Philanthropic Soldiers,Practical Orientalism,and the Occupation of Iraq

This article discusses the ways in which white, male, United States soldiers make sense of both themselves and Iraqi others. Drawing from qualitative interviews with twenty-four said soldiers from southern Indiana, most of whom having deployed to Iraq, it is shown how these soldiers perform gendered and racialized Orientalist discourses to rationalize United States empire and in particular the military occupation of Iraq. Specifically, imperialist discourses that imagine a superior “us” and an inferior “them” and understand United States state violence as ultimately a Western humanitarian “rescue” are shown to be powerful cultural logics in the sense-making practices of the interviewed soldiers. This article then is concerned with what others have called “practical Orientalism”—or the ways in which formal and official Orientalist discourses are adopted by everyday actors.     

Working a Third Shift: Physical Activity and Embodied Motherhood

In their conception of the “third shift,” Dworkin and Wachs argue that working mothers engage in fitness and bodywork in addition to the first shift of professional work and the second shift of household labor and childcare. Within this third shift, the goal for women is to “erase physical evidence of motherhood” and return to the pre-pregnancy self. The cultivation of a body socially defined as “good” and “attractive” thus serves as a visible illustration of an embodied subjectivity anchored in morality and neoliberal personal responsibility, signifying a strong woman who has her body and her life under control. Utilizing thematic analysis to examine dominant constructions of embodied motherhood in popular texts and products, this article offers five conceptual categories to explore why and how women in engage in bodywork. Understanding how women operationalize the third shift of fitness and bodywork is important because it helps to unpack the struggles of contemporary motherhood and the competing realities of home, work, and self-care.     

Cowboy of the World? Gender Discourse and the Iraq War Debate

In this article we examine the debate preceding the most recent war in Iraq to show how gendered framing can compromise the quality of debate. Drawing on a sample of national news discourse in the year before the war began, we show that both anti-war and pro-war speakers draw on binary images of gender to construct their cases for or against war. Speakers cast the Bush administration’s argument for invasion either as a correct “macho” stance or as inappropriate, out-of-control masculinity. The most prominent gendered image in war debate is that of the cowboy, used to characterize both President Bush and US foreign policy in general. The cowboy is positioned against a diplomatic form of masculinity that is associated with Europe and valued by anti-war speakers, but criticized by pro-war speakers. Articles that draw on gender images show a lower quality of the debate, measured by the extent to which reasons rather than ad hominem arguments are used to support or rebut assertions.

Mum's the Word: Intersubjectivity,Alterity, and the Maternal Subject

Where motherhood and ethics are brought together, it is usually under the rubric of an “ethic of care,” with the mother-child relationship figured as a paradigmatic example of such an ethic. In this article I make use of Levinas' account of ethics as first philosophy to flesh out a notion of “maternal alterity” as an alternative to a maternal ethics based on the various complex mental and emotional tasks that make up care. This represents an attempt to recuperate something for the mother out of her often bewildering encounter with the enigmatic otherness of her child. Situating Levinas alongside a dialogue between Jessica Benjamin and Judith Butler on intersubjectivity, I attempt to disentangle maternal subjectivity from the developing subjectivity of the child and offer an account of the maternal subject as an ethical subject situated, perhaps, “otherwise” to a discourse of care.     

Sexual Misgivings: Producing Un/Marked Knowledge in Neoliberal Marriage Promotion Policies

This article draws on what Brekhus has called “the sociology of the unmarked” to illuminate the construction of knowledge in the debate over heterosexual marriage's significance in society. It conducts a qualitative content analysis of archival data written by marriage advocates from 1990 to 2010 and finds that marriage advocates use discourses that incorporate unmarked assumptions concerning heterosexuality and marked knowledge about single motherhood and same‐sex marriage that is linked to neoliberal ideals of individual responsibility and self‐reliant family life. This article uncovers how cultural battles over marriage's significance are connected to a neoliberal discourse of individual responsibility, negotiated through boundary work that marks single motherhood and same‐sex marriage as in need of special consideration.     

