A Revolution in the Binary? Gender and the Oxymoron of Revolutionary War in Cuba and Nicaragua

Unmanned? Gender Recalibrations and the Rise of Drone Warfare

“…Furthermore, “our” soldiers are hailed as warrior-protectors, necessary to shield innocents from the enemy, who are represented as a “particularly malignant form of swaggering masculinity” (Ruddick 1998, 199; see also Peterson and Runyan 1999). Race and ethnicity are often deployed alongside masculinity to represent enemy combatants as particularly dangerous predators (Abu-Lughod 2002; Bayard de Volo 2012; Peterson 2010; Spivak 1988; Ruddick 1998, 199). Finally, as Thobani (2002, 291) has pointed out, “Rendering invisible the humanity of the peoples targeted for attack is a strategy well-used to hide the impact of colonialist and imperialist interventions.”…”

“…Feminist analyses also examine the gender-war system at the state level (Bayard de Volo 2012; Milliken and Sylvan 1996; Peterson and Runyan 1999; Scott 2002; Young 2003). Young (2003) argues that taking a gender lens to war and security “means seeing how a certain logic of gendered meanings and images helps organize the way people interpret events and circumstances” (2).…”

“…These gender adjustments are not by military design so much as outcomes of the co-constitutionality of gender and war, operating in terms of traits closely associated with militarized masculinity: courage, strength, and mastery of emotions (Goldstein 2001, 266–67). Intersectional analysis is key to this shifting masculine hierarchy, as hierarchies within race, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality both inform and are naturalized through the gender hierarchy (Bayard de Volo 2012; Milliken and Sylvan 1996; Peterson 2010).…”

Gendering the Arab Spring? Rights and (in)security of Tunisian, Egyptian and Libyan women

“…Moreover, the feminist conflict/revolution literature also takes issue with the democratization literature’s assumption that there is an automatic connection between democratization and greater social equity among all citizens. Feminist scholars rather maintain that women’s participation in regime change is rewarded only if the new men in power want to pacify them or the men belonging to their social class, as well as in cases when women are seen as necessary draftees into socioeconomic development (Bayard de Volo, 2012; Elshtain, 1987; Eschle, 2000; Handrahan, 2004; Moghadam, 2008). The correlation between (female) agency in conflict/revolution and (male) concessions on women’s rights and access to decisionmaking in the political transition is therefore highly undetermined.…”

“…conflict, revolutions, riots or political transition), however, concepts of gender, sexuality or race tend to become destabilized. In such conditions, the dominant masculinities may feel threatened and react to such a threat perception by inflating and exaggerating the traits of the hegemonic masculinity in a reactionary, radicalized way that produces an atavistic ‘macho’ (Bayard de Volo, 2012) or ‘hypermasculinity’ (Agathangelou and Ling, 2009). Such hypermasculinity accentuates traits such as virility, physical strength or aggressiveness, and acts to protect its privileged position through repressive violence against its residual gender categories.…”