) can be seen especially during times of stress and conflict. For example, the freedom-loving, God-fearing, family-oriented, consumerist American national identity versus the repressive, godless, ruthlessly egalitarian communist Soviet Union (from the American perspective) was a familiar theme during the period of ‘Cold War’. Gender played an interesting role in nationalist Cold War propaganda. Documents and articles disseminated by US Information Agency between 1945 and 1960 show how Soviet gender equality was presented as going against family values, which in turn defined American female identity, primarily as a homemaker (Belmonte 2003). In turn, the Soviets had their own ways of constructing a superior social national identity: an egalitarian, socialist patriotic Soviet identity against fascistic, capitalist, unequal American society. Images changed rapidly in the post-Cold War era. During the so-called War on Terror, the image of Islam as bad for women and the West as a defender of women’s rights is one of the defining motifs. Much rhetoric supporting the ‘War on Terror’ was based on a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’: the ‘us’ identity is strong, brave, democratic, just, humane and pitted against ‘them’, who are cowardly, weak, illegal, authoritarian, extremist, radical, dangerous and inhumane. Therefore, those who fight against terrorism (as decided primarily though not exclusively by the USA) are on the side of the ‘good’, while the terrorists and their ‘rogue state’ backers are, of course, ‘evil’, and those who refuse to participate are weaklings (such as the French during the Iraq invasion). National identity gets more rigid and acutely defined in situations of war and conflict. Of course, gender and sexuality are not the only or necessarily main dynamics in the creation of national identity. Race and religion may play equal or more important role. In fact, when it comes to populism or majoritarian nationalism, the overwhelming focus is on demonisation of ethnic and racial Others. This demonisation itself is heavily gendered, as the Self is constructed as both masculine- and more women-friendly than the Other, which is seen as both subversively feminine and lethally hypermasculine. Nationalism, especially majoritarian nationalism/populism, thus relies on inclusion and exclusion, remembering and forgetting, identity and difference. 310

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CONCLUSION National identity and nationalism get constructed and renewed every day through the activities and lives of its supposed subjects. Gender plays an important role in this process, as do other markers of identity (such as class, religion, race, sexuality, ethnicity and caste). National identity is also always in the process of flux and change. It is not fixed. It is constructed. It is therefore always contested. For instance, Israeli Jewish women protesting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories through activist organisations such as ‘Women in Black’ have a different notion of what a good Israeli Jewish national culture ought to be in comparison to those who deny the very existence of Palestinians as a people. Similarly, those Palestinians who recognise Israel and want to live with it peacefully either as part of one single secular democratic state or two separate states side-by-side and those Palestinians who see not only Israel but all Jews everywhere as the enemies have very different notions of what a Palestinian national culture should be. Majoritarian nationalism, or populism, which deploys a binary politics of Self and the Other, always requires a party or a leader to ascertain who constitutes the deserving subject of the ‘silent majority’ and who are the enemies of this silent majority. Nationalism and populism therefore represent internal contestations over the features and boundaries of the nation and the people. It is also about creating or asserting the identity of the nation/people by distinguishing itself from the Others of the nation/ people. Gender plays a central role in this process of national/people identification; the bodies that are deemed to matter in nationalism are gendered bodies, and the demarcation of the national Self from the non-national (and even anti-national) Other is achieved through specific representations of masculinity and femininity, and nationalist and populist violence is legitimised in gendered terms (defending the honour of ‘our’ women against the enemy men). The durability of the concept of nation makes it an important subject of investigation for scholars of global politics. However, the constructed nature of nationalism and people is perhaps less interesting than considering the gendered and racialised process of construction. It is not enough to say that a nation or a people is a fabricated entity: how is it fabricated? Why and how is this fabrication successfully represented as ‘natural’? How does it build upon already existing gender relations while at the same time reinscribing and maybe even challenging it? Unlike gendered nationalism, a genuine democratic space in which all forms of diversities, justices and freedoms are valued necessitates a feminist politics that challenges nationalisms and populisms and the processes through which these ideologies are sustained. Discussion questions 1. If nationalism and populism are social constructions, why do ‘nations’ and ‘people’ have almost universal appeal? 311

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2. How do gendered representations of the Other play an important part in constituting the national Self and/or ‘the people’? 3. Can there ever be a cosy accommodation between feminism and nationalism? Further reading Enloe, Cynthia. 2001. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, revised edition. London and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (See especially the chapter ‘Nationalism and Masculinity’). Kaul, Nitasha. 2021. “The Misogyny of Authoritarians in Contemporary Democracies.” International Studies Review, https://doi.org/10.1093/ isr/viab028. Mulholland, Jon, Nicola Montagna and Erin Sanders-McDonagh (eds). 2018. Gendering Nationalism: Intersections of Nation, Gender and Sexuality. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ozkirimli, Umut. 2000. Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. New York: St Martin’s Press. References Agius, Christine, Annika B. Rosamond and Catarina Kinnvall. 2020. “Populism, Ontological Insecurity and Gendered Nationalism: Masculinity, Climate Denial and Covid-19.” Politics, Religion & Ideology 21 (4): 432–450. Anand, Dibyesh. 2008. “Porno-Nationalism and the Male Subject: An Ethnography of Hindu Nationalist Imagination in India.” In Rethinking the ‘Man’ Question in International Politics, edited by Jane Parpart and Marysia Zalewski. London: Zed Books. Anand, Dibyesh. 2011. Hindu Nationalism in India and the Politics of Fear. London: Palgrave. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition. London: Verso. Anthias, Floya and Nira Yuval-Davis. 1992. Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle. London: Routledge. Belmonte, Laura A. 2003. “A Family Affair? Gender, the U.S. Information Agency, and Cold War Ideology, 1945–1960.” In Culture and International History, edited by Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher, 79–93. New York: Berghahn Books. Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, revised edition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. De Cleen, Benjamin and Yannis Stavrakakis. 2017. “Distinctions and Articulations: A Discourse Theoretical Framework for the Study of Populism and Nationalism.” Javnost – The Public 24 (4): 301–319. 312

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Dietze, Gabriele and Julia Roth (eds). 2020. Right-Wing Populism and Gender: European Perspectives and Beyond. Bielefeld: Transcript. Dirik, Dilar. 2018. “Overcoming the Nation-State: Women’s Autonomy and Radical Democracy in Kurdistan.” In Gendering Nationalism: Intersections of Nation, Gender and Sexuality, edited by Jon Mulholland, Nicola Montagna, and Erin Sanders-McDonagh, 145–163. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Enloe, Cynthia. 1989. Bananas Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Farris, Sara R. 2017. In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Feminist Review. 1993. Special Issue: “Nationalisms and National Identities.” Volume 44. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jayawardena, Kumari. 1986. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books. Kaltwasser, Cristóbal, Paul Taggart, Paulina O. Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy (eds). 2017. The Oxford Handbook of Populism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kanaaneh, Rhoda A. 2002. Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kaul, Nitasha. 2017. “Rise of the Political Right in India: HindutvaDevelopment Mix, Modi Myth, and Dualities.” Journal of Labor and Society 20 (4): 523–548. Kaul, Nitasha. 2021. “The Misogyny of Authoritarians in Contemporary Democracies.” International Studies Review, https://doi.org/10.1093/ isr/viab028 McClintock, Anne. 1993. “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family.” Feminist Review 44: 61–80. Peterson, V. Spike (ed). 1992. Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press. Puri, Jasbir K. 2004. Encountering Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, Anthony D. 1991. National Identity. London: Penguin. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage.

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CHAPTER 23

Peace Catia C. Confortini and Annick T. R. Wibben There is a stereotypical association of women with peace. Accordingly, women, by nature or socialisation, commit less violence and, therefore, they are more peaceful or peace loving. This is not what this chapter is about. Associating women solely with peacemaking is problematic from a feminist perspective. While women may commit fewer acts of personal violence, it is harder to measure the degree to which they are involved with other forms of violence (for example, structural violence, such as supporting or enacting racist policies). We also cannot be sure whether their purported pacifism has anything to do with an essential characteristic of womanhood, or whether it is due to their position in society as women. Nonetheless, the symbolism of associating women and peace is a comforting and familiar narrative. It is also often employed strategically, to attract funding for example, but can also be used to depoliticise the inclusion of women in important processes – sometimes not only to advance feminist goals, but also to deny them political power. At the same time, it has consequences for how much value we place on peace as a political goal. By associating women with peace, we gender peace as feminine, which devalues it vis-à-vis its common opposite: war. In the context of gendered hierarchies embedded in binary constructions, peace becomes a domestic and private matter, not fit for the realm of politics, which is where war is (supposedly) decided. Consequently, strong associations of women with peace end up reinforcing the marginalisation of both women and peace to the private realm, in turn also supporting women’s exclusion from the political sphere. Reinforcing the association – even by discussing it at length – distracts attention from more exciting feminist work we would like to draw attention to. While there is a long tradition of feminist (activist) scholarship in peace studies, often by women, it has been somewhat marginalised in mainstream peace research (Lyytikainen et al. 2021; Väyrynen et al. 2021; Wibben 2021; Wibben et al. 2019). Elise Boulding (1992, 56), herself a key 314

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figure in this area, summarised it well. Feminist peace scholars were, by the late 1960s, analysing power and emphasising empowerment over coercion. By the 1970s, they had moved beyond traditional notions of security against an adversary and broadened the idea of security to include security against want, security of human rights and the security of an empowered civil society. In the 1980s, they focused on the linkages between war and patriarchy (see Boulding 1992, 56f). Since then, more (activist) scholarship has emerged, culminating in the passing of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000, which marked the beginning of what we have come to call the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda. In the 20 years since, there has been a veritable explosion of feminist scholarship and activism in this area, although interpretation of the agenda among those engaging with it, at the UN and among feminist activists or scholars, has often diverged. Feminist activism around the so-called WPS Agenda begins where feminist scholarship also often starts – by asking seemingly simple questions such as ‘Where are the women?’, ‘What work are they doing?’ and ‘Why is no one paying attention?’ Neither feminist activism nor scholarship ends there, however. Instead, those questions quickly reveal gendered power relations, which shape women’s (and men’s, queer and trans people’s) experiences, including experiences of/in peace. It is by looking at gendered power relations and their effects on people’s lives that feminists view peace not only as the absence of violence, or as an abstract ideal goal, but also as ‘the unfolding of world-wide processes making for the nurture of human life’ (Addams 1907, 238). Peace, in this way, includes both the constant work (the doing) required for the fullness of life (and many feminists would include non-human life as well) and the creation of more just structures to bring that fullness about. By doing feminist analysis, we find that patterns of (gendered) subordination intersect across dimensions of ability, class, caste, ethnicity, indigeneity, race, religion, sexuality and more (see Agathangelou and Ling 2009; Chowdhry and Nair 2004; Collins 2000; Crenshaw 1991; Davis 1981; hooks 1984; Kirk and Okazawa-Rey 2020; Mohanty 1984; Smith 2012) and that one particular form of oppression can never be divorced from other struggles for justice (see also Chapters 5 and 7). While gender oppression is a global phenomenon, it manifests in particular ways in different sites. Feminist peace scholarship, thus, is a political project with wide demands for justice; gender justice also requires racial or environmental justice, for example. What justice and peace entail in any specific case depends on the grievances being addressed (Lugones and Spelman 1983). In other words, while most non-feminist peace studies scholarship considers the twin goals of justice and peace as often in tension with each other, for feminists, peace is impossible without justice, because injustice injures and harms bodies and livelihoods as much as physical violence does. In this chapter, we use the example of feminist scholarship on nuclear politics to exemplify the uniqueness of feminist approaches to peace in shifting understandings of global politics. Here we begin, like much feminist analysis, with the personal – the sphere of everyday life. Feminists 315

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pay particular attention to the politics of the everyday, a political location where peace-war is enacted and shaped in worlds filled with people, emotions and relationships. Specifically, we look in those places that non-feminist scholarship considers irrelevant or marginal to politics, but that, for feminists, reveal crucial insights about gendered power relations (including peace). Secondly, we highlight how feminists propose different ways to look at politics – through the lenses of care, rather than security – and how they experiment with what is possible (see also choi 2021) even in an everyday of seeming impossibilities. In the midst of superpower nuclear rivalry, feminists pay attention to the invisible spaces where peace is already and always practiced but not seen as political.

FEMINISM AND NUCLEAR POLITICS Since the invention of nuclear weapons in the 1940s, peace activists and scholars have been concerned with their impact. Feminist peace activists are no exception; in response to the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) stated: The development of the atomic bomb and other modern weapons is only the culmination of the effort to invent ever more deadly instruments of destruction and [WILPF] reaffirms its conviction that the only defence against such weapons is the abolition of war. (WILPF 1946)

WILPF has been organising against the destructiveness of nuclear weapons since the dawn of the atomic era, advocating for an international agency for the regulation of nuclear energy and the abolition of nuclear weapons (Confortini 2012). But it was not until the 1980s that feminist peace scholars began to write about how the understanding of nuclear weapons, even in disarmament discourses, had itself relied on gendered assumptions about these weapons as symbols of status and masculinity. Moreover, ‘defence intellectuals’ have often resorted to euphemisms and indirect, technostrategic – and gendered – language when discussing nuclear arms (see, for example, Cohn 1987, 1990; Cohn and Ruddick 2004; Duncanson and Eschle 2008). Instead, feminist peace activists and scholars argued that closer attention needed to be paid to the concrete impacts of these weapons on human bodies, on the environment and on the ability of states to prioritise social programmes that would benefit their citizens. While some of these insights have now made their way into policymaking (for example by way of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force on 22 January 2021 [see Acheson 2021]), questions about the varied impacts of nuclear programmes remain sidelined in scholarship on nuclear weapons, even though they affect communities worldwide. Why? Traditional scholarship on global politics has considered many of these issues as beyond the limits of what 316

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is considered pertinent: war is discussed in the abstract, not as an everyday and embodied experience, unless it is the experience of a soldier on an actual battlefield. Feminists, however, insist that the personal is political and international – that what happens in our personal lives is important to understand politics at the domestic and international levels. We highlight the relationality of human beings; we are interdependent and experience (mutual) vulnerability, which can be contrasted with the abstract objectivity of global politics that happens elsewhere, distant from human bodies. It is through these feminist insights that we can begin to reshape how we think about nuclear weapons, as well as nuclear energy, and their place in the world.

THE CONTINUUM OF NUCLEAR POLITICS Shampa Biswas’ (2014) feminist postcolonial account of nuclear politics focuses on people and concerns unaccounted for in conventional accounts of nuclear politics. Her work centres around those whose bodies are damaged or destroyed by the full cycle of production, testing and deployment of nuclear power (both for so-called peaceful purposes and for weapons). In doing so, she reveals how focusing mainly on the (non-)use of nuclear weapons captures only a narrow slice of the problem. Ultimately, what matters for pursuing peace is not, as advocates as well as critics of nuclear weapons argue, the absence of war (even if it includes horrific unusable weapons such as atomic bombs), but rather justice. Following an analysis of nuclear weapons as ‘fetish commodities’ (Biswas 2014, 111), unusable luxury objects that mainly signify status in a hierarchical global nuclear order, Biswas urges us to focus our attention elsewhere. She argues that the production of both nuclear weapons and ‘peaceful’ nuclear energy ‘requires vast investment of resources and subsists on the exploitation of workers in the mining of nuclear materials and in the nuclear industry more generally, and serves enormous corporate interests with various kinds of stakes in nuclear energy and weapons’ (Biswas 2014, 137). The pursuit of costly nuclear weapons as status objects invariably takes much-needed expenditure from other areas, such as investment in social programmes that would benefit the most marginalised people or much-needed programmes to generate alternative, green energy solutions. The production cycle of nuclear weapons as well as of nuclear energy also has a number of direct costs. Extraction of nuclear materials and storage of nuclear waste damages the environment of Indigenous homelands and the health of marginalised communities, where nuclear facilities are often located – entire territories can remain uninhabitable for many years. They include the Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific where the US carried out nuclear tests from 1946–1958 and the Hanford Site in Washington State (Biswas et al. 2021), in the US, a decommissioned nuclear production site of more than 500 square miles full of radioactive waste. Local communities, including Indigenous peoples who rely on rivers 317

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and other waterways for their livelihood, rarely get adequate compensation for their loss and suffering. Therefore, while proponents of nuclear weapons argue that they are useful as a deterrent – that is, that they can prevent harm by deterring states from going to war – they are, in fact, already doing harm everyday. In conventional security studies, the state has been variously conceptualised as a black box, or a billiard ball. It doesn’t matter what happens inside it, because these analyses are primarily interested in how the different units (for example, states) interact with each other. This view of international relations and international security misses the relevance of security for the everyday lives of people, as well as the relevance of these everyday lives for security. For example, states’ ambitions to gain status in international hierarchies come at enormous costs, borne particularly by ‘those vulnerable bodies and Indigenous communities around the world that have been rendered the most insecure by nuclear proliferation and are the least visible in most accountings of nuclear costs’ (Biswas 2014, 25). From uranium mining to nuclear waste storage and cleanup, the resources wasted could well have been spent for ‘life-enhancing goals’ (Biswas 2014, 26). In this way, Biswas’ account ultimately shows a link between ‘peace’ economies that rely on nuclear production and war economies dependent on nuclear weapons. Biswas’ account is a great example of what feminists call the continuum of violence (see, for example, Cockburn 2004; Enloe 2004; Kelly 1996; Reardon 1993). This continuum spans peace- and wartime, as well as the multiplicity of sites associated with them. Drawing attention to this continuum also highlights the link between the violence that happens in domestic, personal spaces and the public violence of war. Feminist scholar Betty Reardon (1996, 10) talks about the ‘war system’, explaining that ‘the competitive social order which is based on authoritarian principles, assumes unequal value among and between human beings, and is held in place by coercive force’. In other words, gendered power generates a social and political system made of unequal and unjust hierarchies, and it is those hierarchies that are ultimately responsible for many forms of violence, including war. Cynthia Cockburn (2010) and Laura Sjoberg (2013) go as far as saying that gender relations are ‘causal’ factors in war – including, we argue, in the context of nuclear politics.

THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL Biswas’ account also illustrates several aspects of feminist approaches to peace. First, note how Biswas switches the focus away from the users and creators of nuclear weapons. This draws attention to the people who experience the effects of these weapons ‘downstream’ and thus uplifts their perspective. The point of view becomes not that of the few who profit, but of the many who suffer. This is in line with one of feminism’s most famous mantras that ‘the personal is political’ or, as Cynthia Enloe has expanded it, ‘the personal is international’ (1990, see also 2014). 318

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Through this assertion, feminists underscore how the everyday spaces that traditional theories of international affairs consider out of bounds (the domestic, ‘private’, personal sphere) are instead spaces where politics is made. To put it in bell hooks’ terms, ‘woman’s everyday reality is informed and shaped by politics and is necessarily political’ (1984, 24). Paying attention to the everyday begins, first, by looking at how ‘private’ spaces which are supposedly removed from global politics – such as the home – instead shape and are shaped by politics and power. Looking at the production cycle of ‘all things nuclear’ is a perfect example of this kind of feminist move. By centring the personal experiences of people and communities affected by nuclear power, Biswas is positioning them as experts who help us to understand nuclear politics. Second, this move brings us to the everyday as a source of knowledge about global politics and the gendered power relations that shape it – not only building knowledge from personal experience but also checking knowledge against personal experience. Enloe (1990, 196) calls this ‘read[ing] power backwards and forwards’. A great example are the various anti-nuclear encampments of the 1980s, where women gathered to protest nuclear weapons sites in Greenham Common (England), Faslane (Scotland), Seneca Falls (USA), Comiso (Italy) and many others. In these semi-permanent living spaces just outside the military bases, feminists engaged in everyday activities, intertwining them with different forms of political action to both resist nuclear weapons logic and celebrate lifenurturing ways to do politics. As Runyan (2015, 217) notes, Greenham Common women laid down in front of cruise missiles, danced on weapons silos, and theatrically put state militaries, local police, local councils and prison systems on trial [; at the same time they] developed reciprocal provisioning economies in the always threatened make-shift camps they lived in over months.

Meanwhile at the still-ongoing camp in Faslane, ‘everyday security practitioners, [… participate …] in organised, self-conscious, collective efforts to challenge elite security logics and processes in and through the everyday’ (Eschle 2018, 291). In doing so, participants continue to negotiate both the (international) security environment they are protesting and the everyday insecurities in the camp arising from the nuclear base. Third, paying attention to the personal and the everyday leads us to think about politics and power in terms of physical bodies and the messy complexities of everyday lives. In this way, thinking from and with the everyday also reminds us that while we ‘can think of “women” as stick figures […] we cannot talk to stick figures’ (Sylvester 1994, 13). Thinking about the personal at the same time as the political (which requires us to go beyond individuals), thus always involves complex negotiations: What do we emphasise? Whose point of view do we adopt? How much can we generalise and where do we need to maintain specificity? Do we start with peace, or do we start with wartime? What happens when we use feminist insights to disrupt neat boundaries? 319

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To give an example, Swati Parashar’s research on wars in South Asia urges us to reconsider war not as a discrete event that disrupts the everyday, but rather ‘as a socio-cultural, trans-historical institution that impacts on the “everyday” lives of men, women and children’ (2013, 615). War shapes our everyday realities, entering intimate and familiar spaces, even in those locations that we claim are ‘at peace’. It does so through our smartphones, TV and computer screens, but also daily in more subtle ways; for example, it influences how we dress, how we move, how we develop social relations (Parashar 2014, 4–6) and even how we shape and perform our gender identities. Parashar concludes that people who experience war know more about international relations than scholarship on global politics does, and failing to pay attention to this knowledge comes at a cost: sustaining and justifying war (see also Parashar 2016).

CARE ETHICS AND THE EVERYDAY Seeing the politics of the everyday leads feminists to consider practices of care that sustain communities as central to our conception of peace. The relationship between care and peace was explicitly theorised by political philosopher Sara Ruddick (1989, 137), who found in maternal practice a set of resources potentially useful for peace. Ruddick’s work was part of a larger tradition of feminist thought that brought to light how a quintessentially ‘private’ and ‘sentimentally honored and often secretly despised’ activity – mothering – involved thinking. She held that this thinking was politically relevant. Writing contemporarily about mothering as political, for example, Collins (2000) theorises Black motherhood as a practice against sexist and racist oppression. From these engagements with the care work of mothering emerges a care ethic that emphasises a relational and context-bound mode of moral reasoning. This ethics of care, ‘places at the forefront human flourishing and the prevention of harm and human suffering’ (Hankivsky 2014, 253). In contrast with abstract notions of justice, the now vast literature on care ethics considers our moral obligations to each other as derived from embodied relations (see, for example, Robinson 2011). A care ethics approach to nuclear weapons might attend to the ways in which the environmental damage of the nuclear production cycle affects the health and livelihoods of nearby (Indigenous) communities, also requiring gender-differentiated care labour to sustain and preserve lives in the midst of such damage. Care ethics starts from recognising our existence as entangled with one another or, as feminists put it, from a relational ontology: rather than seeing human beings as autonomous individuals, feminists recognise our fundamental vulnerability to, and dependence on, each other. Being always already in relation to each other implies a social world made of entanglements, rather than separation. We are all receiving and/or giving care – from the moment of our birth to our last breaths on this planet. Our interdependencies and relationships of care, however, materialise in highly unequal ways, as critics of care ethics’ conceptual inclusiveness have pointed out: ‘indeed, either implicitly or explicitly, any conceptualization of care involves issues of 320

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power, cultural and social production’ (Cloyes, summarised in Hankivsky 2014, 254). As such, ‘when no neutral standpoint exists from which to theorize, attention to the locations from which theory is done becomes crucial’ (Collins, summarised in Bailey 1994, 193). As noted above, Catherine Eschle’s work presents nuclear politics as seen and critiqued by feminist anti-nuclear protesters, setting up and living in encampments around nuclear bases. In describing the actions and practices of those who camp in Faslane, she sheds light on the ways in which they make the ‘everyday … central to the contestation of the nuclear state’ (2018, 291). For example, living in these open encampments means making visible all the social reproductive work campers do together, from caring for each other’s children, to sharing meals with visitors, to preparing and cleaning up collectively. This collective work is, first, an expression of relational ontology – the idea that we all depend on each other to survive and thrive. Second, the visibility of this shared work in the daily life of the anti-nuclear activists represents a critique of the nuclear state as well as its dependence on the capitalist system (Eschle 2016). In the capitalist economy, the work of social reproduction, including care work, remains largely invisible and unrewarded (or under-rewarded). At the same time, since most of this reproductive (care) work continues to fall on women, it is also one of the key obstacles to women’s full participation in politics, including security politics. The feminist anti-nuclear movement, then, simultaneously draws attention to embodied everyday experiences of nuclear insecurity and to alternative re-imaginings and practices of security for/in a world free of both nuclear weapons and labour exploitation. Outside of (feminist) peace camps, in the throes of the capitalist system, care work is more often outsourced than shared. This outsourcing is not, however, evenly distributed. Rather, it is often women (and some men) from marginalised communities who, to earn a living, take care of the children, elderly people or differently-abled persons from more privileged sectors of global society. Meanwhile, the care work within their own communities is taken on by others – or done in a ‘second shift’ after a day of work in the formal labour sector – in any case placing additional burdens of care on marginalised communities. Consequently, ‘certain groups of (economically able, able-bodied, white) privileged women, mostly from developed countries of the North, benefit from the labor, oppression, and marginalization of [other, often migrant] women’ (Hankivsky 2014, 256; see also Collins 2000). This belies the idea that ‘all women are oppressed’, when other structures of domination can be more significant depending on the particular context. When trying to understand varied forms of oppression, it is thus not enough to look for ‘the woman’s voice’ – in the singular – because we need to consider the intersections of different forms of marginalisation, exclusion and oppression. Crenshaw (1991) coined the word ‘intersectionality’ to express this idea and highlight the ways in which women of colour are simultaneously harmed by sexism and racism. Intersectionality has since become a widely used feminist lens to understand – and struggle against – the unequitable distribution of social, political and economic harms. The 321

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idea of intersectionality can also be used to highlight unearned privilege, according to gender, race, class, sexuality, immigration status, disability or other socially constructed categories of identity. Intersectionality is therefore an important tool for feminist work on peace (see, for example, Stavreska and Smith 2020; Wibben and Donahoe 2020). Significantly, simply including more voices, including those from the margins, when the frames of the debate have already been set, is not enough to challenge power relations. Rather, in the multiplicity of everyday experiences, we can find ‘departure points to understand, revalue, and reorient our politics towards what gets structured out, subordinated, and/or made invisible in the gendered, racialised, colonial-capitalist ways power works’ (choi 2021). That is, thinking intersectionally and centring marginalised experiences leads us to reframe and re-imagine global politics in manners that ‘prefigure’ (Confortini 2017) alternative ways to relate to one another. For example, the Lakota people’s opposition to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline illustrates, for Justin De Leon, an Indigenous notion of ontological security ‘based on a cosmology, or an understanding of an ordering between human beings and the universe, that constitutes the conditions that allow for processing of the world in the first place’ (2020, 35). Returning to nuclear politics, centring marginalised people’s experiences leads us to focus on the ways in which communities affected by the nuclear production cycle organise and shape their resistance, but also how their actions reconfigure international relations. They show, for example, how states’ pursuit of nuclear weapons cannot be divorced from their pursuit for nuclear energy – they are both part of an economy of ‘desire’ for power and status in a hierarchical, and gendered, international system (Biswas 2014). Feminist theories have long paid attention to power – gendered, raced, classed and more – in their attempts to describe the world. Shifting the point of departure for feminist thinking about peace in support of genuine change will help feminist theory to continue to become ‘helpful, illuminating, empowering, [and] respectful’ (Lugones and Spelman 1983, 578).