For a sociology of committed professionals: “Art Worlds” in the United States and opposing the war in Iraq

This article analyzes American artists’ opposition to the war in Iraq, emphasizing the way it was determined by their professional situations. Regardless of the networks and political organizations involved, or the ideological dimensions of the anti-war cause, individual professional identities and relationships persisted and influenced their public practices and positioning. In a first section, we compare different artistic subfields and labor configurations, to grasp what, in the participants’ own eyes, made the combination of artistic and militant identities - and, sometimes, the production of a form of “political art” - tenable. The second section concentrates on how political commitment emerged in fields of professional activity, how the functioning of artistic milieus today – that have become more autonomous, specialized and professional – tends to discourage “mixing registers”, i.e. combining aesthetic motives and political logics.     

(New) Bulgarian Enlighteners and Ambassadors? The Reinvention of National Identity in Times of Crisis

Drawing on empirical data from 37 Bulgarian students and young professionals in the UK, this article explores the intersection of the discourses produced by the European crises and migrants' national identity. In Bulgaria, the crisis narrative is embedded in the arguably never-ending democratic transition, manifested in socio-economic instability and political volatility. Simultaneously, “Brexit Britain” is enveloped in strong Eurosceptic sentiments, propelled by a combination of austerity measures and intensified Eastern European migratory flows. Both contexts subject Bulgarian migrants to stigmatizing representations. Looking at migrants' everyday practices, the data reveals that young Bulgarians draw on the related ideas of the “new” Enlightener and Ambassador to counterbalance negative discourses. Thus, the article explores the meanings and significance attributed to the Enlighteners and the Ambassadors, arguing that the participants engage in “social creativity” and “individual mobility” strategies that lead to reinvention of national identity.     

New soldiers and empty boys: imaging traumatic memory

This essay reconstructs one important context for images published by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW): the testimonial practices of anti-war veterans. First in small rap sessions, and then in unofficial public hearings, anti-war veterans recollected their war experiences in an effort to inform civilians about the US war in Vietnam, and mobilise them to oppose it. Photographs of introspective veterans – lost in memory – provide a visual idiom for the experience of ‘flashing back’ that was the basis for veterans’ testimony. If these photographs signify the central role of self-reflection in veterans’ anti-war organising, they also imply a distrust of graphic war photography – both images disseminated by the mainstream media and atrocity photographs taken by soldiers themselves. Anti-war veterans worried that war photographs catered to a consumerist appetite for intense, vicarious experience and provoked only a fleeting sense of revulsion. Compounding this distrust of graphic imagery was the circulation of war souvenirs, atrocity photographs taken by soldiers of their dead and wounded victims. Exploring portraiture as an alternative to photojournalism, this essay situates images of introspective veterans in relation to the pioneering activism of the VVAW and allies them with images produced by other activists working in the visual field, focusing on Martha Rosler’s ‘Empty Boys’.     

The love bug and the melancholic drag queen or a reflection on the cultural/political “grounds” of subjects as sexual

The notion of the subject and its formation has long been at the centre of discussion in critical theory. Identity discourse constructed a passive subject made up of qualities such us gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and age. Poststructuralist thought on the other hand invested its critical mind in producing a mobile subject, one that is both the product and the producer of practices, power and processes. While identity discourse put qualities such as “sex” at the centre of its analysis of subject formation and produced a sexual subject, poststructuralist thought emphasised “bodies and pleasure” and produced the subject as sexual. This article addresses the formation of the subject as sexual through an everyday practice that forms a dominant part of our contemporary computerised era, namely that of the opening of an e‐mail. It reads the effects of the “Love Bug”, the e‐mail that infected millions of computer systems on the 4th of May 2000, so as to assess the extent it produces a different subject sexual than the one already promoted in poststructuralist thought. Butler’s notion of “gender performativity” (a dominant concept in relation to the subject as sexual) and her allegory of the melancholic drag queen are evaluated through ?i?ek’s critique and the example of the “Love Bug” e‐mail. This produces a different reading of the subject as sexual: one that understands sexual pleasure as being at the foundations of subject formation.     

