Recall three justifications for an analysis of pop culture politics. First, for all their superficial escapism, cultural products represent political ideas and ideologies, and do so in ways that may matter more than what we receive through the news. They are full of desires and fantasies that refract and reflect (and to some extent are themselves) real politics. Second, you can criticise the thematics of the show without hating the show. In fact you can do it while loving the show (and finding the fact of that love interesting in itself). In other words, look, I really like Game of Thrones. Moreover, that as great as comparisons with the source text can be, a TV series is a different kind of beast and is entitled to judgement on its own merits. Third, objections that “it’s just a show” don’t wash. If you’re reading this it’s because you have some sense that there are ways of understanding and being embodied in even the lowest of cultural objects (paging Dr Adorno!). That doesn’t mean that the substance of the relationship between media and politics is simple or settled, but it’s there.

Let’s start where we left off last time. It was claimed in some quarters that the plot subverts – even refutes – certain standard typical ideas about the feminine, and critiques feudal social relations along the way. So, rather than being a “racist rape-culture Disneyland with Dragons”, the many strong, complicated, agentic female roles in fact set Game of Thrones as a critique of patriarchy. But only the most one-dimensional of sexisms regards women as utterly abject. The mere presence of intelligent, or emotionally-rounded, or sympathetic female characters is not enough (and that it might be taken as inherently ‘progressive’ probably tells us a lot about contemporary gender politics). No, the issue is how a cultural product deploys some common tropes of masculinity and femininity and, with appropriate caveats about not reading every plot twist as an allegory, how those celebrate or reinforce certain orderings of gender. So a narrative which makes the family the primary unit, and which does so in a conventionally heteronormative register (twincest notwithstanding), is selling a particular idea of gender (and of community and nation and legitimate violence and…).

In Seasons 2 and 3, a few female figures threaten to upset the patriarchal framework. As before, there is Arya, astute, principled, fierce, and eager to promise death to her enemies. Brienne of Tarth, giant, loyal, lethal, dismissive. Ygritte, rugged, capable, sexually dominant, a hardened killer with no respect for rank (“If you ripped my silk dress, I’d blacken your eye”).[1] And yet in each case the threat is contained and wrapped in some familiar gender constraints.

Where Arya once promised to undermine the crucial gendered division (men are the warriors), she has been kept in abeyance for two seasons now. When she acts it is through a mediating male agent of death. We have not seen her sword skills, and her own interventions in combat have amounted to running away, protesting the rights of the innocent, and shouting impotently at older men. Or, at least, we were fed a steady diet of such things until the final glorious episode and her stabby return to form (long may it continue). Here and there, it is hinted that she will have her day, and take her blood price, but we cannot yet be sure that it will even be by her own hand, rather than (again) through the interventions of a phallic guardian like Jaqen H’ghar (or The Hound). For now, she is largely returned to girlhood, given a certain licence to honest observation and earnest rage, but tolerated by those around her precisely because she is so unthreatening. Adolescent, tamed, if capable of the odd act of sneaky murder.

As for Brienne (who never knew her mother), the politics are more ambiguous. For the defence, she is able to articulate a running critique of masculinism over the seasons, not just refusing the natural rights of men-as-warriors, but indeed queering permissible gender bodies (“I am no lady”). And for the prosecution, there is her occasionally over-enthusiastic identification with militarist misogyny (or as she chastises Jamie: “You whine and cry and quit. You sound like a bloody woman!”) and her eventual softening in the bath before The Kingslayer (in what is surely one of the best scenes of the show). Ygritte, too, is able in all her apparent ignorance of ‘civilised’ ways, to defuse the pretensions of Jon Snow, and show him up on the battlefield and in the bedroom (or bedcave or whatever). And yet, having initiated him sexually and also saved his skin, she is in turn abandoned by him. Having risked everything in a bond-of-two, the warnings of her father and brother figures are ultimately vindicated. The endlessly looping story of womankind. She too takes her revenge, although she does so not as so much as Wildling warrior as spurred lover.

