Why we need to study (US) militarism: A critical feminist lens

Abstract

Responding to the special issue call to examine security and militarism alongside one another, this article adopts a critical feminist lens to explore what is at stake when critical scholars study security rather than militarism – and why, for critical feminists in particular, studying one without attention to the other is not helpful. Anchoring the discussion of (US) militarism in ongoing debates about women in combat, the article proposes that studying security without attention to militarism leads scholars to miss the deeply militarist orientation of security studies. It further suggests that feminist scholarship, because it treats militarism and militarization as an integral part of feminist security studies and considers the everyday a crucial site for inquiry, is well suited to studying militarism and security alongside one another. The article then lays out what a critical feminist approach to studying militarism entails and presents some feminist insights on militarization, focusing in particular on what attention to gender can reveal about shared norms of manliness and war. Overall, the article shows why feminist perspectives offer such strikingly different insights into the relationship between militarism and security and what we miss when feminist scholarship is ignored or marginalized in scholarship on these issues.

Feminist foreign policy as ethical foreign policy? A care ethics perspective

“…Once this is understood, it becomes clear that a key effect of the ATT could be the legitimation of liberal forms of militarism exercised by major Western states (Stavrianakis, 2016: 841). In seeking to distinguish between ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ weaponry, we fail to recognize the wider structural effects of militarism (Wibben, 2018). As Paul Kirby has put it, ‘is there ever a conflict where arms flows could not be said to facilitate serious acts of gender- based violence – harms strongly correlated with, but not necessarily inflicted by, the deployment of weaponry?’ (Kirby, quoted in Stavrianakis, in press: 25).…”

Militarization, stigma, and resistance: negotiating military reservist identity in the civilian workplace

“…Militarism and militarization are paradoxical, though; for example, alongside popular support for the UK armed forces, we see ongoing recruitment difficulties and waning support for the idea of overseas military intervention. A wealth of recent scholarship seeking to define and explain the causes and consequences of militarism and militarization has burgeoned across disciplines as diverse as international relations (Stavrianakis and Selby 2012), human geography (Woodward 2005;Rech et al 2015), feminist studies (Enloe 2000;Stern and Zalewski 2009;Mohanty 2011;Åhäll 2016;Wibben 2018) criminology (Kraska 2007;Salter 2014;Evans 2017), sociology (Shaw 1991;Martino 2012;McSorley 2012) and, of most relevance to the current article, CMS (Enloe 2015;Agathangelou 2017;Massé, Lunstrum, and Holterman 2017). Broadening and deepening formulations of militarism derived from earlier literatures (Liebknecht and Sirnis 1972), allied work has identified the spatially and temporally diffuse character of militarization (Hyde 2016) that can play out at the level of everyday commodities (Turse 2008;Jackson 2017) and assume both subtle and hidden forms (Giroux 2004;Kallender and Hughes 2018).…”

What do we do now? Examining civilian masculinity/ies in contemporary liberal civil-military relations

“…Existing gender scholarship and critical militarism/military studies have demonstrated these dichotomies are not timeless universals, or objective facts, but rather contingent effects of power. 83 As indicated by the ambivalence of charitable UK civilian masculinity/ies, these binaries are often blurred and contradictory, even as they are ideologically and discursively reinforced as structural effects. Here, I draw upon a critical, historically-contextualised reading of liberal political thought to examine the ways in which, despite many critical analyses and empirical performances to the contrary, these associations may yet inform social relations and subjectivities.…”