“Why are you trying to destroy the last good thing men have?” Understanding resistance to women in combat jobs

This article argues that opposition to expansion of women's roles in the US military and peer armed forces, particularly into combat-related military occupational specialties, is based on defending a means of proving masculinity and preserving access to power. Research is based on policies of US, UK, and other NATO countries, public statements made by officials, academic articles, and interviews with current and former members of the US military. The article examines shifting definitions of combat, historical examples of American women’s military service, and common and persistent themes of resistance to women in combat roles. The article argues that resistance to women in combat roles is not only inconsistent with operational realities, but is both counterproductive to mission effectiveness, and may even put lives at risk. The article concludes that in an ever-shifting security environment requiring critical thinking, cross-cultural communication, and civil–military collaboration, rethinking gender roles may be advantageous.     

Sex in an Imperial war zone: transnational encounters in Second World War India

This article suggests how the waging of war in an imperial setting may have reshaped military and civilian relations in India from 1939-45. The number of troops stationed in India had repercussions for society and local politics. The article investigates widespread prostitution as one aspect of the gendered wartime economy. Indian prostitution was closely linked to militarization and to the effects of the 1943 Bengal famine. The article also argues this was symptomatic of a more far-reaching renegotiation of the interactions between men and women in the Indian Empire of the 1940s. Other Indian, European, North American and Anglo-Indian women worked as nurses, with the Red Cross and in a variety of roles towards the war effort. Women were subject to new social and sexual demands due to the increased numbers of troops stationed in India in the 1940s.     

21st Century American Military Families: A Review in the Context of the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

This article has three interrelated objectives designed to highlight military family studies in the context of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Often referred to collectively as “the war on terror,” Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom represent the most comprehensive wars fought with an all‐volunteer force since the nation's independence. I review the literature on American military families with an emphasis on the challenges facing military families during these operations. First I provide coverage of issues specific to military marriages and then address the research on children of military families. The article ends with an argument for scholars to take a more integrated approach to the study of military families that would help break down the current state of family scholarship and military family scholarship as parallel lines of inquiry.     

Forget “militarization”: race,disability and the “martial politics” of the police and of the university

This article investigates the limits of the concept of militarization and proposes an alternative concept: martial politics. It argues that the concept of militarization falsely presumes a peaceful liberal order that is encroached on by military values or institutions. Arguing instead that we must grapple with the ways in which war and politics are mutually shaped, the article proposes the concept of martial politics as a means for examining how politics is shot-through with war-like relations. It argues that stark distinctions cannot be made between war and peace, military and civilian or national and social security. This argument is made in relation to two empirical sites: the police and the university. Arguing against the notion that either the police or the university have been “militarized,” the article provides a historical analysis of the ways in which these institutions have always already been implicated in martial politics – that is, of producing White social and economic order through war-like relations with Indigenous, racialized, disabled, poor and other communities. It concludes by assessing the political and scholarly opportunities that are opened up for feminists through the rejection of the concept of militarization in favor of the concept of martial politics.     

One of the Boys?

This article argues that American media reports of the Jessica Lynch case illustrate some of the ways in which gender has been reordered, policed and disciplined within the United States (and North America more broadly) in the wake of 9/11 and in the context of war. The study of a key gendered representation of the war – and of the way gender interlocks with race, class, nationality and sexuality in these representations – tells us not only about how the war was sold to the American public, but also about the degree to which normative and disciplinary gender roles can be stretched, or not, within domestic society and the ways in which contemporary media portrayals of foreign adventures serve to reinforce these gender norms. Ultimately we argue that media portraits of Jessica Lynch demonstrate how little the simple inclusion of women in the military acts to disrupt sexist systems of power and meaning.     

A Less Gendered Access to Land? The Impact of Tanzania's New Wave of Land Reform

Contemporary land reforms in sub‐Saharan Africa tend to be evaluated based on the state‐centric reforms of the past, which disadvantaged women. However, this article argues that the new‐wave of land reforms and their decentralised administration institutions and anti‐discriminatory legal frameworks may be different. Based on field research on the implementation of Tanzania's 1999 Land Acts, it identifies an institutional reconfiguration in which the formal institutions are gradually strengthened and the customary institutions slowly changed. This does not in itself pose a threat to women's access to land and some women, who are otherwise often perceived to be weak, are left better‐off. Nevertheless, access to land becomes socially more uneven.     