The pitiful trajectory of other female figures continue. Having encouraged policies that led to the death of her husband and the collapse of her House, Caitlin Stark continues her run of bad advice, making the mistake of freeing Jamie against her son’s will (Robb is the wiser, and more instinctively strategic, warrior). And although she cannot be blamed for the Red Wedding, it is her own role as tragic mother that presages its occurrence (“All this horror in my family…all because I couldn’t love a motherless child”). Cersei drips cunning poison, and to some degree still runs the show despite her father’s appointment as Hand of the King. Her monologue in Season 2, a kind of parallel to Drogo’s before it, nevertheless carries the predictable weight of woman-as-seductress: “Tears aren’t a woman’s only weapon…the best one is between your legs”.

Among the menfolk, the Father continues to transubstantiate the Nation (“There’s a King in every corner now”). The sword, the throne, the war, the rightful King: all still the discourse of the phallus. Robb Stark fails like Ned before him, and we end Season 3 with the über-dad, Tywin Lannister, as omnipotent and untouchable as ever. Jon Snow has been scattered, his distance from the scene of high politics a direct reflection of his diluted blood, a bastard son at the margins. And Stannis Baratheon, having lain with witches, is nearly compelled into a literal nephew-bastard-sacrifice of his own. When Theon Greyjoy is castrated, his estranged father can find no more use for him, and we can see his point. For Theon is no longer a man, or a son, or an heir. In each case, a politics of lineage and organicist rule, however much the rutting and plotting covers for it.

Or take the traditional Westeros wedding vows, which we hear in the context of an unmistakeable love match (one entered into without political calculation, unlike so many of unions). Father. Smith. Warrior. Mother. Maiden. Crone. Stranger. I am his/hers, and s/he is mine, from this day, till the end of my days. Father-Smith-Warrior. Mother-Maiden-Crone. The man takes the woman as wife by placing his cloak around her shoulders (there can be no gay marriage in alternative universes: only shape-shifters and dragons and green fire and black magic and wargs and vengeful wraiths). It would be hard to find a clearer expression of male protection – the wife moves from ward of father to ward of husband – in our own mundane world. A moral universe of appropriate gender roles laid out in plain sight. A fantastical patriarchy troubled at this margin and that, but rotten to its seductive core. The Sword Needs a Sheath and the Wedding Needs a Bedding!

The above found via Gerry Canavan.

That said, the entitlements of lordship are subjected to more critique than ever before. Numerous minor characters express distain for such a civilisational order and we enter some spaces arranged according to different principles. Quarth is the most multi-cultural of these settings, but also the one most haunted by both the dark arts and narrow economic instrumentality (a city of hollowed magi, metallic burkhas, and trickster merchant-kings). There is more of a sense of disloyalty amongst the lower martial ranks too, those who laugh off Theon’s authority, or who like the Hound are caught between a vestigial sense of honour as a Knight and a contempt for that life. That so much hope for the series rests in the hands of the freaks and the bastard sons (Tyrion, Jon, Gendry) of course reflects that this is not Tolkien High Toryism, but it is hardly the rule of the demos either: they are half-in, half-out of the Westeros ruling class, and in all cases are only even possible candidates for salvation because of their connections to powerful families or their magic blood, each called back to home and to duty. The unwashed masses can’t do political movements, and behead no Kings.[2] In other words, the much-observed bleakness of the plot (no one is safe from GRRM’s pen!) translates to a tragedy of political communities too. There is probably no great saviour first-born in the wings, but then the need for one – rather than some other transformative force – is rather inscribed in the framework of the world.

Versions of political community apparently beyond the daddy model come in two forms. On the one hand, there are the proto-anarchist insurgents. There is revolt amongst the Wildlings (who self-describe as “free people” in choosing barren wastes over feudal loyalties) and the magic-tinged horizontalism of the Brotherhood Without Banners. Like the people of Quarth, the alternative they offer is not quite as pure as it first appears, compromised in each case by economic necessity or unchecked aggression. The initial liberation they offer (“We don’t kneel for anyone beyond the wall”) turns sour quickly, and even bastard Jon finds that previous loyalties are to be preferred to this autonomy. Both groups have had to choose between comfort and freedom (settled habitation apparently being incompatible with anti-monarchism), but both also seem progressively less adequate to those higher values of honour, values rarely executed, but still possible, in the cities of the South (a game of Good King/Bad King).