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have highlighted how feminist perspectives on peace are different from a perspective that examines the relationship between women and peace (on the latter see Aharoni 2017). Feminist perspectives start from and illustrate the politics of the everyday. They focus on how gendered power relations shape and are shaped by international politics, including the politics of peace-war. Using the example of nuclear politics, we have shown how decisions about international security and energy affect private lives in highly differential and gendered ways. Unlike advocates of nuclear weapons, who claim that they keep us safe by making war more unlikely, feminist critics highlight both the gendered nature of the desire for such weapons, and the costs of their non-use as well as of ‘peaceful’ uses of nuclear power. 322

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Feminist scholars and activists also ask us to pay attention to the ways in which the personal and everyday shapes or informs political and international life and, at the same time, to consider the kind of international politics that would be made possible if we took seriously those most marginalised or excluded from political decision-making. Shifting our point of departure to the latter would force us to see the ways in which life is sustained and helped to flourish by relations of care, where the awareness of shared vulnerability and unequal burdens or harms would prompt us to re-imagine (everyday) peace. Feminist peace activism and scholarship move us beyond demands for gender equality or peace and ask us instead to problematise what we mean by peace, to examine how gender intersects with other categories of oppression, and consider whether, in fact, peace is possible without justice. Discussion questions 1. What difference does it make to think about feminist approaches to peace? 2. What might feminist peace look like to you? 3. What does it mean for global politics to shift attention to everyday peace? Further reading Lyytikainen, Minna, Punam Yadav, Annick T.R. Wibben, Marjaana Jauhola and Catia C. Confortini. 2021. “Unruly Wives in the Household: Toward Feminist Genealogies for Peace Research.” Cooperation & Conflict 56 (1): 3–25. MADRE: http://www.madre.org/ McLeod, Laura and Maria O’Reilly, 2019. “Special Issue: Critical Peace and Conflict Studies: Feminist Interventions.” Peacebuilding 7 (2). Reaching Critical Will: http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org Tarja Väyrynen, Swati Parashar, Élise Féron and Catia C. Confortini (eds). 2021. Routledge Handbook on Feminist Peace Research. New York and London: Routledge. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom: http://www. wilpf.org References Acheson, Ray. 2021. Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy. New York and London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Addams, Jane. 1907. Newer Ideals of Peace. New York: Macmillan. Agathangelou, Anna M. and L.H.M. Ling. 2009. Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds. London and New York: Routledge. 323

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Aharoni, Sarai B. 2017. “Who Needs the Women and Peace Hypothesis? Rethinking Modes of Inquiry on Gender and Conflict in Israel/ Palestine.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 19 (3): 311–326. Bailey, Alison. 1994. “Review: Mothering, Diversity and Peace Politics.” Hypatia 9 (2): 188–198. Biswas, Shampa. 2014. Nuclear Desire: Power and the Postcolonial Nuclear Order. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Biswas, Shampa, Trisha Pritikin, Glenna Cole Allee, M.T. Silvia, and Yuki Miyamoto. 2021. “Masculinist States, Radioactive Contamination, and Transnational Nuclear Justice: A Conversation on Building Bridges across Borders.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 23 (1): 149–169. Boulding, Elise. 1992. “Women’s Experiential Approaches to Peace Studies.” In The Knowledge Explosion: Generations of Feminist Scholarship, edited by Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender, 54–63. New York: Teacher’s Press. choi, shine. 2021. “Everyday Peace in Critical Feminist Theory.” In Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research, edited by Tarja Väyrynen, Swati Parashar, Élise Féron, and Catia C. Confortini, 60–69. London and New York: Routledge. Chowdhry, Geeta and Sheila Nair (eds). 2004. Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender, and Class. London and New York: Routledge. Cockburn, Cynthia. 2004. “The Continuum of Violence: A Gender Perspective on War and Peace.” In Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones, edited by Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman, 24–44. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cockburn, Cynthia. 2010. “Gender Relations as Causal in Militarization and War: A Feminist Standpoint.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 12 (2): 139–157. Cohn, Carol. 1987. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 12 (4): 687–718. Cohn, Carol. 1990. “‘Clean Bombs’ and Clean Language.” In Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History, Politics, and Social Theory, edited by Jean B. Elshtain and Sheila Tobias, 33–55. Savage: Rowman & Littlefield. Cohn, Carol and Sara Ruddick. 2004. “A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction.” In Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction, edited by Steven Lee and Sohail Hashmi, 405–435. New York: Cambridge University Press. Collins, Patricia H. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London and New York: Routledge. Confortini, Catia C. 2012. Intelligent Compassion: Feminist Critical Methodology in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1945–1975. New York and London: Oxford University Press. 324

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Confortini, Catia C. 2017. “Past as Prefigurative Prelude: Feminist Peace Activists and IR.” In What’s the Point of International Relations, edited by Synne L. Dyvik, Jan Selby, and Rorden Wilkinson, 83–97. London and New York: Routledge. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–1299. Davis, Angela Y. 1981. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House. de Leon, Justin. 2020. “Lakota Experiences of (In)security: Cosmology and Ontological Security.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 22 (1): 33–62. Duncanson, Claire and Catherine Eschle. 2008. “Gender and the Nuclear Weapons State: A Feminist Critique of the UK Government’s White Paper on Trident.” New Political Science 30 (4): 545–563. Enloe, Cynthia. 1990. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 2004. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 2014. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. 2nd edition. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Eschle, Catherine. 2016. “Faslane Peace Camp and the Political Economy of the Everyday.” Globalizations 13 (6): 912–914. Eschle, Catherine. 2018. “Nuclear (In)Security in the Everyday: Peace Campers as Everyday Security Practitioners.” Security Dialogue 49 (4): 289–305. Hankivsky, Olena. 2014. “Rethinking Care Ethics: On the Promise and Pitfalls of an Intersectional Analysis.” American Political Science Review 108 (2): 252–264. hooks, bell. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center. Boston: South End Press. Kelly, Liz. 1996. “‘It’s Everywhere’: Sexual Violence as a Continuum.” In: Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader, edited by Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott, 191–206. New York: Columbia University Press. Kirk, Gwen and Margo Okazawa-Rey (eds). 2020. Gendered Lives: Intersectional Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. Lugones, María and Elisabeth Spelman. 1983. “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice.” Women’s Studies International Forum 6 (6): 573–581. Lyytikainen, Minna, Punam Yadav, Annick T.R. Wibben, Marjaana Jauhola and Catia C. Confortini. 2021. “Unruly Wives in the Household: Toward Feminist Genealogies for Peace Research.” Cooperation & Conflict 56 (1): 3–25. Mohanty, Chandra T. 1984. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2 12 (3)–13 (1): 333–358. 325

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Parashar, Swati. 2013. “What Wars and ‘War Bodies’ Know about International Relations.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26 (4): 615–630. Parashar, Swati. 2014. Women and Militant Wars: The Politics of Injury. London and New York: Routledge. Parashar, Swati. 2016. “Women and the Matrix of Violence: A study of the Maoist Insurgency in India.” In Researching War: Feminist Methods, Ethics & Politics, edited by Annick T.R. Wibben, 76–91. London and New York: Routledge. Reardon, Betty A. 1993. Women and Peace: Feminist Visions of Global Security. Albany: State University of New York Press. Reardon, Betty A. 1996. Sexism and the War System. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Robinson, Fiona. 2011. The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ruddick, Sara. 1989. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press. Runyan, Anne. 2015. “Going Greenham/Going Gaga on Peace and Security.” Critical Studies on Security 3 (2): 216–219. Sjoberg, Laura. 2013. Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, Linda T. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Stavreska, Elena B. and Sarah Smith. 2020. “Intersectionality and Peace.” In Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies, edited by Oliver Richmond and Gezim Visoka. London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11795-5_120-1 Sylvester, Christine. 1994. Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wibben, Annick T.R. 2021. “Genealogies of Feminist Peace Research: Themes, Thinkers, and Turns.” In: Routledge Handbook on Feminist Peace Research, edited by Tarja Väyrynen, Swati Parashar, Élise Féron, and Catia C. Confortini, 17–27. London: Routledge. Wibben, Annick T.R., Catia C. Confortini, Sanam Rohi, Sarai Aharoni, Leena Vastapuu and Tiina Vaittinen. 2019. “Collective Discussion: Piecing-Up Feminist Peace Research.” International Political Sociology 13 (1): 86–107. Wibben, Annick T.R. and Amanda E. Donahoe. 2020. “Feminist Peace Research.” In Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies, edited by Oliver Richmond and Gezim Visoka. London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11795-5. WILPF (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom). 1946. WILPF Resolutions, 10th Congress, Luxemburg, 4–9 August. https:// www.wilpf.org /wp-content/uploads/2012/09/ W ILPF_triennial_ congress_1946.pdf

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Queer Politics Rahul Rao To attempt to define ‘queer’ would be antithetical to the very project of queerness. In lieu of definitions, we might begin with something more in the nature of orientation or sensibility. Eve Sedgwick describes queer as ‘a continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant’. She reminds us that the word ‘queer’ means ‘across’. It derives from the Indo-European root ‘-twerkw’, which also generates the German ‘quer’ (transverse), the Latin ‘torquere’ (to twist) and the English ‘athwart’ (Sedgwick 1994, viii). These terms suggest a condition of variance from, or being tangential to, something else – something that presumably runs straight or is perfectly aligned, the way things are meant to be. The queer, in contrast, is bent, twisted and askew. Many of these terms have, in some times and places, functioned as slurs used to refer to people who are perceived to be sexually deviant. ‘Queer theory’ as a knowledge project, then, is also an act of appropriation, an attempt to wrest from our enemies the terms in which we are othered and to resignify what they might mean. As Heather Love puts it, queer theory is premised on the hope of an alchemy that might transform ‘the base materials of social abjection into the gold of political agency’ (2007, 18). Because the queer is dynamic and escapes definition except in relation to something else that is understood as stable and normative, it has also functioned as a critique of the politics of identity. To have an identity – or, more pertinently, to be recognised as having an identity – is to be associated with a set of characteristics or a group. Identity invites definition. It draws boundaries around some, distinguishing them from others. Importantly, this can be a progressive move. The marginalised and persecuted have always found refuge and a measure of security in collectivity. But the move to define membership and belonging always produces exclusions. And the reproduction of identity typically requires a constant practice of vigilance – a patrolling of the boundaries of community – that

DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-26

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can reiterate and entrench these exclusions. Thus, even as identity can bring security and safety, queer critique sets itself against the stabilising and disciplining effects of identity politics. One way in which queer theory and praxis distinguish themselves from identity politics is to refuse to see their domain as restricted to sex/ gender (even if this is what provides their initial impetus). As Michael Warner points out, because the sex/gender order is expressed through a range of institutions and ideologies – the family, state, market, religion, ‘race’, biomedical and other regimes of the body – to challenge it is to encounter these other institutions as problems and struggle with them as well. For Warner, ‘being queer means fighting about [all] these issues all the time’ (1993, xiii). Not everyone agrees. For those who find themselves at home in these institutions but for their sex/gender deviance, the domain of their dissidence has tended to be limited to that of gender and sexuality.1 This singular focus has the consequence of leaving intact all the other structures of society (and, indeed, of desiring acceptance within them). The field of sex/gender dissidence has therefore long been marked by a fault line between a liberal project of inclusion that seeks to cultivate tolerance for sexual and gender diversity in the world as it actually is and a queer and defiantly utopian insistence on nothing less than a remaking of the world (Richter-Montpetit 2017). But here is where things get complicated. As I write this chapter in 2021, the term ‘queer’ functions unstably and contradictorily as (i) a critique of identity politics, (ii) an umbrella term for several identities clustering around sex/gender deviance of some kind or other, and (iii) as one identity category among many (as in ‘LGBTIQ’). It will not do to simply declare some of these usages improper, for, as mentioned, to attempt to stabilise the meaning of queer would be contrary to the spirit of queer critique. Given the term’s origins in the popular argot of abuse, being true to that spirit also requires attentiveness to the vagaries of popular usage. By the time you read this chapter, some of the terms in it will likely be outdated, perhaps even offensive. Queer theory must make peace with its own constant obsolescence. This chapter offers an introduction to the central themes, concepts and debates in queer theory. It explores three trajectories that queer studies has taken. First, it investigates the necessity of, and possibilities for, decolonising queer studies, focusing in particular on translation, conceptual innovation and alternative genealogies as decolonising strategies. Second, it illuminates a tradition of materialist analysis in queer studies while also demonstrating how the relationship between queer communities and capitalism is historically contingent and shifting. Third, it scales up concerns with race and class to the international level, demonstrating how queer politics matters to global politics. Not only are queer lives shaped by international structures and processes, but these international dynamics might themselves be queer, haunted as they are by figurations of normality and perversion.

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DECOLONISING ‘QUEER’ If ‘queer’ changes meaning over time, this is also true of its travels across space. Provenance is not destiny. While the term ‘queer’ as a shorthand for gender and sexual non-normativity originated in the humanities departments of Anglo-American universities, it has been appropriated and resignified by scholars and activists in the Global South (see for example Ekine and Abbas 2013; Narrain 2004). Yet the politics of translation is far from straightforward. Interestingly, like ‘queer’, the word ‘translation’ also means ‘to take across’ (Picq and Cottet 2019, 1), suggesting a resonance between the enterprises of queering and translation. Yet the fact remains that the language of queer theory and politics has tended to be accessible only to those with particular kinds of cultural, political and economic capital (Massad 2002). The effort to achieve linguistic indigeneity itself raises deep conceptual and political issues. Dutta and Roy (2014) have shown, for example, how in a diverse and multilingual country like India where a number of terms exist to denote an array of gender-nonconforming communities (for example, hijra, kothi, kinnar, aravani, tirunangai/tirunambi), words like ‘trans’ and ‘transgender’ have nonetheless emerged as overarching signifiers for gender non-normativity. This is the result of several pragmatic considerations: the dominance of English as a lingua franca, the imperative of making oneself intelligible to funders disproportionately located in the Global North and the need for coalitional signs under which we might amass in all our diversity in order to secure political victory. Importantly, Dutta and Roy’s concern is not with the putative cultural inauthenticity of ‘trans’, a term that has been widely adapted and inhabited by gender-nonconforming people in India. Rather, their concern is that terms like ‘trans’ bring with them a conceptual baggage or architecture – in this case, a binary between cis/trans – that does not always accommodate the lived realities of the communities that the terms are called upon to represent. We can see a similar concern with conceptual incommensurability in the work of akshay khanna, who argues that the notion of sexual identity is premised on the idea that ‘who I fuck or am attracted to says something about the type of person I am’ (2007, 167). This idea is usually traced to the work of Foucault (1981, 43) on the history of sexuality, which identifies a key moment in nineteenth-century Europe when biomedical and legal discourses begin to speak of the homosexual as a type or ‘species’ of person, rather than simply as indulging in an aberrant behaviour of which anyone is capable. In the course of ethnographic research with working-class men in India, khanna encounters many for whom erotic and sexual desire do not enter into their self-definition at all. khanna (2016) coins the term ‘sexualness’, as distinct from sexual identity, to describe this social reality whereby desire and eroticism flow through people without constituting them as sexual subjects. From this perspective, the problem is not that there are insufficient identity categories to represent the full spectrum of sexual identities that exist in the

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world, but that the very notion of identity does not do justice to how many people experience desire. Sometimes linguistic decolonisation can open up other conceptual insights. In Uganda, the term ‘kuchu’ has emerged as an umbrella term for gender and sexual nonconformity. But in her early ethnographic work on the kuchu community, Nyanzi (2013, 959) notes that despite its wide circulation, she encountered people who strongly dissociated from the term ‘because it was highly politicised, connotated militant activism or radical “in-your-face” advocacy for sexual minority rights’. This strikes me as similar to the aversion triggered by the term ‘queer’, which many in the West do not identify with. The inadequacies of both kuchu and queer as all-inclusive placeholders for gender and sexual non-normativity point to the limits of language and representation itself. Perhaps we ought to pay more attention to the work that such placeholders do than to the challenge of coming up with the perfect sign for them. Yet even attempting to describe the object of our analysis as ‘gender and sexual non-normativity’ runs into problems. Wiegman and Wilson (2015) have challenged queer theory’s allegiance to anti-normativity, arguing that this is premised on a highly reductive view of norms as always and only regulatory, missing the ways in which they are productive of the very proliferation of difference that the project of celebrating anti-normativity is wedded to. There are other ways in which anti-normativity cannot tell the full story of what it means to be queer. Subjects who do not think of themselves as deviant or anti-normative might nonetheless be read in this way by others, including the state. While some respond to the experience of being queer or queered with proud gestures of defiance and ownership, others may wish to conform to the normative, to fit in, to stay out of trouble. How can we do justice to the ordinary everyday desire for normativity as a means towards survival without always calling it out from a position of avant-garde superiority as an instance of selling out? Butler (2004, 8) reminds us that ‘a liveable life does require various degrees of stability’, making it crucial to distinguish between ‘norms and conventions that permit people to breathe, to desire, to love, and to live, and those norms and conventions that restrict or eviscerate the conditions of life itself’. We might think of this task of distinguishing between restrictive and enabling norms as constitutive of the work of queer politics itself. In these and many other ways, thinking about the language of queer studies can ultimately entail a fundamental questioning of its conceptual premises. If language offers one entry point into decolonisation, genealogy and history – by which I mean both the historicity of gender and the history of gender studies as a discipline – might offer another. Over three decades ago, Spillers (1987) argued that under conditions of slavery, enslaved African women were ‘ungendered’. With names and social relations effaced and no control over their bodies and children, they appear as ungendered cargo in the manifests and archives of the Middle Passage. Their gender is acknowledged, if at all, only indirectly with reference to their indispensable role in ‘the reproduction of the relations of production’ (1987, 77). From a different vantage point, African feminists have long argued that 330

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categories such as ‘woman’ and ‘man’ that were taken for granted in Western gender discourses (at least prior to the advent of queer and trans studies) either did not exist (Oyěwùmí 1997) or did not definitively assign all social roles (Amadiume 1987) in a number of African societies prior to sustained contact with Western colonialism and Christianity (see also Nannyonga-Tamusuza 2009). Thus, Black and Third World feminisms had always already begun to illuminate the contingency and historicity of gender independently of analogous efforts in the (initially) overwhelmingly White disciplines of queer and trans studies. If our genealogies of queer and trans studies begin from here, rather than from the White progenitors through which they are typically routed, we might approach the question of ‘decolonisation’ rather differently. We might also be able to cast a different light on the struggles of the present. From this vantage point, we can appreciate Alyosxa Tudor’s observation that in attempting to stabilise and contain the meaning of ‘woman’, contemporary trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) are fighting a rear-guard action to shore up a conception of White womanhood perceived to be under threat (2020, 2021).

MATERIALISING ‘QUEER’ Is queer politics a left politics? Whereas at one time the two were assumed to be ideological fellow travellers, this is perhaps no longer the case. D’Emilio (1983) famously argued that capitalism is central to the emergence of gay identity in the West. In his account, the advent of wage labour draws people (White men, in the first instance) out of the self-sufficient household economy into new capitalist systems of ‘free’ labour. It was only when people could survive outside the confines of heteronormative family, making a living as individuals through the sale of their labour, that they could craft ‘personal’ lives in which non-normative desire coalesced into an aspect of identity. Urbanisation, mass migration and the anonymity of the city enabled the formation of communities organised around such identities, even if the city was also a space of regulation, exclusion and danger (Houlbrook 2005). Whereas Foucault identifies but does not really account for the discursive shift in the nineteenth-century understanding of the ‘sodomite’, from a practitioner of aberrant behaviour to a distinct species possessing a unique sexual sensibility, D’Emilio helps us to understand this shift as an ideological response – albeit couched in the language of scientific breakthrough – to the new ways in which people were organising ‘sexual’ lives. D’Emilio also illuminates the contradictory relationship between capitalism and the family. On the one hand, wage labour and the satisfaction of needs and desires through market exchange take away many of the economic functions that once made the family indispensable. At the same time as it undermines the family, capitalism continues to rely on it – specifically on its unequal, gendered division of the labour of social reproduction – to produce the next generation of workers. This gives capitalism an investment in the ideology of heternormativity, which enshrines 331

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the patriarchal nuclear family as the primary locus of romantic love and emotional security. Feminists, queers and other critics of this ideology become useful scapegoats for the breakdown of the family – a social phenomenon for which capitalism and the demise of the welfare state is, in large measure, responsible. Positioned as antithetical to the ideological infrastructure of capitalism, D’Emilio argues that queers are well situated to expand the social terrain outside the heteronormative family and perhaps even to undermine its centrality in the organisation of social reproduction. D’Emilio’s reading of the emergence of gay identity has considerable resonance with Marx’s understanding of the proletariat as both child and ‘gravedigger’ of industrial capitalism. From the perspective of the social position that privileged queers occupy in the late capitalist twenty-first-century West, many of the associations that D’Emilio draws can seem radically unfamiliar. So it is salutary to recall that his argument was made in the Reagan-era United States, which was ruled by an ideological dispensation in which the ‘free market’ and ‘family values’ were married to one another. Writing two decades later, Duggan (2003) traces the rightward shift of the mainstream LGBT movement in the United States. Defeated by the hard-right turn of the Reagan/Thatcher era, like many other social movements, it became more conservative, focusing on claims for state recognition of marriage equality and the right to serve in the military while downplaying the redistributive demands around housing and healthcare that were key for poor, racialised and trans communities. Centre-left parties such as Bill Clinton’s Democrats and Tony Blair’s New Labour were prepared to concede demands for recognition, which shored up their liberal credentials without requiring a significant redistribution of material resources; these parties had themselves come to power by shifting rightwards with a view to peeling away fiscal conservatives from their alliance with social conservatives in right-wing parties. The result for queer politics was what Duggan (2003, 50) calls ‘homonormativity’: a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.

This anchorage was even stronger in the Global South, where the emergence of visible LGBT movements coincided in many places with structural adjustment and economic liberalisation. Bhaskaran (2004) reminds us that these wrenching processes, which effectively dismantled the Nehruvian developmentalist state in India, were legitimated by an ideology of ‘compulsory individuality’ that was produced in a range of sites, including the beauty industry and sexual minority activism. The pain of structural adjustment visited on the poor was obscured by the apparent expansion for the middle classes of the range of goods, services and identities that liberalisation had suddenly made available. From the 1980s onwards, queer politics became visible in more and more locations in the Global South 332

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in terms, symbols and idioms that appeared to have been borrowed from the Global North – a phenomenon that Altman (1997) describes as the appearance of the ‘global gay’. A range of different vectors carried these idioms to the Global South, including HIV/AIDS funding, human rights organisations and the global culture industries. Yet they all relied on the circuits of global capital, which had just begun to penetrate economies that had hitherto been closed by protectionist policies. This also meant that elites in the Global South were best positioned both to avail themselves of the new resources and opportunities that global LGBT advocacy made possible and to represent (and, arguably, remake) their own ‘queer’ societies in terms that were intelligible to the global (read: Western). Such concerns led Massad (2002) to characterise LGBT elites in the Arab world, somewhat polemically, as ‘native informants’ to a putative ‘Gay International’. While we might legitimately respond to his critique with the counterclaim that radical movements have always borrowed ideas and strategies from one another, Massad’s focus on the class position of those most able to engage in such acts of borrowing and appropriation – and the implications thereof for queer politics in the South – deserves to be taken seriously. In an ethnographic analysis of transnational organising for LGBTI rights in Uganda, S. M. Rodriguez has demonstrated how the imperatives of working with a transnational ‘non-profit industrial complex’ have steered kuchu organisations away from community-based work towards an increasingly narrow agenda focused on the courts, media and fundraising. They argue that this ‘encourages social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures, effectively halting any major critiques of those structures’ (2019, 83). None of this is intended to imply that queer groups and movements are no longer invested in anti-capitalist critique. There is no shortage of examples to the contrary – from queer groups organising in solidarity with migrants and asylum seekers to sex worker movements for whom material and redistributive concerns have always been primary – although they tend to be far removed from mainstream LGBT organising. The sheer exuberance and vitality of queer materialist thinking is evident in a recent collection that makes a powerful case for a ‘Transgender Marxism’. Beginning with a Marxist understanding of the centrality of normative family to the reproduction of capitalism, the editors of Transgender Marxism argue that ‘to transition is to renege on agreements that were previously assumed, albeit never actually signed for’ (Gleeson and O’Rourke 2021, 26). Transphobia can be understood as a rational response to ‘breaches of continuity in the operation of its private households’ that threaten the very foundations of capitalism. By implication, ‘to emancipate trans people requires, above all else, overturning class divisions, reversing our separation from the means of production, and developing new forms for nurture beyond the family’. Nonetheless, this section of the chapter has attempted to demonstrate that queer movements are no longer structurally and inherently antithetical to capitalism, even if they once were. There is simply no one way in which gender, sexuality, race and class are articulated with one another. 333

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Indeed, the question of articulation is one that is intensely struggled over within such movements, typically between reformist wings that seek pragmatic accommodation and inclusion within hegemonic structures and revolutionary movements that yearn for their abolition. Lest we assume the distinction between reformist and revolutionary impulses to be purely temporal, it is sobering to recall Rosa Luxemburg’s reminder that: people who pronounce themselves in favor of the method of legislative reform in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer, and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society. (Luxemburg 2008, 90, emphasis in original)

GEOPOLITICISING ‘QUEER’ Central among the social structures in which queer movements find themselves mired is the nation-state. For a long time, gender theorists tended to treat the nation as a heteronormative formation that is always repressive and disallowing of homosexuality. Writing in the shadow of the terrorist attacks of September 11, Puar (2007, 46–47) observed a splitting of queerness whereby: homosexuals embrace the us-versus-them rhetoric of US patriotism and thus align themselves with this racist and homophobic production. Aspects of homosexuality have come within the purview of normative patriotism, incorporating aspects of queer subjectivity into the body of the normalized nation; on the other hand, terrorists are quarantined through equating them with the bodies and practices of failed heterosexuality, emasculation, and queered others.

In effect, Puar is describing here a homonormative nationalism that she names ‘homonationalism’, produced through a rapprochement between (i) a US imperial nationalism that legitimates itself partly by claiming to save brown queers from its fundamentalist Islamist opponents in places like Iran and Afghanistan2 and (ii) a domestic LGBT lobby that bargains for reformist advances through a performance of patriotism involving, among other things, the endorsement of imperialist wars that are accepted as necessary for the advance of LGBT rights globally. But homonationalism describes more than simply the sexual mutations of US nationalism in the post-9/11 moment; it names a global conjuncture in which the acceptance of ‘LGBT rights’ has become ‘a determining factor of a nation’s capacity for sovereignty’ (Puar 2011, 139). There is now a rich scholarship exploring how arguments over queerness have become a new fault line in global politics marking a familiar divide between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘savage’ 334

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(Hoad 2000; see also Altman and Symons 2016; Picq and Thiel 2015; Weiss and Bosia 2013). In my own work, I argue that the civilisational logics of homonationalism must be supplemented by the political economy logics of homocapitalism (Rao 2020, see especially Chapter 5). I developed this argument through observing global reactions to the notorious Ugandan AntiHomosexuality Act of 2014. Central here was the World Bank’s cancellation of a $90 million loan that was meant to have funded maternal health projects in Uganda; at the same time, the Bank also conducted studies that purported to demonstrate that the observance of LGBT rights correlated positively with increases in per capita GDP. Thus, the threat of capital withdrawal and the promise of capital infusion have begun to emerge in parallel with the homonationalist discourse of civilisational advance and backwardness as a proselytising strategy for LGBT rights. Indeed, homocapitalism may be the more hegemonic discourse, whereas homonationalism’s claims of civilisational superiority can be, and are, contested by states like Russia that champion ‘traditional values’ at the global level (Wilkinson 2014); homocapitalism’s promise of the productivity and prosperity that will accompany the recognition of LGBT rights is harder to resist in a world where the end of capitalism seems difficult to imagine. Alongside work on the international politics of sexuality, queer IR scholars have also sought to illuminate the gender and sexuality of international politics (see for example Sjoberg 2012; Weber 1999). Most significant here is the work of Cynthia Weber, who deploys queerness as an analytic to understand IR’s core concerns, including state and nation formation, war and peace and international political economy. In her most recent work, Weber (2016) demonstrates how figurations of ‘normal’ and ‘perverse’ sexualities permeate discourses of sovereignty in ways that IR theorists have been slow to recognise. Thus, IR scholarship about anarchy is haunted by the perverse sexualities of the figures of the ‘undeveloped’, the ‘undevelopable’, the ‘unwanted im/migrant’ and the ‘terrorist’, all of which have functioned as foils for the normalised sexualities of the ‘gay rights holder’ and the ‘gay patriot’. In an argument that has considerable resonance with Puar’s work even if here operating as a way of thinking about the ontology of the state system, Weber illuminates the appearance of figurations of the ‘homosexual’ as normal, as perverse and as both in discourses of sovereignty. Cumulatively, this work pushes a long-running constructivist interest in state identity as constitutive of international relations in the direction of taking sex, gender and sexuality seriously as integral dimensions of that identity.