Cosmopolitan militaries and dialogic peacekeeping: Danish and Swedish women soldiers in Afghanistan

Feminist security studies (FSS) scholarship advocates the analysis of women’s war experiences and narratives to understand conflict and military intervention. Here we add a non-great power focus to FSS debates on the gendered discourses of military interventionism. We zoom in on Danish and Swedish women soldiers’ reflections on their involvement in the ISAF operation in Afghanistan. Their stories are deconstructed against the backdrop of their states’ adoption of a cosmopolitan-minded ethic on military obligation. Both states employed women soldiers in dialogic peacekeeping in Afghanistan to establish links with local women and to gather intelligence, tasks that were less frequently afforded to male soldiers. However, feminist FSS scholarship locates military intelligence gathering within racial, gendered and imperialist power relations that assign victimhood to local women. This feminist critique is pertinent, but the gendered and racial logics governing international operations vary across national contexts. While such gender binaries were present in Danish and Swedish military practice in Afghanistan, our article shows that dialogical peacekeeping offered an alternative to stereotypical constructions of women as victims and men as protectors. Dialogical peacekeeping helped to disrupt such gendering processes, giving women soldiers an opportunity to rethink their gender identities while instilling dialogical relations with local women.     

The Turn from “What” to “How”: Garfinkel's Reach Beyond Description

John Heritage described Harold Garfinkel's central question as “how do social actors come to know, and know in common what they are doing and the circumstances in which they are doing it.” The case of Agnes illuminates the methods by which members produce intelligible actions and recognizable—even “natural”—gender orderliness. With this central interest as a starting point, this article offers some observations about transgender women in prison and their creative adaptation to life behind bars.     

The politics of foot powder: depoliticizing motherhood during the US War on Terrorism

This article uses the example of mothers of service members during the US War on Terrorism (October 2001 to present) to show how gendered maternal ideology can disempower women to participate in the political process. When their children join the Armed Forces, mothers seek out online support groups where their experiences of war are validated by other mothers. In these groups, they draw on their maternal relationship to war to define what “support” and “politics” mean. Support is defined as unconditional backing of the troops and the war, and political viewpoints are considered unrelated to this maternal support. Adopting militarized motherhood, mothers describe speaking out against the war politically as dangerous to the troops. Doing so hurts their morale, thus jeopardizing their mission and safety. Collectively, mothers police the boundaries of support and politics, and are disempowered to question war, or to engage in the political process during wartime.     

The resonance of moderate feminism and the gendered relations of austerity

During the tenure of the UK Conservative‐led coalition government (2010–15) austerity policy was rolled out in response to the global financial crisis of 2007–08. In this article a discourse analysis of mainstream newspaper representations of austerity, which appeared throughout this period, is undertaken using the principles of Cultural Political Economy (Jessop 2004). Three key questions are posed: 1) How is gender drawn upon to render austerity intelligible? 2) How do these discursive constructions contribute to the reproduction of particular ideas regarding contemporary gender relations? 3) What do these gendered austerity discourses reveal about the institutionalisation of particular forms of feminism? A critical gender discourse which emphasised equality appeared alongside constructions of gender that reproduced problematic assumptions. Made meaningful in this way, austerity, as a strategy for restoring pre‐crash social arrangements, also restored particular aspects of gender relations. This is theorised as the product of the successful institutionalisation of a hegemonic, moderate liberal feminism prior to the financial crash. The findings contribute to debates within feminist scholarship about the dynamics of gender inclusion and extend our understanding of the associated implications for feminist critique.     

