Despite the burgeoning literature highlighting the significance of gender to global politics, research into international studies curricula suggests that gender is rarely dealt with extensively or even adequately by ‘top ranking’ UK Politics and International Relations (IR) departments. A cursory glance at popular, introductory undergraduate textbooks in Politics and International Relations also reveals that whilst feminism may be included as an approach, accounts of power as institutionally situated remain dominant. As such, many undergraduates only experience brief introductions to feminism, gender, and issues of sexual identity, if anything at all. So when I was given the chance to design and teach two research-led undergraduate courses in 2009, I saw it as an important opportunity: both to provide students with insights into how gender animates global politics, and to engage in a form of ‘feminist pedagogy’ by encouraging students to look at themselves and the world around them critically and analytically, through the interlocking lenses of gender, race, class and sexuality.

My experience of delivering these courses over the past few years has been largely positive. On more than one occasion students have commented that engaging with feminist theories and praxis had ‘opened their eyes’. However, in other students the experience of studying the global through gendered and postcolonial lenses elicited confusion, anger and pain on their part, at least initially. Indeed, as I have continued to teach these courses, I have often thought of student reactions as akin to Kübler-Ross and Kessler’s five stages of grief or what Patti Lather has aptly called ‘stages of feminist consciousness’.

One possible reason for this is that for feminists, the question of ‘What is Politics?’ necessarily includes accounts of power that are personal, emotional, and everyday. Given that trying to account for how power shapes and is shaped by people’s daily lives is not always readily accessible through a focus on institutions and the like – the usual stuff of politics and IR analysis – many feminist teachers are likely to encourage their students to think through how ‘the personal is political’ in their experiences and to re-personalise an often depersonalised and sanitised set of issues including war. Many of my students (though not all, and rarely, it should be said, in a linear fashion) experience moments of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance when taking my courses. Moreover, in reacting to their comments and in trying to anticipate their turmoil I often find myself angry, disbelieving, in negotiating mode, saddened and sometimes having to accept, and very grudgingly I’ll admit, that not all of them believe that gender is as significant to war as I do.

Over the years, I’ve come to reflect on how I can try to negotiate these various stages of grief or feminist consciousness so that my students are able to consider the wider significance of what they have learnt whether they are fully convinced by it or not. One such method is what I call ‘riding it out’ when faced with denial and bargaining. Though optional, my courses in gender and global politics are usually well-populated, taken by a good mix of men and women and receive positive feedback. However, I still begin every teaching year with a sense of trepidation; a feeling that I have to start these courses by ‘proving’ the value of gender as an explanatory variable and an empirical reality to my students. IR, like any other discipline, is not a culturally neutral terrain; it projects and reinforces particular ideas about men and women, about masculinities and femininities that make feminist approaches to the study of war and other global political issues so pertinent in the first place; and students are just as situated within disciplinary contexts as their teachers. In my first classes on the two research-led units in question, it became very clear that I was introducing an approach that was rather novel for most of my students, and as I have already mentioned, feminist research and syllabi are not mainstream aspects of the discipline or indeed my University.

One common reaction I have observed among students in almost each and every new cohort, especially in my Gendering World Politics course at level 2, is that whilst many recognise differential power relations between men and women, they see them as biologically given or as immutable psychological traits. My assertions that there was little to no evidence for this came as a shock to many who insisted on the significance of protective and randy ‘cavemen’ and submissive women. However, some of the most effective interventions on this seem to come from students themselves who, in my experience, get very good at pressing one another on how they have reached such conclusions and what evidence they are basing them on. As such, denial often dissipates within the first few weeks of my courses, though sometimes a linked stage of consciousness/grief, that of bargaining, suggests that doubt, if not outright denial, can still recur at later stages of the course even after sustained exposure to feminist theory, empirical evidence and sustained debate and discussion.

In my first year of teaching Gendering World Politics I remember feeling especially perturbed by the kind of ‘denial’ outlined above but also much relieved at its seeming disintegration as the course proceeded. However, this meant that I was especially shocked when in week nine of a ten week course, in a seminar on gender and the environment, my students began to question the validity of using a feminist lens not only to consider questions of environmental displacement and insecurity and matters of environmental degradation and women’s health, but of a gendered lens more widely. Such reactions from students might be explained, at least in part, by a common challenge that many feminist teachers face: though students may have already been exposed to normative perspectives on how society ‘ought to be’, telling students that there is nothing inherent or natural about the way that men and women are socially situated is not always an easy thing for them to hear.

When discussing issues such as equal pay, it’s always interesting, and often disheartening, to see tell-tale signs of disappointment in the faces of my women students and confusion in the faces of my men students; this tends to occur as the women realise they are unlikely to be paid as much as the young men sitting around them regardless of ability, and as the men realise that not every advantage they get in life may be fully ‘earned’ by them as individuals. Though denial and bargaining often slip away after the first few weeks of a gender course, feminist teachers perhaps need to be aware that moments of anxiety can resurge, and often unexpectedly. In light of the transformative possibilities of ‘opening one’s eyes to gender realities’, we need to be mindful that this can be alienating as well as liberating for some students.

The potential alienation of ‘opening one’s eyes’ to gender and its personal implications may also account for feelings of anger among students. As something that often and almost universally ‘’strikes a chord’ with their experiences, at least to some extent, feminism and gender scholarship is perhaps that much harder to reject than some other normative approaches to political analysis. It can therefore elicit pain and anger and foster controversy between students who disagree. During one seminar in my first year of teaching Gendering World Politics, two students, one man, one woman, became involved in a heated discussion witnessed by the entire group. The man student complained about a focus on women as victims of violence in peacekeeping situations, that the course was supposed to be about gender not women. The woman student attempted to explain that this focus was because women were overwhelmingly victims of violence in such situations, at the hands of peacekeepers who were overwhelmingly men. The man student was very argumentative and dominated the space by talking over the woman student who became red with anger.

My means of intervention was to split the class into small groups and ask them to take up the dispute with reference to their reading. I told them to listen respectfully to each other and to focus on critiquing ideas not individuals. I not only separated the feuding pair, I put all of the women in the class into one group. I did this partly because I noticed that the confrontation had made other women in the class uncomfortable but also because the ways that women and men are socially situated can often lead young men to perform in particularly masculine ways in the classroom, such as speaking over others. Whilst I am not in any way suggesting that there is an essentially ‘female’ or essentially ‘male’ way of interacting, I believe that it can be difficult for women to challenge masculine performances because of the ways that they are socially situated. Importantly, I told the students why I had divided the class this way which they all seemed to understand and appreciate. Indeed, though the general consensus among the women in the class was that they would not want to be divided up this way every week, they all expressed appreciation at having an opportunity to debate these issues with one another, something they had not experienced in other courses.

Ensuring that I am sensitive towards cultural and social dynamics that may affect learning is integral to my teaching philosiphy. I try to foster a learning environment where all students can air and apply their ideas with confidence. I observe how students interact, paying particular attention to who dominates the classroom, who keeps quiet, and so on. Though I think it is valuable to mix students up so they can engage with a range of viewpoints, I also frequently place students in groups where I sense that they feel comfortable working with particular peers. Sensitivity does also involve challenging students on occasion though. As Lee Warren argues, avoiding a controvesial issue “has its own consequences. Students learn that such behaviour is OK and…They miss the opportunity to learn about their own behaviour and its consequences”. This became clear to me in a seminar discussion on Katherine Moon’s insightful work on relationships between South-Korean prostitutes and US soldiers when one of my students identified prostitutes as ‘bad women’. I was stunned by this comment but a graduate student auditing the unit stepped in. She asked the student directly why he felt that way and told him that she found his comments troubling. He proceeded to reflect and unpack his comments and realised why she was offended. This very well-articulated challenge to his comment reduced tension in the classroom and helped this student, and probably others, to think through its implications. Though I was aggrieved that I had not handled this particular situation well myself as the instructor, I learnt a lot from observing the graduate student’s astute challenge.

Another challenge is depression in students. At the start of the academic year, in the first sessions of my undergraduate courses on Gendering World Politics and Gender, Militarization and Resistance, I issue all of my students a warning and an apology that some of the material that they will be asked to read during the course may be very upsetting to them. I do this because one of the key challenges of teaching students who are primarily aged between 18 and 22 years of age, with very little past exposure to in-depth political analysis, is exposing them to articles on, and inviting them to discuss, rape, genital mutilation, torture and violence of various kinds on a weekly basis. Throughout the past few years of teaching these courses, students in different cohorts have expressed that such reading can be challenging, upsetting, disturbing and in the words of one third year undergraduate, can ‘make them cry’. Though students also often express that they believe that engaging with this material is an important way for them to understand the significance of making political and social interventions, the gender and war teacher needs to be mindful of the hazards of some course content. Warning that an especially harrowing reading may have been set that week and allowing students to unpack how readings made them feel in a supportive, non-threatening way are some of the steps we can take but ultimately, there will always be the potential for emotional pain in such courses.

Another issue that warrants further consideration though is the willingness with which some students embrace issues that are deeply upsetting, opting to perhaps complete an undergraduate dissertation on them. In these circumstances it is important to be wary of students engaging in the kinds of depersonalized approaches to global political issues that feminists are so often at pains to challenge, especially when depersonalization becomes a form of fetishizing. Whilst depression can be damaging to students, fostering empathy is an important part of feminist pedagogy on gender and war and of fostering feminist consciousness.