CONCLUSION This chapter has attempted to provide an introduction to some of the central themes, concepts and debates in queer theory. It explored three trajectories that queer studies as a disciplinary formation has taken. First, 335

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it examined strategies for the decolonisation of queer studies, revealing how a commitment to linguistic and conceptual translation can dismantle and reassemble key tenets. It also considered how alternative genealogies of the central insights of queer studies can unsettle conventional wisdom about where they come from and what the work of decolonisation might entail. Second, it illuminated a tradition of materialist analysis in queer studies and demonstrated how the relationship between queer communities and capitalism is historically contingent. This requires a ceaseless re-evaluation of the shifting relations between race, class, gender and sexuality, the articulations of which are never settled for all time. Third, it scaled up these concerns to the international level, demonstrating how queer politics matters to global politics. Not only are queer lives shaped by international structures and processes; these international dynamics are themselves revealed to be queer when we are able to see how they are haunted by anxieties about normality and perversion. You may have noticed an effort in this chapter to integrate insights from trans studies into the discussion at every stage. Trans studies is a vibrant field in its own right, distinct from feminism and queer studies (see for example Stryker and Aizura 2013; Stryker and Whittle 2006). When fields of enquiry emerge as autonomous disciplinary formations, there is usually a story to be told about the inadequacies, myopias and exclusions of the prior bodies of knowledge in relation to which they emerge. Yet even as we celebrate the richness of trans studies and look forward to the advent of newer fields that seek to do justice to forms of desire and embodiment for which we may not yet have language, I suggest that a feminism and queer studies that did not consider trans liberation to be part of their remit would be deeply problematic. In an important critique of the too-clear separation of feminism from queer studies on the basis of their being centred on the objects of gender and sexuality respectively, Butler (1994) argues that such segregation risks reducing each of these disciplinary formations to their most problematic currents, obscuring the rich analytical legacy of the interrogation of sexuality by feminism and of gender by queer studies. While appreciating the distinct contributions of each of these fields, therefore, there might be much to be gained from alertness to the ways in which they have always already transgressed their putative boundaries, calling into question the very self-sufficiency of categories such as gender, sex and sexuality. Discussion questions 1. Given queer theory’s origins in the Anglo-American academy, to what extent can it be useful as a lens through which to view gender and sexual non-normativity in the Global South? 2. What sorts of arguments and social conditions predispose some queer movements to accommodate themselves to capitalism and others to intensify their antagonism towards it? 3. What would it mean to say that the personal is geopolitical? 336

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Notes 1. In outlining her theory of intersectionality, Crenshaw (1989) argues that those who do not feel the need for intersectionality tend to be privileged ‘but for’ a single characteristic that constitutes their marginality and therefore their activism. 2. This is itself a reworking of Spivak’s (1988, 297) well-known description of nineteenth-century British imperial claims about the welfare of Indian women as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’.

Further reading Hoad, Neville. 2006. African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Najmabadi, Afsaneh. 2005. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Otto, Dianne (ed.). 2017. Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks. Abingdon: Routledge. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weber, Cynthia. 2016. Queer International Relations: Sovereignty, Sexuality, and the Will to Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. References Altman, Dennis. 1997. “Global Gaze/Global Gays.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (4): 417–436. Altman, Dennis and Jonathan Symons. 2016. Queer Wars: The New Global Polarization over Gay Rights. Cambridge: Polity Press. Amadiume, Ifi. 1987. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed Books. Bhaskaran, Suparna. 2004. Made in India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/national Projects. New York: Palgrave. Butler, Judith. 1994. “Against Proper Objects: Introduction.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6 (2–3): 1–26. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1: 139–167. D’Emilio, John. 1983. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” In Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, edited by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson, 100–113. New York: Monthly Review Press. Duggan, Lisa. 2003. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. 337

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Dutta, Aniruddha and Raina Roy. 2014. “Decolonizing Transgender in India: Some Reflections.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1 (3): 320–337. Ekine, Sokari and Hakima Abbas (eds). 2013. Queer African Reader. Dakar: Pambazuka Press. Foucault, Michel. 1981 [1976]. The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, volume 1, translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin. Gleeson, Jules Joanne and Elle O’Rourke. 2021. “Introduction.” In Transgender Marxism, 1–32. London: Pluto Press. Hoad, Neville. 2000. “Arrested Development or the Queerness of Savages: Resisting Evolutionary Narratives of Difference.” Postcolonial Studies 3 (2): 133–158. Houlbrook, Matt. 2005. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. khanna, akshay. 2007. “Us ‘Sexuality Types’: A Critical Engagement with the Postcoloniality of Sexuality.” In The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India, edited by Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharyya, 159–200. London: Seagull. khanna, akshay. 2016. Sexualness. New Delhi: New Text. Love, Heather. 2007. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2008. The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike, edited by Helen Scott. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Massad, Joseph. 2002. “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World.” Public Culture 14 (2): 361–385. Nannyonga-Tamusuza, Sylvia A. 2009. “Female-Men, Male-Women, and Others: Constructing and Negotiating Gender among the Baganda of Uganda.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 3 (2): 367–380. Narrain, Arvind. 2004. Queer: Despised Sexuality, Law and Social Change. Bangalore: Books for Change. Nyanzi, Stella. 2013. “Dismantling Reified African Culture through Localised Homosexualities in Uganda.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 15 (8): 952–967. Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Picq, Manuela Lavinas and Caroline Cottet. 2019. “Sex, Tongue, and International Relations.” In Sexuality and Translation in World Politics, edited by Caroline Cottet and Manuela Lavinas Picq, 1–12. Bristol: E-International Relations. Picq, Manuela Lavinas and Markus Thiel (eds). 2015. Sexualities in World Politics: How LGBTQ Claims Shape International Relations. Abingdon: Routledge. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press. Puar, Jasbir K. 2011. “Citation and Censorship: The Politics of Talking About the Sexual Politics of Israel.” Feminist Legal Studies 19: 133–142. 338

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Rao, Rahul. 2020. Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality. New York: Oxford University Press. Richter-Montpetit, Melanie. 2017. “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (in IR) But were Afraid to Ask: The ‘Queer Turn’ in International Relations.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 46 (2): 220–240. Rodriguez, S. M. 2019. The Economies of Queer Inclusion: Transnational Organizing for LGBTI Rights in Uganda. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Sedgwick, Eve. 1994. Tendencies. London: Routledge. Sjoberg, Laura. 2012. “Toward Trans-gendering International Relations.” International Political Sociology 6 (4): 337–354. Spillers, Hortense J. 1987. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17 (2): 64–81. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Stryker, Susan and Aren Aizura (eds). 2013. The Transgender Studies Reader 2. New York: Routledge. Stryker, Susan and Stephen Whittle (eds). 2006. The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. Tudor, Alyosxa. 2020. “Terfism is White Distraction: On BLM, Decolonising the Curriculum, Anti-Gender Attacks and Feminist Transphobia.” https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/gender/2020/06/19/terfism-iswhite-distraction-on-blm-decolonising-the-curriculum-anti-gender-attacks-and-feminist-transphobia/ Tudor, Alyosxa. 2021. “Decolonizing Trans/Gender Studies?: Teaching Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Times of the Rise of the Global Right.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 8 (2): 238–256. Warner, Michael. 1993. “Introduction.” In Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, edited by Michael Warner, vii–xxxi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Weber, Cynthia. 1999. Faking It: US Hegemony in a ‘Post-Phallic’ Era. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Weber, Cynthia. 2016. Queer International Relations: Sovereignty, Sexuality, and the Will to Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. Weiss, Meredith L. and Michael J. Bosia (eds). 2013. Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Wiegman, Robyn and Elizabeth A. Wilson. 2015. “Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 26 (1): 1–25. Wilkinson, Cai. 2014. “Putting ‘Traditional Values’ Into Practice: The Rise and Contestation of Anti-Homopropaganda Laws in Russia.” Journal of Human Rights 13 (3): 363–379.

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Race and Coloniality Columba Achilleos-Sarll Race is a powerful organising structure of the international system. It can be traced back to the formation of the ‘Atlantic world’ that emerged as a result of the European colonial project that began in 1492 (Shilliam 2017, 286). The sedimentation and reverberation of colonial histories of violence and dispossession continue to emerge in old and new forms in a variety of politics and practices including most recently, for example, Brexit, Trumpism, militarised national borders, racialised police brutality, huge displacements of people, climate change, ongoing settler colonialism, neoliberal restructuring, widening global inequality and a global pandemic. As W.E.B. Du Bois, an African American intellectual, famously stated: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea’ (Du Bois 1994, 9). Even though clear and ongoing racial-colonial structures continue to organise world politics, race and coloniality are often absent or erased from policy and academic discussion. While gender and gender relations are increasingly being referenced or acknowledged in relation to different aspects of foreign and domestic policy, gender is often privileged and prioritised as a marker of difference rather than a relation of power that never exists in isolation. Some feminist scholarship, in making only passing reference to race, has been criticised for treating race as an optional add-on, a marginal social category lumped together as part of an intersectional ‘etc.’ that concludes a list of ‘identity’ markers – a problem Judith Butler describes as the ‘embarrassed “etc.”’ (Butler 1999/1990, 182). The claim that ‘women’s rights’ are ‘human rights’ has, in part, become formalised within the international policy edifice on gender equality (see, for example, Grewal 1999, 2005). Gender equality has received some degree of policy acceptance as evidenced, for example, by the UN 340

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World Conferences on Women first held in Mexico City in 1975 and then convened every five years until the conference in Beijing in 1995; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination and Violence Against Women (CEDAW) adopted in 1979; and the passing of UNSCR 1325 on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ in October 2000. The same, however, cannot be said for racial equality, which was at the heart of the global wave of Black Lives Matter protests that began in the summer of 2020 sparked by the murder of George Floyd, an African American man who was killed by Derek Chauvin, a White police officer. In this chapter, I argue that erasing racial and postcolonial politics in feminist theory and praxis not only has theoretical implications, but also serious political consequences. By erasing or ignoring race, feminism will struggle to understand and respond to the intersectional oppressions that underlie and uphold the global political system. Additionally, by failing to take race and coloniality into account, feminists run the risk of being complicit in imperial (and militarised) state projects. There will be no gender justice or feminist peace without racial justice and they must be advocated for concurrently. Firstly, I introduce postcolonialism and decoloniality and discuss some of the differences between these traditions of thought. I then outline some key terms related to these bodies of scholarship, including colonialism, imperialism, coloniality and race. Following this, I locate postcolonial feminism, which is a distinct intellectual framework, within this body of scholarship, and briefly introduce the concept of intersectionality. In the second half of the chapter, I offer a brief case study of the plight of migrant women at Britain’s Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, where I apply a postcolonial, and intersectional, feminist lens to demonstrate how the gendered, racialised and colonial politics of migration and citizenship operate in practice.

A NOTE ON POST/DECOLONIAL SCHOLARSHIP In order to establish the importance of taking race and coloniality seriously as a feminist scholar, it is necessary to outline the traditions of thought associated with postcolonialism and decoloniality. These bodies of scholarship emerged out of political developments challenging the colonial world order established by European empires. ‘Postcolonial’ (unhyphenated) signifies the lingering (colonial) hierarchies of race, class and gender despite the dissolution of formal empire. The term, therefore, is not meant to signal a temporal break or historical shift that marks the end of colonialism and the beginning of the postcolonial (McClintock 1995). Consigning colonialism to the ‘past’ – as an event with a ‘start’ and ‘end’ date – obscures histories of, and constitutive ongoing relationships among, empire, colonialism, imperialism, slavery, capitalism and patriarchy (Wolfe 2016). Notwithstanding the significant crossover between postcolonialism and decoloniality, there are important distinctions between these traditions of thought. Firstly, there are disciplinary differences. Postcolonialism 341

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emerged as an intellectual movement building on the writings of diasporic scholars from the Middle East and South Asia, including Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri C. Spivak.1 Although this work does (in part) address the material and socio-economic modes of colonial and imperial exploitation, it is concerned primarily with the cultural realm – that is, how the cultural assumptions and attitudes of European imperialists reproduced an Orient/Occident binary to justify the West’s domination of the ‘Other’. By contrast, decoloniality can be traced back to the work of diasporic South American scholars, including sociologists Anibal Quijano and Maria Lugones, as well as philosopher Walter D. Mignolo. 2 This literature significantly overlaps with world-systems theory, theories on development/underdevelopment, and the Frankfurt School of critical theory (Bhambra 2014). A major contribution of decolonial thought has been to situate the development and concept of ‘modernity’ within the history of colonialism. There are also differences pertaining to the geographical and temporal remit of study. Mirroring their diasporic routes, postcolonial scholars have addressed, for the most part, the colonial and imperial histories of the Middle East and South Asia, whereas decolonial scholars have focused primarily on South America. While postcolonialism addresses colonial relations of the 19th and 20th centuries, decoloniality examines a longer timeframe, beginning with earlier settlements from the 15th century onwards that came to be known as ‘the Americas’ (for a more comprehensive examination of these differences, see Bhambra 2014). Beyond these differences, it is also important to note that the verb to ‘decolonise’ is an active practice, referring to the ways in which those concerned with pursuing anti-oppressive justice attempt to move beyond the structures of colonialism to imagine alternative possible futures that do not reproduce the patterns of hegemonic power that presently exist.

RACE AS A ‘TRACE OF HISTORY’ Having broadly outlined the contours of postcolonialism and decoloniality, it is important to distinguish between some of the key terms in this literature, in particular colonialism, imperialism, coloniality and race. Edward Said offers the following distinction between imperialism and colonialism: ‘Imperialism’ means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory; ‘colonialism’, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory. (Said 1993, 8)

By contrast, ‘coloniality’ can be defined as that which continues to reverberate (or survive) after the ‘event’ – that is, the end of formal colonial rule. As Ramón Grosfoguel explains, ‘[c]oloniality allows us to understand 342

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the continuity of colonial forms of domination after the end of colonial administrations, produced by colonial cultures and structures in the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’ (Grosfoguel 2007, 219; see also Quijano 2000). The term race is directly related to these concepts and has a long and complex history that does not lend itself to a precise definition. In the mid-20th century, with the demise of formal empire, scientific discourses around race were gradually discredited. These discourses were grounded in purportedly ‘biological’ theories that sought to organise the world into social hierarchies according to some ‘natural’ human belonging. With the advent of genetic sequencing, however, which proved that genetic inheritance had absolutely no bearing on cultural practices or mental competencies, the ‘biological fact’ of race was concretely refuted. Race is not a fixed essence (akin to physical markers of difference) but is a system of categorisation that is socially and historically constructed, as well as being spatially contingent (Doty 1993). Patrick Wolfe (2016, 4) describes race as a ‘trace of history’; in other words, ‘colonialism speaking’ (10). That is, the invocation of race and racial difference bespeaks different histories of slavery, empire, colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy, although racial distinctions are also continually reproduced in new ways. ‘Race’, Wolfe therefore contends, ‘registers the state of colonial histories’ and is ‘intrinsically performative’, meaning that ‘rather than describing human groups, it brings them into being’ (2016, 10). Colonised populations, Wolfe (2016, 2) argues, continue to be ‘racialised in specific ways that mark and reproduce…unequal relationships’. Racialisation, then, is the ‘active productivity of race’ (Wolfe 2016, 4), whereas racism is the discriminatory and violent effects of that productivity (see Ahmed 2002, 47; Nisancioglu 2019, 46). Rejecting the argument that race is biologically fixed and acknowledging the malleability of the discourse around race does not mean, however, that discussions around race are somehow irrelevant. As Anne McClintock (1995) so aptly writes: To dispute the notion that race is a fixed and transcendent essence, unchanged through the ages, does not mean all talk of race must cease, nor does it mean that the baroque inventions of racial difference had no tangible or terrible effects. On the contrary, it is precisely the inventedness of historical hierarchies that renders attention to social power and violence so much more urgent (8).

Given that race is a system of categorisation and an ordering structure of world politics, McClintock reminds us that it is important not to equate race with necessarily being Black and/or colonialised (McClintock, 8). In the 19th century, the Jews, the Irish and even sex workers were all considered ‘races’ (McClintock, 8). Nonetheless, the White (heterosexual) body is often posited as the norm against which everyone else is racially marked ‘Other’, and as such, regularly escapes the process or act of racialisation. This does not mean, however, that the White body is not itself racialised. 343

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As Shilliam (2017, 293) argues: ‘persons racialised as white enjoy “transparency”, meaning that their cultural competencies and full humanity are presented to be self-evident’. Whiteness, therefore, is a racialised positioning and standpoint.

POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISM Colonialism not only (re)produced the ‘colonised’ but it also infiltrated the social relations of the societies it colonised, including its gender relations. Maria Lugones (2010) argues that gender itself was a colonial imposition which flattened the gendered pluralities that existed before colonialism. The multiple variants of postcolonial feminist thought which include Black, ‘Third World’, Afro, Indigenous, decolonial and transnational feminism have long histories but emerged in the discipline in the late 1970s and 1980s in line with post/decolonial scholarship, but from a particular consciousness that sought to understand the interrelationship among race, coloniality, gender and sexuality. In particular, this scholarship was a response to, and a critique of, Eurocentric feminists, particularly Euro-American second-wave feminists, who advanced a global feminist perspective (see, among others, Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Carby 1989; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Lorde 2018; Lugones 2007; Moranga and Anzaldúa 2015; Smith 1990; Spivak 1997). These feminists challenged the imperial nature of feminist thought and practice, including how ‘global feminism’ (which is sometimes referred to as ‘international feminism’) essentialises the notion of womanhood. It does so by historically and analytically separating gender from other relations of power – such as that of race and coloniality. By divesting gender of any relationality to race, and ignoring colonial histories of violence and dispossession, (some) global feminists propagate the notion that women represent a homogenous group with common interests, needs and perspectives (Mohanty 2003, 110). Two texts were foundational to the critiques of global feminism, and the subsequent popularisation of postcolonial feminism: Under Western Eyes by Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? (1998). Under Western Eyes (Mohanty 1984) provides an eloquent rebuttal to the universalising claims about womanhood. Mohanty describes how, by making hypervisible the victimhood of ‘Third World’ women, and thus representing Third World cultures as hopelessly backwards and patriarchal, global feminists erase the history and ongoing effects of colonialism and imperialism. This discourse, Mohanty explains, produces ‘a composite, singular, “average Third World Women”’ (Mohanty 1984, 334). The second landmark text critiquing global feminism – Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? – explores the relationship between Western discourse and the subaltern (woman). She highlights the effects of the erasure of imperialism on understandings of power and the production of knowledge and demonstrates how ‘brown women’ have 344

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been constructed as victims of ‘brown men’ in Western discourse leading to the eviction and suppression of subaltern women’s texts and voice (Spivak 1998). By considering women as a singular group, some feminists assume that women experience a universal form of oppression and face a universal version of patriarchy (see, for example, Morgan 2016). Through the erasure of difference and based ‘on the implicit assumption that women qua women have a necessary basis for unity and solidarity’ (Amos and Parmar 2005, 47), some feminists advocate that an inversion (or rebalancing) of power between ‘men’ and ‘women’ will achieve gender equality. Mohanty (1984, 339) explains, however, that to imagine possibilities for solidarity and emancipation along a singular relation of power is counterintuitive, because ‘[b]eyond sisterhood there is still racism, colonialism and imperialism!’ Simply put, not all men have power and not all women are powerless.

INTERSECTIONALITY AS THEORY AND METHODOLOGY The determination that gender does not work in isolation from other power relations which structure society lies at the heart of postcolonial feminism and is described by the concept ‘intersectionality’ (for further elaboration, see Chapter 5). In line with an intersectional, and postcolonial feminist, epistemology, gender (like race) can be understood as a power relation, though always ‘inflected through, and co-constituting of, other hierarchical forms of structuring power’ (McClintock 1995, 5). Black American feminist scholar and lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw initially coined the term ‘intersectionality’. Crenshaw sought to draw attention to the experiences of poor and working-class Black women in the United States (Crenshaw 1989, 1991, 2017). In so doing, she proposed a new kind of analytical framework for feminist theory. Rather than treating gender and race as ‘mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis’, Crenshaw called for an analysis of the productive interplay between race and gender (1989, 139). Intersectionality therefore not only draws attention to intragroup differences (differences within a group) but also, more importantly, is able to expose how intersectional oppressions – sometimes referred to as systems of domination – variously affect individuals or groups located in different historical, social, political and economic contexts and structures. In most contexts, therefore, considering gender and gender relations alone is woefully insufficient if you are trying to understand the experience of those of a denigrated racial group. Intersectionality not only contributes a theory of gender as a relation of power constantly (re)produced through other forms of structural power; but it can also be mobilised as a methodology, or a system of studying particular phenomena. A methodology informed by intersectionality is attentive to the process of categorisation – that is, the ways in which people are often placed into different groups based on fictitious assumptions about bodies and behaviours. This relies on the reproduction of hierarchies that, in turn, (re)produce exclusions and inequalities (McCall 2005, 1777). 345

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THE RACIAL, GENDERED AND COLONIAL POLITICS OF MIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP Having laid the foundations of a postcolonial feminist approach to world politics, in the final two sections of this chapter, I use this approach to examine how the interplay among race, gender and coloniality (re)produces particular forms of exclusion, domination and oppression, which underpin the politics of migration and citizenship. Through the construction and demarcation of space, geopolitical constructs such as the ‘border’, ‘state’ and ‘sovereignty’ regulate the movement of bodies in ways that normalise inequalities of power (Pratt 2020, 3). These inequalities reflect binaries that differentiate the ‘foreign’ from the ‘domestic’, the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside’ of the state and ‘us’ from ‘them’, which are predicated on gendered, racialised and colonial hierarchies within and between states (see, inter alia, Hooper 2001; Peterson 1992; Tickner 1993; Walker 1993). These binaries divide the world into so-called zones of conflict and zones of peace. ‘Zones of peace’ (within which Europe firmly positions itself) are contrasted with ‘zones of conflict’ (usually reserved for countries outside Europe’s borders and often represented as being in a perpetual state of conflict and fragility). This distinction reproduces two colonial assumptions: that Europe is peaceful, and that Europe is gender progressive (Holvikivi and Reeves 2020, 150). This binary construction – of peaceful/conflict-ridden – is based on ‘the long-standing histories and legacies of colonialism that already connect those migrants, or citizens, with Europe’ (Bhambra 2017, 396). Gurminder K. Bhambra (2017, 402) explains how, during decolonisation, the categories of the ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ were constructed as a threat, and immigration controls subsequently introduced, when those from the dominions and colonies began to move to the metropole, notwithstanding that the direction of travel had, until then, overwhelmingly been the movement of those from Britain to the settler colonies for commercial gain. Bhambra (2017) argues that categorising the ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ as a threat was not, therefore, a question of mobility per se, but rather one of race and racialised hierarchies that emerged in old/new ways in the context of decolonisation. In Western media portrayals of the so-called refugee crisis, which culminated in 2015 with an increase in the number of migrants fleeing to Europe, critical scholars have observed that the dominant discourse has overwhelming represented the refugee as male and a potential terrorist and security threat, which has fuelled anti-immigrant and xenophobic discourses across Europe. The female migrant has been much less visible in these portrayals, which has contributed, as feminists have long argued, to the gendered links between masculinity and violence and femininity and vulnerability. The female body, especially the non-White and nonEuropean female body, has historically been represented in need of masculine, and often European, forms of protection in ways that (re)produce a White saviour narrative. This has contributed towards the perception

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that some cultures are fundamentally incompatible with women’s rights, and thus lacking in gender equality norms as defined by the ‘West’ (AbuLughod 2013). Conceptualisations of security, risk and threat affect border regimes and contribute to exacerbating the insecurities faced by migrant women and other marginalised groups (see, for example, Stachowitsch and Sachseder 2020) who come to Europe to seek asylum. Scholars, activists and civil society groups have documented how the UK’s draconian immigration policies, for example, increase the risk of sexual abuse (as well as other forms of abuse) against migrants, thus highlighting the disposability of migrant bodies (see, for example, Perera and Pugliese 2018; see also reports by Help Refugees and Women for Refugee Women). Although men and women often share similar reasons for migration, scholars have drawn attention to gendered and racialised differences in their experiences (see, amongst others, Bosworth et al. 2018), the ways in which gender and race are constituted in immigration legislation (see, for example, Turnball 2015), and how colonial histories and legacies shape border policies and practices (see, inter alia, Balibar 2002; Kinvall 2016). Attending to the politics of gender and gender relations alone is therefore inadequate to fully account for the operation of power in relation to the politics of migration and citizenship. In the final section, I elaborate on the intersectional politics of migration and citizenship through the events that unfolded in 2008 at Britain’s infamous – and privately run – Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre (‘Yarl’s Wood’). 3

YARL’S WOOD: THE ‘NAKED PROTEST’ By the end of 2018, Yarl’s Wood, Britain’s primary immigration removal centre for women, held up to 163 detained women. Described as a ‘prison-style’ camp, it had, for many years prior, come under intense criticism for its inhumane treatment of detainees. On 10 April 2008, a group of 15 African mothers who were being held at Yarl’s Wood, many of whom had long been awaiting deportation, staged a ‘naked protest’ (see also Chapter 9). The protest was in response to the Centre’s decision to deport two detainees, a Burundian mother and her British-born baby, who, they argued, had received inadequate access to legal representation. During the first protest, a pregnant Nigerian woman was forcibly restrained, separated from her six-year-old son and placed in solitary confinement. Another protest took place the following day. This time the women demanded information about the whereabouts of the mother and her child. During the protest, the mothers removed their clothes – some baring their breasts, others their genitals. This was followed by a hunger strike, and an open letter to the British Government documenting the inhumane treatment they and their children had experienced while being indefinitely detained. This act of political resistance and activism communicated that these women were ‘naked but alive’ (Tyler 2013, emphasis in original, 214). In

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other words, they engaged in ‘a deliberate impersonation of their dehumanisation’ (215, emphasis in original) related to the slow violence associated with indefinite detention in order to challenge the idea of British citizenship. As Mercy Guobadia, one of the detainees explained: ‘I took my clothes off because they treat us like animals. We are claiming asylum, we’re not animals’ (cited in Tyler 2013, 214). Britain has a long history of detaining asylum seekers and other ‘illegal’ migrants, and many different forms of political protest and action have been staged in response. What was exceptional about the Yarl’s Wood protest, however, was the Western media coverage that it received at both international and national levels – no doubt deemed ‘newsworthy’ because this was a group of pregnant, non-White and non-European, women and mothers, some of whom had decided to strip naked in front of the detention centre guards. Although the protest was ‘sensationalised and/or sexualised’ (Tyler 2013, 214) in Western media discourse, in the African context, the history of collective naked protest is symbolic of ‘radical maternal power’ (Tyler 2013, 214, cites Van Allen 1972). Although the ‘naked protest’ did not change the status of these women – in fact, many were punished, and some were immediately deported as a consequence – it was a significant act of political resistance. After the protest, however, Serco, the global corporation contracted by the British Government from 2007 to manage Yarl’s Wood, claimed that no protest had taken place (in Dugan 2011), thus negating the legitimate demands of the women and rendering them apolitical and devoid of agency. In UK immigration policy, there has been an increasing number of laws introduced to manage not only the bodies of non-citizens, but also particularly pregnant – or suspected pregnant – (non-citizen) women. One piece of legislation, for example, denies them access to free medical care upon arrival. The British Government has labelled these groups of individuals ‘health tourists’, exploiters of the welfare system and a potential threat to UK national security. In simplifying and securitising the very complex realities behind the various reasons someone might migrate, pregnant female migrants have become specific targets of tighter border controls and management (Tyler 2013, 216). As Eithne Luibheid (2006, 74) explains: ‘The pregnant bodies of non-national women provide particularly powerful loci through which the state both extends and legitimizes its exclusionary immigration policies’. As the example of Yarl’s Wood (and Britain’s immigration policy more broadly) powerfully demonstrates, the ‘state’ and ‘sovereignty’, reproduced through ideas and hierarchies of gender, race and sexuality, are entangled to ‘impose fixed and stable meanings about who belongs and who does not belong to the nation’ (Doty 1996, 122). The ‘naked protest’ itself draws attention to how claims of citizenship are intimately connected to micro- and macro-structures of patriarchy, sexuality, racism, imperialism, coloniality, neoliberalism and global capitalism. As Tyler (2013, 218) writes, the protest ‘reminds us that contemporary struggles over citizenship are reconfigurations of long-standing and persistent relations of colonial (and capitalist) forms of injustice and exploitation’. 348

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The same commercial interests that previously dictated the movement of people to and from the colonies through the transatlantic slave trade have therefore re-emerged in border regimes (Bhambra 2017). The pattern of forced migration of the colonial period continues as disaffected and disenfranchised people risk their lives to undertake dangerous and often deadly journeys via centuries-old routes to the imperial centres of power and capital. But instead of finding refuge, in many cases, they enter another phase of insecurity where migrants risk abuse, indefinite detention and deportation to unsafe places.