And then there is Khaleesi, and her subaltern army. The racial rhetoric has transmuted instructively: from a representation of the dark-skinned as incapable of even fully human experiences (remember, the Dothraki had no words for thank you) to a fantasy of the white saviour. For all the redemptive joy of watching the Mother of Dragons in the ascendent, this is a textbook imperial feminism (we might even, out of the corner of our eye, identify a latent homonationalism: after all, the only community with open female fighters is ruled by a gay king). First, Daenerys teaches the remaining Dothraki principles of gratitude and honour (they initially wish to steal from their hosts), and then jokes with Jorah Mormont that they are essentially good at killing and theft. Then, once they have left the scene, an analogous dark mass takes their place. The Unsullied too, combine murderous talents with a certain deferential nature. Although they ‘choose’ the freedom Daenerys offers, their willingness to die for her is not that far from their compulsion to sacrifice under past masters. As she herself puts it on the cusp of liberating a people, some “learn to love their chains”. What, we wonder, would happen if they were not appropriately thankful?

The visual rhetoric of this is striking throughout, and not complicated. Whether with the Dothraki, or Mirri Maz Duur, or the Unsullied, or the peoples of Yunkai, dark-skinned peoples are liberated, educated, made human and whole by Daenerys’ grace. They are usually martial races, raised up on the civilisational ladder but also kept useful as killers by white tutelage. In this sense, they are more degraded than even the peasants of Westeros: where the latter can at least articulate their resentment of the aristocratic order, Daenerys’ wards muster little in the way of speech. In the final, rousing scene (and is there really any other way to read except as a celebration?) they raise Khaleesi up as saviour, chanting ‘mother’ over and over with childish relief. A subjectivity of enslavement and gratitude.[3]

Some years ago, Jeffrey Sconce wrote of the Game of Regression:

Medievalesque fantasy is especially sad when it is framed as some type of compensatory escape from the problems and confusions of modern life.  Ah, the middle ages, when men were men, women were women, and the Gilles de Rais could sodomize and murder over 400 children with complete impunity…How sad that “fantasy” – a protean and theoretically limitless domain – should be so rigidly codified around such a ridiculously childish set of conventions: kings, queens, knights, jousts, quests, faithful hounds, noble steeds, etc.  It’s as if “comedy” could never advance beyond variations on the banana-peel gag.

That still holds. There is critical possibility in this world yet, and everything may shift (I’m holding out for the benevolent reign and quick abdication of King Tyrion and Queen Arya, followed by a socio-economic transition to full communism, with dragons for all as a transitional demand). George R. R. Martin is clearly a player of the long time, although the self-conscious aping of Tolkien, right down to his name, is not an encouraging sign. The question, as ever, is what our desires for this kind of fantastical world disclose, and what other possibilities they foreclose in the process.

[1] I neglect here Margaery, Shae, Melisandre, Osha, and Meera the Arya-substitute, amongst others. A full accounting would doubtless have to take notice of these recessive figures, but they seem less central to the plot, and less potentially usurping of standard masculinity/femininity ideas to deal with at length. The Red Woman is potentially the most powerful female figure apart from Daenerys, but conforms much more closely to the role of the manipulative and over-sexed witch.

[2] Having not read the books like a proper fanboy, a statement like this might well come back to bite me on the ass, but my sense is that bastard Kings is about as radical as it will get.

[3]  The only redeeming possibility is that she is not meant to stand in for Westeros whiteness, but for the more otherworldly force of dragons: a sorceress of sorts who, thanks to her magic blood, can do stuff beyond the ken of mere mortals.

A guest post, following on from some previous reflections on gender and teaching and the politics of pedagogy, from Marsha Henry. Marsha is Lecturer in Gender, Development and Globalisation at the LSE Gender Institute, where she teaches, amongst other things, a course on gender and militarism. Her most recent research is into sexual exploitation in peacekeeping missions and peacekeeper labour hierarchies, and she is also, with Paul Higate, author of Insecure Spaces: Peacekeeping, Power and Performance in Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia (Zed, 2009). With Pablo, she recently co-edited a special issue of International Feminist Journal of Politics on ‘Rethinking Masculinity and Practices of Violence’. This post is based on a presentation given in San Francisco at the International Studies Association in April 2013.