I would be being dishonest if I were to suggest that feminist consciousness is not my overall aim. Though I would hope that I am largely able to avoid “implying ideological correctness” in the classroom, not least because my own research involves critiquing humanist thinking that insists on the universality of something called ‘progress’ and its capacity to liberate everyone, I do want my students to see gender scholarship as a valid approach to the study of IR and to recognise gender relations as something that affects their own lives. As Cindy Rosenthal argues, though many students are now “enjoying the rewards of feminism, many of today’s twenty-something undergraduates resist any association with things ‘feminist’ and [may] consider gender as a largely irrelevant construct in their lives”. This is often my experience at the start of the academic year when denial, bargaining, anger and depression most often characterise the reactions of my students. Of course, some students begin my course as feminists and remain that way but these students are rare. Others will leave still experiencing aspects of denial, bargaining, anger and depression. I agree with Lather that feminist consciousness is a process and a non-linear one at that; so whilst I hope that most of my students reach the stage of ‘acceptance’, this is not something I can ever guarantee.

However, the most rewarding aspects of teaching on gender and sensitive issues such as war are those moments when you observe that students have not only come to realise the significance of gender to their lives, but also to the wider workings of local and global power relations and how they are situated within them. As bell hooks argues, Feminism is for Everybody; but this has often come as a surprise to my students in light of the supposed ‘post-feminist’ culture they find themselves in. For some of the young women who take my classes, feminism can equip them with the language and knowledge to challenge, something they begin to do in the classroom. Some of those women students have asked the men sitting around them in the class if they think it’s fair that the women students are likely to earn less money than them. For some of the men who have taken my courses the knowledge that most feminists would agree that ‘gender is not a synonym for women’ and that it is important to examine how men as well as women can be oppressed by salient assumptions about gender is often a revelation. For many of these young men, this realisation engenders reflection on the significance of gender to their lives and relationships.

Thus, although there are many challenges in teaching gender and war and gender and other sensitive topics to undergraduates, not least those emotions and pains elicited from exposure to emotionally arresting material, I remain optimistic about the value of feminist pedagogy and my focus on gender in my teaching. It seems that among my students at least, there is an appetite for courses that engage with wider understandings of power than those that the discipline has traditionally been concerned with; even if at times that process can be a painful one.

So here I am; it is 9:30am. I am sitting in a room with other women at our weekly Friday writing group. We call ourselves the Writing Warriors, as much to describe what we’re doing as also to encourage ourselves to continue doing it. Most of us are untenured still, which adds an extra dimension to the task of writing – must be productive, must publish! Many of us have small children and when the writing stops, that’s what we talk about: How do we deal with the challenges of combining motherhood and an academic career. We exchange recommendations for childcare and kid-friendly restaurants; we give advice on breastfeeding, potty-training, and where to buy healthy snacks (we certainly don’t have time to make them). Sometimes one or more of us have to miss the writing day (or part of it) when a child is home from school, a babysitter is ill, or we just cannot focus on our own research because we need to catch up on teaching or service commitments (of which we all have plenty, of course).

So here I am; I arrived late today. Only a few minutes late, but late enough to be occupied still with what I left behind in the rush to get here as close as possible to 9am when we meet, greet, talk about our writing plans for the day, and then start writing, promptly at 9:15am. I am wondering should I have left earlier. When? I could have skipped breakfast. I could have ignored my daughter’s requests to read her a story before leaving. Should I not have bothered to throw in the load of laundry? Or, to wipe off the food from the high-chair? I could have gotten here a few minutes earlier…

So here I am; writing IR. I am an international relations scholar, so this is what I do, I write IR. I need to convince myself that this is what I am doing, say it again: I write IR. I write IR. As I repeat these words, something else pops into my mind: Sam I am, I do not like that Sam I am. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them Sam I am… just like the character in Dr. Seuss’ children’s book needs to be convinced to try green eggs and ham just like I need to convince myself, that I am writing IR.

So here I am; staring at the blank page. It is 10:20am by now. I just deleted several paragraphs about how I’m not working on my ‘book project’ – the title I give that dreaded task of preparing my dissertation for publication. I’m still thinking about home, about what I left behind to now stare at the blank page. It’s a beautiful sunny day; I’m sure they’re having fun on the playground now. My IR self is getting angry, “This has nothing to do with work!” Yes, it does, the feminist self replies: “The personal is political.” This is personal; there is politics here somewhere.

So here I am; today is my research day. I have teaching on my mind now: Enloe says the personal is international. We were reading Bananas… I can hear my daughter, “nyummy, nyummy, nane, meh nane.” It’s hard to write IR as a feminist and mother. I get sidetracked, I burst into laughter (my writing cohort wonders why), I am tempted to leave, to go slide down the blue twisted slide, to let the sand slip through my fingers, to make today a baby day instead.

So here I am; still. I did not leave. I will try to focus on IR. I hear my judo coach: “try more, try more.” Sensei is 93, the highest ranking female in judo history. Her motto is “Be strong, be gentle, be beautiful. In mind, body and spirit.” I will be strong. I wonder about her life. She has taught judo all over the world. She has dedicated her whole life to judo, yet she has not received the 10th Dan, an honor reserved for men it seems. Wow, there might be (feminist) IR in a place I have not previously thought about. Strange things can happen when the personal becomes IR.

So here I am; I am getting excited finally. I should write about my new research project – the one I want to work on, have been working on quietly, unofficially, in the private sphere of my home. The one I am telling myself I cannot pursue yet, because I have that ‘book project’ to worry about, and tenure. It’s about mothering, no parenting, and peace. My IR self raises her eyebrows, “Do you want to finally marginalize yourself? You know that IR thinks little of those who concern themselves with peace!” The feminist self wonders, “Why parenting? Don’t you value mothers’ work?” I am quiet now.

So here I am; it is 11:15am. We entered our third hour of writing and I am determined to leave my mother self behind and embrace my scholar self fully. I ran to my office and grabbed some material I’ve been reading for this paper. There is an essay here, ‘Mother Writes’. Its author, like myself, is writing about how her “two roles are often in conflict when I write an academic paper”. At the outset, she considers her roles to be informed by a Cartesian split of body (mother) and mind (scholar). I am uncomfortable with that idea. I don’t think of myself as split along these lines. I move my body as a teacher, I gesture and point, shout and stride; I feel it as a scholar, it aches when I sit at my computer too long, it requires nourishment (chocolate!) as I think; I use it as a mother, to feed, to hug, to lift, to rock, to run…

So here I am; body AND mind. I’m writing on writing. My panel has the subtitle “Who do we become when we write?” and I want to scream: “It depends!” It might help if I think about who I become when I (try to) write IR. More and more I resist becoming that IR self, you know, the one conversant in security studies and IR theory. Examining the structure of security narratives and how they confine our thinking about and response to particular events used to fascinate me, and on some days it still does. Most of the time, however, it is too removed from my lived-experience as a mother-feminist. When I observe parents on the playground and ponder how their behaviors influence their children’s capacity to engage in empathetic cooperation, I wonder if others have ever wondered. When my husband and I discuss parenting strategies, we base them on the assumption that children behave as well as they are treated. My mind is engaged.

So here I am; thinking about thinking. I’m thinking about maternal thinking, about that thinking that emerges from, resonates with, and feeds into maternal practice. This is Sara Ruddick’s term of course; she writes about Maternal Thinking as one of the many forms of rationality, exceptional in that it incorporates feeling as part of rationality. Taking the feminist commitment to knowledge derived from lived-experience seriously, she argues “all thinking […] arises from and is shaped by the practices in which people engage”. Maternal thinking is shaped by the demands – preservation, growth, and social acceptance – of maternal practice. Meeting these demands requires strategies of preservative love (protection), nurturance, and training which are sometimes conflicting. Mothers, as maternal practitioners, reflect on their strategies, talk about the struggles they face, and share their frustrations and triumphs.[1] They do so, sometimes, while writing their disciplines.

So here I am; talking about my writing. I explain my longing for this new research project on parenting and peace. I tell my writing cohort about the claims made in parenting manuals, written by the ‘experts,’ about how some particular approach will lead to more balanced, more peaceful children and futures. I say, “I am curious about the validity of their statements, how would one devise a research project? What discipline would it be in?” I have a pile of books about mothering with me today and one mother-writer laughs, says something about “this is not research, this is me-search.” I feel hurt.

So here I am; it is 2:25pm. One of my mother-colleagues just entered the room. Her children have found out that mommy doesn’t ‘really’ work on Fridays. That is, she doesn’t teach, she writes. If she doesn’t teach today, why can’t she stay home? For the last few weeks the children have suddenly gotten ill on Thursday nights. How does one respond as a mother-scholar? The writing women do requires a room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf pointed out long ago, but for mother-scholars it also requires good childcare arrangements, supportive partners, and a culture that recognizes all of the work we do as work.[2]

So here I am; thinking about tenure now. Most of us here today have yet to jump that hurdle. How does writing change when it is done for the purpose of achieving tenure? If I was not looking toward tenure, would I hesitate to embark on my new project? I have to think about the constraints placed on my time by my m/other-work. Would I be able to publish a book in time? In my unofficial research, I’ve been reading other mother-academics thoughts on the demands of tenure. What resonates, still, are reflections on how the years spent preparing for tenure are also the prime childbearing/childrearing years. Talk about a second shift!

So here I am; the feminist self is alert. The tenure process is gendered, no surprises, really. It’s not the only part of an academic job that is. My university has yet to find a space to build a childcare facility on site. It seems there are always more pressing projects to be completed… We talk about our service commitments, they are racialized too. Faculty of colour, just like female faculty, are in demand for committee work. Students look toward faculty of their own race or gender for direction. Talk about a double burden!

So here I am; I’m tired. It’s 4:36pm. I begin thinking about dinner – take-out anyone? Will someone have hung the laundry today? Will the baby be happy to see me, or upset that I didn’t come home earlier? The weekend is coming, how much of it will I spend in the office getting ready for next week? Should I have spent all of today writing? I could have done things differently, I could have been done with my grading, or class prep, or email… what work should be prioritized?

So here I am; ready to go home. When I sit down to nurse my daughter and I reflect on my writing at the same time, I will be doing IR … and I can applaud myself for having begun writing my first piece of maternal IR.

[1] This amounts to “an identification and a discourse about the strengths required by their ongoing commitments to protect, nurture, and train”, Ruddick says.