CONCLUSION This chapter has highlighted the need to take race and coloniality seriously in feminist research and gestured towards the theoretical and political consequences of not doing so in terms of the potential of reproducing hegemonic power. Through an intersectional analysis of migration and citizenship, addressing in particular the case of detained migrant women at Yarl’s Wood, brings into sharp focus what we might miss if we treat gender and gender relations as the primary structure of power. Indeed, the politics surrounding the ‘naked protest’ that took place in 2008 at Yarl’s Wood is intimately connected to micro- and macro-structures of patriarchy, sexuality, racism, imperialism, coloniality, neoliberalism and global capitalism and yields important insights about their interconnectedness. This protest – supposedly confined to the ‘local’ and perhaps seemingly ‘insignificant’ when read against wars and global pandemics – is inherently global-colonial in character; an everyday act of resistance shaped by empire. Though swept under the carpet by the British Government, reading the protest using a postcolonial feminist lens powerfully demonstrates the importance of taking account of the co-constitution of the global and the local as it intersects with gender, race and the colonial in the politics of migration and citizenship. This example, and many others besides, highlights why it is utterly vital for feminists to take race and coloniality seriously as a key part of their gender analyses. Discussion questions 1. Why should feminists attend to race and coloniality? 2. What is at stake if feminists (historically and analytically) separate gender from race and coloniality? 3. Take a contemporary example like the so-called refugee crisis, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, or the global pandemic. What does the interplay of race, gender and coloniality look like in your chosen phenomenon? How does taking race and coloniality into account with gender help us to better understand the underlying politics? 349

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Notes . For further reading see Said (1993), Bhabha (1994) and Spivak (1988). 1 2. For further reading see Quijano (2000), Lugones (2010) and Mignolo (2002). 3. Since mid-2020, the population at Yarl’s Wood has been significantly reduced due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sources also indicate that Yarl’s Wood was repurposed to house channel migrants, but after coming under intense criticism from local residents and faith group leaders, the plan has been shelved.

Further reading The Combahee River Collective. 1986. The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. Moranga, Cherríe and Gloria Anzaldúa (eds). 2015. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Albany, NY: State University of New York (SUNY) Press. Peck, Raoul. 2016. I Am Not Your Negro. Magnolia Pictures. Documentary film based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember This House. Shilliam, Robbie. 2020. “Race and Racism in International Relations: Retrieving a Scholarly Inheritance”. International Politics Reviews 8: 152–159. Spivak, Gayatri C. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–213. London: Macmillan. References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2013. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2002. “Racialized Bodies.” In Real Bodies, edited by Mary Evans and Ellie Lee, 46–63. London: Palgrave. Alexander, M. Jacqui and Chandra T. Mohanty. 1997. “Introduction: Genealogies, Legacies, Movements.” In Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, edited by M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra T. Mohanty, xiii–xvii. New York and London: Routledge. Amos, Valerie and Pratibha Parmar. 2005. “Challenging Imperial Feminism.” Feminist Review 80 (1): 44–63. Balibar, Étienne. 2002. Politics and the Other Scene. Translated by Christine Jones, James Swenson, and Chris Turner. London: Verso Books. Barbero, Iker. 2012. “Orientalising Citizenship: The Legitimation of Immigration Regimes in the European Union.” Citizenship Studies 16 (5–6): 751–768. 350

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Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2014. “Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues.” Postcolonial Studies 17 (2): 115–121. Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2017. “The Current Crisis of Europe: Refugees, Colonialism, and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism.” European Law Journal 23: 395–405. Bosworth, Mary, Andriani Fili and Sharon Pickering. 2018. “Women and Border Policing at the Edges of Europe.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44 (13): 2182–2196. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Carby, Hazel V. 1989. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the African-American Women Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press. Cohn, Carol. 2008. “Mainstreaming Gender in UN Security Policy: A Path to Political Transformation?” In Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Shirin M. Rai and Georgina Waylen, 185–206. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Doctrine.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (8): 139–167. Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–1299. Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 2017. On Intersectionality: Essential Writing. New York: The New York Press. Doty, Roxanne. 1993. “The Bounds of ‘Race’ in International Relations.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 22 (3): 443–461. Doty, Roxanne L. 1996. “Sovereignty and the Nation: Constructing the Boundaries of National Identity.” In State Sovereignty as Social Construct, edited by Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber, 121–147. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1994. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Gramercy Books. Dugan, E. Friday. 2011. “Mothers Detained in Immigration Centre Hold ‘Naked’ Protest.” The Independent, 11 April 2011. http://www. independent.co.uk /news/uk / home-news/mothers-detained-inimmigration-centre-hold-naked-protest-807802.html Grewal, Inderpal. 1999. “‘Women’s Rights as Human Rights’: Feminist Practices, Global Feminism, and Human Rights Regimes in Transnationality.” Citizenship Studies 3 (3): 337–354. Grewal, Inderpal. 2005. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, and Neoliberalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan (eds). 1994. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2007. “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms.” Cultural Studies 21 (2–3): 211–223. 351

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Holvikivi, Aiko and Audrey Reeves. 2020. “Women, Peace and Security after Europe’s ‘Refugee Crisis’.” European Journal of International Security 5 (2): 135–154. Hooper, Charlotte. 2001. Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics. New York: Colombia University Press. Kinvall, Catarina. 2016. “The Postcolonial Has Moved into Europe: Bordering, Security, and Ethno-Cultural Belonging.” Journal of Common Market Studies 54 (1): 152–168. Kirby, Paul. 2020. “Sexual Violence in the Border Zone: The EU, the Women, Peace and Security Agenda, and Carceral Humanitarianism in Libya.” International Affairs 95 (5): 1209–1226. Lorde, Audre. 2018. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. London: Penguin Books. Lugones, Maria. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22 (1): 186–209. Lugones, Maria. 2010. “Towards a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25 (4): 742–759. Luibheid, Eithne. 2006. “Sexual Regimes and Migration Controls: Reproducing the Irish Nation-State in Transnational Contexts.” Feminist Review 83: 60–78. McCall, Leslie. 2005. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30 (3): 1771–1800. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. Mignolo, Walter D. 2002. “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (1): 57–96. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1984. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” boundary 2 12 (3)–13 (1): 333–358. Mohanty, Chandra T. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Moranga, Cherríe and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 2015. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Albany, NY: State University of New York (SUNY) Press. Morgan, Robin. 2016. “Introduction.” In Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology, edited by Robin Morgan. New York: Open Road Integrated Media. Nisancioglu, Kerem. 2020. “Racial Sovereignty.” European Journal of International Relations 26(SI): 39–63. Orford, Anne. 2002. “Feminism, Imperialism and the Mission of International Law.” Nordic Journal of International Law 71 (2): 275–296. Perera, Suvendrini and Joseph Pugliese. 2018. “Sexual Violence and the Border: Colonial Genealogies of US and Australian Immigration Detention Regimes.” Social & Legal Studies 30 (1): 66–79.

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Peterson, V. Spike, ed. 1992. Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory. Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Pratt, Nicola. 2020. Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. Berkeley: University of California Press. Quijano, Anibal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Ethnocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1 (3): 533–580. Said, Edward W. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. Shepherd, Laura J. 2008. Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice. London: Zed Books. Shilliam, Robbie. 2017. “Race in World Politics.” In The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, edited by John Baylis, Steve Smith, and Patrician Owens, 285–298. 7th edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Dorothy E. 1990. The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Spivak, Gayatri C. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. London: Macmillan. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1998. Can the Subaltern Speak? New York: Columbia University Press. Stachowitsch, Saskia and Julia Sachseder. 2020. “The Gendered and Racialised Politics of Risk Analysis. The Case of Frontex.” Critical Studies on Security 7 (2): 107–123. Tickner, J. Ann. 1993. Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security. New York: Colombia University Press. Turnball, Sarah. 2015. “Gender, Race, and Immigration Detention.” www.compass.oc.ac.uk/2015/gender-race-and-immigration-detention/ Tyler, Imogen. 2013. “Naked Protest: The Maternal Politics of Citizenship and Revolt.” Citizenship Studies 17 (2): 211–226. Van Allen, Judith. 1972. “‘Sitting on a Man’: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women.” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 6 (2): 165–181. Walker, R.B.J. 1993. Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolfe, Patrick. 2016. Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race. London and New York: Verso.

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Religion Katherine E. Brown Engaging in gender analysis of religion and global politics is challenging – much of contemporary gender studies in social sciences and humanities is ‘religion-blind’; many studies on religion are ‘gender-blind’. However, analysing gender and religion together is vital not only because religious practices, institutions, traditions, narratives of redemption, creation stories, eschatological utopias, and iconic images have created and legitimated gender, enforced, oppressed and warped it, but also subverted, transgressed, transformed and liberated it. Recognising this relationship between gender and religion is important because unacknowledged biases within our studies produce only partial insights. Those who consider religious affiliation as a sign of false consciousness often fail to recognise how religious faith and practice have served as a source of encouragement and empowerment for women; they do not consider the agency of women as religious subjects. Conversely, others who are sympathetic to religion might be predisposed to scholarship that is more apologetic in nature and tend to ignore the oppressive sides of religious institutions and practices. Nevertheless, religion (and the religious) permeates all aspects of global politics – even when officially excluded – and does so in gendered ways. Similarly, global politics influence religion and the religious in gendered ways. This is evident when we look at the Islamophobic legacies of the Global War on Terror.1 To explore this in more detail, the chapter begins by unpacking what might seem a self-evident question – how did a schoolgirl become a threat to national security? In asking this, we discuss how secularism shapes global politics at every level and, in doing so, produces gendered subjects. The chapter then moves to consider women’s agency and role in religion and global politics. We explore how religion and politics affect women’s everyday lives, especially in relation to reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. Women are not passive actors in these spaces, and the chapter 354

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explores how religion can empower women. The chapter then considers three examples that explore the gendered nexus of religion and politics, looking at a section of the global political economy, an example of policymaking, and transnational movements, respectively.

GENDER IN RELIGION AND GLOBAL POLITICS It is often presented as common sense that the Global War on Terror is about religion – and women’s bodies are key normative and physical battlegrounds. This is evident in the case of Shamima Begum, a British teenager who joined the so-called Islamic State Caliphate in Iraq, made infamous when the British Government revoked her citizenship (Farnham 2019; Masters and Regilme 2020). How did a schoolgirl acquire the status as a ‘threat to national security?’ To address the question, we must first explore the idea of secularism. Religion is central to the mythology of the Westphalian foundation of the modern state system. Epitomised by the mantra of ‘separation of church and state’, there has since been a continuous process of removing religious authority from the public sphere. This process is known as secularism, and casts religion as a matter of ‘private belief’, rather than cause for public action or collective identity. Secularism places religion within the ‘domestic’ sphere (beyond politics) to preserve the smooth running of the state, and laicism (the need to privatise religion) underpins much political and IR theory and practice. Experienced most overtly in France and Turkey, the aim is to protect the liberties of ‘free-thinking’ individuals and preserve the stability of the state. Joan Scott uses the word sexularism to show the unspoken difficult relationship between secularisation, women’s rights and gender equality (2009). The process of secularisation, that is the implementation of secularism, is frequently seen as the ‘natural’ evolution of international relations, leading to liberal governance (Asad 2003; Juergensmeyer 2017). Secularism is so powerful in global politics that refusal to act in a secular manner in international relations is seen as dangerous, extremist and backward, by many IR thinkers and practitioners (Hurd 2004). Concern with theocratic states such as Iran or Saudi Arabia, and the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, lies with their insistence on behaving outside ‘secular norms’, so reasoning behind their policies cannot be fully understood or predicted. Fears of shari’a law (Islamic jurisprudence) emerging in the Western world rely on shari’a being cast as barbaric in application, irrational in process and logic, and delivering unjust outcomes because it is religious and therefore antithetical to liberal governance. Secularism in IR assumes that with globalisation, universalising of human rights and the generation of some form of global morality, religions are no longer required for normative decisions, as a universal morality takes on a global structure. While religion – in the form of privately held beliefs (such as the religious conviction of a President or Prime Minister) – might be tolerated within global politics, its inclusion as a set of institutions or as embodied public practices is not. 355

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However, to understand the relationship between secularism and religion in these simplified terms ignores a range of secular positions, and the reality that religion has refused to stay in its allocated place. Rather, the secular is a complex cultural formation with ‘its own practices, its own sensorium, its own hierarchy of faculties, its own habits of being’ (Warner 2008). This account of religion and IR also ignores the gendering at work in these constructions. The private sphere is typically associated with the domestic, the emotional, and the corporeal, and also associated with the female/feminine. In contrast, the public sphere is a space of rationality, reason, and secularity – men’s space (Peterson 1992). These binaries are not only gendered; they are also hierarchical; language used to deny women is similar to that used for the exclusion of religion from the public sphere. Both religion and women cannot be contained within the private sphere; and to borrow from the feminist catchphrase, 2 the religious is political and the political is religious. Secularism is not just a belief system or a normative commitment in global politics; it is also a process that creates gendered subjects. This can be seen in states’ attempts to control the visibility and mobility of women’s bodies. As Gökarıksel and Mitchell (2005, 150) write in their comparison of the veil debates in Turkey and France, ‘secularism is one of the many technologies of control that state actors wield to discipline the wayward bodies of those defined as existing outside the cultural boundaries of the nation, particularly women and migrants’. Disciplining women’s bodies has often been expressed through debates about clothing – where (women’s) dress is represented and interpreted as an expression of (im)purity and (im)morality; hence, Laura Bush’s claim that the invasion of Afghanistan was in part to save Muslim women – as she mimed wearing a burqa (Abu Lughod 2002). Putting this together, we see how gendered processes of secularism lead politicians to determine that a schoolgirl is a threat to national security. The discourses of the Global War on Terror situate the violence of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and now the so-called Islamic State, by foregrounding religion rather than economics, colonialism and the Cold War legacy. Asked in policy circles is, ‘How Islamic is the Islamic State?’ (Hasan 2015; Wood 2015). This framing is only possible because of secular logics outlined above (Foster et al. 2017). Moreover, the ongoing negative effects of the Global War on Terror are disproportionately felt among Muslim communities (Kundnani and Hayes 2018). Tapping into a longer history of Orientalism, Muslims are forced into being perpetually ‘at-risk’, permanently suspected of ‘being terrorists’ (Pantazis and Pemberton 2009). Muslim men are cast as ‘folk devils’: toxically masculine, violent, deviantly criminal, ‘backward and bearded’, subject to increasing state surveillance and public suspicion (Brown 2020). Recruitment propaganda of terrorist organisations manipulate Western Muslim masculinities, in that they emphasise Muslim emasculation by European states and offer new ways of being ‘ideal men’ – a ‘five-star jihad, with kittens and Kalashnikovs’ (Perešin 2018). Muslim women become ‘visibly Muslim’ – and we see an increase in hate-crime motivated violence targeting hijabi women in secular societies (Zempi 2020). 356

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European countries are under humanitarian pressure to repatriate and rehabilitate women and children associated with the so-called Islamic State, while also (unprecedently) criminalising and securitising their return regardless of individual participation. The willingness to cast ‘returnees’ as security threats is a notable policy and discursive shift – women and children were previously represented almost exclusively as ‘groomed’, ‘brainwashed’ victims who needed saving. Now, female returnees from conflict situations, like Shamima Begum, are widely seen to have doubly transgressed – by being presumed to have rejected secular liberal European norms (read: traitors to secularism) and the gender norms of pacific, passive wives and mothers (read: traitors to feminism) – while the children bear the ‘sins of their fathers’. Confinement in rehabilitation centres and camps (both in Iraq and Syria, and Europe), and attempts to revoke citizenship of dual nationals, show how the logic of war continues, even as official references to a ‘Global War on Terror’ have largely disappeared from policy discourse. Gender analysis asks us not only to look at where women are, but also to see how gender identities, roles and ideologies intersect with other relations of power to affect the distribution of resources and authority in various ways.

GLOBAL POLITICS, WOMEN AND RELIGION Just as secularism creates gendered subjects, so does religion. Cultural images, ideas, norms and stereotypes about women permeate religious traditions and inform wider socio-cultural practices. In Christian faiths, the complex figures of the Virgin Mary, Eve and Mary Magdalene shaped social norms regarding motherhood, chastity and marriage for women worldwide. This has had significant implications for women who had children outside marriage, as the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland show – until the late 20th century, ‘difficult’ girls (sexually active, or abused, or simply poor) were sent to ‘laundries’ by their families or the state. The asylums/ laundries were operated by holy orders of nuns that sought to protect society from the contagion of ‘wayward’ women, while simultaneously attempting to reform the women through a harsh regimen of laundry work and devotional rituals (Titley 2006). Sometimes known as Penitents, they had committed no crimes but could not easily leave, and were forced to work without pay under extremely harsh conditions. It is estimated that some 10,000 women passed through the laundries between 1922 and 1996; religious orders are refusing to contribute financially to the compensation scheme set up for the 600 survivors who ‘worked’ under them, but they have indicated willingness to help in other ways (JFMR n.d.; O’Loughlin 2018; Wade 2013). Here, we see complex interactions between religious institutions, the state and religious ideals of womanhood that permeate Irish society. While this story could be understood simply in terms of economic exploitation and the hardships faced by vulnerable women, this interpretation would ignore the fact that the gendered religious ideals of mainstream Catholicism 357

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enabled Irish society to justify, ignore and accept the treatment of these women. No religion has a monopoly on the poor treatment of women’s and sexual minorities’ security, rights and lives, nor are attacks on women’s rights and liberties confined to the Global South or to the past; they are contemporary and global, despite decades of national and international laws designed to protect women’s rights. In some cases, we can see active attempts to roll back women’s rights; at the UN, we see an ‘unholy alliance’ against women’s and LGBTQA rights, in the promotion of ‘family first’ agendas which seek a ‘counter-revolution in UN social policy’ through the language of ‘natural parenting’, ‘natural families’ and ‘traditional values’ (Austin Ruse, head of the Center for Family and Human Rights [C-Fam], cited in Sanders 2018, 271). The aim is to reaffirm religiously authorised gender roles and norms, which see marriage as between men and women, and which limit women’s reproductive rights. These efforts were notably supported by the Trump administration. Further, Saudi Arabia was elected to the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 2017, despite requiring that women have male guardians and denying them numerous basic human rights. Forty-seven members of the Economic and Social Council supported the appointment, including at least three EU countries. In Russia, too, sustained attacks on homosexuality, and in particular violence against gay men, are justified through the same ‘traditional values’ and ‘family values’ upheld by the Russian Orthodox Church (Stoeckl 2020). A similar pattern is found in neighbouring Chechnya under Ramzan Kadyrov (Scicchitano 2021). Where women and LGBTQA groups have challenged religiously informed idea(l)s of womanhood and sexuality, they have often faced violent backlash, stigmatisation and resistance from entrenched positions. In Kenya, there is an interfaith commitment to eradicate the practice of female genital cutting (FGC)3 among both the Christian and Muslim religious leadership, but despite this, and despite legislation banning FGC since 2011, the practice continues, with those not consenting sometimes facing violence and social exclusion in their communities. In fact, in late 2020, there were significant protests against new laws which increased criminal penalties for aiding and abetting FGC. Further complicating matters, global campaigns to eradicate the practice position women as ‘mutilated victims’, denying communities and women agency, while reaffirming ethnocentrism (Bedri and Bradley 2017). For Christian communities in Kenya (and elsewhere) that practice FGC, many undergo FGC not only with ideas of transitioning to womanhood and religious purity, but also as a kind of anti-colonial protest, and as part of their desire to ‘worship as Africans’ without renouncing traditional beliefs and practices (Corman 2016). Muslim supporters of FGC recognise this language and see the campaigns against FGC as an attack on Islam and as part of broader challenges to marriage (Van Raemdonck 2019). Although both Christian and Muslim leaders worldwide have demonstrated how FGC contravenes religious texts, and many women confirm the medical harms of FGC, these examples show that tackling ‘belief’ outside of localised religio-political contexts has limited success. 358

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Women have also used religious imagery and themes strategically. In Argentina, women emphasised their roles as mothers, embodied in the Catholic construction of Marianismo (valuing the reproductive ability and moral strength of women), to claim political justice. As mothers of ‘the disappeared’, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo could claim justice from the ruling regime. This reveals how the blurring of the ‘private’ or ‘domestic’, and the public spheres, and the traditional understanding of women’s roles in the home, was used as the lynchpin of public protests. The weekly vigils of Jewish ‘Women in Black’ (referring to their clothing), which call attention to their opposition to war, and Women of Machsom Watch’s documentation of human rights abuses at Israeli checkpoints, also use their moral authority as mothers and grandmothers (which is embedded in Judaism) to challenge Israeli soldiers (Sharoni 2012). Within the Black Lives Matters movement, however, Muslim women of colour face a double erasure (anti-Blackness in Muslim communities, and Islamophobia in society); nevertheless, we see Black women’s spirituality and faith playing a part in the movement (Auston 2017; Lloyd et al. 2016; Rashid and Muhammad 2015). As Blair Imani discusses, as a queer Muslim activist of colour, religion isn’t what oppresses her (Zatat 2020). Women mobilise and influence politics due to their religious identities, and religious feminists have engaged in the transformation of religious thinking, behaviours and organisations too (see Chapter 7); in 2005, Amina Wadud led a mixed Muslim congregation in prayer, and in 2016, Lila Kagedan officially became the first female Orthodox rabbi. Feminist theologians of all faiths make concrete contributions to our understanding of world events, such as The Female Face of God in Auschwitz by Melissa Raphael, or Side-by-Side’s (an interfaith network) discussion on gender, theologies and COVID-19 with Reverend Dr. Lydia Mwaniki (All Africa Conference of Churches) and Niclas Lindgren (PMU, Swedish Pentecostal Churches). Feminist theology has also led to transformations within religious thinking and community, including an increasing acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning and asexual (LGBTQA) religious peoples (Fulkerson and Briggs 2012). Muslim theologians such as Ally (2015) and Khaki (2018) present readings of holy texts and traditions that challenge the prohibition of homosexuality in mainstream Islam and reclaim a queer history and diversity in Islam to challenge fundamentalist understandings of faith. This has a significant positive effect on how LGBTQA Muslims articulate their fights for human rights worldwide within a religious framework (El-Tayeb 2012; Jahangir and Abdullatif 2018). However, women’s history does not progress teleologically from oppression to emancipation in religion or politics. The history of Buddhism in Japan points to this, showing how women have been included, and then excluded, in Buddhist traditions and politics, only for them to (re)engage actively with new religious movements rooted in reformed Buddhist and Shinto traditions in the 20th century (Ambros 2015; Faure 2003). These examples demonstrate first how women’s agency and power (or lack thereof) within states is shaped, in part, by underlying or overt 359

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religious norms about women’s roles in society and the family. Religious symbols and norms intersect with issues of race and gender to produce culturally intelligible subjects. Consequently, challenging ideas about womanhood and sexuality can be difficult and can sometimes be dangerous. This leads to the second point: gender and religious understandings of gender are not static. Religious institutions and organisations constantly have to reaffirm what womanhood is within their traditions, and how it applies to society. Third, these discussions about gender and religion also help define key ideas of masculinity and male privilege. There are complex relationships between women’s agency and empowerment, and religion – neither necessarily antithetical to feminism nor feminist.