It’s the first day of Lent term and the students are nervously gathered in a small stuffy classroom.  When I walk in and head towards the front of the room, the group falls silent. I introduce myself and we start a round of introductions and I ask students to speak briefly about their interest in the course. The first student tells me, and the class, that she’s in IR (International Relations), and is keen to take the course because she’s interested in studying sexual violence in war.  Another student turns to her, incredulous because she too is interested in that exact subject, and that furthermore she has worked for 3 months in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and has ‘seen a lot’. A few more students echo similar interests and I’m trying hard not to stereotype these students. But it’s difficult. A mythical figure is beginning to crystallise in my head and I can’t stop it. This figure is young, female and possibly middle-class, sometimes Scandinavian. She’s studying IR, Human Rights or Gender Studies. A few male students also indicate an interest. Some indicate interest in other topics, but there is a numbers problem from the outset. I feel uncomfortable as this is the third year that I’ve taught this course, each time allotting only one lecture week to the subject of sexual violence in war, and subsuming it under the larger heading of ‘gender, sexualised violence and work in militarised contexts’. Each year students have asked for more time to be devoted to the subject, for the lecture week to be moved up, and for their to be less focus on diversity in the armed forces. When students come to me during office hours to discuss the scope of their dissertations on the subject I fidget. After a few conversations with colleagues, I decide I need to start compiling a list – of compelling reasons why students should not write on the subject of sexual violence in war. But what would I do with this list? Can it be shared? And what of my responsibility not to teach on the subject?

10: Writing About ‘It’ Narrows The Political Focus

As a committed feminist, I’m all for drawing significant attention to the ways in which women experience conflict in distinctive ways. But the concentration of interest on sexual violence in wartime often leads to a neglect of the ways in which women experience violence (labelled as sexual or not) in peacetime. This noticeable singular focus on the topic also narrows the possibility of dislodging categories and subject positions. It is often assumed in class conversations, essays and subsequently dissertations that women are the victims and men are the perpetrators of this form of violence. This assumption appears in written work in a way that both masks the possibility of other positionings within the perpetrator-victim continuum, as well as the structurally embedded way in which sexualised violence occurs and is experienced by individuals and communities. This failure to explain the pervasiveness of sexualised violence against women tends to reinforce the binaries and provides a rather fixed aperture for analysing sexual violence in war and its consequences.

9: Researching The Topic Inspires Voyeurism

I’m squirming in my seat as one of the students smiles widely while she explains her interest in working on the topic of sexual violence as a weapon of war. She could be nervous explaining herself in front of her peers and her professor. She could be feeling awkward about the subject matter. She could be conforming to gendered expectations of women in the classroom where female students who express themselves confidently or through feminist rhetoric are categorised as aggressive. If feminist critique is pleasurable, how do we ‘do’ our analysis of sexual violence in wartime, paying attention to experience, trauma, and moral responsibility? There is a tendency, in making visible the ‘horror’ of it all, that students sensationalise the subject by focussing on the minutiae, the details and the thick descriptions. Honing in on the bodily experience of rape, for example, can remove rape in war from the wider social, cultural, economic and political context in which it always takes place. It can be an abstraction of the total experience. The affective impact is that readers of these dissertations distance themselves from subjects in the studies. Those who are victims and/or survivors and end up consciously or unconsciously performing what Donna Haraway referred to as a god-trick.

8: Writing About ‘It’ Invokes Colonial Stereotypes & A Colonial Gaze

Students who are developing gender goggles in regard to militarisation and the effects of war on women tend not to recognise their critiques as potentially reinforcing colonial tropes. Sexual violence in war cannot be easily dislodged from its articulation within colonial narratives. The subject of sexual violence in war is multiplex, precisely because attached to the many narratives and discourses are ideas and metaphors of Africa as a place of barbarity, exceptionalism, alterity: the ‘Heart of Darkness’ (as Margot Wallstrom recently commented in a speech aimed at drawing attention to sexual violence in war). Along with this, African men feature as pathologically violent and therefore prone to participate in sexual violence as a war weapon. The Black Man as Rapist Myth has a long history in colonial and popular accounts, and haunts these dissertations. Add to this, stereotypes of subaltern, ‘Third World’ and African women as the penultimate victims living in what some have deemed the ‘worst place to be a woman’ (DRC), connote many problematic ideas about Africannness, gender and geopolitics.