Making Sense of Dissatisfaction during the Transition to Motherhood through Relational Dialectics Theory

Motherhood is a complicated experience as well as concept in U.S. society, and while several notions of motherhood circulate in U.S. culture, they are not equally accepted. Their unequal circulation is the focus of our study. Using relational dialectics theory, we sought to identify dominant and marginalized discourses evoked by new mothers who are dissatisfied with their transition to motherhood. Twenty women with a first child under the age of two years old shared their experiences during semi-structured interviews. These mothers’ talk reflects a variant on dominant discourses of motherhood – the Discourse of Motherhood as Innately Desired (DMID) where wanting to be, as well as looking like, a “good” mother are subthemes. However, the Discourse of Motherhood as Learned (DML) served as a counterpoint for sense-making that offers space for alternative, albeit marginalized, understandings of motherhood where it is not assumed as the primary goal for women nor a natural extension of their womanhood.     

Conditional Inclusion: Sexual Minorities,Tolerance, and Nationalism

This article discusses how the approach towards sexual minorities has shifted from exclusion to inclusion between the mid-1980s and the present, and explores how the view that Japan is more tolerant of sexual minorities than the USA and Europe actually limits discussions on citizenship. An examination of the AIDS crisis and the Fuchu Youth Center court case in the 1980s and 1990s shows that gay men were regarded as a threat to national identity, seen to endanger Japan and whose sexuality was deemed to be unintelligible. In a word, their citizenship was denied. In the 2010s the ruling Liberal Democratic party issued a report on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues, which examined measures aimed at achieving equality for those who suffer from SOGI discrimination. While sexual minorities became an object of inclusion, only partial and circumscribed citizenship was granted. Although the report ostensibly aims to promote SOGI diversity, it relegates the existence of minorities to the private sphere, and limits diversity by demanding the acceptance of a “tolerant culture” predicated on heterosexism and gender norms. By positioning their diversity effort in Japan's “tolerant traditional culture,” the party inadvertently incorporates nationalism and renders it central to their approach towards SOGI diversity. This article concludes that the discourse that the Japanese state is tolerant of sexual minorities undermines the recognition of sexual minorities’ citizenship.     

Confronting “Victim” Discourses: The Identity Work of Battered Women

In this article I explore how battered women both draw from and reject victim discourses in their processes of self‐construction and self‐representation. Data gathered from semistructured interviews with forty women who experienced violence from an intimate partner in a heterosexual relationship demonstrate that available “victim” discourses are both enabling and constraining. Four common representations of a victim emerged as most influential to women's identity work: as someone who suffers a harm she cannot control; as someone who deserves sympathy and/or requires some type of action be taken against the victimizer; as someone who is culpable for her experiences; and as someone who is powerless and weak. “Victim empowerment” and “survivor” discourses also played a role in how women understood and made sense of their experiences. In their attempts to construct identities for themselves, battered women become caught between notions of victimization, agency, and responsibility.     

The biopower of beauty: humanitarian imperialisms and global feminisms in an age of terror

As part of a feminist commitment to collaboration, this article, which appears as a companion essay to Minh-Ha T. Pham's "The Right to Fashion in the Age of Terror," offers a point of departure for thinking about fashion and beauty as processes that produce subjects recruited to, and aligned with, the national interests of the United States in the war on terror. The Muslim woman in the veil and her imagined opposite, the fashionably modern and implicitly Western woman, become convenient metaphors for articulating geopolitical contests of power as human rights concerns, as rescue missions, as beautifying mandates. This essay examines newer iterations of this opposition, after September 11, 2001, in order to demonstrate the critical resonance of a biopolitics of fashion and beauty. After the events of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush's administration launched a military and public relations campaign to promote U.S. national interests using the language of feminism and human rights. While these discourses in the United States helped to reinvigorate a declining economy, and specifically a flagging fashion industry (as Pham addresses in her companion essay), feminism abroad was deployed to very different ends. This article considers the establishment of the Kabul Beauty School by the nongovernmental organization Beauty without Borders, sponsored in large part by the U.S. fashion and beauty industries. Examining troubling histories of beauty's relation to morality, humanity, and security, as well as to neoliberal discourses of self-governance, the author teases out the biopower and biopolitics of beauty, enacted here through programs of empowerment that are inseparable from the geopolitical aims of the U.S. deployment in Afghanistan.