RELIGION AND GENDER: STRUCTURING GLOBAL POLITICS The discussion in the previous section points to multiple connections between state power and religious institutions. Three examples in particular draw out some nuance of the relationship between gender and religion in world politics: the not insignificant political economy of religiously appropriate fashion; how religious institutions have influenced public policymaking; and the role of transnational religious movements in international relations. The ‘Islamic Chic’ fashion market The ‘modest fashion’ industry is estimated to be worth billions. Specifically, the ‘Islamic Chic’ market is expected to be worth over US$360 billion annually by 2023 (Touré 2019). Combined with the rise of ‘hijabistas’ as influencers on Instagram and other social media platforms, Muslim women are now encouraged to participate faithfully in the worldwide fashion industry and associated commercialism, without compromising faith-based gender norms. The commodification of religion (from religious tourism to the purchase of religious objects) is not new; the pilgrimages and tours of Saints’ bones and holy relics in earlier phases of Christianity were also about gender, politics and piety (Denzey 2008). However, the commercialisation of religious dress, occurring at the same time as religious dress comes into question politically, gives rise to important questions of representation regarding gender, race and class. Dolce & Gabbana launched its abaya haute couture range in 2017, and Vogue Arabia celebrated an all-hijabi front cover with the bylines, ‘women shattering stereotypes’, ‘my choice: what dressing modestly means today’ and ‘my body; my rules’ in April 2019; at the same time, though, burkinis on public beaches in Europe have been demonised in tabloid media, and elsewhere, women who decide not to wear a hijab face increasing social pressure to conform (Brown and Morgan 2016). In 2019, Janet Zeba Nassiry became Miss World Australia, celebrating her dual Afghan-Australian heritage and Muslim identity, appearing in 360

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Vogue Australia in November 2020; Nassiry stated that ‘girls need a range of beauty ideals to embrace their authentic and true selves’, seeing herself as a role model (Vogue Australia 2020, 140). Yet, in the same month, Halima Arden, the first Muslim hijab-wearing model, quit the industry. She had previously modelled for major fashion labels and was the first hijabi model on the cover of Sports Illustrated. She claimed that her participation in the fashion world necessarily compromised her faith, and that she wanted to spend more time with her mother. She described humiliating experiences, constant discrimination and Islamophobia and minimal, grudging accommodations to her faith. Posting a photo she was ashamed of, where a pair of jeans was placed on her head to cover her hair, she said on Instagram: ‘This wasn’t “representation”, this was mockery. I was too young and naive to see it back then’. She continued: ‘As if we ever needed these brands to represent hijabis. They need us. Never the other way around’ (cited in Alghoul 2020). These examples show that we also need a feminist political economic framework as well for understanding secularism and religion in global politics. Religion and public policymaking Within the secular world system, religion is seen as irrational and emotional, so one might assume a negative reaction when political leaders publicly use faith as a basis for making decisions, yet there exist numerous examples where faith has been instrumentalised to garner support for some decisions, through ethno-religious nationalism and appeals to a religious base. In Poland, Prime Minister Kaczyński’s move to ban abortion in all but an extremely limited set of circumstances is designed to keep the Catholic Church – a significant influence on social, economic and political life in Poland since its days resisting Communism – on side. It also enables Kaczyński to compete with other far-right parties in Poland for popular support (Żuk and Żuk 2020). Women protested the new laws in 2020 by blocking churches and disrupting services, as well as street protests. In response, the chairman of the Law and Justice party issued an appeal to far-right nationalist groups to mobilise and protect ‘our churches’. Late 2020 saw an inter-faith marriage stopped by police in India. A Hindu nationalist youth association had complained that the marriage was part of a campaign of ‘love jihad’, and reported it for not having sought official permission under new laws in Uttar Pradesh (which were designed to protect Hindu women from forcible conversion to Islam) (Ganguly 2021). Increasing numbers of Buddhist women in Myanmar support the violent expulsion of the Rohingya by Buddhist nationalists – even in one case physically preventing a Muslim Rohingya woman accessing medical care – and also support the compulsory conversion of non-Buddhist men should they wish to marry Buddhist women. Even though fewer than 5% of Myanmar’s population identify as Muslim, Islam is presented as a threat to national identity and Buddhist values (Marler and Aguilar 2018). In the Politics of Piety, Mahmood (2008) discusses similar recourse to 361

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conservative religions by women in Egypt and their complex agency that can compromise the rights of other women. In Japan, despite a secularly-informed taboo surrounding religion in public life, we see the rise of religious organisations influencing politics. In 2015, of the 19 cabinet ministers in then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration, all but one were members of ‘The Shinto Political Federation’s Parliamentarians Association’, a religious association which Abe chaired. Religious and ethno-nationalist groups linked to the Japanese government and parliament calling for the veneration of the Emperor, restoring his divinity and promoting patriotism have also blocked calls for the acknowledgement of the sexual slavery of ‘comfort women’4 during WWII (Yamaguchi 2018). Some ‘patriotic’ new religions such as ‘Kofuku no Kagaku’ (‘Science of Happiness’) and some Christian sects in favour of the unification of religion and state have engaged in a widespread campaign, collecting massive numbers of signatures from Japanese people who deny the ‘comfort women’ problem altogether (Yamashita 2015). Transnational religious movements Stalin once quipped, ‘How many [military] divisions does the Pope have?’ – but the (soft) power of the Roman Catholic Church should not be underestimated. Religions are often global in their morality and reach, their influence extending beyond state borders, leading a questioning of the faithful’s patriotism. The idea of a religious diaspora having transnational loyalties has been used to marginalise religious minorities and fuel sectarian violence. The global influence of particular religious leaders and organisations, from the Catholic Holy See to the clerical Shi’ite elite in Iran, has led to accusations of terrorism of their followers elsewhere in the world – from Northern Ireland (the Irish Republican Army) to Lebanon (Hezbollah). These might be considered examples of ‘hard power’, but more often, the fear is of the ‘soft power’ these authorities hold on issues such as climate change, women’s rights and ending poverty. A feminist perspective and gender analysis of the transnational influences of religious groups allows us to pay attention not only to the issues that emerge, but also to examine who has power within these transnational religious spaces. More often than not, these official religious spaces are male dominated. As with feminist approaches more broadly, examining where women are in religious organisations and in the informal spaces of religion, we find different accounts of power, politics and life. McGuire (2008) has long argued that many women’s forms of spirituality are not recognised by traditional measures of religiosity, leading to women’s religious needs and experiences being excluded in studies and policy. In the European context, Sointu and Woodhead (2008) note how women are drawn to spiritual forms of religious expression rather than formal institutions or organised official religions. As Cynthia Enloe argued in relation to women in international relations, feminist researchers of religion find that 362

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women have always been present in religion if we choose to see them, and with their visibility, we reveal their agency as unconfined by masculine ideals of religion and politics. Marla Frederick, in her work on Black women, faith and activism, has described Black women’s empowerment in and beyond the Black church as ‘creative agency’ (2003, 3). Religious eco-feminist activism (which seeks to promote pro-environmental behaviours by identifying connections between women’s lives, religious traditions and beliefs and environmental well-being) is one area where creative agency, informal political space and religion come together – including in Pakistan where women are identified as custodians of the environment, linking an ethics of care to their eco-feminist volunteering activities and challenging the gender-blind approaches of mainstream environmentalist groups (Haq et al. 2020). Women’s interfaith efforts in peacebuilding in post-conflict Liberia are another example: following the second civil war, Liberian women used informal public spaces – airfields and sports pitches – to engage in shared prayer, to develop interfaith commitments to peace and raise public awareness (Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs 2013). Transnational religious movements and transnational faith-based organisations (FBOs) also have significant philanthropic interests, influencing global development and relief works worldwide (Bartelink and Wilson 2020; Cooper 2019). FBOs are often seen as sites of women and agency, with women as key actors in the field, but women are typically less present in decision-making processes, such as in Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), who campaign for child protection and an end to gender-based violence (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015). In IRW, Petersen (2018) does not find a ‘religious’ rejection of ‘secular’ gender norms, nor a straightforward secularisation of religious norms. FBOs, like IRW, are not only ‘norm takers’ but also ‘norm makers’ that influence both the religious communities they engage with and the sectors in which they intervene, including on women’s rights (Bettiza and Dionigi 2015, 2). The iconography of religion has been subverted by some groups to powerful effect. The transnational transgender, lesbian and queer movement, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, for example, protest in exaggerated and sexualised religious garb. This movement, while not officially religious in its nature, expresses itself through religious imagery and symbolism. Like many Catholic nuns, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence go through a period of aspirancy, a postulant and a novitiate stage before becoming fully professed; the entire process to become a ‘Sister’ takes a year or more (Wilcox 2018). The group has expanded from San Francisco, where it was founded in 1979, and now includes women, men and transgender people of all sexualities (though mainly gay men still) in chapters or Abbeys across the world. Identifiable in most countries by their white faces and glamorous makeup, as well as their creative headdresses, some orders wear uniforms resembling traditional Catholic nuns’ habits; others wear dresses or skirts below their coronets and veils. Sisters claim to be ‘nuns for the twenty-first century’ serving communities not served by traditional nuns of any religion (Wilcox 2018). For many, the charity work they do and the street 363

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protests they participate in are linked to their sense of spirituality which is frequently formed of a bricolage of religious traditions linked to their subjective life experiences. While this movement might seem to mock those of faith, they tap into an important mode of understanding about spirituality, and particularly the power of community.

CONCLUSION This chapter has discussed how religion impacts on global politics in gendered ways, how gender is transformed by religious institutions and practices and shown how religion itself is framed through understandings of global politics. It argues against a religion-blind or a gender-blind approach to the study of global politics. How the religious impacts on the secular and vice versa is complex and cannot be captured in simple linear conceptualisation. Feminist readings of gender, religion and global politics require us to think in intersectional, transnational and adaptive ways. These discussions not only show how religion can provide ‘common ground’ – a cultural marker of identity and belonging as well as a sign of difference – but also how constructions of religious identity in the public sphere are often delegitimised as irrational and not belonging. Whether you’re interested in better understanding women’s rights, humanitarian and development agendas, environmentalism, terrorism, race relations or nationalism, you’ll find a feminist or gender approach to the study of religion vital to your studies. Discussion questions 1. What are the tensions in compelling women to either wear or not wear a burqa in the public sphere? 2. How is Islamophobia gendered? 3. In what ways do religious narratives on gender impact on LGBTQA and women’s rights worldwide? Notes 1. Islamophobia is understood as both anti-Muslim and anti-Islam sentiment. ‘Islamophobia is any distinction, exclusion or restriction towards, or preference against, Muslims (or those perceived to be Muslims) that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life’ (Runnymede 2017, 1). 2. ‘The personal is political, and the political is personal’ is derived from the title of Carol Hanisch’s 1969 essay (published in 1970). 3. FGC is sometimes known as female circumcision or female genital mutilation (FGM) and also in some official documents referred to as FGC(M). The severity of the practice varies from symbolic ‘cutting’ to clitoridectomy and infibulation. 364

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4. The Japanese government issued a public statement in 1993 admitting that ‘comfort stations’ were created at the request of Japanese military authorities, and that many women were made to serve as ‘comfort women’ against their will. However, the official stance is that the matter is legally resolved and denies associations with human trafficking, sexual slavery or prostitution. https://text.npr. org/940819094

Further reading Auga, Ulrika E. 2020. An Epistemology of Religion and Gender: Biopolitics, Performativity and Agency. Abingdon: Routledge. Donahoe, Amanda E. 2014. Gender, Religion, and International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fulkerson, Mary McClicntock and Sheila Briggs (eds). 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herrington, Luke M, Alisdair McKay and Jeffrey Haynes (eds). 2015. “Nations under God: The Geopolitics of Faith in the Twenty-First Century.” E-IR. https://www.e-ir.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/ Nations-under-God-E-IR.pdf Redding, Jeffrey A. 2018. “Transgender Rights in Pakistan?: Global, Colonial, and Islamic Perspectives.” In Human Rights in Translation: Intercultural Pathways, edited by M. Rozbicki. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. References Abu Lughod, Lila. 2002. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” American Anthropologist 104 (3): 783–790. Alghoul, Diana. 2020. “Respect My Hijab: Muslim Model Halima Arden Quits the Runway.” Al Araby, 25 November 2020. https://english. alaraby.co.uk/news/respect-my-hijab-muslim-model-halima-aden-tellsindustry Ally, Shabir. 2015. “Homosexuality: An Islamic Perspective.” Let the Quran Speak. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBWD3cr1pC8 Ambros, Barbara. 2015. Women in Japanese Religions. New York: New York University Press. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. Auston, Donna. 2017. “Prayer, Protest, and Police Brutality: Black Muslim Spiritual Resistance in the Ferguson Era.” Transforming Anthropology 25 (1): 11–22. Bartelink, Brenda and Erin K Wilson. 2020. “The Spiritual is Political: Reflecting on Gender, Religion and Secularism in International Development.” In International Development Actors and Local Faith Communities: Ideological and Cultural Encounters, edited by Kathryn Kraft and Olivia Wilkinson. Abingdon: Routledge. 365

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Bedri, Nafisa and Tamsin Bradley. 2017. “Mapping the Complexities and Highlighting the Dangers: The Global Drive to End FGM in the UK and Sudan.” Progress in Development Studies 17 (1): 24–37. Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. 2013. Ending Liberia’s Second Civil War: Religious Women as Peacemakers. Washington, DC: Georgetown University. https://berkleycenter.george town.edu/publications/ending-liberia-s-second-civil-war-religiouswomen-as-peacemakers Bettiza, Gregorio and Fillippo Dionigi. 2015. “How Do Religious Norms Diffuse? Institutional Translation and International Change in a PostSecular World Society.” European Journal of International Relations 21 (3): 621–646. Brown, Katherine E. 2020. Gender, Religion, Extremism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Katherine E. and G. Rhydian Morgan. 2016. “The Burkini: A Portrait.” Paratonnerre, 16 September 2016. http://leparatonnerre.fr/ 2016/09/16/le-burkini-un-portrait/ Cooper, Rachel. 2019. Faith-Based Organisations and Current Development Debates. K4D Helpdesk Report 624. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. Corman, Crystal. 2016. “Violence Against Women and Girls in Kenya: Roles of Religion.” Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs. https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/publications/violence-againstwomen-and-girls-in-kenya-roles-of-religion Denzey, Nicola. 2008. The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women. Boston: Beacon Press. El-Tayeb, Fatima. 2012. “‘Gays Who Cannot Properly Be Gay’: Queer Muslims in the Neoliberal European City.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19 (1): 79–95 Farnham, Harriet. 2019. “What the Media Circus Surrounding Shamima Begum Can Teach Us About Gender and Nation”. Genderings, 3 April 2019. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/gender/2019/04/03/ gender_and_nation/ Faure, Bernard. 2003. The Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity and Gender. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Elena. 2015. “Engendering Understandings of FaithBased Organisations: Intersections Between Religion and Gender in Development and Humanitarian Interventions.” In Routledge Handbook of Gender and Development, edited by A. Coles, L. Gray and J. Momsen, 560–570. London: Routledge. Foster, Russell, Nick Megoran and Michael Dunn. 2017. “Towards a Geopolitics of Atheism: Critical Geopolitics Post the ‘War on Terror’”. Political Geography 60: 179–189. Frederick, Marla. 2003. Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ganguly, Sumit. 2021. “The Problem with India’s Love Jihad Laws.” The Conversation, 27 January 2021. https://theconversation.com/ the-problem-with-indias-love-jihad-laws-152675 366

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Gökarıksel, Banu and Katharyne Mitchell. 2005. “Veiling, Secularism, and the Neoliberal Subject: National Narratives and Supranational Desires in Turkey and France.” Global Networks 5 (2): 147–165. Haq, Zeenat Abdul, Muhammad Imran, Shabir Ahmad and Umar Farooq. 2020. “Environment, Islam, and Women: A Study of EcoFeminist Environmental Activism in Pakistan.” Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education 23: 275–291. Hanisch, Carol. 1970. “Personal is Political: The Women’s Liberation Movement.” http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html Hasan. Mehdi. 2015. “How Islamic is Islamic State?” New Statesman, 10 March 2015. https://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2015/03/ mehdi-hasan-how-islamic-islamic-state Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman. 2004. “The Political Authority of Secularism in International Relations.” European Journal of International Relations 10 (2): 235–262. Jahangir, Junaid and Hussein Abdullatif. 2018. “Same-Sex Unions in Islam.” Theology & Sexuality 24 (3): 157–173. Juergensmeyer, Mark. 2017. Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. 4th edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Justice for Magdalene Research (JFMR). n.d. “Preserving Magdalene History: About the Magdalene Laundries”. JFMR. http://jfmresearch. com /home/preserving-magdalene-history/about-the-magdalenelaundries/ Khaki, El-Farouk. 2018. “We Resist: A Queer Muslim Perspective”. TedEx. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXydVaieYdo Kundnani, Arun and Ben Hayes. 2018. The Globalisation of Countering Violent Extremism Policies. Transnational Institute. https://www.tni. org/files/publication-downloads/the_globalisation_of_countering_ violent_extremism_policies.pdf Lloyd, Vincent, Wes Alcenat, Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Pamela R. Lightsey, Jennifer C. Nash, Jeremy Posadas, Melynda Price, Cheryl J. Sanders, Peter Slade, Josef Sorett and Terrance Wiley. 2016. “Religion, Secularism and Black Lives Matter.” Imanent Frame, 22 September 2016. https://tif.ssrc.org/2016/09/22/ religion-secularism-and-black-lives-matter/ Mahmood, Saba. 2008. Politics of Piety. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Marler, Isabel and Macarena Aguilar. 2018. “What’s Attracting Women to Myanmar’s Buddhist Nationalist Movement?” Open Democracy, 30 January 2018. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/womenmyanmar-buddhist-nationalist-movement/ Masters, Mercedes and Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. 2020. “Citizenship Revocation as a Human Rights Violation: The Case of Shamima Begum.” E-IR, 28 November 2020. https://www.e-ir.info/2020/11/28/citizenshiprevocation-as-a-human-rights-violation-the-case-of-shamima-begum/ McGuire, Meredith B. 2008. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 367

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O’Loughlin, Ed. 2018. “These Women Survived Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and Now They’re Ready to Talk.” New York Times, 6 June 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/world/europe/magdalenelaundry-reunion-ireland.html Pantazis, Christina and Simon Pemberton. 2009. “From the ‘Old’ to the ‘New’ Suspect Community: Examining the Impacts of Recent UK Counter-Terrorist Legislation.” The British Journal of Criminology 49 (5): 646–666. Perešin, Anita. 2018. “Why Women from the West are Joining ISIS’, International Annals of Criminology 56 (1–2): 3–42. Petersen, Marie Juul. 2018. “Translating Global Gender Norms in Islamic Relief Worldwide.” Progress in Development Studies 18 (3): 189–207. Peterson, V. Spike (ed.). 1992. Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations. London: Lynne Reinner. Rashid, Hussein and Precious Rasheeda Muhammad. 2015. “American Muslim (Un)Exceptionalism: #BlackLivesMatter and #BringBack OurGirls.” Journal of Africana Religions 3 (4): 478–495. Runnymede. 2017. Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us All. The Runnymede Trust. https://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/ Islamophobia%20Report%202018%20FINAL.pdf Sanders, Rebecca. 2018. “Norm Spoiling: Undermining the International Women’s Rights Agenda.” International Affairs 94 (2): 271–291. Scicchitano, Dominic. 2021. “The ‘Real’ Chechen Man: Conceptions of Religion, Nature, and Gender and the Persecution of Sexual Minorities in Postwar Chechnya.” Journal of Homosexuality 68 (9): 1545–1562. Scott, Joan W. 2009. “‘Sexularism’: Ursula Hirschmann Annual Lecture on Gender and Europe.” Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/11553/RSCAS_DL _ 2009_01.pdf Sharoni, Simona. 2012. “Gender and Conflict Transformation in Israel/ Palestine.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 13 (4): 113–128. Sointu, Eeva and Linda Woodhead. 2008. “Spirituality, Gender and Expressive Selfhood.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47 (2): 259–276. Stoeckl, Kristina. 2020. “The Rise of the Russian Christian Right: The Case of the World Congress of Families.” Religion, State and Society 48 (4): 223–238. Titley, Brian. 2006. “Heil Mary: Magdalen Asylums and Moral Regulation in Ireland.” History of Education Review 35 (2): 1–15. Touré, Katia Dansoko. 2019. “The “Hijabistas”: Veiled Fashionistas Chased by Luxury Brands.” The Africa Report. https://www.theafricareport. com/21176/the-hijabistas-veiled-fashionistas-chased-by-luxury-brands/ Van Raemdonck, An. 2019. “Paradoxes of Awareness Raising in Development: Gender and Sexual Morality in Anti-FGC Campaigning in Egypt.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 21 (10): 1177–1191. Vogue Australia. 2020. “Role Model.” Vogue Australia. 16 November 2020. https://www.pressreader.com/australia/vogue-australia-9FAU/ 20201116/282291027765178 368

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Wade, Jennifer. 2013. “How Can Religious Orders Refuse to Pay Compensation to the Magdalenes?” The Journal, Ireland. https:// www.thejournal.ie/explainer-how-can-religious-orders-refuse-to-paycompensation-to-magdalenes-996240-Jul2013/ Warner, Michael. 2008. “The Ruse of Secular Humanism.” The Imanent Frame. http://tif.ssrc.org/2008/09/22/the-ruse-of-secular-humanism/ Wilcox, Melissa M. 2018. Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism and Serious Parody. New York: New York University Press. Wood, Graene. 2015. “What ISIS Really Want.” The Atlantic. https:// www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-reallywants/384980/ Yamaguchi, Tomomi. 2018. “Revisionism, Ultranationalism, Sexism: Relations Between the Far Right and the Establishment Over the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue.” Social Science Japan Journal 21 (2): 193–212. Yamashita, Aikiko. 2015. “Japanese Religions and the Issue of ‘Comfort Women’.” Sightings. University of Chicago. https://divinity.uchicago. edu/sightings/articles/japanese-religions-and-issue-comfort-women Zatat, Narjas. 2020. “Blair Imani: Queer, Muslim and BLM Activism in a Trumpian America.” Al Araby, 29 October. https://english.alaraby. co.uk/features/blair-imani-donald-trump-danger-muslims Zempi, Irene. 2020. “Veiled Muslim Women’s Responses to Experiences of Gendered Islamophobia in the UK.” International Review of Victimology 26 (1): 96–111. Żuk, Piotr and Pawel Żuk. 2020. “‘Murderers of the Unborn’ and ‘Sexual Degenerates’: Analysis of the ‘Anti-Gender’ Discourse of the Catholic Church and the Nationalist Right in Poland.” Critical Discourse Studies 17 (5): 566–588.

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CHAPTER 27

Terrorism and Political Violence Caron Gentry and Laura Sjoberg It is well known within International Relations and the sub-field of Terrorism Studies that a universally agreed upon definition for ‘terrorism’ is elusive and undecided. Most scholars (Gentry 2020; Hoffman 2006; Jackson 2005; Majozi 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2014; Richardson 2006; Schmid and Jongman 2005) see ‘terrorism’ as a value-laden, pejorative term, used to discredit and delegitimise those who are labelled ‘terrorists’. Feminist scholarship reveals power hierarches created through binaries, such as masculinities and femininities (Parpart and Parashar 2019; Peterson and Runyan 2009; Tickner 1992). One such binary is key to understanding the study of terrorism. In narratives about terrorism, states are normally treated as the legitimate, heroic, rational actor (masculinised) and terrorist actors as illegitimate, horrifically violent and irrational (feminised or devalorised). Feminists demonstrate that ‘terrorist’ is also a heavily gendered term used to devalorise politically violent actors, replicating Westphalian binaries of masculinised/legitimate states with a monopoly on violence against emasculated/feminised/illegitimate non-state actors without that monopoly. Using gender analysis reveals gender biases in the concept of ‘terrorism’ that are at the heart of its definitional concerns, political problems and moral ambiguities. This chapter’s first section examines definitional problems related to terrorism, including inconsistencies in what or who is included (and excluded) in common definitions and how these inclusions/exclusions are gendered. In the second section, we problematise terrorism by discussing its gendered implications. The third section engages a key element theorising terrorism through gender lenses: understanding how people identified as terrorists are gendered in media and scholarly

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discussions of their actions. The final section discusses gender in ‘counterterrorism’ theory and practice.

WHAT IS TERRORISM? There are a number of definitional issues with the concept of terrorism. In the third edition of their book Political Terrorism (2017), Alex Schmid and Albert Jongman surveyed scholars and policymakers to provide a definition. They received and coded 109 different responses, finding that ten terms appeared with the most frequency. These are (with the percentage of definitions they appeared in): • • • • • • • • • •

Violence, force 83.5% Political 65% Fear, terror emphasised 51% Threat 47% Psychological effects and anticipated reactions 41.5% Victim-target differentiation 37.5% Systematic, organised action 32% Method of combat, strategy, tactic 30.5% Extranormality 30% Coercion 28%

Thus, most scholars emphasise that terrorism is violence most often directed at noncombatants to draw attention to a political position and intended to spread fear. While definitions do not mention who counts as ‘terrorists’, many scholars only use the term to describe non-state actors, meaning it distinguishes both a method of violence and a type of actor (see Richardson 2006; Hoffman 2006; Greene 2017; for a lengthier discussion see Richards 2015). Defining terrorism is as controversial among policy institutions as it is among scholars and policymakers. The ‘official’ definition of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) includes intentionally and unlawful causing of death, bodily harm, property damage and/or economic loss to intimidate populations or compel government or intergovernmental organisation action. While this definition is fairly straightforward, other parts of the United Nations, and even other resolutions of the UNGA, have different definitions. Even within some countries, different government agencies hold different definitions. Each definition is subjective (see Jackson 2005), context-based (see Hoffman 2006) and politically beholden to the purposes of those defining it (see Gentry 2020, 44; Jackson et al 2009). Perhaps because of these difficulties, there is a trend towards characterising terrorism (as a ‘weapon of the weak’, as ‘one person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist’ or as ‘new’ and Islamic) rather than defining it. Through gender lenses, each of these characterisations brings with it a

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The disorder of women, the disorder of terrorist organisations In her classic article, Pateman (1980) traces how women have been constructed as ‘disordered beings’. She defines disorder as: • •

civil disorder: riot, breakdown of law and order, and personal disorder: internal malfunction of an individual, disordered imagination, disorder of health.

She outlines how women’s ‘threatening nature’ has been attributed to engendering vice, bringing a state to ruin, characterising women as hostile and contrary to civilisation and overall, as subversive forces. Through ancient and modern gendered constructions of individuals and society, women have been seen as biologically weak and unable to handle the weight of civic and political responsibilities. This means they are treated as unable to grasp the full ideas of justice. On the other hand, men, constructed as rational beings, are able to handle the responsibilities of public life. Tickner (1992) critiques Hans Morgenthau for transposing this idea of the rational man onto the state: that in the Westphalian system, IR scholars have granted masculine characteristics to states. These include rationality, logic and assertiveness. But this assertion of states as rational actors rests on the notion that an opposite force/actor exists. In some work, participation in international organisations is seen as irrational (see Kenneth Waltz’s use of Rousseau’s stag hunt 1959, 167–170). For the purposes of this chapter, how can the rational/irrational binary be seen in the tensions between states and non-state politically violence groups? Can one apply Pateman’s criticism of ‘disordered’ women to ‘disordered’ terrorists?

problematic and gendered history. Characterising terrorism as a ‘weapon of the weak’ reflects a Westphalian notion that states both do and should monopolise the legitimate use of force in politics. This implies a divide between (legitimate) states and (illegitimate) non-states, which feminist scholars (for example, Tickner 1992) have criticised as not only false but insidious, hiding violence of states towards marginalised citizens, including women. ‘The weak’ (feminine), then, are opposed to ‘the strong’ (masculine) legitimate states, by definition delegitimised and devalorised by the re-enforcement of gendered notions of sovereignty. Suggesting that ‘one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter’, while acknowledging the subjectivity of the definition of terrorism, does little to deconstruct the label’s use. Many people are stigmatised as ‘terrorists’ only to be later recognised as heroes or freedom fighters (see Figure 27.1). Perhaps the most insidious of these short-cut characterisations, through gender (and racial) lenses, is also among the most influential: the ‘New Terrorism’ thesis espoused by Hoffman (1999 and 2002), Walter Laqueur (1996, 2000) and Goertz and Streitparth (2019). In brief, ‘New Terrorism’ proponents argue that terrorism was once about few deaths for a big audience and a political cause and now focuses on large-scale attacks and mass casualties with an ideological or fundamentalist religious cause. While most ‘New Terrorism’ theorists do not explicitly say it, the effect (and some argue intent) of this approach is associating a bigger, badder, terrorism with Islam. Both the empirical validity of the ‘New Terrorism’ thesis and the normative problems with this association have been widely critiqued (see Githens-Mazer and Lambert 2010; Jackson 2005; Puar and Rai 2002; Tuastad 2003) but nevertheless maintain salience as a shortcut to 372

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Figure 27.1  Nelson Mandela (right) and F.W. de Klerk. Source:  Wikimedia Commons © World Economic Forum (CC BY-SA 2.0) (https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Frederik_de_Klerk_with_Nelson_Mandela_-_World_Economic_Forum_Annual_Meeting_ Davos_1992.jpg).

understanding terrorism. Critics suggest that ‘New Terrorism’s’ academic and policy popularity echo longstanding prejudices against Muslims and the Arab world, often referred to as Orientalism. The word Orientalism was first used by Said (1978) to describe a Western perspective towards Muslim populations that makes the racialised assumption that all people associated with Islam are fundamentally unable to progress and adhere to (presumed desirable) Western standards of morality and civilisation. While we do not wish to replicate these harmful notions, we do want you to be able to critically identify them. Therefore, in the context of Terrorism Studies, the deeply biased ideas include: that Muslims are less intelligent and incapable of learning; that Muslim men are more violent, controlling and hypersexualised than Western men; that Muslim women are more submissive and therefore helpless than Western women; and that all Muslims are religiously fundamentalist (see Akram 2000; Nader 1989; Said 1978). Decolonial feminist scholars have identified associations between Islam and terrorism as racist, sexist and heterosexist, which impact upon radicalisation analysis, terrorism theories and counterterrorism policies (see Gentry 2020; Khalid 2017; Narozhna and Knight 2016; Nayak 2006). These short-cut characterisations, not least associating terrorism with Islam, solve neither the definitional nor political problems with the word ‘terrorism’. Yet, many scholars want to study and teach about terrorism, and many students want to learn about it. This conundrum often creates a ‘we know it when we see it’ approach towards labelling terrorists (see Richardson 2006, 19). The things we ‘know’ as terrorism tend to focus on causing fear by targeting non-combatants, something 373

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Who is a terrorist? The Cases of Nelson Mandela and Augusto Pinochet It may be surprising to some that former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, and one of the iconic images for peace and reconciliation was once considered a terrorist by the South African Apartheid government. Mandela had been a leader of the political party, the African National Congress (ANC), which advocated the violent overthrow of the Apartheid regime. In 1964, Mandela was found guilty of counts relating to guerrilla activity and sentenced to life in prison on Robbin Island. Mandela’s leadership of the movement against Apartheid from prison paired with immense pressure from the international community to change the government of South Africa led to the end of Apartheid. President de Klerk legalized the ANC and freed Mandela, effectively changing his classification from ‘terrorist’ to ‘political leader’ very quickly. In 1994, Mandela was elected to be the first post-Apartheid South African president and is now seen as a hero for his activism in the face of danger. On the other hand, Augusto Pinochet, the fascist dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990, was a state leader when he committed acts that would likely have otherwise been defined as terrorism, including but not limited to targeting, kidnapping and torturing civilians to maintain his control over his country. Pinochet also participated in Operation Condor, identifying left-wing activists for both the United States and other South American juntas who injured or killed them. Pinochet was protected internationally from any charges that might link to terrorism due to his status as a former leader of a sovereign state. If a ‘terrorist’ can become a ‘freedom fighter’ and then a state leader and a hero, why can a state leader not become a ‘terrorist? Is terrorism a method, a style of violence, or does it also depend on the identity or ideology of the actor?

condemned by theoretical and jurisprudential laws of war for centuries if not millennia (see Bellamy 2008). Perhaps because of this ‘knowledge’, many associate terrorism with normative wrong (and even monstrosity) and counterterrorism with normative right (and even heroism). Yet, this association does not always tell the whole story. For example, in the 2004 Beslan school siege by Chechen ‘terrorists’, 334 hostages were killed, including 186 children. Doubtless, the Chechens who seized the school did something normatively wrong. Still, the characterisation of the Chechens as ‘terrorists’ wholly responsible for the deaths is incomplete. Russian security forces both escalated the confrontation and killed some of the hostages. Certainly, the Russian ‘counterterrorists’ share some of the direct blame for the deaths. Context also matters. Russian forces were responsible for mass killings and endemic sexual violence, among other atrocities, in Chechnya. While it does not excuse the Chechens, it shows a more complicated picture than the evil ‘terrorists’ wronging legitimate ‘counterterrorists’. Perhaps one way of solving problems with the label ‘terrorist’ is adopting the language of (violent) extremism or radicalisation. Even if stakeholders cannot fully agree on defining terrorism, discussions always centre on the threat/use of violence rather than who commits violence. By contrast, ‘extremism’, ‘violent extremism’ or ‘radicalisation’ is a way of focusing on a person’s mindset or belief system that may inspire the use of violence (Borum 2011, 8). Thus, the work on extremism or radicalisation examines the factors in a person’s life that draw them to political violence to solve their political problems (McCauley and Moskalenko 2017; Taylor and Horgan 2006). Therefore, terrorism and extremism/radicalisation are related, but not all extremists ever use terrorist (or, for that matter, any) 374

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violence. The adoption of more nuanced approaches allows those studying or countering political violence to differentiate between the violence (terrorism) and the thinking, or ideology, that may galvanise violence (extremism/ radicalisation). However, this semantical difference is also not without gendered problems.

