Gender,visuality and violence: visual securitization and the 2001 war in Afghanistan

Visual securitization (the discursive processes by which images are assigned security implications) is integral to understanding how war and political violence is made possible. However, its insights have yet to be coupled with feminist international relations (IR) scholarship, which is alert to the connections between gender and (in)security. This article synthesizes these two research areas through Lene Hansen’s (2011) framework of visual securitization to investigate the gendered logics that underpinned the 2001 war in Afghanistan. By analyzing 123 photojournalistic images alongside American media texts and foreign policy discourse, I argue western images of Afghan women enacted a specific visuality through which they became constructed as a legitimate matter of security. The article makes two important contributions through this analysis. Firstly, it extends feminist understanding of the war in Afghanistan by demonstrating how the interplay between the visual and textual, and the gendered and racial logics operating within such interplay, visually produced Afghan women as a referent object of security. Secondly, this argument illustrates how gender can be critical in enabling the acceptance of visual securitizations, and how such securitizations can be enacted through gendered representations of insecurity and threat.