[2] Chris Bobel makes the point about childcare in her book on The Paradox of Natural Mothering.

Part I: Fear

I am lucky in this room, among my colleagues. I am working in feminist political theory, not international relations, and my discipline has been advocating for and responding to feminist work that is in one’s own voice and that tells one’s own story for decades. Still, I feel a sense of paralysis. I am 27 years old. I have passed my qualifying exams. I have written dozens of graduate papers. My work is starting to get published. I am now starting to stare down my dissertation. And I am not sure that my work has ever been truly honest.

It was my Master’s supervisor who graciously began to break my training. She encouraged me to write in the first person. In her class, I had argued passionately with some of my more conventional colleagues. I had defended the overt positionality of narrative political theory, and valorized those who had the courage to write in their own voice. And yet I most often continued to write as though I was not there at all.

So I started to use first-person pronouns in my academic writing. Sometimes I even included a personal anecdote to make my writing more compelling, more convincing. I believe firmly in the importance of personal narrative for political theory, and for social sciences scholarship. I have thrown in the occasional story to illustrate a point. But I have never really, truly, made myself visible and vulnerable in my theory.

I am afraid. I have come to a place where I can no longer only speak an I that serves as nothing more than a grammatical device between abstract ideas, or a persuasive tactic to convince others of a conclusion I have already drawn. But I cannot wholeheartedly embrace autoethnography and my own narrative, either. I am afraid.

I fear that I will learn that I can write as a faceless academic, but not as a whole person. I fear that I will write a self-indulgent mess that will say much more about me than about the state of the world. Most of all, I fear that the abstract language I have used to protect myself will no longer be there to protect me from the pain of criticism, and the criticism will not be of my ideas. It will be of me. Irish novelist Frank Delaney has said that:

The telling of your story to someone else, you telling me your story, for example, is an act of trust by you that I will accept your story, that I won’t despise it or trash it in any way. So therefore the very act itself, the story telling, becomes an emotional transaction.

I have written and spoken of my ideas for many years. In the beginning, I did it to protect myself. I was a strange and bullied child. I hid myself and my ideas behind formal structures and the rules of essays, speeches, and debating tournaments as soon as I could learn how. This protectiveness served me well. I have settled into my own skin, and those early strategies have become my career. So re-learning to write and theorise is dangerous. I can never be sure what wrong move or next happening will leave me naked. I do not know when my writing will bring the fingernails of a tiny but menacing girl to scratch across my five-year-old eyes. Again.

Critique is a central part of academic work, and one that I have long valued beyond measure. It would thus seem easier to write in the abstract, to speak in the authoritative and unquestionable voice of my profession. But it no longer feels honest, and I crave honesty. In speaking of the fear he has of writing about his relationship with his abusive father, due to the effects that the act of writing will have on him, Delaney concludes that if he is “to have any honesty from now on, those are the things I have to look at.” If my work is not honest, if I am not honest, it is because I have not followed through with the implications of my own philosophical commitments. Because I have tried to obscure and eliminate my vulnerability with rhetorical tactics. Because I have not let my work implicate me.

There is some discussion at the workshop about whether graduate students should engage in narrative writing at all. Some fear punitive consequences for our careers. Others argue that such strategies must be learned somewhere, and that our needs as whole people must also be served in our academic training. As I listen to this debate, I finally come to terms with what I already knew: that I am unable to reconcile my philosophical commitments with the way I have been trained to write about them. That if my doctorate is going to mean anything, I must use it to learn to write differently. That I must allow myself to become someone different in the process. I had known this for some time, but I was, I am, afraid of it. It would be easier to not know.

But in this workshop, I am bolstered, elated, and encouraged by this group of adventurous academics. I am still afraid, but I am not alone in my uncertainty and my vulnerability. I know not that there is nothing to fear, but rather that it is better to be afraid and to do something valuable than to be confident and to do something meaningless. And most significantly, I know that the difference between the two is the support of others. What follows, for me, will be messy and uncomfortable. I am afraid, but I am relieved. I know that if I learn to be honest, I will not be alone.

Part II: Honesty

I have written my post, but I am far from finished. I am once again lucky: my supervisor is always gentle while being firm in her direction. She wants to push me on my use of the concept of honesty, and its connection to authenticity. And so I pull myself back to October 2012, to the workshop, at the same time as I try to pull myself forward, through the weeds. I intend to spread myself as I reach in both directions.

She is right, of course. What is honesty in a context of non-fiction, first-person narrative writing? Why does it matter? And does it rely on authenticity? The hole is gaping. My initial attempts to fill it are mostly noise: a little tweak here, a rhetorical device there. Plugging the holes is consistent with my training. I barely spread myself at all. She nudges again. It is certainly easy to slip into a convenient catch basin of authenticity: to assume that pouring out my soul on paper is somehow more authentic than my abstract writing. If I am not careful, my attempts at honesty will be nothing more than a cathartic pastime validated by unexamined assumptions that I would not accept if they were laid out for me.

So I must once again find a way to reconcile my instinct (for that is what it is) with both my practice and my philosophical commitments. What do I mean by honesty, and what is authenticity? Can I satisfy my craving for honesty without accepting all that comes with claims to authenticity? My training tells me that I should do a review of the literature. Authenticity is big. Whole books have been written, some by great names in my field. I want to cover it as I try to reach forward and back, but I can’t. It is too big, and I do not know enough. Even worse, in the context of this short post, it would serve primarily as an attempt to defer to big names and ongoing, unsolved debates. I could comfortably lose myself in there. That could fill at least four pages, and no one would look at me too closely.

There will be a time and a place for that in my work, I know. But for now, I will resist the urge to let myself off the hook.

I am actually struggling with the notion of authenticity as it is used in the vernacular, without long philosophical expositions. We make short and unthinking assumptions about what is authentic. With a rough glance, I can make out four different facets of the authentic in the vernacular. First, the authentic can be tied to concepts of truth. We see something as authentic if someone has actually, in fact, experienced it. It is tied to a state of the world; it has actually occurred. It is, objectively and subjectively, true.

Second, the authentic can be tied to concepts of credibility. We see someone as credible because they have personal experience of the topic at hand, and thus their knowledge of the topic takes precedence. In strands of feminist theory in which I engage, this takes the form of demands that we do not speak of the experiences of those who are oppressed in ways that we are not. In my supervisor’s context of international relations scholarship, and as she writes, the relevant question is often seen to be: “Have you been there?”. Authenticity is part of a claim to be taken seriously, and more seriously than others who are seen as inauthentic.

Third, the authentic can be tied to concepts of nature and, particularly, of the natural as opposed to the artificial. That which is authentic, in this sense, is either primordial or spontaneously generated. This relies on the premise that the authentic is distinct from the artificial.

Fourth, the authentic can be tied to concepts of quality of life. To live authentically is often seen as a qualitative measure of the value of one’s way of being in the world over the course of one’s life cycle. In existentialist terms, “the norm of authenticity refers to … a recognition that I am a being who can be responsible for who I am.” One’s choices are authentic, in an existentialist sense, if they are consistent with that which one chooses to do for oneself, rather than simply to meet social rules or expectations.

There is a lot within authenticity that I cannot accept as a goal of my narrative writing. I can’t look for truth. I do not expect my work to be seen as an objectively more accurate account of the state of the world than academic work that does not use narrative methods. I expect that it allows us to see different things, and to see things differently, but this is not a hierarchy of accuracy. I do not believe narrative methods expose more truth, or something that is more true.

I can’t look for credibility. Credibility, in the context of non-fiction narrative and autoethnography, means too much shelter from criticism, critique, and engagement. My supervisor rightly describes “Have you been there?” as a question that is “asked to dismiss and to silence”. Moreover, seeking credibility through narrative writing would mean using it as a shield once again; I would be replacing the shield of abstract writing with the shield of narrative writing, and in many ways, the narrative shield is a much tougher one to penetrate. I must avoid looking for credibility with my stories. I would be lying if I said that I did not want to protect my story, in Delaney’s sense. But I do not accept that this is an acceptable goal of my work. I feel a responsibility to actively wrestle with that desire, and constantly renegotiate where the border of my self-protection lies.

I can’t look for naturalness. I find much of Donna Haraway’s varied work to be extraordinarily compelling; I believe the borders between the natural and artificial are much more a product of mediated, discursive, and historically particular happenings than they are a reflection of some objective state of the world. There is no natural, authentic me to expose. There is only a particular, always shifting, incoherent sense of self. There may, at times, be value in exposing those particulars through narrative methods, but this value is not dependent on it being natural to do so.

So perhaps all I can look for is to improve the quality of my life. I am a poor fit with existentialism. I do not rationally accept the existence of an authentic me beyond history, discourse, and circumstances. But I cannot say I am free from a sense that I have a role “in making myself.” I am looking to write in a way that I can look back on and feel okay about: to write in a way that subjectively feels like “me.” I can no longer write in a way that is disconnected from what I believe, because it is too painful for me. What’s more, it is boring. It feels disingenuous to the way I wish to be in the world. In this way, only, it is inauthentic.

This is the honesty I want. It is hard to defend; it seems I have written myself into a corner. My need for honesty is entirely subjective. It’s not about me being more truthful, more credible, or more natural than my writing previously allowed. Indeed, I hope to use narrative writing to destabilise these three facets of authenticity in my work. It is simply because I cannot stand the disjuncture I perceive between what I believe and how I express myself in my work. What’s more, I cannot find means of justifying this need that I could reasonably expect anyone else to accept.

So it seems I cannot use my own search for honesty to make any claims about why autobiographical narrative writing is valuable in and of itself, or why others should do it. I could perhaps suggest to a colleague that they might find their own sense of dishonesty piqued if they were to examine the disjuncture between the way they write and their epistemological beliefs. I could abandon this question of honesty and write a very different post about why narrative methods are generally valuable, and what they might bring to our disciplines. I believe I could make good arguments for this position. From the workshop, I know that I would be in very good company. But my need for honesty is then incredibly limited in its application. I am unsettled to have written and examined so much, only to learn more about myself than about my method. This, too, goes against my training. Perhaps it is time for me to say that my own needs and desires are necessarily relevant to my work, and are relevant, period.