GENDERING TERRORISMS A big problem with partially relying on ‘knowing’ terrorism ‘when you see it’ is that this ‘knowing’ excludes some things that would fall within explicit definitions – particularly violence revolving around gender and women. Gender, as a logic that structures thinking, practice, policy and knowledge, is often ignored or bypassed in the intuitive ‘knowing’ of terrorism. Because of this bias, women are often assumed to be by definition irrelevant to the study (and practice) of terrorism, and therefore underrepresented as scholars and as subjects. Much recent scholarship characterised as the ‘state of the art’ in Terrorism Studies omits women altogether or casts them in traditional, one-dimensional gender roles. As we will discuss below, this matters when it comes to who is identified as ‘terrorists’. Feminist scholars have argued that some of the things that technically fit most definitions of terrorism are selectively left out of the label’s application. For example, ‘many feminists in social work and psychology have demonstrated the parallels between domestic violence and terrorism’, where domestic violence victims ‘face violence or the threat of violence to inculcate fear and to coerce or intimidate them into compliance’ (Sjoberg 2009, 71). For nearly four decades, Couples and Family Therapy scholars have argued domestic abuse, in which violence escalates and is meant to control and intimidate the spouse, is related to the ideological system and structure of patriarchy. Because this violence is ideological, holds political goals and aims to create terror, these scholars identify it as ‘patriarchal terrorism’ (see Dobash and Dobash 2004; Gentry 2015; Johnson 1995). Yet ‘patriarchal terrorism’ is part of a larger continuum of gendered violence, including rape (wartime and ‘everyday’), mass shootings (where women are the largest victim group), online and street harassment (where women are also the largest targets). This whole continuum is also often omitted from studying terrorism. Thus, it is important to pay attention to how patriarchy and misogyny shape understandings of political violence itself (Gentry 2020). Terrorism Studies often avoids studying the system that subjugates women, patriarchy, and the ideologies that patriarchy uses to ‘police and enforce’ women’s compliance with it, misogyny (Manne 2018, 20). Terrorism Studies not only ignores ‘patriarchal terrorism’ and related violence, but it also tends to dismiss misogynistic extremism or violence committed by White men.1 The misogynistic ideologies of the rising alt-right, in the United States and worldwide, have been only partially explored. Gender, patriarchy and misogyny all take a back seat to the far/alt-right’s antiSemitism and racism (see Auger 2020; Hoffman, Ware and Shapiro 2020; 375

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Sexuality, new terrorism, and counterterrorism activities Just days after the 9/11 attacks, posters were placed in New York depicting Osama bin Laden as being sodomised by the Empire State Building with the caption: ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. Puar and Rai (2002) argue that this is a demonstration of the US’ affronted masculinity asserting itself against the masculinity of not just bin Laden but the whole of Al Qaeda and potentially all of Islam. In their fascinating article, they create links between images such as the poster in New York with the activities of the War on Terror. For instance, it is well known that torture took place in Abu Ghraib, a prison in Iraq taken over by US forces to hold terrorist suspects during the war in Iraq. Much of this torture was sexualised and used to emasculate Iraqi men. Rape and forced masturbation were common. This extra-normative violence targeted the deeply held beliefs about sexuality in Iraqi culture and was meant to shame the violated men and women. What are other examples of how political violence uses gender norms regarding societal position and sexuality to undermine and demoralize the opposing side?

Sharpe 2000), even if the work acknowledges the centrality of procreation of White people and the targeting of abortion clinics, both of which fall squarely within misogyny. In addition to omitting these ‘parts’ of the ‘whole’ of studying terrorism, the gender blinders on Terrorism Studies often cause scholars to stop short of studying gender as a context for acts of ‘terrorism’. Terrorism and insurgency take place in a gendered world. Each person engaging in, or reacting to, actions classified as terrorism lives in a community structured by gender hierarchy within a gendered state in a gender-hierarchical international system. Thus, if Terrorism Studies fail to account for the complexities of gender, it provides an incomplete account of the factors that go into producing and countering political violence. This is because the omission of women is not only representational, but substantive. It accompanies and is accompanied by erasing values, character traits, ways of knowing, and methods of analysis associated with femininity. Scholars who study terrorism usually only use analytical tools associated with masculinities – objective ‘scientific’ research into terrorists’ (perceived) autonomous ‘rational’ behaviour. This work ignores the feminist realisation that all knowledge is both perspectival and political – including knowledge defining and understanding. As a result, traditional Terrorism Studies often neglects the political context of ‘terrorist’ actors, the role of emotion in their actions, their interdependence and the interdependence of ‘their’ and ‘our’ personal and political worlds.

GENDERED TERRORISTS One of the assumptions usually made is that terrorists are men. Gender stereotypes assume women’s innocence and non-violence, making a ‘female terrorist’ figure appear oxymoronic. When women work with ‘terrorist’ organisations or commit acts usually understood as ‘terrorism’, 376

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governments, media outlets, and even scholars react in myriad ways – from confusion to sensationalism. Though women now occupy many personal and professional spaces previously reserved for men, including soldiering, ‘woman’ as capable of violence which is by definition morally wrong appears to remain outside of femininity’s boundaries (Gentry and Sjoberg 2015). Still, in any definition of terrorism, there is a large and growing number of female terrorists both currently active and historically documented. There have been female suicide bombers in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Kenya, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan, to name a few. Women have committed acts classified as terrorist for organisations as diverse as the right-wing Ku Klux Klan (United States) and the left-wing Shining Path (Peru); the Red Army Faction (a Marxist-Leninist group in West Germany) and the Islamic State (Iraq/Syria); the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Elam (LTTE, a Tamil independence movement in Sri Lanka) and the Chechen separatist movement. Women have engaged in bombings, airplane hijackings, support operations, militant fighting, intelligence gathering and other activities for many organisations generally understood as terrorist. Several organisations labelled terrorists have explicit policies endorsing women’s rights (such as the LTTE, or the FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia]), but even organisations conservative on gender rights issues have recruited for women (such as the Islamic State). None of these, however, have fully integrated women (see Alison 2008; Cook and Vale 2018; Henshaw 2016; MacDonald 1988; Ness 2008; Parashar 2014; Tétreault 1994). Despite this high and growing level of involvement, ‘female terrorists’ remain largely invisible or sensationalised. When women commit acts of terrorism, they are often distanced both from ‘normal’ femininity and from agency in their actions. They are sometimes described as products of femininity gone awry, a move that allows the preservation of ideal femininity as pure and terrorism as masculine/masculinist. As our previous work has discussed, women terrorists are often characterised with gender-essentialist narratives about motherhood, monstrosity, or sexuality. Across these narratives, women’s violence is explained by flaws in their femininity: the need to avenge either infertility or harm to children, insanity, hypersexuality or lesbianism (Gentry and Sjoberg 2015). The presence of virtually no evidence that these motivations play any (much less a dominant) role in women’s terrorism does not decrease their popularity. Women’s terrorism is frequently characterised as psychological rather than political, and involuntary rather than agential. The stereotypical (new) ‘terrorist’, then, becomes a hypermasculine man, politically motivated but religiously inspired, aggressive, dominant and violent without the restraint that would come from civilisation, (liberal) citizenship and (state) strength. Seeing that women are ‘terrorists’, then, requires rethinking the concept. Terrorism has been theorised largely as the enterprise of men; including women changes how we think about how people (men and women) commit terrorism (see Parashar 2009; Sjoberg and Gentry 2008). 377

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Particularly, recognising women as terrorists argues for questioning the personal/political divide. While the literature implies political motivations for ‘male terrorists’ and psychological ones for ‘female terrorists’, seeing ‘male’ and ‘female’ terrorists suggests that all politically violent actors have personal and political motivations. Recognising women as terrorists also argues for interrogating the rational/emotional divide. ‘Terrorists’ are often framed as rational actors, while in the case of ‘women terrorists’, rationality is seen as driven by emotion (see, for example, Bloom 2011; Pape 2005). Deconstructing this dichotomy suggests that strategic and emotional considerations matter in understanding political violence. Making female ‘terrorists’ visible also suggests reformulating traditional notions of terrorist decision-making. ‘Terrorists’ are often seen as decision-makers, while ‘female terrorists’ are seen as lacking agency in their violence. Including both perspectives would see terrorists as never fully independent in their decision-making, but rarely without agency; they are, to different degrees, relationally autonomous (see Hirschmann 2009).

GENDERED COUNTERTERRORISMS Defining ‘counterterrorism’ is entirely dependent upon how terrorism is perceived. As the New Terrorism thesis shapes the perspectives of stakeholders, many counterterrorism and countering violent extremism policies reflect these influences. For example, many of the events of the ‘War on Terror’ are owed to New Terrorism and its relationship with Orientalism (see Tuastad 2003). Such a fundamentally flawed and biased perspective has influenced counterterrorism policy for the past two decades. Often, counterterrorism policies can be examined for constructions of gender and race. These racialised and gendered conceptions of all people associated with Islam have allowed for problematic international and domestic counterterrorism policies to emerge. Although only 1 out of 498 terrorist attacks in Europe was conducted by radical Islamist actors in 2006 (and 4 out of 583 in 2007; see Europol 2009), the key agenda in Western and global counterterrorism is combatting radical Islamist groups (see Cortright and Lopez 2007; Githens-Mazer and Lambert 2010; Romaniuk 2010). The influence of New Terrorism can be seen in a case study of the United Kingdom’s domestic counterterrorism policies. The UK’s CONTEST counterterrorism strategy The UK’s counterterrorism strategy is known as CONTEST and is based upon a rule of law and criminal prosecution approach. Its strategic framework is made up of four strands: Pursue (to stop attacks), Prevent (to stop radicalisation), Protect (to strengthen protection against attacks), and Prepare (to mitigate any attack’s impact). Prevent is the most widely contested and heavily criticised strategy. Prevent’s focus is to stop radicalisation and reduce support for terrorism. 378

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Radicalisation is defined as ‘a process of personal development whereby an individual adopts ever more extreme political or political-religious ideas and goals, becoming convinced that the attainment of these goals justifies extreme methods’ (Volintiru 2010, 7). Thus, its focus dovetails with that of extremism: the rationale behind a person’s acceptance of violence or violent ideology for political problems. In Prevent work, models of radicalisation are often conflated with ‘jihadi’ radical Islam and tied to the New Terrorism thesis (Borum 2011; Sedgwick 2010). Radicalisation is synonymous with irrationality, fanaticism and extremism – discourse that, through association with Orientalism, removes credibility, legitimacy and political agency from the subject. Therefore, extremism and radicalisation represent a racialisation of a central theme in counterterrorism (see Gentry 2020). The connection to New Terrorism is clear in Prevent’s focus and discourse. Prevent’s objectives include challenging the ideology behind violent extremism, disrupting extremists, and supporting vulnerable individuals and communities – all of which is tied in the original document to Islam (Home Office 2009). CONTEST focuses upon the radical Islamic threat to the UK, and argues that this is the most pressing, in spite of the historical threat from the nationalist Irish Republican Army and the growing threat from the far-right English Defence League. Thus it advocates for allying with the Muslim community in order to marginalise extremist voices. Yet, this is problematic as it has led to Muslims feeling monitored and manipulated by the police and community services (see Vertigans 2010). In 2017, a government official was quoted as saying, ‘It [Prevent] is really a counterIslamic strategy’ (Versi 2017). The racialisation intersects with gender. The UK has assumed that men are more likely to be radicalised and have begun to target women for introduction into the community (see Brown 2020; Gentry 2020, 146–149). It is assumed that because women are more submissive in these communities, they are not involved in the planning or implementation of political violence. These assumptions pose significant problems. By being focused on Muslim communities and radical Islamic violence, the UK government neglects other threats. Second, the strategy of allying with the Muslim community is backfiring as the communities feel essentialised as radicalisation risks (Ragazzi 2017). Third, some scholars argue that counter-radicalisation is not a remit of counterterrorism and conflates social services (allying with a community) and security operations (Richards 2011).

CONCLUSION Looking at terrorism and Terrorism Studies through gender lenses reveals that we miss many of the important dimensions about what terrorism is, who commits acts classifiable as terrorism and how and why counterterrorism works (or does not work) by neglecting its gendered dimensions. We, with other scholars of gender and terrorism, suggest that understanding terrorism as a gendered phenomenon in a gendered 379

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world increases the accuracy and sophistication of studying ‘terrorism’. An approach using gendered lenses can help to capture a number of previously obscured dimensions of discourses of terrorism and counterterrorism, including definitional ambiguity, sexism and Orientalism in the identification and treatment of the figure of the ‘terrorist’, and gender constructions that go into reading men and women, states and non-state actors. Throughout these themes, constructions of masculinities and femininities play a key role in making possible interpretations of terrorism across governments, intergovernmental organisations, research projects and classrooms. Discussion questions 1. Is the term ‘terrorism’ helpful and accurate? What are its intellectual and political implications? Can you define ‘terrorism’ usefully? How does the use of the word ‘extremism’ compare? 2. What does a ‘terrorist’ look like? Are terrorists gendered masculine or feminine? Can states be ‘terrorists’? 3. How do constructions of masculinity and femininity impact counterterrorism policies? How are gender norms and ideals written into counterterrorism? How (if at all) does gender analysis improve understanding, seeing or reacting to terrorism? Note 1. On the other hand, Terrorism Studies is highly cognisant of the misogynistic violence believed to be committed by brown men. The War on Terror in Afghanistan was partially justified to stop the Taliban’s abuse of women (see Shepherd 2006).

Further reading Åhäll, Linda and Laura J. Shepherd (eds). 2012. Gender, Agency and Political Violence (Rethinking Political Violence). London: Palgrave MacMillan. Brown, Katherine. 2020. Gender, Religion, Extremism: Finding Women in Anti-Radicalization. New York: Oxford University Press. Gentry, Caron E. 2020. Disordered Violence: How Gender, Race, and Heteronormativity Structure Terrorism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. MacDonald, Eileen. 1988. Shoot the Women First. London: Arrow Books. Puar, Jasbir K. and Amit S. Rai. 2002. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 20 (3): 117–138. Sjoberg, Laura and Caron Gentry (eds). 2011. Women, Gender, and Terrorism. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 380

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References Akram, S.M. 2000. “Orientalism Revisited in Asylum and Refugee Cases.” International Journal of Refugee Law 12 (1): 7–40. Alison, Miranda H. 2008. Women and Political Violence: Female Combatants in Ethno-National Conflict. Abingdon: Routledge. Auger, Vincent A. 2020. “Right-Wing Terror: A Fifth Global Wave?” Perspectives on Terrorism 14 (3): 565–587. Bellamy, Alex J. 2008. Fighting Terrorism: Ethical Dilemmas. London: Zed Books. Bloom, Mia. 2011. Bombshell. New York: Viking Press. Borum, Randy. 2011. “Radicalization into Violent Extremism II: A Review of Conceptual Models and Empirical Research.” Journal of Strategic Security 4 (4): 37–62. Brown, Katherine. 2020. Gender, Religion, Extremism: Finding Women in Anti-Radicalization. New York: Oxford University Press. Cook, Joana and Gina Vale. 2018. From Daesh to Diaspora. London: International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, King’s College London. Cortright, David and George A. Lopez (eds). 2007. Uniting Against Terror. London: MIT Press. Dobash, Russell P. and R. Emerson Dobash. 2004. “Women’s Violence to Men in Intimate Relationships: Working on a Puzzle.” British Journal of Criminology 44 (3): 324–349. Europol. 2009. “TE-SAT: EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report.” The Hague: European Police Office. Gentry, Caron E. 2020. Disordered Violence: How Gender, Race, and Heteronormativity Structure Terrorism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gentry, Caron. E. 2015. “Epistemological Failures: Everyday Violence in the West.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 8 (3): 362–382. Gentry, Caron E. and Laura Sjoberg. 2015. Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Rethinking Women’s Violence in Global Politics. London: Zed. Githens-Mazer, Jonathan and Robert Lambert. 2010. “Why Conventional Wisdom on Radicalization Fails,” International Affairs 86 (4): 889–901. Goertz, Stefan and Alexander E. Streitparth. 2019. The New Terrorism Geneva: Springer. Greene, Alan. 2017. “Defining Terrorism: One Size Fits All?” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 66 (2): 411–440. Henshaw, Alexis. 2016. Why Women Rebel: Understanding Women’s Participation in Armed Rebel Groups. London: Routledge. Hirschmann, Nancy. 2009. The Subject of Liberty: Toward A Feminist Theory of Freedom. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hoffman, Bruce. 1999. “Terrorism Trends and Prospects.” In Countering the New Terrorism, edited by Ian Lesser, John Arquilla, Bruce Hoffman, David F. Ronfeldt and Michele Zanini, 7–38. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation. 381

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Hoffman, Bruce. 2006. Inside Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press. Hoffman, Bruce, Jacob Ware, and Ezra Shapiro. 2020. “Assessing the Threat of Incel Violence.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 43 (7): 565–587. Home Office. 2009. The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering International Terrorism, 2009 (Prevent). Jackson, Richard. 2005. Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics, and Counter-Terrorism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jackson, Richard; Marie Breen Smyth; and Jeroen Gunning. 2009. Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda. London: Routledge. Johnson, Michael P. 1995. “Patriarchal Terrorism and Common Couple Violence: Two Forms of Violence against Women.” Journal of Marriage and Therapy 57 (2): 283–294. Khalid, Maryam. 2017. Gender, Orientalism, and the ‘War on Terror’. London: Taylor and Francis. Laqueur, Walter. 1996. “Postmodern Terrorism.” Foreign Affairs 75 (5): 24–36. Laqueur, Walter. 2000. The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction. London: Oxford University Press. Manne, Kate. 2018. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacDonald, Eileen. 1988. Shoot the Women First. London: Arrow Books. McCauley, Clark and Sophia Moskalenko. 2017. “Understanding Political Radicalization: The Two-Pyramids Model.” American Psychologist 72 (3): 205. Majozi, Nkululeko. 2018. “Theorizing the Islamic State: A Decolonial Perspective.” ReOrient 3 (2): 163–184. Nader, L. 1989. “Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Control of Women.” Cultural Dynamics 2 (3): 323–355. Narozhna, Tanya and W. Andy Knight. 2016. Female Suicide Bombings: A Critical Gender Approach. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nayak, Meghana. 2006. “Orientalism and ‘Saving’ U.S. State Identity after 9/11.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 8 (1): 42–61. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabeb J. 2014. “From a ‘Terrorist’ to a Global Icon: A Critical Decolonial Ethical Tribute to Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela of South Africa.” Third World Quarterly 35 (6): 905–921. Ness, Cindy (ed.). 2008. Female Terrorism and Militancy: Agency, Utility, and Organization. Abingdon: Routledge. Pape, Robert. 2005. Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. University of Chicago Press: Chicago. Parashar, Swati. 2009. “Feminist International Relations and Women Militants: Case Studies from Sri Lanka and Kashmir.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 22 (2): 235–256. Parashar, Swati. 2014. Women and Militant Wars: The Politics of Injury. London: Routledge.

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Parpart, Jane and Swati Parashar. 2019. Rethinking Silence, Voice, and Agency in Contested Gendered Terrains. New York: Taylor and Francis. Pateman, Carole. 1980. “The Disorder of Women.” Ethics 91 (1): 20–34. Peterson, V. Spike and Anne Sisson Runyan. 2009. Global Gender Issues in a New Millennium. Boulder: Westview Press. Puar, Jasbir K. and Amit S. Rai. 2002. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 20 (3): 117–138. Ragazzi, Francesco. 2017. “Countering Terrorism and Radicalisation: Securitising Social Policy?” Critical Social Policy 37 (2): 163–179. Richards, Anthony. 2011. “The Problem with ‘Radicalization’: The Remit of ‘Prevent’ and the Need to Refocus on Terrorism in the UK.” International Affairs 87 (1): 143–152. Richards, Anthony. 2015. Conceptualising Terrorism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richardson, Louise. 2006. What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Terrorist Threat. John Murray: London. Romaniuk, Peter. 2010. “Institutions as Sword and Shields: Multilateral Counter-Terrorism since 9/11.” Review of International Studies, 36: 591–613. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Vintage. Schmid, Alex P. and Albert J. Jongman. 2005. Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories, and Literature. London: Transaction. Sedgwick, Mark. 2010. “The Concept of Radicalization as a Source of Confusion.” Terrorism and Political Violence 22 (4): 479–494. Sharpe, Tanya Telfaire. 2000. “The Identity Christian Movement: Ideology of Domestic Terrorism.” Journal of Black Studies 30 (4): 604–623. Shepherd, Laura J. 2006. “Loud Voices Behind the Wall: Gender Violence and the Violent Reproduction of the International.” Millennium 34 (2): 377–401. Sjoberg, Laura. 2009. “Feminist Interrogations of Terrorism/Terrorism Studies.” International Relations 23 (1): 69–74. Sjoberg, Laura and Caron E. Gentry. 2008. “Profiling Terror: Gendering the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terror and Other Narratives.” Austrian Journal of Political Science 37 (2): 1–16. Taylor, Max, and John Horgan. 2006. “A Conceptual Framework for Addressing Psychological Process in the Development of the Terrorist.” Terrorism and Political Violence 18 (4): 585–601. Tétreault, Mary Ann (ed.) 1994. Women and Revolution in Africa, Asia, and the New World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Tickner, J. Ann. 1992. Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Global Security. New York: Columbia University Press. Tuastad, Dag. 2003. “Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis: Aspects of Symbolic Violence in the Middle East Conflict(s).” Third World Quarterly 24 (4): 591–599.

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Versi, Miqdaad. 2017. “The Latest Prevent Figures Show Why the Strategy Needs an Independent Review.” The Guardian. 10 November 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/10/preventstrategy-statistics-independent-review-home-office-muslims. Vertigans, Stephen. 2010. “British Muslims and the UK Government’s ‘War on Terror’ Within: Evidence of a Clash of Civilizations or Emergent De-Civilizing Processes?” The British Journal of Sociology 61 (1): 26–44. Volintiru, Clara. 2010. “Towards a Dynamic Model of Terrorist Radicalization.” EIR Working Papers No. 27. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ ssrn.1747690 Waltz, Kenneth. 1959. Man, the State, and War. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Violence Swati Parashar Political violence and its injuries are ubiquitous and recognisable to people who are perpetrators, witnesses and survivor-victims, often all at the same time. One could argue that within the patriarchal universe we inhabit, violence is the tool that shapes gendered bodies and experiences; it is a politics of ‘injury’ (physical, psychological, emotional, cultural), the impact of which is felt beyond individual harm. It is the method that societies and polities use to produce particular kinds of ‘men’ and ‘women’, govern gendered bodies, protect their gendered order and ultimately retain their existing privileges or acquire new ones. However, who gets to speak about violence and how its discourses are constructed in the media, in scholarly spaces and in different geographies are critical to understanding these injuries and their impact. As Agathangelou and Ling (2004) remind us: ‘those at the margins of world politics understand violence. They negotiate with it daily. Yet elites exploit violence to affix collective identities, forge a common political project, and subsume dissent. In this way, they deny opportunities for transformation in exchange for more violence’. Nowhere is this more visible than in social media, with its selective outrage and solidarities with grieving communities and those affected by violence. However, we must ask ourselves what and who constitutes violence, how we talk about violence, and in whose interest. Let us consider two examples in recent times. The New Zealand Mosque attacks in March 2019 killed 51 people and injured 40, making headline news for days (Ellis and Muller 2020). The resilience of the communities and post-attack discussions made national news beyond New Zealand. But think about the numerous attacks in Afghanistan including the bombings in May 2021 in a predominantly Shia Hazara area in Kabul which killed 85 people and injured 147, or the numerous attacks in African countries including the October 2017 truck bombings that killed more than 500 people and injured 316 others (Maley 2021; DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-30

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Muibu and Nickels 2017). Beyond the statistics, these incidents did not even make media headlines in most cases, consigned to the realm of ‘normal’ occurrences in some geographies and with certain kinds of people (who, if not deserving, are certainly ‘used’ to a life of violence). Or think about a different kind of violence – such as the starvation deaths in Yemen which do not make any news at all (Graham 2020). How do we understand and unpack violence itself using feminist perspectives, along with its myriad manifestations, complexities and impact? The next section maps the major contributions of feminist scholars to the study of violence. This is followed by a discussion about gendered myths around violence, especially those that either normalise or exceptionalise violence. The chapter then looks at gendered erasures and the coloniality of violence, paying attention to colonial and imperial histories of people and societies that are erased in our contemporary understandings of violence. Certain kinds of violence (marked by colonial understandings) are unreported and understudied and the next section looks at the ‘slow’ and ‘invisible’ violence of famines or starvation deaths. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how certitudes are avoidable to make sense of different kinds of violence, and to rethink accountability and justice in a world where violence is pervasive and always gendered.