7: There Will Be An Insufficient Account Of History and Geopolitics

The majority of dissertations focus on the subject of sexual violence in the conflict region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In seminars and supervision sessions in my office, I felt unease with the abbreviation of the full name for the country to Congo. When using the term Congo, students revert the country back to its colonial history and place it at the centre of discussions about sexual violence in war. Few students are interested in studying older conflicts and thus empirical studies of Rwanda, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, and Kosovo have more or less dropped off of the list of case studies that concern students. These conflicts become archived, shelved into the past in a way that suggests each new and contemporary conflict is somehow more worthy of study. It is almost as if students feel that if the study is not located in the ‘heart’ of Africa, it is a lesser form of violence to document. As such, ‘random’ acts of sexual violence (read: everyday), become too mundane to feature. In addition, larger relations of global politics across geographic contexts are left unaddressed. What is the relationship between where sexual violence is used as a weapon of war and the body of academic knowledge being produced in order to expose it? Students do not always think about the power relations between those who are able to speak about sexual violence, to name the victims and the perpetrators, likely at a distance, and those who witness, but who may not want to testify, speak to truth or even to be given what Pupavac has termed ‘therapeutic governance’.

6: Ethical Dilemmas are Rarely Challenged or Resolved by Writing

How can I object to outrage and criticism of rape? And sexual violence as a weapon of war? To criticise someone else’s criticism of gender-based violence would be itself an ethical challenge. As such, writing on the subject of sexual violence as a weapon of war can create an ethical vacuum and a political seal around the discussion, making it morally reprehensible to challenge the way in which arguments are strung together, information is arranged and presented, and the geo-ontological space from where the student speaks about (or for) women who have experienced sexual violence during conflict. As such these dissertations and essays provide little opportunity for discussing the politics of representation, the ethics of humanitarian intervention, the imbalance of power produced by international global governance institutions, and the dilemmas of treating rape survivors as a means to a (feminist) end. Many of the dissertations end up treating sexual violence as a weapon of war as a grand anecdote, used instrumentally to critically comment on the state of sexism and militarism in the world order – a laudable goal and necessary critique – but what about the simultaneous responsibility to acknowledge academic privilege? Moral compasses need to be checked: student and myself.

5: Where Are You From?: Positionalities, Standpoints, and Situated Knowledges

In addition to the ethical dilemmas that are not considered sufficiently, there is the question of perspective. Which type of student is able to write about sexual violence as a weapon of war? And worse, what about the students that may have (recently) experienced war (Swati Parshar recently spoke about the methodological and ethical dilemmas of teaching about gender and war at ISA San Diego). How can sexual violence as a weapon of war be articulated? What are the registers available? And from which geopolitical position can the subject be approached? At least two types of students emerge in relation to this growing interest in the topic. White, middle-class, (sometimes-Scandinavian) female students have told me over the past two years, that they want to write about the subject. I try not to think of the growing problem of students just a few years back who developed a mass obsession with writing about the veil, but I’m experiencing intertextual anxt. The other student ‘figure’ emerging is the young, feminist-sensitive white, middle-class male – who is likely to be from Europe or the US. He is interested in meticulously mapping the issue, demonstrating some of the quantitative complexities of sexual violence. But I’m grossly generalising here. Mastery narratives are infused in many of the students’ desires. I’m trying not to jump to conclusions. Am I being too sensitive about positionality? Why does it matter where the student is standing, thinking and feeling? If all knowledge is situated then cannot this problem be resolved by a mere paragraph or two in the dissertation giving the usual declarations of privilege, reflexivity and western attachment? I’ve got my doubts.