This is where it is helpful to not be alone. Consistent with his remarks in the workshop, Naeem Inayatullah has written, “We can hypothesize that no matter how and what we compose, writing emerges from our needs and wounds”. Perhaps there is no escaping my own needs and feelings in my narrative writing. I am making a choice to exchange one form of authorial discomfort for another, and I am doing so, at least in part, for my own reasons. Inayatullah’s insights further encourage me when he suggests that “exposure and disclosure of the self/selves, rather than locating some idiosyncratic ‘n of 1’ or some sui generis entity, instead uncovers events, histories, cultures, and worlds”. I want to believe, and I do believe, that I can reconcile my voice and my theory, and feel more honest as an academic, without accepting the multifaceted burden of authenticity. I want to believe that I can do so in a way that will help both me and the quality and colour of my work. I need to believe I can meet my needs while uncovering worlds.

So perhaps, as I struggle to reconcile my theory and my voice, my craving for this particular type of honesty is one over which I do not need to feel guilt. Maybe it is enough to be wary of, and to grapple with, truth, credibility, and naturalness in my narrative work. Maybe I can give myself permission to acknowledge my needs as only one of several valid considerations in my work, even if they are not abstractly justifiable. Time will tell whether there is space in my discipline, or space within me, to stop apologising for them.

Why rethink masculinity and conflict? After all, the connection of men and masculinities to organised (and seemingly unorganised) violence has been subject to considerable academic scrutiny over the last decades, not least as part of the feminist critique of disciplinary International Relations. It is now increasingly common to both note the unequal character of gendered violence (it is predominantly men who do the killing and the maiming) and to stress the contingent and sometimes paradoxical status of this situation (women kill and maim too, and the content of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ varies significantly over time, space and context). The analysis of gender within global politics has also moved beyond the level of the state and war to interrogate the full spectrum of social life, from popular culture to political economy. And yet elite institutions still prove stubbornly resistant to teaching gender, feminism and sexuality within ‘the international’, despite introductory texts which increasingly offer such insights to the curious student.

Although you wouldn’t know it from some of the caricatures in circulation, feminist and gender scholars write often of multiplicity in masculinities, of varied and shifting constructions of gendered agency, and of representations of violence as themselves constitutive of gender, rather than merely reflective of a pre-existing distribution of essences. Some, like Melanie McCarry, have become rather sceptical of this situation, warning that the actions and power of men themselves are obscured in the consensus that there are many masculinities. In other words that multiplicity, discourse and construction are not advances in theory, but ways of displacing responsibility away from concrete male perpetrators. At the same time as they direct attention to the material practices of men such criticisms also tend to gloss over rich and situated examples of critical theorising along exactly those lines. A different brand of critic has sometimes suggested that feminism may be incapable of properly analysing the variety of gendered experiences in conflict. But here too, a comprehensive history of the field instead reveals many close and nuanced considerations of men and women at war.

Nevertheless, ambiguities do persist in the way feminist and gender scholars describe and account for masculinity. Against this background, a number of problems come into sharper focus. First, how are masculinities and violences connected in specific locations of power? Second, how do these connections play out internationally, in the interactions between political communities, however understood? Third, just how related are gendered identities to fighting, killing and dying in conflict settings? And fourth, how do the complexities of violence situated in this way reflect back onto theorising about gendered hierarchy and difference?

Some of these questions are more familiar than others, but the collection of articles presented in our special issue of International Feminist Journal of Politics substantially addresses them all (I know, get us, right?).

First, they are united by a keen awareness of the intersectionality of gender with other social fields, and by attention to the resulting layers of performance and identity. This comes out particularly strongly where differential international and inter-communal placements of race, ethnicity and nation come into play: for Paul Higate in the contrast between consensual bonding amongst ‘Western’ security professionals and the more coercive interactions between them and racialised colleagues; for Ruth Streicher in the perhaps surprising valorisation of Thai soldiers (and their ‘civilised’ uniforms) in the eyes of Malay-Muslim girls and women; for Megan MacKenzie and Marianne Bevan in the idea of cautious and restrained New Zealand police culture against a more aggressive Timor Lestese variant; and for Maria O’Reilly in the projection of a paternalistic ‘liberal’ identity onto the task of state-building amongst Balkan men posed as devalued and divergent. To take Streicher’s example:

When inquiring about their feelings towards the insurgency, many young Malay-Muslim students of Islamic Private schools in the provincial town of Pattani described their feelings towards the unrest as ‘indifferent’ or ‘just normal’. Their perception of the insurgency had been significantly shaped by encounters with army counterinsurgency efforts rather than with insurgent violence. One of the sites of regular encounters with soldiers were army road checkpoints, where soldiers are required to check passing traffic to determine and arrest potential suspects. To my initial surprise, however, the majority of girls did not express feelings of fear or anxiety when describing their encounters with army personnel in interviews. By contrast, a number of them openly admitted their flirtatious admiration of soldiers, and often referred to the fashionable look of the military uniform. My increasing interest about the uniform was met with giggling responses, and girls explained their fascination by describing the army costume as ‘tae’, a Thai expression meaning smart, handsome and trendy. Elaborating on reasons why some girls liked soldiers, 19-year-old Mariyam, for instance, clarified: “If you wear the soldier’s uniform, it looks tae … Even someone who is not handsome but wears the uniform looks ‘tae”.

A second crucial unifying thread concerns the relation of masculinity to violence. Here the rethinking is even clearer, disentangling military masculinities from war as such. Most prominently, Luisa Maria Dietrich challenges the connection between masculinity and violence by showing how involvement in guerrilla organisations undid pre-existing identities, enabling female fighters to gain the status of heroic combatants and leaders usually reserved for men, and re-valuing activities and emotions commonly designated as ‘feminine’ (cooking, tenderness, mourning) such that male guerrillas embraced them and reflected on them fondly. As a female veteran of Colombian conflict put it

There is one thing in armed struggle that allows for more equality. In the context of armed struggle, there is no merit that you didn’t need to earn, because life itself was at risk . . . There is no such thing as ‘he is more handsome’, those things do not matter . . . And if it’s a woman or a man does not matter. What matters is getting us out of this problem, so there it is about who is most capable.

And another, on the reconfiguring of gender roles:

Many comrades acknowledge it, and it would be interesting to establish why . . . the M-19, they say, was a more feminine than masculine organization. Well, and they argue that it was more open, more connected to pleasure . . . I feel it was a more modern guerrilla, … but it did not cease to obey social orders.

In Peru too, male veterans recounted experiences of transformation:

Male tenderness . . . which is there, or at least I have experienced it with people, with whom we joined together in the early phases and also served time in prison. I believe that there develops a very, very strong feeling, which is beyond gender . . . being a militant and living in the underground makes you tough, but at the same time allows new forms of tenderness, a tenderness, which you would not express in a normal situation. . . . there was a lot of affection between men . . . But it was not a gay thing. Not at all. It was masculine affection of support and of strength.

Tellingly, it was in the period after war when gender norms retreated to older patterns. Putatively ‘non-gender’ factors, such as political vision and class dynamics, are shown to have a major impact on ideas of appropriate gender identity, just as the conditions particular to private military contracting contribute to the status of fratriarchy as a dynamic within Higate’s account of hazing (as previously discussed).

From Rion Sabean’s series ‘Men-Ups’

Across the cases, masculinities do intersect with violence, but in sometimes surprising ways. For example, masculinity and conflict may be connected as much by the restraint of violence as by its promotion. Consider Streicher’s Thai soldiers, rendered attractive as symbols of cleanliness, civilisation and modernity; or MacKenzie and Bevan’s New Zealand police officers, emphasising their training and experience as pacifying aggression; or O’Reilly’s reading of Paddy Ashdown as protective father, using his implied strength to settle otherwise warring children.

Finally, these close readings reveal a series of disjunctures, slippages and paradoxes in the performance of masculinity. Attempts to articulate a particular form of masculinity fail, remain partial or appear as always in process, part of more-or-less conscious projects of national identity-making (Streicher), of undoing and reforming a particular notion of sovereignty (O’Reilly), of narrating the mission of international ‘assistance’ (MacKenzie and Bevan), of privatising force in the service of imperial and hegemonic power (Higate) and of revolutionary transformations of social class (Dietrich). So we are reminded again that masculinity (indeed, all gender) is always incomplete, but in a constant dialectic – shifting in different fields, and established temporarily and evasively.

And yet all this also gestures towards some continuing problems in the analysis of masculinities and violence. The process of ‘rethinking’ always leaves one open to the charge of having forgotten some old lessons. In particular, the analysis of a series of phenomena adjacent to violence (the party as a male-bonding session, the association of the uniform with state identity, the conditions of guerrilla life, training for peace-time policing or the written reflections of a High Representative) may lead us to neglect the role of masculine violence itself. The field of war envelops much beyond combat, and to speak of a ‘conflict setting’ is to speak of much more than fighting, killing and dying, which take up a relatively small part of it. And yet it is these activities – the fighting, killing and dying – that are transformative, and it is in relation to them that other martial practices are aligned. They are complex forms of social organisation, but it is the violence which they organise. This need not imply any functionalist support, as if uniforms only exist so that there can be armies, but it does suggest a need to remain attentive to what it is that violence itself accomplishes in gender orders. We do not, then, propose that masculinity and violence have been successfully rethought wholesale, but these papers (which you should now go and read) do expose, interrogate and assess gender and violence as interwoven processes in motion. Which is a pretty good start.

