This article critically examines the entanglements between ‘security’ and the geopolitical and geo‐economic formations that assist in the cyclical continuation of conflict. The author questions the biopolitical configurations of state and private forms of militarised security. The author’s approach to this research addresses the spatial and corporeal aspects of civilian security in contemporary conflicts zones – with a specific focus on Afghanistan. Drawing on the work of feminist political geographers, this article highlights the corporeal as a key site of analysis for the everyday and seemingly apolitical spaces occupied by civilians living amidst political conflict. This descriptive analysis of security and insecurity focuses on four specific areas: (1) Afghan civilian security measures, (2) domestic spaces as sites of security and violence, (3) mobile forms of security and insecurity and (4) the divergent perceptions and experiences of security/insecurity between international civilian workers living in Afghanistan and Afghan civilian citizens. While macro‐scale analyses of security and civilian agency in various locations are important for geographic inquiry, it remains imperative that geographers and other social scientists examine the particularities of specific conflict sites and situations in order to avoid one‐size‐fits‐all responses to or analyses of political conflict – and subsequently flattening civilian experiences through aggregated forms of knowledge production. This paper seeks to investigate several key aspects of feminist political geography by examining the multiple and varied experiences of the everyday within this conflict zone.
The papers in this themed section collectively explore the intertwined geographies of corporeality and violence; to explore the ways in which narrow representations of race and culture are imbricated in the mis/understanding of gender based violence. This introductory essay draws out linkages across these papers, and to several themes in feminist geography. Combined, the four papers in the themed section offer new pathways for feminist geographers to consider. The authors connect the intimate and the global, the personal and the geopolitical, and offer critical insights into how feminist geographers might unpack entangled inequalities that give rise to distinct experiences of violence. Through their disparate studies, the authors also destabilize the assumptions mapped onto gendered bodies, particularly those that rely on racist, sexist, and classist representations of 'culture' and 'community' to describe gendered vulnerability. Subsequently, their analyses reveal how these assumptions simultaneously work to erase or ignore structural inequalities of capitalism or the state, which frame, contribute to and perpetuate violence against vulnerable bodies and geographies. They collectively underscore the epistemological, methodological and ontological possibilities of corporeal geographies particularly when tasked with intellectually analyzing both exceptional and everyday experiences of violence.
This paper examines corporeal modernity as part of the larger 'savior and liberation' trope produced for Afghan women by US-led military, political and economic intervention post-9/11. This savior trope has been identified as a co-optation of women's rights discourses and activism (Hunt 2002), a misguided approach to security through gendered scripts of masculine aggressive protection and female submission (Young 2003;Dowler 2002), and as yet another example in a long history of gendered tropes devised by colonial and imperial powers to save Muslim women (Abu Lughod 2002). This study adds to existing feminist critiques of US intervention in Afghanistan by examining the Beauty Academy of Kabul and the participation of Miss Afghanistan in the 2003 Miss Earth Pageant as particular lenses through which the economic and corporeal 'liberation' of Afghan women was presented in the US. This economic approach occurs at the site and scale of the body in order to (re)define corporeal modernity through corporate driven, heteronormative, and hegemonic beauty standards.
This paper examines embodied representations o f state (in)security within three broad thematic categories: biometrics, prosthetics, and military biopower. This analysis elucidates the ways in which gender and race are put to work through representational framings o f US state security. These framings, while diverse, offer similar taxonomies of inclusion-exclusion, security-insecurity, and violence against or care for certain bodies. This critical examination explicates how security is succinctly situated by autonomous state actors, 'life politics', and manipulations of the global-intimate through the lens of mimetic gendered and raced bodies. I argue that these various visual representations aid in reinforcing to the mainstream/white US citizen-subject that he or she remains secure within the immediate U S homeland by way o f the displacement of contemporary war violence elsewhere-rather than such violence circulating 'everywhere'. A visual and discursive representation o f security-insecurity illustrates a purposeful militarized illusion, inscribedthrough the many examples discussed in this paper. These disparate techniques shape US citizens' imagination o f 'terror' as potentially 'everywhere', while simultaneously situating the US military's war 'over there' (elsewhere) as part of securing the homeland. These corporeal exemplifications help to situate security within the homeland and a/effectively shroud the flesh-and-bone devastation of US military violence elsewhere.
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