4: Singularising Grammar

Recent work by Maria Eriksson-Baaz and Maria Stern, and Paul Kirby shows the dangers of not paying attention to grammar and narrative form when analysing the subject of sexual violence as a weapon of war. A tendency towards specific types of narratives, or a singularising grammar can have a number of problematic effects. Again, student dissertations and essays can adopt a colonial gaze, therefore unproblematically analysing the subject of gender-based violence without sufficient attention to a critical ‘race’ perspective on the subject. In addition, singularising grammars tend to reinforce and crystallise binaries and binary thinking. Only one sexed subject can be the victim and the opposite [sic] sexed subject remains perpetually the perpetrator. Students need to pay attention to the modes of writing they are engaged in. And, of course, not just for the subject of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

3: Encourages A Non-Feminist Standpoint

Sexual violence as a weapon of war is a subject that encourages a mastery complex in students. It becomes another subject to be managed, mapped, tallied and diagrammed. Some students over the years have continually crafted lengthy, worthwhile dissertations analysing issues of validity and reliability of statistics available, especially on the DRC. One student wrote a comprehensive analysis in a recent essay, without once making reference to the politics of sexual violence as a weapon of war. The dissertation outlined all of the arguments for and against taking numbers seriously, different variables that should or should not be included, causes including greed and grievance, and finally some of the ways in which practices vary from context to context, citing the infamous piece by Elizabeth Jean Wood which shows that sexual violence in war cannot be explained on simplistic biological arguments. But should dissertations on sexual violence in war pay adequate attention to the political perspectives of feminist scholars and activists? Is this attempt to say everything possible about sexual violence as a weapon of war a reterritorialising and silencing move? Is it an attempt to master the subject without paying attention to the ways in which sexual violence is embedded within social, political and cultural relations, and require all students of the subject to ask moral, ethical and political questions?

2: It Inspires Problematic Proximity and/or Remoteness

Dissertations and essays often take an intimate or proximate approach to the subject, or remove themselves from the messiness of experience altogether. For example, some dissertations spend a great deal of time illustrating the ‘horrors’ of sexual violence as a weapon of war, reiterating victims narratives from various primary (or not) sources. In an attempt to draw significant attention to the seriousness of sexual violence as a weapon of war, and the dismissal of it as a systematic practice, students spend considerable time illustrating the bodily affects of such war practices, sometimes describing in visceral terms the embodied details of violence through film clips, testimonies and journalist exposes. Vicarious trauma can be evidenced, in addition to forms of witnessing, and voyeurism. Many of the accounts are repetitively traumatic (oftentimes for the reader), with multiple essays and dissertations on the subject, following similar grammatical registers and rhetorical strategies as outlined above. At the same time as the proximity becomes vulgar, there is also a simultaneous distancing that occurs. The ‘inhumanity’, ‘exception’, and ‘bare life’, depicted in the students’ words creates a rupture in the reader’s ability to engage. It dehumanises the victims as it does the audience. This is sometimes reinforced through a ‘rational’ and ‘matter-of-fact’ tone. The rape narrative is elevated and becomes untouchable – and even unmarkable.

1: Replication and Reiteration Are No Good

Here’s another important reason not to write a dissertation on sexual violence as a weapon of war in the DRC. It’s been done already! Students continually ask me ‘can you suggest a couple of books on the subject?’. Where to start? There is so much to be said about gender and violence in militarised contexts more generally, but there has also been a great deal written about by a number of scholars. And it is precisely this body of knowledge that has sometimes been misanalysed by students. That is, although much of this writing has politically exposed the issue, students often read it as a holistic canon on the subject, interpreting the text as they wish. Dissertations often become regurgitated and simplistic snapshots of other work, reinforcing particular perspectives and portrayals and therefore contributing to the reification of the subject (missing a cogent assessment of narrative forms). A rhetorical stasis is created, where certain material and citations are circulated and re-circulated, with little new insight or critical perspective provided.

So these are my thoughts about writing on the subject of sexual violence as a weapon of war and a list of reasons why I think students should not write their dissertations on the subject. There are clearly many potential pitfalls. All of these reasons demand another set of analyses which is to do with how I should teach about sexual violence in war, although in many ways this, I think is a much harder task. In the meantime, can we have a moratorium on dissertations on sexual violence as a weapon of war?

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.