Omar El-Khairy’s Sour Lips deftly weaves together the impulses of benevolence, ventriloquism and celebrity that are the principal lineaments of this troubling story. El-Khairy’s MacMaster (played by Simon Darwen) is a complex figure, driven by a desire to counter Orientalist stereotypes of Arabs, a desperate need to occupy the positionality and authenticity of the native so as to be taken seriously in the online communities in which he seems to spend most of his life, and a more prosaic hunger for fame, book deals and everything else a PhD candidate might want. Yet in some ways, true life was stranger than the narrative that El-Khairy conjures up. MacMaster’s elaborate hoax was uncovered, in part, through information provided by a Paula Brooks, executive editor of the US-based lesbian and gay news site LezGetReal, with whom ‘Amina’ had been in contact. Thank fuck, I hear you say, except that Brooks was herself a fake identity created by Bill Graber, a 58-year old former air force pilot and retired construction worker based in Dayton, Ohio, who claimed to have been inspired to create his online avatar after a lesbian couple with whom he was friendly had been mistreated by an Ohio hospital. Convinced that the mainstream media did a poor job of representing LGBT folks, Graber created Brooks because he felt that ‘the best way to do it was to have people who were in the life, living the life, tell the story.’ Clearly more than lone eccentrics, the uncanny simultaneity of MacMaster and Graber’s performance as putatively liberal straight men getting off on playing spunky lesbians speaking truth to power begs a gigantic WTF?!

There is something slightly discomfiting about El-Khairy’s portrayal of Arraf. The ‘real’ Amina was an empty signifier—a vessel into whom everyone poured their desires for intersectional harmony. On stage, Amina is an active subject, speaking back to Tom, troubling his authorial sovereignty. Eschewing a possible Spivakian move in which the silenced subaltern might have been placed centre stage with no words of her own, this device in effect sets up a battle between two Aminas—MacMaster’s hoax and El Khairy’s desire for an authentic subject who emancipates herself—leaving this member of the audience wondering whether the playwright was complicit with MacMaster in writing his preferred version of Amina. (I wonder if George Bernard Shaw contemplated possibilities other than having Eliza Doolittle storm off or live happily ever after with Henry Higgins; in a postmodern time in which character development takes place through mass viral endorsement, there were a million Aminas floating around in the ether: she was everything we wanted her to be.) But perhaps I am being reductionist and too literal, for the violent eroticism of the interaction between Tom and Amina performs all sorts of other representational work: in these most dramatic scenes, we see the inner conflict that one supposes MacMaster experienced in the course of perpetrating his extraordinary fraud, and, more fundamentally, the always fraught relationship between author and character.

Most compelling and disturbing about the staging of Sour Lips is its three-member chorus (Takunda ‘TK’ Kramer, Celine Rosa Tan, Eden Vik) whose herd-like, frenzied canonization of Amina and equally frenzied demonization of Tom—‘share to Twitter, share to Facebook, share to Google plus’—are the motor driving the plot. Who were these people in real life? The sorts who would trek to a fringe theatre in south London to watch plays about the Arab Spring. If this is what civil society looks like, it’s enough to make you shudder.

Sour Lips is showing at the Ovalhouse Theatre 29 Jan – 16 February.

Havana’s Malecón, or seawall, close to Calle 23 and not far from where I interviewed Yakelín.

Yakelín comes to the Hotel St. John nearly every day around two o’clock in the afternoon. Most days, Jean-Claude is already there, ensconced on the terrace with a glass of dark rum, chatting amiably with the staff, or pensively smoking a cigar as he waits. When she arrives, she kisses him discreetly before settling down for a drink on the terrace. The hotel is rather unassuming, but it sits just steps from the busy east end of Calle 23, known as La Rampa, and blocks from the historic University of Havana, and as such Hotel St. John has become a haven for tourists and foreign students who come here for strong coffee and cold beer. After an hour or so, Yakelín and Jean-Claude walk away together, hand in hand.

This same routine has been going on for more than two years now, since the day that Yakelín first met Jean-Claude, walking along Calle 23 with a friend. She was 21 years old, living in a small flat with her mother, father, brother, two sisters, aunt, uncle, two cousins and her grandmother. After spending her teenage years at a boarding school in the countryside, she had elected not to continue to university and was back in Havana with her family. Like so many others, her family worked hard to make ends meet, and Yakelín was looking for ways to lighten the burden. Not long after they met, Jean-Claude made her a proposition.

He suggested that, since I was en la lucha [struggling to get by], you know, he suggested that I no longer be in the streets [looking for leads on work, food, clothes] and that he was going to help me resolver mis problemas [solve my problems]. And since then, he’s my boyfriend.

Jean-Claude is married, but Yakelín says that in spite of that they have a “formal relationship” – she lives in a comfortable casa particular, for which he pays, and they spend every afternoon together. As a retiree, Claude lives more or less permanently in Cuba, leaving only to attend to his affairs in France and returning laden with gifts including clothing, jewellery, and even a television. He provides her with spending money and helps to support her family as well. She says she loves the independence he has given her, even though she readily acknowledges the implied contradiction – she has found her freedom in total dependence on him. Yakelín has no official work at present, because she feels that the meagre salary is simply not worth the trouble.

They make a striking couple. Jean-Claude is a heavy-set Frenchman with thinning white hair, the quintessential European tourist with a gold chain showing through the loosened collar of his guayabera shirt, an ever-present cigar, and a burgeoning self-assurance that suggests affluence and social status. Yakelín, on the other hand, is a slender, arrestingly beautiful young woman with espresso skin and hair that falls to her waist. She wears tight-fitting, stylish clothing, obscures her eyes with immense sunglasses, and her many gold bangles jingle with each languid movement – the quintessential cubanita. It comes as no surprise, then, that they attract attention as a pair; indeed, she is frequently stopped by the police and asked for her identification when they are together, at which point Jean-Claude assures the officers that she is his girlfriend, not a ‘jinetera’ – the term Cubans use to describe young women who date foreigners for money – and need not concern them. Usually, they say, that works.

Jean-Claude, for his part, speaks often about the difficulties involved in pursuing a relationship with a Cuban woman as a foreigner – the bureaucratic and administrative hurdles which prevent Cubans and foreigners from cohabiting, but also the constant attention from the police. He mentions briefly that he worries Yakelín will one day be approached in his absence, but then waves away the unwelcome thought like a bothersome fly.

“When they see us, when they see the age difference – me with a tourist – they think I’m a jinetera,” she says, but that is one thing that Yakelín is clear that she is not. She never went looking for a relationship with a tourist, nor does she know many foreigners. While Claude’s money has certainly profoundly improved her circumstances, she insists it is not central to their affective bond and that she is not seeking a way out of Cuba – she would like to see France, certainly, but she would miss Cuba far too much to leave it forever. Yakelín knows what her relationship looks like to outside observers, particularly given that she does not currently have a job, so she is very careful not to court trouble in other respects – she regularly attends meetings of her local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), and she is a dues-paying member of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC). Beyond that, she wants nothing to do with politics – she does not see the point in even broaching the subject.

When I ask about the future, Yakelín takes a moment to think, looking across the patio at Jean-Claude where he sits, conversing with a friend a few tables away while we talk. “I would like to get married,” she says with a wry smile, “But not to him. I love him very much, but unfortunately, he’s already married. What I would like – what I would really like – is my own house. I like my independence, you know, and I want to be beholden to no one.” She has no immediate plans for anything to change, though, and in the meantime she says she is happy spending her afternoons on the terrace of the Hotel St. John.

-*-*-

Early on during my fieldwork in Cuba, I had begun frequenting the terrace of the Hotel St. John as a place to take stock after a day of research and to write my field journal. There were a number of regulars there, mostly foreigners, but one couple caught my eye in particular – a young woman and her older companion, easily thirty years her senior and clearly foreign, even to my untrained eye. A friend of mine, over coffee at the St. John, had once glanced pointedly in Yakelín and Jean-Claude’s direction and said wryly, “Fieldwork.” I finally spoke to them on a sweltering afternoon in June.

Calle Obispo, in the heavily-touristed Old Havana neighbourhood.

The ‘jinetera’ – that controversial term that Yakelín attempts to avoid – is something of a spectre in contemporary Cuba. The word, which literally means ‘jockey’, rose to prominence in local parlance during the profound economic crisis of the 1990s, when it was pressed into service to describe the Cubans’ interactions of all kinds with foreigners to alleviate economic hardship. When it came to sexual liaisons with said foreigners, the Cubans in question were (and continue to be) presumed to be women of colour. Noelle Stout argues that, far from being a “misnomer for prostitution”, the term ‘jineterismo’ is indicative of a more emancipatory paradigm that challenges traditional notions of the victimised prostitute and recasts them with greater agency and power. Or, as Teresa Marrero somewhat more colourfully puts it:

the word prompts the nature of the exchange; jineteras […] mount and control the animal being ridden. This worldview suggests a rearranging of standard notions of the nature of (sexual) consumerism. While contemporary marketing notions hold that the buyer of goods and services reigns supreme, here Cuba’s jineterismo suggests that the provider of services can play and manipulate to its advantage the relation between consumer and provider.

Thus, while there are those who argue that a ‘jinetera’ is nothing more than a prostitute, its use in Cuba suggests something more fluid, indeterminate, and contingent. In the early days of the crisis, ‘jinetera’ distanced young women from the perceived criminality and low morality of prostitution, speaking instead to their shrewd ability to manipulate their circumstances and support themselves amidst adversity. Today, the ‘jinetera’ has become a folkloric figure in post-Soviet Cuba, appearing in brightly-coloured naïf paintings for sale in the tourist markets, serving as muses to the underground music scene, and coming to embody the deeply-engrained fantasy of Cuban mulata sensuality. Perhaps Coco Fusco said it best: “I got the sense,” she noted on visiting the island in the mid-1990s, “that on the street these women are perceived as heroic providers whose mythical sexual power is showing up the failures of an ailing macho regime.” With time, the word ‘jinetera’ has taken on some crassness and become a less elegant descriptor – one of several reasons Yakelín prefers to avoid it, and she’s not alone in this – but for many, and often depending on context, it still holds considerable power.