Cultural Sexism is Ordinary: Writing and Re‐Writing Women in Academia

When we ‘write women’ in academia, the focus in much of the literature to date has been to write about women. The focus of this article is the writing of women themselves; to give voice to women's experiences as constructors of knowledge. Through so doing this article uses writing as praxis; as a mechanism to disrupt, challenge and open a space for renegotiation of cultural norms within academic institutions. Based on qualitative data collection over a six‐year period, this article writes women's experiences and unpacks the way in which cultural sexism has become an ordinary feature of women's academic lives. It also considers ways in which the underlying cultural interpretations of hegemonic masculinized structures may be re‐written.     

Gendered practices in institutions of hegemonic masculinity

Vital knowledge about gender relations can be gained through the study of military and defense organizations. Such institutions of hegemonic masculinity tend to represent and reify specific notions of masculinity in ways that make it the norm. The article suggests that such institutions can be approached through feminist methodology, for example, by using critical analysis to question what appears ‘normal’ in institutional practice and by listening to the voices of women who challenge the norms of hegemonic masculinity by engaging in daily institutional practice. The article relates ‘women's voices’ and this ‘site’ of knowledge to feminist methodology by developing the standpoint perspective. It is argued that the notion of struggle formulated in standpoint theory is a useful way to understand the knowledge gained by women engaging with institutions of hegemonic masculinity, and an important contribution to the understanding of gender dynamics. Furthermore, it proposes that this ‘site’ of knowledge production will become increasingly relevant as women in rising numbers are taking positions within defense and military institutions and challenging historically embedded norms of hegemonic masculinity.     

“Ancient Volscian Border Dispute Flares”

Reception of the 2012 film adaptation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, dealt with two particular themes: the homoerotic relationship between Fiennes' Coriolanus and the rebel leader Aufidius whose forces he eventually joins, and the choice to shoot the film in Serbia and Montenegro. While south-east Europe has become an increasingly popular location for Anglophone filmmaking, the promotion and reception of Coriolanus foregrounded the significance of Belgrade and the Balkans as a site of recent conflict. Moreover, the film constructs the world of Coriolanus and Aufidius through simulating or even re-using images of “Balkan” space with which viewers have already become familiar through news media, and it therefore draws on and contributes to representative practices that constitute the Balkans as a violent and warlike zone. Yet Aufidius' rebel force resembling militias from the Yugoslav wars is opposed to a highly disciplined “Roman” military equipped for urban warfare in 2000s Iraq. This article contends that the film achieves this contrast primarily through evoking different military masculinities associated with each force, which have been widely disseminated through still and filmed war photography, and secondarily through its use of specific ex-Yugoslav landscapes and cityscapes. The complex relationship between images of the Balkans, masculinity and military discipline in Coriolanus shows that images of military masculinities juxtaposed with a post-Yugoslav material environment continue to operate as symbolic resources in a contemporary western imaginary of war.     

Donald Trump's discursive field: A juncture of stigma contests over race,gender, religion,and democracy

Donald Trump's election to the U.S. Presidency in 2016 qualifies as one of the more shocking events in American political history. This article reviews the literature on the social construction of Donald Trump's political career. It finds prominent ideological laminations over racism, Islamophobia, nativism, sexism, Christianity, and right‐wing populism in Trump's discursive field. This article argues that Trump's discursive field comprises a juncture of stigma contests over the moral worth of numerous collective identities including men, women, racial minorities, immigrants, Muslims, Christians, and the middle class. Such stigma contests likely exacerbate recognition gaps created by neoliberal policies. This review suggests that scholars should continue to examine the connection between Trump's political career and stigmatization. Moreover, cultural sociologists should ready themselves to track the dialectical response to Trump and to assess the lasting impact on the American normative order.     

A Modern Day Caesar? Donald Trump and American Caesarism

This article argues that the American political system under Donald Trump is an example of what Antonio Gramsci dubbed “Caesarism,” a situation where a taut balance of warring class forces allows for the emergence of a third force to freeze the antagonism and challenge/usurp established political institutions. To concretise Gramsci's rather abstract formulation and to better illuminate the nature of American Caesarism, this article employs a reading of the Roman poet Lucan's magisterial Civil War. Through a close reading of this text, we can explore the origins of Caesarism and study the efficacy of different means of struggle against it. Lucan thus helps us reinvigorate the concept of Caesarism and apply it in the contemporary American context. In particular, it will be demonstrated that whereas Lucan depicts a progressive form of Caesarism with a qualitatively new state form, the Trump administration embodies a regressive form of Caesarism within an old state form.     