THE FEMINIST JOURNEY SO FAR In the last three decades or so, feminists have written extensively about the need to understand violence in non-conventional ways and centre people in analyses of its impact and origins (Parashar 2013). These feminist accounts draw attention to how violence affects women, their experiences as victims, survivors, anti-war activists and as cultural/ national symbols of violent contestations. Consider the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: what were projected as wars between enemies (the US against the Taliban/Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein) soon reflected the violent contestations over different gendered orders. Both sides claimed to be waging the war to liberate women from either the constraints of decadent Western modernity or fundamentalist, authoritarian Islamist regimes. Moreover, both sides also projected a certain masculinity to their preferred audiences. For example, the gun wielding Taliban militants ensured that women were erased from public life and were reinstated in the perfect ‘Islamic’ household in full purdah, performing chores suitable to their religiously sanctioned gender identity. They not only wielded full control over women’s lives and bodies but also governed public morality and private spaces. Their masculinity was defined through a very narrow interpretation of Islam that gave them privileges and power through violent militarism. On the other hand, American masculinity was severely threatened by the 9/11 violent terrorist attacks, resulting in a sense of emasculation and loss. The recovery of masculinity became a political project 386

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in which the Bush administration played a key role. Only a spectacular military response to the 9/11 attacks – witnessed through the invasion of Afghanistan – would suffice and purge the world of the evil Taliban terrorists. The good American soldiers would not only serve their country and people, but also the women of Afghanistan, liberating them from the control of the Taliban. That is what civilised White men do anyway, ‘save the brown women from brown men’ (Spivak 1994, 93)! In this dominant narrative, there was no space to listen to women or their aspirations, until feminists began to write about issues that affected them, and about the gendered order that is upheld and challenged in such violent encounters. Feminist research has highlighted the magnitude of sexual violence (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013). Emasculating ‘the enemy’ and impregnating ‘enemy women’ are an established form of psychological and physical violence during wars. In the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh, for example, it is estimated that 300,000 women were subjected to sexual violence by the Pakistan army, as a documented war strategy adopted at the highest levels of decision-making. Bina D’Costa argues that the women ‘were raped by members of the Pakistan Army in a strategic attempt to target Bengali ethnic identity’ (D’Costa 2011, 19). Feminist works in different disciplines have made the stories of the raped Bengali women accessible by documenting the experiences of these women and pointing out the challenges they faced after the war, including during the hearings of the International Crimes Tribunal (D’Costa 2011). From cases during the World Wars to former Yugoslavia, from Sudan to the Democratic Republic of Congo, from the Rohingya Genocide to the civil wars in Nepal and Sri Lanka, from the Islamic State wars in Syria and Iraq to localised conflicts in Kashmir and Chechnya, sexual violence has been deployed by all sides. Comparatively less written about but equally important are cases of sexual violence against men and boys that feminists have also highlighted through sophisticated methodological tools and analyses. These experiences are underreported, precisely because of the gendered order that thrives on preserving militarised masculinity, and not on narratives of emasculation (Féron 2018; Zalewski et al 2018). Another area of neglected research that has been undertaken by feminists studying violence is the involvement of and impact on children. The reality of thousands of children being recruited into armed militias and as sex slaves got some public attention with the release of a documentary on the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by warlord Joseph Kony in Northern Uganda in 2012 (Oloya 2013). However, this is a much wider phenomenon that demonstrates not just the abuse of vulnerable children, but also the ways in which children navigate political violence and their aftermath (D’Costa 2016). Although deeply invested in uncovering the stories of before, within and beyond violence that bring enormous suffering to women and children, feminist analyses move beyond the narratives of victimhood. Those narratives have been questioned and nuanced in several feminist works, which have highlighted the role of women as planners and perpetrators 387

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of violence. There have always been women fighters at the frontline, senior women military strategists and women heads of state who have taken decisions about going to war. The inclusion of women in armed violence in different roles is either scripted through an appeal to women’s empowerment or to a call for traditional feminine notions of sacrifice, nation and motherhood (Parashar 2014). Women’s participation in and support for combat roles, in state and non-state militaries, is a growing phenomenon and yet is dependent on gender norms that vary from culture to culture. The reasons why Tamil women fought in the war in Sri Lanka were very different from women who contributed to the anti-colonial war in Algeria, to the militant resistance in Kashmir or to the Maoist resistance in Nepal. A number of women continue to participate in the violence and vigilantism of right-wing groups, even advocating the use of extreme violence and rape against women perceived as the ‘enemy’ (Parashar 2015, 105). Rather than dismiss these as cases of women performing militarised masculinity, feminist works highlight the prevalence of militarised femininities, which may perform tasks that are seemingly patriarchal, but with different motivations and objectives. In many such cases of women demonstrating militarised femininity, the gendered order is subverted, sometimes causing uneasy ruptures and paradigm shifts: the culture of the military changes, traditional gender norms are set aside and women find themselves in decision-making positions, not just as victims. This does not mean that militarised masculinity disappears, but militarised femininity challenges gender stereotypes (men are violent, women are peaceful) and reclaims some ground for nuance and for the analysis of women’s complex and multi-layered identities. A number of liberal state militaries today, for example, are making the case that women should serve in the armed forces. This may or may not change the culture of war but will definitely mean that militaries reliant on patriarchal cohesion and male bonding will be subjected to new gender norms and greater representation of women (MacKenzie 2015). It is impossible to not think about the consequences of these changes on issues of sexual violence and LGBTQ rights in the military, and on societies that restrict the participation of women in some arenas. While mainstream analysis continues to focus on actors, decisionmaking, methods and outcomes of political violence, feminists have consistently focussed on the category of gender and its relationship to the ‘everyday’. The most important contribution in the gendered rereading of violence by feminists has been the focus on militarism and masculinity (Duriesmith 2017). While this link is obvious and perhaps overstated, recent feminist and postcolonial works have unpacked the relationship among the state, citizens and militarism. Discourses about security and development in postcolonial contexts have led to ‘excessive militarism’ that thrives on the shared consensus between the state and citizens that security is a collective enterprise in which the material and affective labour of militarism must be performed by both sides (Parashar 2018).

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Masculinity plays a critical role in such expressions of excessive militarism, and both states and citizens adopt masculinist vocabularies, supporting violence against those they see as the ‘enemy’ or the ‘other’. States filled with ‘postcolonial anxiety’, at the slightest questioning of their sovereignty and territorial integrity, may demonstrate excessive militarism to violently police non-conforming citizens, who must be mainstreamed. Citizens, on the other hand, might embrace military logics and military ethos, both to contest the state’s violence and to confer legitimacy on the state and secure development benefits. The case of the Maoist/Naxal conflict in India is a suitable example, where the state treats Maoist insurgents as wayward citizens, who need to be – militarily – brought to the ‘mainstream’. The state’s masculinity is in direct contestation with the militarised masculinity of a section of the people who feel marginalised. Women have participated in such guerrilla warfare, not perhaps in the hope of complete emancipation from patriarchal constraints, but to alleviate their material and living conditions that make them vulnerable to state violence (Parashar 2016). A focus on masculinity (embodied by the state and its institutions, by vigilante/guerrilla groups, by resistance fighters and by ordinary citizens) enables an emphasis on the fact that most wars are man-made, and militarisation and masculinity are co-constitutive. Recent works in the field have challenged the idea of hegemonic masculinity, arguing for more alternative masculinities that can challenge the efficacy of wars and the violence that they necessitate (Messerschmidt 2018). However, militarised masculinity does not fully capture the discourses around violence that deal with complex colonial histories and inequalities. In some sense, as we focus on the gendered narratives of violence, we must not lose sight of the fact that in our studies are hidden erasures and marginalisations that perpetuate gendered myths about violence.

GENDERED MYTHS ARE COMFORTING Depersonalised, normalised gendered myths about violence are comforting and preserve the societal status quo. For a very long time, we believed in the idea of man–violence and women–peace, until feminist research successfully challenged these binaries. Moreover, mass violence since the twentieth century has become more organised, impersonal, technically sophisticated and psychologically framed by distance and denial. We are not connected to either the objects that kill or those whose lives we value less, who ‘deserve’ to be killed or are collateral damage. This was powerfully demonstrated in Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Adolf Eichmann as an ordinary, dull, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). ‘It would have been

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so much more comforting to believe Eichmann was a monster’ (White 2018). Arendt offers an understanding of how the ‘exceptional’ can be ‘normalised’, as a means to understand the context of mass violence and the motivations of its individual perpetrators. She was criticised for her views, but since then feminists have demonstrated the limits of our continuous search for psychosocial monsters as perpetrators of violence and their hapless victims. We see masculine figures with deviant behaviour as a normal mode of existence. For a very long time, women were not even considered perpetrators of violence, till feminist research busted this myth (Sjoberg and Gentry). Another good example is the film made by the BBC on the 2016 Delhi Gang Rape called, India’s Daughter. The perpetrators, interviewed in non-transparent ways and with questionable ethics, were normalised to show how Indian men navigate issues of gender, class, masculinity and sexuality. They were normalised in problematic ways in the film to also demonstrate that India is a dangerous place for women; sexual violence is rampant because Indian men inherently think in violent misogynist ways. Normalising the exceptional, or the politics of normalisation itself, is comforting as it offers a way to embrace juridical challenges and obstacles to real justice. Normalisation enables us to locate violence ‘out there’, in Global South geographies such as the DRC, India, Jamaica and Afghanistan. Consider that a widely prevalent sense of emasculation has now resulted in normalising a ‘reclaimed’ masculinity through what is termed ‘populism’ of a violent kind we had never seen before. Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’, Modi’s ‘Make in India’, Imran Khan’s ‘Naya Pakistan’, Xi Jinping’s ‘Chinese Dream’, Erdoğan’s ‘New Turkey’: these are all invocations of a glorious past and the march into a future where the bounties of globalisation have been completely exhausted; replaced by inward looking, xenophobic masculinist cultural nationalisms, unleashing gendered violence on their own people and beyond. There is lamentation of the loss of ‘religion’ and strong leadership, of good traditional values, of greatness of ancient cultures and civilisational heritage and of status in the international society of states. We have normalised this violence as a by-product of populism, the idea that there is a contest between ‘the pure people’ and their unified will, and ‘the corrupt elite’. Feminists have demonstrated how violence is interlinked in many ways, operating along the war and peace continuum (Väyrynen, Parashar, Féron and Confortini 2021). War violence is linked to sexual violence, domestic violence, exploitation and abuse. D’Costa and Braithwaite (2015) have demonstrated how in many postcolonial societies, both violent actions and violent imaginaries cascade – from crime to war, to more war and to state violence such as torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial execution. Gerlach (2010) argues that extremely violent societies are not violent in some cultural or essential way. Rather, societies transition in and out of extremely violent periods of their histories as a result of crises. Violence cascades across space and time from one kind of violence to another. 390

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GENDERED ERASURES AND COLONIAL VIOLENCE Chris Cuomo (1996), talking about ‘war’ as a violent system, aptly reminds us, Philosophical attention to war has typically appeared in the form of justifications for entering into war, and over appropriate activities within war. The spatial metaphors used to refer to war as a separate, bounded sphere indicate assumptions that war is a realm of human activity vastly removed from normal life, or a sort of happening that is appropriately conceived apart from everyday events in peaceful times.

This applies to all other forms of political violence where clear beginnings and endings are envisaged and the violent act itself is seen as an event or series of occurrences. From a feminist point of view that takes gender into account, it becomes all the more relevant to see political violence as an everyday presence than merely an event with a specific time line and without entry and exit points. We turn to Das (1996) as she argues that violence is not simply in the events (rapes, brutality, riots) but also in what people had to witness. As we reflect on the certitudes about normality, banality and quotidian that seem to dominate our understandings of violence, it is important to remember that we continue to erase histories of people and societies, especially colonialism and imperialism, in order to justify violence as a contemporary affliction devoid of context. For much of the Global South, former colonies and now postcolonies, you cannot understand contemporary violence without its antecedents, without accounting for colonial continuities and historical legacies. History should not be understood here in the ordinary, official, disciplinary sense but histories as ‘the past that lives and the past with which most people still live, at least in societies not dominated by the historical consciousness, are often dependent on shared and private memories that bypass the historical mode of reasoning’ (Nandy 2001, 21). Violence is not a product but a process in these societies where the violent histories of colonialism are gradually being erased out of analysis of the contemporary ‘political’. Postcolonial scholars contend that we are still doing body counts of colonialism’s violence so the epistemic and discursive must address the materiality of violence. As Arendt would say, ‘What a risky business to tell the truth on a factual level without theoretical and scholarly embroidery’ (cited in Heller 2015, 2). Can we consider erasures and silences as violence when we are still looking at injured, violated, exterminated, disappearing, mourning, lifeless, rotting, suffering bodies? And are bodily injuries only about blood and war, sudden deaths on the temporal scale? What about the slow starvation of bodies, deaths, displacement and the negation of the gendered self that occurs in geographies that matter less, and through the legacies of colonial encounters? In the colonial era, White spaces were created overnight and hundreds of cultures and traditions of knowledge were wiped out as obsolete or redundant. More than 391

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200 million people were killed in the last century to set a new track record in human violence (Nandy 2001, 22). Even more important, we brought to the violence new institutional, technological and psychological skills and immense creativity. In fact, we reordered our entire existence to acquire better capacities to kill. We are still excavating the dead of colonialism as is evident in the case of Canada where unmarked graves of Indigenous children have left the country reeling under the impact of its own hidden colonial violence (Austen and Bilefsky 2021). Violence of the colonies was highly gendered, as colonial masculinity took charge of women who needed saving from the emasculated men. It was in this context that Ashis Nandy, in The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (1983), highlighted the gendered impact of colonial violence on both coloniser and colonised. Nandy argued that Gandhian movement was unique in its willingness and capacity to embrace the androgeneity and emasculation, rejecting European terms of emasculation. Gandhi stands rejected in his own home country now, with the belief among large sections of the youth that Gandhi’s emasculation was neither emulative nor desirable. More masculine heroes have been resurrected for the cause of a muscular nation-state that relies on ancient glories and articulation of a highly exclusive and homogenous nationalism. This reordering of colonial masculinities was manifested in high levels of violence against women. Colonialism meant a rereading and recasting of religion and society in which violence against women and minorities, policing of certain kinds of bodies is central to the colonial project. We often hear responses that violence is embedded in those cultures and precolonial gender norms (which apparently did not change with the arrival of colonialism) and the current neoliberal quick fix of ‘gender equality’ and ‘human rights’ will set things right. The stories of indentured labour in the Caribbean and the violence against Indo-Caribbean women are a good example here, violence that travelled with them away from ‘home’ and into a foreign land. As cultural bearers of the coolie identity, women were responsible for upholding gender norms as prescribed in the epics and myths; if they deviated they were treated as ‘fallen’ women and subjected to extreme forms of violence. Domestic violence became Guyana and Trinidad’s most serious human rights violation, most common form of violence. Justice was often denied because of the needs of indenture (lack of work meant more violence; displacement and identity crisis meant more violence; emigration and male insecurity, impunity, corruption and above all the political economy of colonialism all contributed to more violence against women). Men could not be punished as they were needed on the plantations, and battered women were labelled depraved and deserving of the beating by colonial magistrates. Any claims to asylum, as in the cases of Indo-Trinidadian women, were made in the language Western benefactors liked to hear: the battered brown women, who needed saving from the brown men! The colonial justice system had no time or place for women as it was invested in protecting men who provided bulk of the indentured labour. The coolie woman’s battered body was the site on which coolie and 392

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colonial masculinities played out their politics of contestation, resistance and dissent (Bahadur 2015). Feminist postcolonial scholars are drawing attention to the gendered violence of colonialism, but there are still other forms of violence that have been erased from public memory or reframed as natural disasters or crisis. Deborah Thomas’s powerful work on Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (2011) is a reminder about the violence in colonial locations as the complicated result of a structural history of colonialism and underdevelopment, not a cultural characteristic passed from one generation to the next. Citizenship is embodied; scholars must be attentive to history and political economy. Thomas mobilises a concept of reparations as a framework for rethinking justice. ‘What is needed to generate real justice, in other words, is a sustained conversation about history – and about the place of that past in the present, in terms other than those of righteous blame and liberal guilt’. Forgiveness is only sometimes restorative but never reparative, she reminds us. With violence, we have to dig deep as feminists, holding people and patriarchy accountable, and demanding reparations. Nothing less will suffice.

INVISIBLE, ‘SLOW’ VIOLENCE The stories above shatter our myths about the public-private divide and challenge how we understand violence at the intersections of these domains, or inside and outside them. The attention to violence in public discourse is enhanced by the extensive media coverage of war-affected landscapes, injured and mutilated bodies, blood, gore and displacement of people, all of which demonstrate the rupture of ‘normalcy’ and exceptionality. What does not get as much media/scholarly attention and does not make it to the public discourse are certain other kinds of violence and mass atrocities where the death and suffering are neither a rupture of everyday life, nor a body count that can be routinely sensationalised and evoked in the nurturing of political constituencies and in demands for accountability. These are slow, unaesthetic and ordinary deaths of ordinary lives. Consider, for example, that we pay attention to war bodies and fleeing refugees from Iraq and Syria, but very little attention is given to emaciated and ‘feminised’ bodies dying of hunger and famine in Yemen. Why have we not paid attention to hunger deaths although hunger is on the rise again in the world? In 2016, 100 million people faced crisis-level food insecurity, an increase of 20 million from the year before. In 2017, famine was declared in South Sudan and famine risk alerts were issued for Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen (FAO 2017). Between 1870 and 2010, at least 100 million people died in large-scale famines (de Waal 2018, 5), indicating that mass starvation should be seen as mass violence on a par with genocides and wars. With 13 million at risk of starvation in Yemen, 85,000 children have died. And we have reduced these deaths to bodies and statistics. What factors contribute to famines, or starvation deaths not being recognised as acts of political violence involving human agency and accountability? 393

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It is important to take into account that we have over emphasised certain kinds of war violence (rape, direct combat, disappearances) at the cost of those others that are perhaps not ‘masculine’, ‘exceptional’ or ‘mainstream’ enough. Famines and hunger deaths are associated with wars and conflicts, a ‘slow’ kind of violence that is hardly ever reported, except as a humanitarian crisis, not as war inflicted on certain populations. A careful study will suggest that more people globally are threatened by food insecurity and famines than by death in direct combat or civilian attacks. Feminists, first appropriately suggested that wars are understudied compared to peace, then they themselves overstudied certain wars and war bodies, at the cost of others. This selective focus in critical war studies contributes to the hierarchical gendered world, where certain deaths hold more political purchase than others. In this context, the most recent Nobel Peace Prize to the World Food Programme is a timely and astute reminder to all of us who study war and peace from a gender lens, that certain kinds of war deaths and suffering, such as those afflicted by hunger and famines are yet to find a place in our debates and writings about violence. Mass violence like famines is rarely considered violence; famine could be a by-product of violence but it is basically outside the sphere of violence as it is conventionally defined. Moreover, famines are represented through feminised images of famine victims and survivors, of emaciated bodies and shrinking human forms, of women and children on display. The pictures are not considered violent enough themselves and mostly represent the household as the site of public violence. The public gaze is drawn to the household, extricating from the realm of the ‘political’ the mass starvation deaths that have occurred in wars, or through colonialism. This representation of starvation crimes is also deflected to inaccessible and invisible geographies in the Global South that are not ‘strategic’ spaces for possible interventions. Hence, most commemorated are famines in Ireland and Ukraine, but not those in Africa or Asia. Famines or starvation deaths can be understood from feminist perspectives as by-products of ‘real’ political violence or acts of war (Ferguson, 2018; Summers, 2018). By treating famines as outside of violence, the human agency involved in engendering conditions of famine and also famine relief efforts are invisibilised or rendered politically inconsequential. In their important research, Parashar and Orjuela (2021) have argued that famines should be understood as a form of ‘slow’ violence, relevant for both peace researchers and feminist scholars who study violence and its effects, as well as issues of memorialisation and transitional justice.

CONCLUSION In conclusion, the gendered stories of violence point to varying roles that men and women perform, the embeddedness and subversion of gender hierarchies and the preservation of the gendered social order where

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violence appears to be inevitable, and perhaps even natural. As discussed in the preceding paragraphs, feminist knowledges have been critical in highlighting the various forms of violence and injuries inflicted on a vast section of people, those that are hidden, erased, ‘slow’ and less spectacular. Feminists have ably demonstrated through their research and activism that violence is ‘normalised’ through gendered discourses and practices. However, it is very important to acknowledge differences in feminist approaches, epistemologies and methods, enabling us to bust every possible myth that normalises war in human history or privileges one kind of suffering over another. Can we then reimagine a world without the relevance and spectacle of violence? Das (2002) argues in Violence and Translation, we have to live with some forms of uncertainty and violence. To accept that is not to be fatalistic. Thinking that we are going to somehow exclude every form of pain seems to me to be a very dangerous way of thinking. I am for a version of moral perfectionism that is rooted in acknowledging the flesh and blood character of our being in the world.

This chapter has tried to show that discussions on violence have produced discursive certitudes that have become obstacles in the pursuit of peace and justice. It has provided an overview of the ways in which it is possible to reimagine the different conceptualisations of violence and introduced the readers to the idea that violence is always gendered and injury inducing in all its forms. Feminist approaches emphasise self-reflexivity and we need to continuously channel feminist curiosity to throw light on violence that is hidden, that misses our attention and that needs to be highlighted, as we reimagine and rebuild a world where accountability is established and justice matters for sustainable peace.

Discussion questions 1. What is violence and how is it gendered? Can we imagine a violence free society? 2. How do gendered bodies become repositories of culture, honour and nationalism in times of violence? Explain with examples. 3. What are some other examples of ‘slow’ and ‘feminised’ violence, which do not receive adequate public and scholarly attention?

Further reading Ní Aoláin, Fionnuala, Naomi Cahn, Dina Francesca Haynes and Nahla Valji (eds). 2017. The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Tarja Väyrynen, Swati Parashar, Élise Féron, and Catia C. Confortini (eds). 2021. Routledge Handbook on Feminist Peace Research. New York and London: Routledge. http://www.icrc.org/eng/war-and-law/protected-persons/women/index. jsp https://thepolisproject.com/category/violence-lab/#.YOMXxx2xU_U http://www.genderandwar.com/ References Agathangelou, Anna M. and L.H.M. Ling. 2004. “Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence and Desire from September 11.” International Studies Quarterly 48 (3): 517–538. Austen, Ian and Dan Bilefsky. 2021. “Hundreds More Unmarked Graves Found at Former Residential School in Canada.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/world/canada/indigenouschildren-graves-saskatchewan-canada.html Bahadur, Gaiutra. 2016. Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Braithwaite, John and Bina D’Costa. 2015. “Cascades Across an ‘Extremely Violent Society’: Sri Lanka.” International Journal of Conflict and Violence 9 (1): 1–14. Cuomo, Chris J. (1996), War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence. Hypatia, 11: 30–45 Das, Veena. 2002. “Violence and Translation.” Anthropological Quarterly 75 (1): 105–112. Das, Veena. 1996. “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain.” Daedalus 125 (1): 67–91. D’Costa, Bina. 2011. Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia. New York: Routledge. D’Costa, Bina (ed). 2016. Children and Violence: Politics of Conflict in South Asia. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Duriesmith, David. 2017. Masculinity and New War. London: Routledge. Ellis, Gavin and Denis Muller. 2020. “The Proximity Filter: The Effect of Distance on Media Coverage of the Christchurch Mosque Attacks.” Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online 15 (2): 332–348. Eriksson Baaz, Maria and Maria Stern. 2013. Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems in the Congo and Beyond. London and New York: Zed Books. Ferguson, Jane. 2018. “Is Intentional Starvation the Future of War?” The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/is-yemenintentional-starvation-thefuture-of-war. Féron, Élise. 2018. Wartime Sexual Violence against Men: Masculinities and Power in Conflict Zones. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Gerlach, Christian. 2010. Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 396

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Graham, Laura. 2020. “Prosecuting Starvation Crimes in Yemen’s Civil War.” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 52: 267–286. MacKenzie, Megan. 2015. Beyond the Band of Brothers: The US Military and the Myth that Women Can’t Fight. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maley, William. 2021. “Terrorism and Insurgency in Afghanistan.” In Terrorism, Security and Development in South Asia, edited by M. Raymond Izarali and Dalbir Ahlawat. London and New York: Routledge. Messerschmidt, James W. 2018. Hegemonic Masculinity: Formulation, Reformulation, and Amplification. Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield. Muibu, Daisy and Benjamin P. Nickels. 2017. “Foreign Technology or Local Expertise? Al-Shabaab’s IED Capability.” CTC Sentinel 10 (10): 33–37. Nandy, Ashis. 2001. “The Twentieth Century: The Ambivalent Homecoming of Homo Psychologicus.” Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies 33 (1): 21–33. Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Oloya, Opiyo. 2013. Child to Soldier: Stories from Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Parashar, Swati. 2013. “What Wars and ‘War Bodies’ Know About International Relations.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26 (4): 615–630. Parashar, Swati. 2014. Women and Militant Wars: The Politics of Injury. London: Routledge. Parashar, Swati. 2015. “Anger, War and Feminist Storytelling.” In Emotions, Politics and War, edited by Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory, 93–107. London: Routledge. Parashar, Swati. 2016. “Women and the Matrix of Violence: A Study of the Maoist Insurgency in India.” In Researching War: Feminist Methods, Ethics and Politics, edited by Annick T.R. Wibben. London: Routledge. Parashar, Swati. 2018. “Discursive (In)Securities and Postcolonial Anxiety: Enabling Excessive Militarism in India.” Security Dialogue 49 (1–2): 123–135. Parashar, Swati and Camilla Orjuela. 2021. “Famines: ‘Slow’ Violence and Gendered Memorialisation.” In Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research, edited by Tarja Väyrynen, Swati Parashar, Élise Féron and Catia Cecilia Confortini. London: Routledge. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1994. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Summers, Hannah. 2018. “Yemen on Brink of ‘World’s Worst Famine in 100 years’ if War Continues.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian. com/global-development/2018/oct/15/yemen-on-brink-worst-famine100-years-un 397

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Thomas, Deborah A. 2011. Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica. Durham: Duke University Press. White, Thomas. 2018. “What did Hannah Arendt Really Mean by the Banality of Evil?” Aeon Journal. https://aeon.co/ideas/ what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-the-banality-of-evil Zalewski, Marysia, Paula Drumond, Elisabeth Prügl and Maria Stern (eds). 2018. Sexual Violence Against Men in Global Politics. New York: Routledge.

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Note: Page reference with “n” denote endnotes.

