This article focuses on gender mainstreaming policies and advocacy on gender equality in the post-tsunami context in Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam. Through the analysis, this article illustrates how gender mainstreaming policy documents and gender advocacy of the provincial and central government, when drawing from sex/gender division and binary of genders, reproduce heteronormative boundaries. By focusing on details, I argue that the image of the heteronormative nuclear family participates in normalising other identity categories; such as urban and middle-class. I also provide examples of how simultaneous to the production of dominant norms, gender advocacy challenges heteronormativity and norms governing heterosexuality and actively question the dominant gender norms. Drawing from postcolonial feminist and recent queer critiques, I argue that advocacy that solely focuses on gender and/or sexuality reduces human bodies and their desires to simplistic stick figures. Thus, it remains blind to other forms of violence, such as global economic and political frameworks that define ‘building back better’ primarily as recovery and rehabilitation of economy, assets and labour force.

The sexual politics of peacePost-conflict reconstruction efforts, including those made under the auspices of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, often draw on the notion that a crisis functions as a potentially positive catalyst for major social and political transformations in societies and in the rebuilding of states. 1 However, the phenomenon of postwar backlash against gender-related reforms creates new forms of gendered insecurities and vulnerabilities: 2 the symbolic value of women during and in the aftermath of war often focuses on their contribution as reproducers of the nation and their role in embodying cultural and national borders, placing strong taboos on female sexuality and sexual violence. 3 This sexual ideology, with its dual patriarchal focus on female chastity and the 'fallen woman', 4 gains significance in the name of decency, virtue, honour and national survival.This article engages with the Women, Peace and Security agenda, 5 and the themes of this special issue of International Affairs, by examining postwar experiences in two contexts: Finland after the Lapland War , and conflict in Aceh, Indonesia (1976Indonesia ( -2005. I ask what abjected women 6 -women 'written out of history' 7 -and their experiences can tell us about the gendered notions

Feminist scholars and activists have historically been written out of peace research, despite their strong presence in the early stages of the field. In this article, we develop the concept of “wifesization” to illustrate the process through which feminist and feminized interventions have been reduced to appendages of the field, their contributions appropriated for its development but unworthy of mention as independent producers of knowledge. Wifesization has trickle-down effects, not just for knowledge production, but also for peacebuilding practice. We propose new feminist genealogies for peace research that challenge and redefine the narrow boundaries of the field, in the form of a patchwork quilt including early theorists, utopian writing, oral history, and indigenous knowledge production. Reflections draw on the authors’ engagements with several archives rich in cultures and languages of peace, not reducible to a “single story.” Recovering wifesized feminist contributions to peace research, our article offers a new way of constructing peace research canons that gives weight to long-standing, powerful, and plural feminist voices, in order to make peace scholarship more inclusive and ultimately richer.