What drew me to Yakelín and Jean-Claude was outside appearances: they could not have fit the stereotype of a ‘jinetera’ and her foreign date better in their respective ages, racial difference, and perceived social capital – he a white and palpably affluent senior citizen, she a young and attractive woman of colour. On closer examination, however, they gave the impression of genuine and utter normality. Outside observers regularly presuppose their relationship to be purely transactional and devoid of genuine emotional attachment, basing this judgement on the assumption that money and love are antithetical, mutually repellent concepts – and that sex can only occur in the context of one (prostitution) or the other (a ‘real’ relationship), and never the twain shall meet. Yakelín herself, however, is secure in her understanding of their relationship as genuine and affectionate. Jean-Claude supports her and pays her way in life, but she contends that he does this out of love for her and solidarity with her circumstances. Their relationship challenges the notion that any liaison between a Cuban (especially a Cuban woman of colour) and a foreigner (especially a foreign white man) must necessarily be construed as ‘jineterismo’, in the sense of it being purely a financially interested relationship, or even ‘prostitution’.

‘Jinetera’ is often a label applied from the outside by others, as a sort of judgement on the veracity and legitimacy of a pairing. It is one that Yakelín does not feel describes her experience at all, having never sought out liaisons with foreigners. Her current relationship is stable and based on mutual affection, whereas ‘jineteras’ are meant to be young women who specifically seek out tourist men, and who flit from one man to the next both frequently and easily – this is, after all, how they are presented in the state-run media. Yakelín’s story goes a long way towards demonstrating that there is no one type of woman who becomes romantically and sexually involved with a non-Cuban man. Her behaviour and her relationships do not conform to the received knowledge on ‘jineterismo’ as a sexual practice in Cuba.

None of this, of course, means that Yakelín is not regularly brought under the rubric of the ‘jinetera’ by virtue of appearances. She is regularly stopped by police officers for identification checks, and she and Jean-Claude have struggled to find permanent accommodation where they can legally reside together. Yakelín’s careful observance of some of the other tenets of Cuban socialism, such as the CDR meetings and membership in the FMC, is also noteworthy – being with a foreigner and not having a state-sector job both count as strikes against, so it becomes increasingly important to tick all the other relevant boxes. While she did not lay claim to any particular political views, even seeming to have despaired of the possibility, Yakelín is a savvy actor within the current political system and acutely aware of her precarious position. Her experience is marked in particular by her race and her gender, and by assumptions about her sexuality based on these factors, which together ensure that her relationship will never be taken at face value and will continue to place roadblocks in her path.

If words such as ‘jineterismo’, ‘jinetero’ and ‘jinetera’ are in fact empty signifiers, then what purpose do they serve? Viviana Zelizer argues that, far from necessarily contaminating an intimate relationship, financial support often plays an affirmative, reinforcing role in intimate relationships: “money cohabits regularly with intimacy, even sustains it.” Furthermore, the people involved, particularly in scenarios where the stakes are high and confusion is likely, are usually vigilant about clarifying “whether the relationship is a marriage, courtship, prostitution, or some other different sort of social tie” – what Zelizer calls relational work. One of the ways in which they do this is by marking relationships with titles and labels that speak to their intended meanings, be they long-term or fleeting, serious or light-hearted; however, outside actors are equally likely to assign meaning to what they see.

In Cuba, this has led to a discursive tug-of-war, heavily laden with normative assumptions about women’s sexuality, promiscuity, and moral integrity. Practices of naming allow everyone involved – from government officials and police to journalists, mass organisations, and society at large – to situate young Cubans on either side of various binaries of good/bad, right/wrong, virtue/vice (conversely – and tellingly – the global standard terminology of ‘sex worker’ has never caught on in Cuba). Labelling is far more than a semantic issue – labels do work, they support and reject, they build up and break down. Using a different word (or no word at all) can radically change the game, allowing young women to avoid some of the stigma of being branded as criminals or whores on one hand, and to maintain the open-endedness of their encounters by denying a client/prostitute relationship – in that sense, words like ‘jinetera’ underline the incompleteness and mutability of lived experiences. But perhaps most crucially, changing the terms of the game matters because it allows individuals to say not only what they are not – that is, prostitutes and criminals – but also to effectively articulate what they are, to create a new form of subjectivity.

The state-led discourse of prostitution, in which certain women are classed as ‘good’ or ‘normal’ and others as degenerate, dangerous, pathological or immoral, forms part of a binary that seeks to control, regulating the behaviour of an ever-increasing sector of the population through surveillance and even violence. When words like ‘prostitute’ or ‘whore’ are used uncritically by state actors, in conjunction with a racialised profile, it serves to depoliticise the process by which certain women are deemed to be in need of – and available for – state intervention. The use of terms that go beyond this binary relation, or – perhaps most importantly of all – the act of denying any terminology at all, destabilises the simple opposition of ‘good woman’/prostitute, opening up possibilities for new relationships, identities and subjectivities. In this way, language has become a key battlefield for young Cubans seeking to resist prescriptive ways of being.

Yakelín’s story was echoed by dozens of the other young people whom I met and interviewed in Cuba. She paints a conflicted and ambiguous picture of how contemporary youth in Cuba view their role in society and their futures. They defy those who would depict them as victims or whores, as well as restrictive understandings of who they are and what they want. By and large, Cuban youth contend that the socialist ideals with which they have grown up, and to which many still ascribe, need not be seen as diametrically opposed to material wellbeing, nor even to international pop culture and fashion. By crafting new subject positions and identities that destabilise traditional notions of race, gender, and even class, young Cubans are mediating their own circumstances in ways previously unavailable to them. The economic adversity experienced in the 1990s, which is still felt today, has opened up new spaces to enact new political subjectivities, new sexual identities and practices. This is not to say that so-called ‘jineteras’ have created an entirely emancipatory space without repression or retribution; indeed, the racialised bodies of young women in Cuba have become the objects of state-led violence – physical, sexual and symbolic – in the struggle to control and ascribe meaning to ‘jineterismo’, a situation which I continue to explore in my writing. It does, however, merit recognition that young Cubans, and especially young Cubans of colour, are finding new ways of resisting the life prescribed for them through sexuality and the crafting of identities, sometimes at great personal risk, and thereby carving out a new space for themselves.

Source

The “daughter of India” died in a hospital in Singapore yesterday, causing shockwaves around the globe and placing India on the verge of a violent implosion. Whilst rape had become a matter that women were told that they had to contend with in their everyday lives, that they must make it safer for themselves by not being alone after dark, by not dressing provocatively, and by not drinking or acting in a manner that is ‘lewd’ and ‘unladylike’, especially in North India, something about this case has led to a national uprising of unprecedented proportions. People have taken to the streets, New Year eves’ parties have turned into mass commemoration events, and the Internet is positively ablaze with news, blogs, and posts about this nameless woman whose impact on Indian politics today cannot be exaggerated.

India has had the distinction of being labelled the worst country in the world for women and Delhi is often called India’s ‘rape capital’, so perhaps it is not surprising that a 23-year old woman was gang-raped on a bus by six men on the way home after watching The Life of Pi with her boyfriend. It is perhaps also not surprising that the rape was brutal, that a metal rod was shoved into her vagina, that the men took turns at “having a go” and finally got rid of both her and her male friend by throwing them out of the window of the moving bus. What is surprising, however, is the reaction. Why has an event that may even be classified as mundane garnered so much attention and prominence?

Many on the so-called Left in India have proclaimed that the case has been given such importance only because the woman was (ostensibly) middle-class and it is always a shock when it happens to “us”, not least when it happens in a manner this horrific. Most of the mobilized youth claim that this was the last straw in what has been a devastatingly protracted chain of brutalities against women. The cynics argue that reactions such as these are tokenistic gesture that will change nothing but help those protesting come together in a moment of collective catharsis, share in a feeling of shame and sorrow not unlike that experienced when Pakistan defeats India in a cricket match. For me, the answer to the question posed above is ultimately immaterial. Yes, the woman was not a Dalit or Adivasi, and crimes against the poor in India vastly exceed those against the rich. And yes, the injustices perpetrated against the rich, powerful or established have historically been at the forefront of media reporting and government agendas, as was most blatantly obvious in the case of the Mumbai attacks in 2008. And indeed, it is unlikely that there will be any overwhelming change in either attitudes or policy towards women in the immediate aftermath of this insurrection.

In light of this, should we just lull ourselves into a state of callous complacency and churn out platitudes about the state of our society? Those who want to are welcome to squander away both hope and perspective. For those who recognise that the path to any significant change is thorny but may yet render itself navigable, some acknowledgement of the conditions that have made gender-based violence possible and continue to make it possible, even run-of-the-mill, is in order. An awareness of how we ourselves, albeit unwittingly, reproduce these conditions and help engender systemic violence that is both symbolic and ‘real’ is also urgently needed. We must be cognisant of the fact that India is a deeply conservative society and the ‘opening-up’ of the economy since 1991 has witnessed a patriarchal backlash in the face of rising inequity, the collapse of the extended family and the disappearance of any social welfare. Those who have placed the blame singularly on “Indian men” and our “backward culture” – and who think revenge in the form of capital punishment and castration is the only solution – fail to take into account how deeply embedded they are in this patriarchal order and how readily they are partaking of a discourse that is both misogynistic and short-sighted.

The calls for castration are symptomatic of an acutely phallocentric order – where a man’s ‘masculinity’ is considered his greatest pride, and the source of this masculinity is none other than his reproductive organs. Similarly, the widespread proclamation that “rape is a crime worse than murder” and must be punished accordingly has a patently sinister side to it. Is a woman (or man for that matter) who has been raped not entitled to a life? Is she “worse than murdered”? Is it the “defilement”, the snatching away the “honour” and “purity” of a woman that so bothers us? It is worth remembering that the woman who died yesterday, who the Indian government in yet another meaningless and flippant gesture has called a “martyr” and “Delhi’s braveheart”, desperately wanted to live. She had been “violated” by six men in an ordeal that lasted over an hour, was on life-support, but not, in her own opinion, worse than dead. She was only (worse than) dead after she died.