The paper I presented earlier this month at the International Studies Annual Conference held in San Francisco looks at how Afghan masculinities have been represented in and by Anglo-American media. The words ‘Afghan man’ conjure up a certain image, a pathologised figure that is now associated with most males in Afghanistan. The paper analyses this figure of the ‘militant’ Afghan man, most strikingly captured by descriptions of the Taliban and juxtaposes it with the less popular, though still familiar trope of the ‘damned’ Afghan man, embodied in the figure of the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai. But here I focus on a particular construction of the Taliban as sexually deviant, (improperly) homosexual men.

Jasbir Puar, in her trenchant appraisal of today’s war machine and the politics of knowledge that sustains it argues that the depictions of masculinity most widely disseminated in the post 9/11 world are terrorist masculinities:

failed and perverse, these emasculated bodies always have femininity as their reference point of malfunction and are metonymically tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and the body – homosexuality, incest, pedophilia, madness and disease.

Whilst representations of al-­Qaeda as pathologically perverse have permeated the Western mainstream, the Taliban because of its historically low international profile has escaped that level of media frenzy. The attention it does get, however, is almost always mired in Orientalist fantasies of Eastern men as pathologically disturbed sodomisers. The ‘high jack this fags’ scrawled on a bomb attached to the wing of an attack plane bound for Afghanistan by a USS Enterprise Navy officer, while in no way ubiquitous, is certainly an edifying example of our image of the Taliban as perverse and not quite “normal”.

This perversity of the Taliban has been largely attributed to their madrassa upbringing, an all-­male environment and their concomitant attitude towards women. Echoing anthropologist Lionel Tiger’s concerns that “it is in the crucible of all­‐male intensity that the bonds of terrorist commitment and self‐denial are formed”, Ahmed Rashid claims that the members of the Taliban had been brought up in a “totally male society”, in the “madrassa milieu”, where “control over women and their virtual exclusion was a powerful symbol of manhood and a reaffirmation of the students’ commitment to Jihad. Indeed, “denying a role for women gave the Taliban a kind of false legitimacy rooted in the political beliefs and ideologies”. Tiger focusing on al Qaeda offers the conventional and over-stated male-bonding thesis as an explanation for their failed masculinity and sexual perversity. In this imaginary, a lethal mix of male homosociality, the segregation of male and female populations and Islamic ideology carves out a space for terrorism, illicit sex and paedophilia. Both al‐Qaeda and Taliban are used as examples of this dangerous concoction.

The Talib is at once “too masculine” and repulsively effeminate. As a Pashtun, he belongs to the “martial races” – a designation invented by the British in the 19th century and is proclaimed to be inherently “warrior­‐like”. These qualities once used to extol the virtues of Afghans as a “noble” “fighting-people” are now used to denounce them as products of a culture of nasty fighting. Indeed, as with all discursive regimes, the question of power (as knowledge) is of paramount importance: we see the culturally sanctioned “hegemonic masculinity” of the 20th century Pashtuns morph into a widely-­reviled, failed masculinity of the Taliban in the 21st century.

Sensationalist reportage on paedophilia among so-called terrorist populations has become pedestrian after 9/11 and Pashtun Afghans have been painted, on more than one occasion, as queer sodomisers. The collection of photographs that Thomas Dworzak recovered in 2001 from dusty photographic studios in Kandahar capture a different side of the Taliban – dressed in colourful clothes, reading books and often with kohl applied to their eyes. However, as Faisal Devji notes in his introduction to The Poetry of the Taliban “these images are seen and described as ‘foreign’ or ‘other’”. Dworzak’s explicit aim in his work was to portray the Talibs as “human” and perhaps even “normal” in their complexity, not the one-dimensional monstrous figures they are conventionally depicted as, however, the photographs have been appropriated and interpreted as evidence of a pathological Pashtun tendency towards “queerness”.

Although Pashtun men are not authentically “homosexual” they are, so this story goes, “culturally” paedophiles. A Telegraph headline opines rather forcefully: ‘Paedophilia Culturally Accepted in South Afghanistan’ and the sentiments are echoed by the Examiner.com which cites U.S. soldiers and Reuters journalists as saying Paedophilia is a “way of life” in Afghanistan. The New York Times contends that paedophilia is the “curse” of “male-dominated Pashtun culture. Tim Reid of The Times writes of the “Pashtun obsession with sodomy”, “the Taliban’s disdain for women” and “the bizarre penchant of many for eyeliner”. In this environment of degeneracy and deviance, the construal of Pashtun men as not quite homosexual but still engaging sexually with other men (or boys) is a profoundly political act. It lets us, as Western observers, bemoan the “state of affairs” in Afghanistan, but it allows us to hope for a brighter future post- intervention. By “saving Afghan women” from Afghan men, we are therefore, also saving Afghan men from themselves in this liberal humanitarian narrative.