9/11 terrorist attacks 16, 386–387 50 Years is Enough 81 ableism 110–111, 168, 170–172, 174–175 Abu Ghraib 376 Abya Yala 141, 147n2 access to water: and gender 267–268; for irrigation 267–268; and land ownership 267 activism: feminist 77–80, 155–158; menstrual 115–119; as sextremism 114; women 77–80 aesthetics 94–105; feminist 99–103; and global politics 96–99; politics 95–96 Afghanistan 307, 334, 385–387, 390; female suicide bombers in 377; gender justice in 113; Taliban, takeover by 13, 18n3; Taliban-ruled 355; United States invasion of 88n6, 356; US troops in 14, 16; War on Terror in 380n1 African Development Bank (ADF) 197 African National Congress (ANC) 374 agency 275–276, 280, 284 Agenda 21 183–185, 187, 269 Agreement on Agriculture 264 agricultural land 265–266; corporate acquisition of 268; gender gap in access to 266–267 agriculture: in Global South 264–268; women role in 265 al-Qaeda 16, 356, 376, 386 Amnesty International 86 Anthropocene 181, 186–188, 190 anti-Asian racism 5 anti-feminism 154–155, 160 Anti-Homosexuality Act (Uganda) 335

antimilitarist feminist approaches 294–296 Apartheid regime 374 Arab Spring 83 Argentina 67, 69, 116–117, 359 art 94–105; as feminist politics of resistance 103; as feminist politics of transformation 103; see also aesthetics artificial intelligence (AI) 155, 160–161 Asian-American feminism 50 Asian Development Bank (ADB) 197 Asian tsunami 98 Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Enloe) 10, 12, 18 #BeenRapedNeverReported hashtag 156 Beijing Declaration 269 #BeingFemaleinNigeria hashtag 158 Berlin Wall, fall of 11 Black feminism 50, 331 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests 9, 66, 341, 359 ‘Black Summer’ 3–6 Black women 363; and Black Lives Matter 359; erasure of 49; and intersectionality 345; and legal justice 48; see also women bodies: in science 69–71; in social movements 66–69; that matter 71 body politics 109–119; feminist 109– 111, 113, 115–116, 118, 119; in global feminist struggles 110–111; menstrual activism 115–119; naked protests 112–115; trends in 110–111; see also politics Bretton Woods 212

399

Index

British International Studies Association 11 Buddhism 180, 359 Burke, Tarana 157, 163n1 bushfires 3–4 Butler, Judith 62, 63, 72n1, 330, 336, 340 Canada 11, 114, 116, 133–135 Can the Subaltern Speak? (Spivak) 52, 344–345 capitalism 234; and gay identity 331; global 348–349; industrial 260, 332; neoliberal 269; and transphobia 333 care 125–126; and migration 124–128; in time of COVID-19 133–135; transnational political economy of 130–131 care capital 130 care ethics 320–322 care labour 130; see also care work care migration 128 care work 124–135; care and migration 124–128; COVID-19 pandemic and migrant 131–135; feminised 281; and international migration 282; migrant 128–135; and racial politics 281; see also care labour carrier sanctions 279 Catholicism 357–358 Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) 197 charities 172–173, 175 Chicana feminism 50 children: and colonial violence 392; deaths in Yemen due to starvation 393; and Islamic State 357; mortality rates of 211; and political violence 387 China: land documentation 267; modern 303; one child policy 307 China Development Bank (CDB) 197 Chthulucene 188 cis women 110, 111; and nationalism 307 citizenship: colonial politics of 346–347; gendered politics of 346–347; racial politics of 346–347 civil society organisations 214 classical realism 65 climate change 4–5, 189–190; anthropocentric 71; and cross-border displacement 283; gendered dimensions of 190; and migration 282–283; social aspect of 190 climate denialism 3 climate justice 189–190 Coalition to End the Third World Debt 81

400

Cohn, Carol 69–71, 293 Cold War 11, 52, 85, 213, 356; end of 85; and gender 310; ‘tourist attractions’ 12 Collectif 95 Maghreb-Egalité 85 Collins, Patricia Hill 48, 50, 320 colonialism 341–342, 344, 391–392; consigning 341; gendered violence of 393; vs. imperialism 342; and international health 213; and international law 244; see also colonial politics coloniality 349; defined 342; overview 340 colonial politics: of citizenship 346–347; of migration 346–347; see also colonialism colonial violence 391–393; see also violence Combahee River Collective 50 comfort women 362, 365n4; see also women Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) 82, 88n4 Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee) 250–251 commodification of religion 360 communism 301, 361 Conference on Human Rights, 1993 81 conflict-related sexual violence 249 conflict victims’ movement 146 CONTEST (counterterrorism strategy) 378–379 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) 79, 111, 250–251, 277–278, 341 counterterrorism 376; defined 378; gendered 378–379; UK’s CONTEST 378–379 counterterrorists 374; see also terrorists COVID-19 pandemic 5, 41, 87, 170, 171, 211–212; care in time of 133–135; and domestic violence 222; and feminised care work 281; and gender 276; and inequity 219–222; and migrant care work 131–135; and migrant domestic workers 281; and migration 276; national response committees, women’s role in 221; and unsustainable practices 219–222 creativity: as a feminist 29–30; and feminist knowledge 22–31; and feminist politics 25–29; and gender 29–30 Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 48, 250, 321, 345

Index

crisis imagery 96; dominant 96, 99; gendered dimensions of 97 critical theory 11 crop rotation 264–265; see also agricultural land cultures of militarism 291 decolonial feminism 147; see also feminism decoloniality 341–342 de-industrialisation 232 devalorisation of feminised qualities 230 development 140–147; constructing ‘global South woman’ 143–145; decolonising 145–146; development myth 141–143; of gendered neoliberal governmentality 197–199; new possibilities 145–146; sustainable 181, 183–185, 187, 190, 261, 269, 271n1 Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) 80–81, 83 development myth 141–143 ‘difficult’ girls 357 digital feminist activism 155–156 digital platforms: gendered foundations of 160–162; racialised foundations of 160–162 digital politics 154–162; and feminist activism 155–158 dimorphism 63, 227, 231 disability 167–175; ableism 170–172; contextualising 168–170; nationstates and role in creating impairment 173–175; rights-based approach to 172–173 discrimination: and health emergencies 220; and migrant women 281; structural 103, 218; women in agriculture 265; workplace 263 disorder, defined 372 ‘disordered’ women 372 displacement: global political economy of 280–282; see also migration ‘domestic intersectionality’ 52 domestic violence 276, 278, 289, 375, 390, 392; and COVID-19 pandemic 222; and health emergencies 222; see also sexual violence; violence Ebola virus 220 ecofeminism 181–186, 259; and international environmental politics in 1990s 183–185; see also feminism ecofeminists 180–181; affinity 182; critical 185; social 182; and WED 183–184

ecologism 180, 191n1; see also environmentalism ecology/environment 180–191; ecofeminism 181–186; environmental politics 186–190; green politics 181–186; and queer ecology 181–186 Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) 82, 197 economic (material) devaluation of feminised work 237 economic theory: and gender 228–229; neoclassical 198 economy: productive 232–234; reproductive 234–236, 235; virtual 236–237 Elshtain, Jean Bethke 94, 100 emasculation 356, 386–387, 390, 392 Enloe, Cynthia 7, 10, 94, 290, 309, 318, 362–363 environmentalism 180, 191n1; see also ecologism environmental politics 4; Anthropocene 186–188; climate justice 189–190; contemporary trends in 186–190; see also politics epistemology 34 essentialism 191; gender 51, 186; problematic 183; strategic 56 ethics: care 320–322; defined 34 ethno-racial liberation movements 48 European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) 197 European Union (EU) 197 Extinction Rebellion 181 extractive industries 263 famines 3, 94, 393–394 female genital cutting (FGC) 358, 364n3 female nakedness, in politics 112 female suicide bombers 377 FEMEN 114–115 feminine identities 259 feminisation 231; of agriculture 262; cultural code of 237; of employment 233 feminised political imagery 102 feminism 11, 42–44; anti-feminism 154–155, 160; Asian-American 50; Black 50, 331; Chicana 50; decolonial 147; first-wave 78–79; fourth wave of 155; and gender 30; global 344; governance 10, 140, 246; hegemonic 51, 53; Indigenous 50; liberal 246, 294; and nuclear politics 316–317; postcolonial 50–51, 53, 341, 344–345; and race 341; radical 182, 246; reformist 294; second-wave 78–79; Third World

401

Index

331; transnational 50–51, 53, 54, 344; Western 142, 144; White-dominated 50, 158; women of colour 50–51, 54, 145; see also women feminist activism 77–80, 315; digital 155–157; within digital domains 155; and digital politics 155–158; and WPS Agenda 315 feminist body politics 109–111, 113, 115–116, 118, 119 feminist International Relations 9–18; beginning 11–13; hesitations 16–18; masculinity 13–16 feminist knowledge: creative matters in 25–29; creativity and 22–31; cultures 156 feminist methodology 34–44; in and beyond IR 35–36; care and joy 41–42; feminist about 36–42; feminist curiosity 37–39; reflexivity throughout research process 39–40; relational nature of research 40–41 feminist politics: aesthetic politics as 95–96; creative matters in 25–29 feminists: about feminist methodologies 36–42; action on international stage 80–81; aesthetic critique of global politics 99–103; antimilitarist 294–296; approaches to international law 243–244; approaches to security 289–290; conversations on international law 245–251; creativity as 29–30; curiosity 37–39; on globalisation 230; on informalisation 236; and masculinist bias 229; on militarism 290; organisations 77, 80, 86, 118, 154, 246; peace scholarship 315; and racialisation 229; reformist 294–296; resistance in Tunisia 83–87; and social provisioning 229; on violence 386–389; see also feminism; women feminist theology 359 feminist theory 11, 18, 29–30, 322, 341, 345 feminization of survival 281 ‘femocrats’ 10 first-wave feminism 78–79 flexibilisation 232 food sovereignty 269–270 ‘fossil fuel hegemony’ 3 Foucault, Michel 329, 331 ‘fragmentation debate’ 252n2 free bleeding movement 118 ‘Gaia hypothesis’ 181 Gamergate 159–160

402

gender 259; and access to water 267– 268; -based inequalities 260; coding 228; and Cold War 310; and Covid-19 pandemic 276; and creativity 29–30; and economic theory 228–229; equality 215, 219, 340–341; exploitation 204, 220; and extractive industries 263; and feminism 30; and food sovereignty 270; and global governance 200–204; and globalisation 227; and global politics 60–71, 355–357; and GPE 228, 230–231; hierarchy 231; and ideas/matter 61–65; and migration 275, 276; and militarism 292–293; and nationalism 302; and natural resources 260–264; and postcolonialism 51; as power relation 345; problematising ‘bodies that matter’ 71; and refugee protection 277–280; religion relationship with 354–357; science and social movements 65–71; and securitisation 277–280; see also men; non-binary; queer; transgender; women Gender and Development (GAD) approach 140, 142, 191n2 gender and development ‘problem’ 140 Gender and International Relations Working Group 11 gender-based violence 42, 67, 87, 103, 113–114, 158, 363 gender diversity: and global health institutions 221; tolerance for 328 gendered erasures 391–393 gendered governance 201–203 gendered harms 38 gendered myths 389–390 gendered politics: of citizenship 346– 347; of migration 346–347; see also politics gendered terrorists 376–378; see also terrorism; terrorists Gender Equality Architecture Reform Campaign 82 gender gap 262; in access to agricultural land 266–267 ‘gender ideology’ 310 ‘gender legitimacy’ 247 gender norms 292–293, 388, 392; culturally defined 189; faith-based 360; hierarchical 12; naturalisation of 102; reinforcing 221 gender oppression 112, 115, 315 gender stereotypes 68, 94, 95–99, 101, 103–104, 143, 173, 376; depiction of women 233; and militarised femininity 388

Index

genealogies of intersectionality 48–55 global capital 262 global care chains 128–130 Global Eradication Polio Initiative 214 global feminism 344 global governance 195–205; and gender 200–204; gendered neoliberal 203–204; gendered neoliberal governmentality in 197–199; global politics 196–200; key instruments of 196; organisations 197; Post-Washington Consensus 199–200; racialised 203– 204; Washington Consensus 199–200 global health: achievements in 211; agenda setting 214–219 global health institutions: and gender diversity 221; and gendered burdens of care 221; and intersectionality 221 globalisation 198, 230; feminists on 230; and gender 227; macro level 131; micro level 131; neoliberal 82, 187, 198, 204, 227, 234, 237; political economy of 227; and productive economy 233 global life expectancy 211 global migration 126–127 Global North 5, 40, 49, 127; -centric intellectual institution 9; civilisational hierarchies 244; and queer politics 333 global political economy: of displacement 280–282; of migration 280–282 global politics 196–200; feminist aesthetic critique of 99–103; and gender 60–71, 355–357; gendered 196–200; problematising ‘bodies that matter’ 71; and religion 354, 357–360; science and social movements 65–71; secularism in 355; structuring 360–364; and women 357–360 Global South 50, 246, 391; agriculture in 264–268; civilisational hierarchies 244; gender gap 262; and queer politics 329, 332–333; women in 229 ‘Global South woman’ 143, 144; construction 143–145; development 143–145 Global War on Terror 355, 357 Global Water Partnership 269 Goldman Sachs 198 governance: as embodied practice 201–203; feminism 10, 140, 246; transnational 130 governmentality 197–199 Grameen Bank 143 Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp 67, 68 Greenpeace 181

green politics 181–186 gross domestic product (GDP), and health outcomes 214–215 Group of Seven (G7) 197 Group of Twenty (G20) 197 Guernica (painting) 95 Guerrilla Girls 103, 104 Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women 278 hard power 362 health: and biological conditions 212; defined 212; equity 214; international 212–214; and social determinants 212; system and migrant care work 132–133 healthcare 212–213, 216, 218; exploitation of women providers 220; and pandemic 132; reproductive 261 health emergencies: and discrimination 220; and domestic violence 222; and gender exploitation 220 ‘Health for All by 2000’ Declaration 213 health outcomes: and GDP 214; and wealth creation 214 hegemonic feminism 51, 53 hegemonic masculinity 389 Hindu nationalism 303 Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings 316 HIV/AIDS 186, 211; and MDGs 215, 216; and SDGs 218 homocapitalism 335 homonationalism 334–335 homonormativity 332 hooks, bell 44, 145, 319 household: care in time of COVID-19 133–135; migrant care work in 133–135 humanitarian crises, and gendered images 96–99 Human Rights Conference, 1993 80 Human Rights League 86 human security 289–290 hypermasculinity 15, 295, 310 identity politics 328 impairment, and nation-states 173–175 imperialism: vs. colonialism 342; constructive 141; defined 342; erasure of 344; and international health 213; Western 52 ‘Incel Rebellion’ 159

403

Index

Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) 202, 206n2 India: Chipko movement in 269; gender-nonconforming communities, terms for 329; Hindu nationalism in 303; inter-faith marriage 361; land documentation 267; love jihad 361 indigenous ‘alternative feminine forestry science’ 261 Indigenous feminism 50 industrial capitalism 260 infant mortality 211 infectious diseases: deaths due to 211; outbreak control and international health 213 informalisation 235–236 Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) 197 intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) 196, 197, 201 internally displaced persons (IDPs) 276 International Alliance of Women (IAW) 79 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) 206n2 International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) 206n2 International Conference on Population and Development (1994) 80 International Council of Women (ICW) 79 International Criminal Court (ICC) 111, 197 international criminal law (ICL) 243, 249 International Development Association (IDA) 206n2 international domestic workers (IDWs) 281 international environmental politics 183–185 International Finance Corporation (IFC) 206n2 international/global political economy (GPE) 227–238; and gender 228, 230–231; overview 227 international health 212–214; agenda and imperialism 213; and colonialism 213; and infectious disease outbreak control 213; see also health international humanitarian law (IHL) 248–249 international human rights law 243 International Labour Organization (ILO) 79, 126, 127, 197 international law 243–252; defined 243; and feminist approaches 243–244;

404

feminist conversations on 245–251; feminist ‘messages’ vs. feminist ‘methods’ 245; regimes 243; and violence 244 international migrants 126, 136n1 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 81–83, 143, 197, 198, 199, 261, 264 International Refugee Convention 277 International Relations (IR) 9; and feminist methodology 35–36; intersectional methodologies and praxis for 55–56 International Studies Association 11 intersectionality 47–57, 321–322; genealogies of 48–55; and global health institutions 221; and international law 250; intersectional methodologies and praxis for IR 55–56; as methodology 345; postcolonial feminist critiques 51–53; as theory 345; and Third World 50–51; transnational solidarities 53–55; and women of colour feminists in U.S. 50–51 intersectional methodologies 55–56 intersectional reflexivity 55 invisible violence 393–394 irrigation: access to water for 267–268; management schemes 267; see also agricultural land Islam 310, 373 ‘Islamic Chic’ fashion market 360–361 Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) 197 Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) 363 Islamic State 356, 377 Islamophobia 359, 361, 364n1 Jana Sanskriti 103, 104 Japan 362 justice see climate justice Kenya: Christian communities in 358; female genital cuttings (FGC) 358; Women’s Greenbelt Movement 269 knowledge: -based politics 25–26; feminist 22–31; problem with 23–25; production 25–26 ‘kuchu’ 330 Ku Klux Klan 377 land documentation 267 land ownership: and access to water 267; societal norms around 268 l’Association des Femmes Tunisiennes pour la Recherche et le Développement (Association of Tunisian Women for Research on

Index

Development, or AFTURD) 83–84, 85, 86 l’Association Tunisienne des Femmes Démocrates (Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, or ATFD) 83–87 Laundries, Magdalene 357 La Via Campesina 269 League of Nations 79 LGBTQIA+ community 186, 358; Muslims 359; religious peoples 359; rights 335 ‘the LGBTQ lobby’ 310 liberal feminism 246, 294 liberalisation 198, 202, 230, 261–262, 332 liberalism 11 liberal legalism 251 Liberation Tamil Tigers of Elam (LTTE) 377 ‘Little Boy’ (nuclear weapon) 72n1 love jihad 361 MADRE 81 Madres de la Plaza de Mayo 67, 69, 146, 359 majoritarian nationalism 301, 305, 311 malaria: eradication from Europe 215; and MDGs 215 Manosphere 158, 160 Marcha de Las Putas 115 Marche Mondiale des Femmes/The World March of Women 81 Marianismo 359 martial politics 290–291 Marx, Karl 144, 332 masculine bias 277 masculinist protection 292 masculinity: colonial 392; and excessive militarism 389; feminist international relations 13–16; hegemonic 389; militarized 293; and nationalism 306; relational properties of 292–293; toxic 158–160; and violence 386–387 maternal mortality rates 211 meaningful feminist reflexivity 40 men: institutions of authority 230; institutions of power 230; see also gender Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) 155, 158; and misogyny online 158–160; toxic masculinity 158–160 #Menstruaccion hashtag 116 menstrual activism 115–119 menstruator 120n2 Menstrupedia 118 method, defined 34 methodology, defined 34

#MeToo movement 154, 155, 157–158, 163n1 migrant care work 127–128; analysing 128–131; and COVID-19 pandemic 131–135; global care chains 128–130; and health system 132–133; in household 133–135; transnational political economy of 130–131 migrants: as informalised workers 235; international 126, 136n1 migrant worker, defined 126 migration: care and 124–128; and climate change 282–283; colonial politics of 346–347; and Covid-19 pandemic 276; and gender 275, 276; gendered politics of 346–347; global 126–127; global political economy of 280–282; and natural disasters 282–283; racial politics of 346–347; securitisation of 277–280 militarisation 290–291; defined 290; vs. militarism 291 militarised femininity 388 militarism 290–291; defined 290; feminists on 290; and gender 292–293; vs. militarisation 291; and military sexual violence 293–296 militarized masculinities 293 military sexual violence (MSV): defined 293–294; and militarism 293–296; and security 293–296; see also sexual violence Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 81, 87, 144, 215; and Development Assistance for Health 215–216; and HIV 215; and malaria 215; and minority population 216; and mortality rates 215; vs. SDGs 218; and taboo topics 216 Millennium Project 197 mining industry 263 misogyny 375 misogyny online 158–160 Mohanty, Chandra T. 52–54, 144, 344 mortality rates: maternal 211; and MDGs 215 Mother Earth 181–182 The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo see Madres de la Plaza de Mayo The Mothers of Victims and Survivors Network 67 mouvement de la tendance Islamique (MTI) 85 multicropping 264–265 Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) 206n2 muscular paternalism 4

405

Index

406

Muslim Brotherhood 85 Muslims 356; biased ideas of 373; emasculation 356; LGBTQA groups 359; and racialisation 379; supporters of female genital cuttings (FGC) 358; Western perspective towards 373 Muslim women 356; biased ideas of 373; and ‘hijabistas’ 360; and ‘Islamic Chic’ fashion market 360–361; and religion 359; see also women myths, gendered 389–390

ontology 34 oppression: gender 112, 115, 315; structural 231 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 197–198 Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) 197 Orientalism 356, 373 orthodox theory 228 Our Common Future 261, 269 Oxfam 132

Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies 80 naked protests 112–115 nation, defined 303 national culture: defined 303; Israeli Jewish 311; Palestinian 311; and women 307 national identity 311; defined 303; performance of 304 nationalisation of natural resources 263–264 nationalism: defined 302; and gender 302; majoritarian 301, 305, 311; populist 304; primordialist view of 303; theorising 302–305; and women 305–308 nation-states 168, 201; and impairment 173–175; muscular 392 natural disasters 3, 94; and migration 282–283; see also COVID-19 pandemic; famines natural resources: and gender 260–264; resource politics 260–262; in rural areas 262–264 neoliberal global governance 203–204 neoliberal globalisation 82, 187, 198, 204, 227, 234, 237 neoliberal globalism 198 neoliberal governmentality 197–199 neoliberalism 197–199, 348, 349 Nepal 268 New Development Bank (NDB) 197 new terrorism 376, 378–379 ‘New Terrorism’ thesis 372–373 New Zealand Mosque attacks (2019) 385 non-binary 11, 38, 63, 219, non-entrée measures 278, 279 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 168, 172, 175, 198 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) 197 nuclear politics: continuum of 317–318; and feminism 316–317

Pachamama 181 peace 244–246; associating women with 314, 363; feminist 314–323, 341; international 248; zones of 346 Penitents 357 ‘people with disabilities’ 176n5 Philippines 133, 310; care responsibilities 128; and Filipino nurses 132; land documentation 267 Planeta Femea 183, 184 Poland: abortion ban 361; FEMEN protests 114 political violence 370–380, 385, 387 politics: female nakedness in 112; gendered 346–347; global (see global politics); identity 328; martial 290–291; nuclear 316–318; queer 327–336; resource 260–262; and social media 154 populism 309–311, 390; academic scholarship on 302; defined 301; and nationalism 305; right-wing 303 populist nationalism 304 positionality 39 postcolonial anxiety 389 postcolonial feminism 50–51, 53, 341, 344–345 postcolonial feminist critiques 51–53 postcolonialism 9, 11, 51, 341–342 postmodernism 11 poststructuralism 11 Post-Washington Consensus 196, 198, 199–200 power: hard 362; soft 362 primordialism 303 private spaces 319, 386; domestic 144; feminised 125 privatisation 80, 85, 230, 234, 260, 264, 269–270 productive economy 232–234; de-industrialisation 232; feminisation of employment 233; flexibilisation 232; and globalisation 233 protests: FEMEN 114; naked 112–115

Index

public policymaking 360; and religion 361–362 queer: decolonising 329–331; defined 327; identity 63, 64, 110, 156, 244, 291, 296, 302, 309, 310, 315, 327– 336; ecologists 185–186; geopoliticising 334–335; materialising 331–334 queer ecology 181–186 queer politics 327–336; decolonising queer 329–331; and homonormativity 332; as left politics 331; materialising queer 331–334; see also politics queer theory 327 race: defined 343; and feminism 341; overview 340; as trace of history 342–344 racialisation 279, 343; and counterterrorism 379; and digital platforms 160–162; and gender 379; and global governance 203–204; political economies of 229 racial politics: of citizenship 346–347; of migration 346–347 racism 18, 109–110, 343, 345, 375–376; anti-Asian 5; anti-immigrant 233; and COVID-19 pandemic 134; and migrant domestic workers 276; and women of colour 321 radical feminism 182, 246 radicalisation 162, 373–375, 378–379 realism 11; classical 65 reflexivity: research 55; throughout the research process 39–40 reformist feminist approaches 294–296 refugee(s): crisis 346; defined 277; law and policy 280; protection and gender 277–280; see also migrants religion 354–364; and global politics 354–357; iconography of 363; and public policymaking 361–362; relationship with gender 354–357; and secularism 356; transnational religious movements 362–364; and women 354, 357–360 ‘religious marriages’ 86 Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development 269 reproductive economy 234–236, 235; informalisation 235–236; socialisation 234; social reproduction 234–235 research: reflexivity 55; relational nature of 40–41 resistance 88n1; art as feminist politics of 103

Resolution 1325 (WPS) 246, 247, 315 resource politics: gendering 260–262; and international policymaking 269; negative trends in 264; see also politics rights-based approach to disability 172–173 Roman Catholic Church 362 rural areas: natural resources in 262–264; women in 262–264 Said, Edward 342, 373 science: bodies in 69–71; and social movements 65–71 second-wave feminism 78–79 secularism 354–357; in global politics 355; and religion 356 securitisation: and gender 277–280; of migration 277–280 security: feminists approaches to 289–290; and military sexual violence 293–296 Security Studies 289 ‘sextremism’ 114 sexuality 376; categories of 306; and ecology 185; female 103, 111, 113–115; history of 329; international politics of 335; rights movements 49; see also gender sexualness 329 sexual violence: conflict-related 249; feminist research on 387; against men and boys 387; and war violence 390; see also violence Sexual Violence Against Refugees: Guidelines on Prevention and Response 278 sexularism 355 single-axis approaches 48 Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence 363 SlutWalks 114–115 ‘Smart Economics’ agenda 146 social ecofeminists 182 socialisation 234, 314 social justice movements 48, 50 ‘Social Justice Warriors’ (SJWs) 154, 159 social media: awareness of feminist movements 156; censoring 157; platforms 155, 158, 160, 360; and politics 154 social movements: bodies in 66–69; science and 65–71; see also specific social movements social provisioning 229 social reproduction 234–235 soft power 362 Soviet Union, collapse of 11

407

Index

Soy1Soy4 118 starvation deaths 394 stocks, defined 136n1 ‘#StopTaxingPeriods’ campaign 116 ‘strategic essentialism’ 56 structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) 261 structural discrimination 103, 218 structural oppression 231 sustainable development 181, 183–185, 187, 190, 261, 269, 271n1 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 82, 87, 144, 216–217; and gender equality 219; Goal 3 217–218; vs. MDGs 218 systems of domination 345 Taliban 13–14, 16, 18n3, 356, 387 terrorism 370–380; characterising 371–375; defined 370, 371; gender biases in concept of 370; gendering 375–376; women 377–378 Terrorism Studies 375–376 terrorists 374; Chechen 374; gendered 376–378; women 378 Third World 51; feminism 331; and intersectionality 50–51; and women of colour feminists in U.S. 50–51 Third World Conference on Women in Nairobi 52, 80 ‘Third World women’ 50 toxic masculinity: and misogyny online 158–160; and MRAs 158–160; see also masculinity Toxic Shock Syndrome 115 transgender 11, 156, 211, 219, 329, 359, 363 Transgender Marxism 333 transnational faith-based organisations (FBOs) 363 transnational feminism 50–51, 53, 54, 344 transnational feminist networks (TFNs) 77, 78, 80–82, 87–88, 88n4 transnational governance 130 transnational movement: of care capital 130; of care labour 130 transnational political economy of care approach 130–131 transnational religious movements 362–364 transnational solidarities 53–55 transphobia, and capitalism 333 transwomen, and nationalism 307 Trump, Donald 13–14, 66, 70 Tunisia: feminist resistance in 83–87; National Council for Freedom 86 Twitter 154, 160

408

Ubuntu 251 Uganda: Anti-Homosexuality Act 335; kuchu community 330 UGTT Women’s Commission 86 UN Agency for Refugees (UNHCR) 278 UN Charter 247–248; Chapter VII 248 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) 80 UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education 79 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 185 UNHCR Policy on Refugee Women 278 Union Général des Travailleurs Tunisiens (UGTT) 84 United for Peace and Justice 81 United Nations (UN) 110, 198, 215; Commission on the Status of Women 358; Committee on the Status of Women 52; Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriage 79; Convention on the Nationality of Married Women 79; Convention on the Political Rights of Women 79; Decade for Women 52, 79, 80; Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) 82, 197; General Assembly Committees 197; International Conference on Financing for Development, in Monterrey, Mexico 82 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) 81, 183–184, 186 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) 186–187 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) 126 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 82, 197 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) 371 United Nations Security Council 10, 246–247 United States: Information Agency 310; Third World and women of colour feminists in 50–51; Three Mile Island accident 269 UN Security Council on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) 245–246, 315 UN World Conference on Women 79 UPIAS 170

Index

Vienna Declaration 81 violence 385–395; colonial 391–393; feminists on 386–389; gender-based 42, 67, 87, 103, 113–114, 158, 363; and international law 244; invisible 393–394; and masculinity 386–387; slow 393–394; and women asylum seekers 279–280; women participation in 388; see also sexual violence virtual economy 236–237 virtual reality 236 Voice and Agency: Empowering Women and Girls for Shared Prosperity 82 vulnerability, feminised notions of 38 ‘Wall of Moms’ 68 War on Terror 16, 310, 376 Washington Consensus 196, 199–200 Western feminism 142, 144 Western imperialism 52 West/rest dichotomy 147n1 White-dominated feminism 50, 158 women: activism 77–80; associating with peace 314; asylum seekers 279– 280; bodies, disciplining 356; comfort 362; empowerment 215; and gender stereotypes 233; in global health programmes 221; and global politics 357–360; in Global South 229; healthcare providers, exploitation of 220; as informalised workers 235; and inheritance 260; and knowledge of economics 229; and nationalism 305–308; as protectors of environment 261; and religion 354, 357–360; and reproductive economy 234–235; role in agriculture 265; in rural areas 262–264; terrorism 377–378; terrorists 378; see also feminism; feminists Women, Environment, Development (WED) 183–184 Women and Development (WAD) approach 140, 142, 191n2 Women and Trade Network 81 Women in Development approach (WID) 140, 142, 191n2 Women in Development Europe (WIDE) 80 ‘women in development’ studies 228–229 women-led non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 77, 88n4 #WomenMarchUG hashtag 158

women of colour 49; feminism 50–51, 54, 145; feminists and Third World 50–51 ‘Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace’ 112 Women’s Action Agenda 21 183 Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) 81 Women’s International Coalition for Economic Justice 81 Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) 79 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) 79, 246, 247, 316 Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development and Peace (WLP) 81 World Bank 81–83, 143, 198, 199, 206n2, 261, 264, 335; Côte d’Ivoire policy 202–203; Gender Data Portal 83; World Development Report 2012 87 World Bank Group 197, 202 World Commission on Environment and Development 261 World Commission on Water 269 World Conferences on Women 52 World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development (World Bank) 82 World Food Programme 197 World Health Assembly 213 World Health Organization (WHO) 5, 131, 167, 197, 212, 219; Constitution, Article 1 212; priority health agendas for 213 World Report on Disability 168 World Social Forum (WSF) 81–82 World Trade Organisation (WTO) 143, 197, 198, 264 World War II 141, 146 World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet 183 Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre 347–349 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) 79 zones of conflict 346 zones of peace 346

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