The protests in Delhi and around India contain within themselves a latent emancipatory potential. But in order for this to amount to anything, even something as pedestrian as allowing women to negotiate public spaces in Delhi without constant threat of harassment, we must think about how our subjectivity as women, men, and citizens is (re)produced. This is the only way we can build up some resistance to the “common-sense” we are invariably brought up with. We need to start problematising the taken for granted assumptions that our heteronormative order inflicts upon us everyday, most importantly the implicit belief that women are “less equal” than men. The contours and manifestations of this tacit hierarchy may be different in the West from those in the global South, but the substance remains largely the same. As always, the words of anthropologist Barbara Diane Miller resonate deeply: “We must not forget that human gender hierarchies are one of the most persistent, pervasive and pernicious forms of inequality”. Change will not come easy.

The full call is as follows:

(Im)possibly Queer International Feminisms

The 2nd Annual IFjP Conference
May 17-19, 2013
University of Sussex, Brighton, England

The aim of this conference is to serve as a forum for developing and discussing papers that IFjP hopes to publish.  These can be on the conference theme or on any other feminist IR-related questions.

Feminists taught us that the personal is political.  International Relations feminists taught us that the personal is international.  And contemporary Queer Scholars are teaching us that the international is queer.  While sometimes considered in isolation, these insights are connected in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. This conference seeks to bring together scholars and practitioners to critically consider the limits and possibilities of thinking, doing, and being in relation to various assemblages composed of queer(s), international(s), and feminism(s).

Questions we hope to consider include:  Who or what is/are (im)possibly queer, (im)possibly international, (im)possibly feminist, separately and in combination?  What makes assemblages of queer(s), international(s) and feminism(s) possible or impossible?  Are such assemblages desirable – for whom and for what reasons?  What might these assemblages make possible or impossible, especially for the theory and practice of global politics?

We are interested in papers and panels that explore these questions through theoretical and/or practical perspectives, be they interdisciplinary or located within the discipline of International Relations.

Sub-themes include (Im)Possibly Queer/International/Feminist:

• Heteronormativities/Homonormativities/Homonationalisms
• Embodiments/Occupations/Economies/Circulations
• Temporalities/‘Successes’/‘Failures’
• Emotions/Desires/Psycho-socialities
• Technologies/Methodologies/Knowledges/Epistemologies
• Spaces/Places/Borders/(Trans)positionings
• States/Sovereignties/Subjectivities
• Crossings/Migrations/Trans(gressions)
• (In)Securities

We invite submissions for individual papers or pre-constituted panels on any topic pertaining to the conference theme and sub-themes. We also welcome papers and panels that consider any other feminist IR-related questions.

Any inquiries should be addressed to the conference coordinator, Joanna Wood, at cait@sussex.ac.uk

Abstracts should be no more than 250 words.

Deadline for submissions: January 31, 2013

We will, however, confirm acceptance of submissions before the deadline if we receive abstracts early.  Early submission is therefore recommended.

Please submit your abstract here.

It’s often been said that this is not only a socio-economic crisis of systemic proportions, but also a crisis of the imagination. And how could this be otherwise? Decades of being told There Is No Alternative, that liberal capitalism is the only rational way of organizing society, has atrophied our ability to imagine social forms of life that defy the bottom line. Yet positive affirmations of another world do exist here and there, in neighbourhood assemblies, community organizations, art collectives and collective practices, the Occupy camps… It is only difficult to tell what exactly the notion of progress is that ties these disparate small-is-beautiful alternatives together: What type of utopias can we imagine today? And how do concrete representations or prefigurations of utopia incite transformative action?

Javier Lozano Jaén

First thing one has to notice about utopia is its paradoxical position: grave anxiety about having lost sight of utopia (see Jameson’s famous quote: “it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”) meets great scepticism about all efforts to represent utopia. The so-called “Jewish tradition of utopianism,” featuring Adorno, Bloch, and later on Jameson, for instance, welcomes utopianism as an immanent critique of the dominant order, but warns against the authoritarian tendencies inherent in concrete representations of utopia. Excessively detailed pictures of fulfilment or positive affirmations of radiance reek of “bourgeois comfort.” With one sweep, these luminaries rid utopianism of utopia, reducing it to a solipsistic exercise of wishing another world were possible without the faintest suggestion of what that world might look like.

But doing away with the positive dimension of utopia, treating utopia only as a negative impulse is to lose the specificity of utopia, namely, its distinctive affective value. The merit of concrete representations of utopia, no matter how imperfect or implausible, is to allow us to become emotionally and corporeally invested in the promise of a better future. As zones of sentience, utopias rouse the desire for another world that might seem ridiculous or illusory when set against the present, but which is indispensable for turning radical politics into something more than just a thought exercise. Even a classic like “Workers of the World Unite!” has an undeniable erotic (embodied) quality to it, which, if denied, banishes politics to the space of boredom and bureaucracy. It is one thing to tell people that another world is possible and another entirely to let them experience this, for however shortly.

Most concrete representations and prefigurations of utopia from the past half century or so have been of the anti-authoritarian sort. Whether we look at the literary utopias of the ‘70s (Ursula le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Sally Miller Gaerhart’s Wanderground (1984)) or the concrete utopias of intentional communities and anti-war affinity groups from the same period, the soup kitchens and street parties of the anti-globalization movement, Argentina’s occupied factories, or the Occupy camps from last year, all of these examples bring into relief an egalitarian, bottom-up, democratic socialist vision very different from the socialist realist aesthetics that preceded it. The strong emphasis on cooperation, equality, mutual aid, liberation, ecological wisdom, feminism, and creative living informing them is traceable to the New Left counterculture, but even more so to its anarcho-communist and ecofeminist declinations present in the work of people like André Gorz, Ivan Illich, Murray Bookchin, Paolo Freire, Silvia Federici, Maria Mies, Vandana Shiva, and in a host of anti-hegemonic social movements like the Italian Autonomia, the MST, Via Campesina, the Zapatista, etc.

1 Soil-Erg bill by Claire Pentecost, Documenta 13

This intersection is not coincidental. The prefigurative bent in anti-authoritarian politics makes it ripe for utopian exploration. Unlike mass political utopias, like liberalism or socialism (whose utopian elements serve as ideological cover for various models of organization and representation), anti-authoritarian politics is not interested in seizing power or implementing a specific political program with mass support. This doesn’t mean that it shies away from engaging power, only that it is not interested in conquering or reforming it. The goal of anti-authoritarian politics is rather to relax the grip of power for people to determine their own conditions of existence in more inclusive and egalitarian ways. This rather modest concern allows anti-authoritarians to dispense with many of the distinctions and considerations typical of instrumental politics: the separation between strategy and utopia, present and future, means and ends, the ascetic postponement of the good life until “after the revolution,” or getting political representation right. Even the class antagonism found at the root of all revolutionary politics can be put aside since building a counter-hegemonic bloc is not an immediate priority.

This is no easy position to take. The courage to act as if we already lived under conditions of freedom, as if our dreams were not threatened by domination or repression, and, therefore, did not require the careful choosing of an appropriate strategy for long-term success, invites more scorn than applause. Utopia is for fools! Without a way to generalize and democratize utopia, its radical content will sooner or later become a lifestyle choice only a handful of people (activists) can embrace and enjoy. There is some truth to this indictment, but it misses entirely the function of utopian representation, which should be judged less in terms of its strategic, long-term efficacy than in terms of its equally strategic and long-term affective resonance.

Banned from “mature” politics, the task of representing utopia has generally been women’s work. As feminists distanced themselves from the ’68 macho revolutionary culture (be it party politics or guerilla tactics), they turned to the politics of everyday life. Whether in literature or in intentional communities and affinity groups, women risked the cardinal sin of politics – being unrealistic and impractical, by building utopias from the ground up around activities they were told did not have a proper place in politics: eating, cleaning, housing, care and education. If the material foundation of capitalist domination was to be found in the home, utopia would also have to start at home, from the basic activities that reproduce the body in all its difference and social relationality. Science fiction turned out to be the most comfortable home for this exercise, with most critical utopias of the 70s being written by women. (The genre is, after all, by definition, concerned with dramatizing what dress, work, food, personal relations, and social institutions might look like under different social conditions and intentional communities.)

In the most famous example, The Dispossessed (1974), Ursula Le Guin’s writes about a resource-scarce planet, Anarres, where a syndicalist economy ensures the satisfaction of basic needs with the help of highly sophisticated technology. Its inhabitants (Odonians) live modest, communal yet highly self-directed lives. They work out of passion and conviction, consume goods only for their use value and do away with luxuries. They live and take meals communally, education and health care are universal, energy is renewable and used with great care, and art, celebrations and rituals are integrated into the everyday. Le Guin borrows generously from Murray Bookchin’s radical libertarianism, Kropotkin’s principles of mutual aid, voluntarism and individual freedom, anarcho-syndicalist practices of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and various elements from the civil rights movement, the ‘68 student revolts as well as socialist China, Cuba and Yugoslavia to offer an alien of a counter-image as possible to the Cold War America of her time.

An even better example is Marge Piercy’s equally famous Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), which blends together elements from peasant societies, creole and indigenous cultures, and the American counter-culture into a profoundly anti-sexist, anti-racist and anti-ageist utopia. Piercy’s strength is that, rather than basing female liberation on the elimination of domestic work, as many feminists have done, she makes female forms of action and knowledge into the formative element of her social vision. Parenting and farming are the most esteemed and valorised types of work, everything else being mechanized; everyone is involved in child rearing and is technically a “mother”; and there are dozens of festivities celebrating women’s roles. This utopia starts not with grand ambitions of liberation, equality and justice, but ends up there, nonetheless, by having the patience to first attend to the unrecognised and unrewarded work that makes life possible in the first place.