Mujeres '94

ABSTRACT

Periods of democratic transition may provide space for increased political participation by women. Often, however, women's participation inexplicably falls off after the transition period to former low levels. This article argues that the form women's participation takes in transitions is crucial to both the shape of the resulting new democracy, and the subsequent impact of the new democratic institutions on building or sustaining a women's movement. A case study of the 1992-1994 transition period in El Salvador suggests that women must be present and contribute to the transition; form autonomous organizations but remain engaged with the state; and transform their political behavior from opposition to interaction with the new state.     

Negotiating freedom: Women of colour and the transition to free labour in Cuba, 1870–1886

This article argues that women of colour were central to the process of the legal transition to free labour in Cuba. Through an examination of legal appeals for freedom – which were often facilitated by new opportunities created by transition legislation – it shows that women were motivated by factors such as their families and frequently by their position as urban domestic servants. They could also make use of gendered understandings of slavery and freedom, which were socially prevalent although not legally enshrined. The paper argues that a focus on women and gender may have important implications for our understanding of Cuba's transition to free labour and of some of the constructions of citizenship and nationhood with which it was entwined.     

Why Did the Communists Win or Lose? A Comparative Analysis of the Revolutionary Civil Wars in Russia,Finland, Spain,and China

According to classic interpretations of the communist revolutions, political mobilization of peasantry was critical for the success of the revolutionary forces. This article, which reexamines the experience of civil wars in Russia, Finland, Spain, and China, argues that peasants’ contribution to the revolutions in Russia and later in China became possible under two historical conditions: breakdown of state authorities during the mass mobilization wars and existence of an unresolved agrarian problem in the countryside. Neither of these conditions alone, as the experience of other countries has shown, was sufficient for a success of the revolutionaries. The Spanish civil war of 1936–1939, for instance, was not preceded by a major international war. Because institutions of the traditional social order had not been undermined by war, Franco was able to defeat the Popular Front government, despite the peasants’ support of the revolution. In the Finnish civil war of 1918, which broke out in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution, state institutions did not collapse completely and the peasantry was divided in their responses to the revolution; the rural smallholders, for example, aligned with the Mannerheim's White army, not with the urban revolutionaries.     

Women in Politics in Post-Transitional Democracies: the chilean case

This article looks at women's participation in formal political institutions in posttransition politics. Employing the case of post-dictatorship Chile, it outlines the barriers to women's participation in the formal political arena; discusses the various strategies that Chilean women are currently employing to overcome their exclusion; and finally, examines the challenges that political women confront in promoting 'women's interests' in political institutions. Throughout the article two main arguments are advanced. First, where women's movements do not demand institutional reforms during the transition period - a time when movements enjoy influence and parties are in flux - then the barriers to women in political institutions re-emerge. In Chile, the fact that women did not demand institutional reforms, such as quotas for women in decision-making positions, is linked tothe broader strategy of the movement tomake citizenship demands based on women's 'difference'. This strategy inhibited women from demanding power (i.e. access to institutions as individuals) because this conformed to a masculine-defined notion of politics inconsistent with women's 'different' style of practising politics. A second,related argument is that a strategy based on women's 'difference' hinders women in politics frompromoting feminist goals,especially in the climate ofsocial conservatism that characterizes post-transition Chilean politics. Despite these constraints and the many challenges Chilean women in politics confront, gains are being made, as women recognize the need for, and begin to demand, institutional reforms to expand their presence in formal politics.     

Making Feminist Sense out of ‘Charlie Wilson's War’

Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Mike Nichols's film about the womanizing Congressman who engineered black funds for the CIA's proxy war in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, is historically misleading but highly instructive, because in packaging dominant American masculine identity and war politics as popular entertainment for post-9/11 audiences, it reveals the sexed and gendered ‘politics of the visual’ in global affairs. This intertextual study of ‘Charlie Wilson's war’ as movie, constructed history and legacy examines Wilson as a prime exhibit of a needy masculinity that, like the film's emasculated CIA, bulks itself up through surrogate military selves. It also analyses modes of the imaginary and specularity in brother-bonding with the mujahidin, tracks the proxy system's loops of masculine identity-and-war-making between Stateside and South Asia in the post-Vietnam 1980s and interrogates the dynamics of imperial ‘un-seeing’ in this campaign and its long aftermath. While US proxy wars proliferate worldwide, the lack of useable political memory about the ground truths of ‘Charlie's war’ continues to matter because America's second ‘good’ war in Afghanistan, bound to the first by gendered causal links, has re-empowered the forces that still menace women's rights and lives.     

