Malalai Joya, Greta Thunberg, Idle No More leaders – what do these figures have in common? They each decided to act/speak out against the failures, lacks, exclusions, violence and injustices in the words and deeds of different authorities claiming to act on behalf of (their) security and protection, and thus made visible, challenged and disrupted the dominant logics of protection on which such claim is based. More specifically, they each enacted this critique by performing a contemporary form of parrhesia – a practice in Ancient Greece that consisted in speaking truth frankly and courageously to power, taking risks in doing so out of a sense of duty to improve a situation for oneself and others. Yet none of these women stated anything radically new or shockingly unknown. So why, then, did speaking truths that were already known lead to such dire consequences and intense reactions? This article will argue that by mobilizing the frameworks of logics of protection and parrhesia together, we can have a fuller understanding of these figures’ dissident truth-speaking: it is precisely their positionings within logics of protection that made their truths so daring and, in turn, it is through parrhesia that Joya, Thunberg and Idle No More activists made logics of protection visible through their disruption, opening up potentialities for ‘doing’ and ‘being’ otherwise. The dual framework offered in this article thus offers interesting avenues through which to explore resistance, truth and protection in (feminist) security studies today.
Résumé de l'article Cet article vise à analyser le film Dans la vallée d'Elah à partir d'une perspective théorique féministe de la sécurité internationale, afin de déceler les rapports de genre et de « race » qui sous-tendent la construction de différentes masculinités au sein des discours et des narrations sur la sécurité internationale, la guerre et la militarisation, notamment dans le contexte de la guerre en Irak et des productions culturelles s'y référant. En effet, si le film est critique de plusieurs aspects de la guerre en Irak, il est à se demander si ces critiques ont entraîné une véritable déconstruction des discours genrés et racisés qui légitiment et rendent possibles la militarisation et les guerres, ou si ceux-ci, même critiqués, sont reconduits par la narration du conflit. L'article soutient que la masculinité hégémonique du personnage principal est construite en opposition à une masculinité pervertie par la guerre en Irak chez les jeunes soldats y ayant combattu, limitant la critique à cette guerre spécifique et non à la guerre en général.Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. [https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politiquedutilisation/]
‘I feel like a monster’, typed Chelsea Manning, referring partly to her gender identity but mostly to her job in the US military. Morally conflicted by what she saw and read while serving in Iraq, extremely isolated from her unit and experiencing emotional distress in relation to her gender identity, Manning would act on these stressors by leaking hundreds of documents to Wikileaks, and coming out as a (trans) woman. While she was quick to be classified as either a hero or a traitor, her case evades such dichotomisation and calls for more sophisticated readings. While a lot has been written on Manning in queer and transgender studies, surprisingly little has been published on this case in International Relations, not even in the quickly growing field of Queer IR. Yet Manning’s case helps highlight many of its core concerns in relation to issues of power, security, and sovereignty. In fact, what is often lost when reading the Manning case are the queer and trans logics of protection that were disrupted by Manning’s disclosures and that made such disruption possible. These dominant logics rely upon a culture of secrecy that must be preserved for performances of national security to hold true.
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