The concrete utopia of the OWS camps was, of course, never as detailed or complex. The camps did, however, take the anti-authoritarian sensibility seen in Le Guin and Piercy out into the streets, where it acquired concrete social and spatial dimensions. The camps were probably the most heavily disputed and criticized part of Occupy. Accused of breeding power differentials and exclusions, cultivating a cliquish and alienating activist aesthetics, and becoming ends-in-themselves that diverted attention from important questions of strategy and organization, they were also considered a threat to rational discourse and, not least, “health and safety.” Had these camps not existed, however, as sentience zones where people could experience first-hand the lessons of direct democracy, the joys of being together, and the advantages of a post-capitalist utopia where communication was open, work was shared, and goods were exchanged freely, the critique informing them would have remained a purely theoretical exercise without the kind of mass resonance we’ve witnessed.

The camps brought together people formerly disillusioned with (parliamentary) politics as well as people who had only known each other via social networks. They brought back the body to the public sphere of politics – not the smooth body from billboard ads or the criminalized body of the homeless, not the broken body of the worker or the isolated body of the consumer, but the collective body of unalienated cooperation and public enjoyment. Organized around activities deemed tasteless (cooking, sleeping, child care) or dangerous (assembling, celebrating) in public, the camps infused politics with a corporeal and even sensuous (non-rational) dimension shunned in modern politics, even in its anti-capitalist form. For many people this was a restorative experience. Isolated, depressed and discouraged by the ethos of personal responsibility, rediscovering the pleasure of being (effective) together offered immediate psychological relief and was perhaps the most important political lesson of the camps. Feminists have been saying this for years, that we should move the basic activities of social reproduction to the centre of anti-capitalist struggle, and put an end to the separation between the personal and the political, between political activism and the reproduction of everyday life. Turning protest into a way of living-in-common, turning the camps into self-reproducing “round-the-clock bodily presence,” was a far more effective strategy than anything one-off demos and strikes could have achieved. The camps practically became a vision of life after austerity.

The question, of course, is how to turn countercultural practices such as these into enduring counter-institutions. How exactly do concrete representations of utopia incite transformative action? Radical events, like the Occupy camps, where the normal order of things dissolves, divisions of labour and hierarchies get suspended, time moves faster, events seems more real, experiences arrive unmediated, and people live beyond their usual emotional, intellectual and sensorial limits are, by definition, impatient with time. When politics becomes sensuous there is not a lot of room for pragmatic questions of strategy and organization. Instead of waiting for some blueprint version of “revolution” or paving its way with ascetic and sacrificial struggles, radical events rush to live the future we desire now. Foolish as this may seem, it is not incorrect to say that change has never come from the “realists” (rationality is the language of liberal capitalism) or that for change to be effective it must be affective.

Radical politics cannot just offer a critique of the present, no matter how correct or convincing, but must also substantiate this critique with an affirmative experience people can relate to and have a stake in. Of course, there is always the danger for the utopian feeling to eclipse the difficult work needed to generalize and normalize utopia. But the solution is not to erase or deny the contribution of the camps. When the forces of reaction are engaged in a systemic campaign of erasing any collective memory of victories past, it is up to us to remember that other forms of living and cooperating are possible (or were possible for a brief period of time). It is not by the amount of change but by the courage to act for change that we should judge instances of concrete utopia.

One of the more interesting interventions made at Friday’s Gender, Militarism and Violence roundtable came from Vron Ware on the topic of a photo exhibit about the British Army’s Female Engagement Officers. The exhibit is funded by the Poppy Appeal, which was itself subject to some debate as a sentimental memorialism allocating funds in the service of a imperial-nostalgic self-image. The pictures, collected by a female former RAF Sergeant, are presumably understood by military and civilian leaders to be a significant public relations resource in illustrating the flexibility, equity and decentness of Anglo-American-Western ‘involvement’ in Afghanistan. Manifestations of cultural sensitivity, postfeminist integration and armies as state-building reconciliation services. And yet someone decided, both on the Army website and Twitter account, that the best image to lead with was that of knickers on a washing line. A puerile social media engagement.

The rest of the images, and the media coverage of them, focus heavily on assorted ‘personal’ issues experienced by the women. Gaze on their beauty products! See how they control their lustrous hair! Peak in on their need for mementos of home! Marks of difference indeed, although none of the coverage I have seen broaches the possibility that men too might stash deodorant in their tents, or manage their body hair to maintain professional standards, or display reminders of loved ones waiting at home. Instead, as any gender-sensitive observer might expect, the specially femininity of these troops displaces all other dimensions of war/peace/development/security (an impression encouraged by some of the subjects themselves). The BBC even recently juxtaposed the death of a female army medic with an image of another woman coming out of the shower tent. A soft voyeurism on military women as leaky bodies and as somehow out of place. But not just that. The juvenilia comes packaged together with the idea of the Female Engagement Officers as crucial to a kind of military effectiveness:

Captain Crossly told the London Evening Standard that one of the highlights of the tour was ‘seeing the absolute fascination of women in the compound when I removed my helmet and protective glasses to speak to them in their own language’.

She added: ‘Women are known throughout the world to bring people together, to focus on family and community. Just by being female, even in military uniform, you are seen to promote such things and are therefore more accepted.’

Lieutenant French said: ‘The photographs demonstrate the more feminine traits of female soldiers can be used as a strength on operations.’

So, alongside the spectre of menstrual bloody and scandalous nipples, we begin to see soft/smart power at work, a new way of managing global insecurity set against past machismos. Female Engagement Officers as so many Montgomery McFates. As clear an illustration as one could imagine of what Laleh Khalili has analysed as the gendered practices of counterinsurgency:

At one level, counterinsurgency itself is presented as the opposite of a more mechanised, technologically advanced, higher-fire-power form of warfare. Given that the latter is often coded as hyper-masculine, the former is considered feminine. Second, the very object of population-centric counterinsurgency would be perceived as feminine, since the focus of counterinsurgency is the transformation of civilian allegiances and remaking of their social world. On the one hand, in the binary categorisation which forms the basis of mainstream discourses about war, civilian (feminine) is the opposite of combatant (masculine). On the other hand those spaces and subjectivities which regular warfare destroys as a matter of side-effect rather than intent, or which are considered ‘collateral’ to the main job of war-fighting in conventional warfare, are demarginalised, brought into focus, and, in some senses, made central to the work of military and civilian counterinsurgents. These spaces and subjectivities are perceived by both the military and the civilians as gendered in particular and specific sorts of ways. Finally, the practice of counterinsurgency itself is predicated on ‘telling’ (combatants from civilians, hostiles from friendlies etc.), invading, organising, fighting, detaining, transforming, and destroying on the basis of gender (cross-hatched with class and race).

Borrowing from Anne McClintock, this is what Khalili identifies as a colonial context in which, although power is shaped primarily in the interests of (white) Western men, white women are, in relation to the ‘local’ populations, placed in “positions of decided – if borrowed – power”. Past the intimate titillations lies the imagined capacity of the feminine to negotiate and coopt the ‘private’ spaces that imperial grunts cannot otherwise reach. The close co-existence of a mockery of the engagement officers as flawed or impossible soldiers with a view of them as capable and crucial is instructive. It reflects the continuing ambiguity of the counterinsurgent soldier-scholar: that military subject that both retains the characteristics of power, dominance and force usually coded as masculine but also continually keeps them in check through the sensitivity, understanding and communal intelligence more often thought of as feminine. At the level of doctrine, this has been a constant pre-occupation of planners and advisers. Just ask David Kilcullen (also cited by Khalili):

Most insurgent fighters are men. But in traditional societies, women are hugely influential in forming the social networks that insurgents use for support. Coopting neutral or friendly women, through targeted social and economic programs, builds networks of enlightened self-interest that eventually undermine the insurgents. You need your own female counterinsurgents, including interagency people, to do this effectively. Win the women, and you own the family unit. Own the family, and you take a big step forward in mobilizing the population.

Compare that with the views of famed military historian Martin Von Creveld, who wrote the following more than a decade ago on the feminisation and attendant decline of Western militaries:

police forces that specialise in crowd-control now often include a handful of helmeted, baton-carrying, women not because they are really needed – when hard comes to hard they are nowhere to be seen – but because they may be used against other women. In a world where any man who so much as touches a woman is likely to be accused of ‘sexual harassment’, it is helpful to have a few of them around.

The tension, then, is not just one found in media narratives, but also in the internally varied projects for military transformation themselves. An internal othering, in which militaristic ideologies distinguish themselves from an antiquated past or a feminised future, here seeking to preserve the idea of real men doing real fighting, there enacting a progressivism which sees in armed collectives a real equality and a greater ability to understand and intervene in the world than fragmented and egotistical civilian society is capable of. It is an ambiguity that extends beyond this instantiation of gender to the nature of counterinsurgency itself, as Alan Cromartie has recently argued so persuasively.

The original counterinsurgency theorists (like David Galula) reclaimed in the updates of Kilcullen et al. were concerned with the guarding of an imperial order (Galula’s experience was in Algeria, and contemporaries like Robert Thompson were dealing with the problem of rebels in colonial Malaya). Today’s manuals cannot acknowledge that heritage, but terms like ‘legitimacy’ and ‘development’ cannot erase the underlying reliance on violence, displacement and the assassination of political opponents. The ‘culturally sensitive general’ is thus faced again and again with the demands of direct control. A rather fraught internal tension, transposed via gender codings into a contradictory dismissal/valourisation of the feminine at war, and its promise of imperial nurture: coaxing subjected communities into acceptance and usefulness, and saving shock-and-awe masculinity from its own delusions of victory through firepower. But with silly knickers.