“The waiting and not knowing can be agonizing”: tracing the power of emotions in a prolonged conflict in the South Caucasus

Moving beyond the usual strategic and national issues of war in international relations, feminist theorizing on aspects of war has stressed the pressing need to depict it as something experienced by individuals. This study addresses this need by considering the critical case of the protracted conflict over the Nagorny Karabakh region in the South Caucasus. Despite the 1994 ceasefire, no satisfactory settlement for all the parties involved in the conflict has yet been reached. In fact, since the four-day war in April 2016, the situation has become even more tense, with an increased risk of renewed hostilities. This article uses empirical research with women in Nagorny Karabakh to examine the impact of this protracted conflict through an analysis of emotions in their everyday lives. It argues that fear, grief and trauma not only affect individual women but also create a collective identity amongst them that is defined by compliance with the heightened militarization of society in this region. In this way, this study shows that emotions feed into the persistence of patriarchal relations. By exploring women’s emotions, this article contributes to the growing literature in international relations that examines war as lived experience.     

Not without my sister(s)

Less than two months after 11 September 2001, and a few weeks after the beginning of the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan, President George W. Bush made an urgent plea to see Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar. Not only did the President want to see Kandahar; he encouraged US citizens to view it as well. This article offers two readings of Kandahar – the first suggestive of what its filmmaker Makhmalbaf saw in Afghanistan and the second suggestive of what Bush saw (or hoped to see) in Makhmalbaf's Afghanistan. In particular, this article focuses on how the Bush administration – against the intentions of Kandahar's director and star – propelled occidental subjects to ‘lift the veil’ on Afghanistan and on Afghan women by viewing Kandahar as if it positioned the feminine as a needy and willing object of US rescue. It was in part by laying this particular claim to the separated sisters of Kandahar that the Bush administration constructed a humanitarian US ‘we’ as among the foundations of its ‘moral grammar of war’ in the war on terror.     

Class,State, and Revolution in the History of American Capitalism

The significance of the American Revolution has generally been downplayed in accounts of the rise of capitalism in the United States, especially those undertaken from a critical perspective. New approaches to the history of capitalism, however, have emphasised the centrality of the state. This article argues that re‐centring the state's role in the history of capitalism should return attention to the significant restructuring of the American state that occurred during and as a result of the revolution. At the same time, it argues that this restructuring cannot be understood historically outside the context of class‐formation of which it was a part. Revolution reshaped the new nation's capitalist class, in the near term, much more than it did the labouring classes. This reconfiguration encompassed and went beyond the innovation of new political institutions. In the long‐run it helped to underpin the particular development of capitalism in the United States.     

“Without women,the war could never have happened”: representations of women’s military contributions in non-state armed groups

Feminist international relations theory argues that male consolidation of power in the aftermath of armed conflict often occurs as men gain the status of heroes in the post-war appraisals. Explorations of republican commemoration in the North of Ireland have uncovered the dominance of the male protagonist with a notable relative absence of militant republican women. Militarized masculine narratives and patriarchal understandings of what is deemed a combatant role, and therefore deemed worthy of commemorating, consistently fail to value or recognize women’s multiple and vital wartime contributions. This article argues that conventional definitions of military contributions and combatant roles are imprecise, highly gendered and ultimately function as a mechanism to denigrate and exclude women’s wartime labor. Based on in-depth interviews with former combatants, the article critically explores the ways in which republican women themselves conceptualize their contributions to armed struggle. Emerging from this is a theoretically rich narrative of women’s multiple and diverse military roles which firmly challenge the limited definition of “a person with a weapon.” It is suggested that by paying careful attention to the lives of combatant women, feminist scholars can use their experiences, narratives and meanings to challenge existing frameworks and discourses, and redefine combatant roles and wartime contributions.