However, with both homosexuality (or its lack thereof) and paedophilia it is almost as though the issue at stake here is solely the discomfort experienced by the foreign troops stationed in Afghanistan. In spite of its tongue-in-cheek tone, an article by The Scotsman published in 2002 gets to the heart of the matter. “In Bagram British marines returning from an operation deep in the Afghan mountains spoke last night of an alarming new threat—being propositioned by swarms of gay local farmers.” The reactions of the marines, even if not entirely serious, are telling: An Arbraoth marine, James Fletcher exclaims: “They were more terrifying than the al-­Qaeda [sic]. One bloke who had painted toenails was offering to paint ours. They go about hand in hand, mincing around the village”. In the words of Corporal Paul Richard, the experience was “hell”: “Every village we went into we got a group of men wearing make-­up coming up, stroking our hair and cheeks and making kissing noises”.

The inevitable pop-psychologising follows. The author Chris Stephen offers: “The Afghan hill tribes live in some of the most isolated communities in the country”. And one of his interlocutors, a marine Vaz Pickles adds: “I think a lot of the problem is that they don’t have the women around a lot… We only saw about two women in the whole six days. It was all very disconcerting.” In spite of its jocose tone, the deep-­seated homophobia and racism of these soldiers is notable – a band of effeminate Afghan men are labelled as “more terrifying than al‐Qaeda”.

The San Francisco Chronicle makes the point patently clear: “Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older walking hand­‐in­‐hand with a pretty young boy”. The choice of words is instructive: it is Western forces who “had a problem”.

And so, visibly perturbed and laden with suspicions about the perverse sexual tendencies and inclinations of the Pashtun people, the US military decided to conduct an academic enquiry into the ways of the Afghan people. The result: a Human Terrain report conducted by the US army on “Pashtun Sexuality”. Ostensibly, to help American soldiers fight better and be more culturally sensitive, the report essentially turned out to be an exercise in sensitising Western fighters to the devious ways of the Other. The report written by Anna Maria Cardanalli, a social scientist (of sorts), claims to draw on ethnographic studies and anthropological expertise argues:

Military cultural awareness training for Afghanistan often emphasizes that the effeminate characteristics of male Pashtun interaction are to considered “normal” and no indicator of a prevalence of homosexuality. This training is intended to prevent servicemembers from reacting with typically western shock or aversion to such displays. However, slightly more in‐depth research points to the presence of a culturally-­‐dependent homosexuality appearing to affect a far greater population base then [sic] some researchers would argue is attributable to natural inclination.

The source of the discomfort, in line with the report on Pashtun sexuality, is that homosexuality in southern Afghanistan, is a) “culturally-­‐dependent” and b) affects a greater number of people than is deemed “natural”. Since the report makes a case for “Pashtun sexuality” as neither “natural” nor “normal”, but as culturally-­‐sanctioned debauchery it becomes easy to label their homosexual interactions as “inauthentic”.

The argument is that “statistically” gay men are supposed to be a minority and given the high incidence of homosexuality in Afghanistan, there is something “deviant” and “unnatural” about this. Indeed, numerous commentaries point out that homosexuality is something “they do” and not something “they are”. Inasmuch as gay men are not a minority in Afghanistan, they are not really homosexual, they are merely deprived – of female intimacy. Similarly, paedophilia is a cultural “norm” in Afghanistan because of the lack of “freely available” women. In accordance with this reasoning, most same‐sex relationships have been reduced to a “Pashtun obsession with sodomy”. Not only does this play into a strange identity politics, whereby we decide what they are and how this makes them different from us, it also often functions in accordance with a reductive causation according to which effeminacy is equated with homosexuality. “Hugging doesn’t mean sex locals tell us, and neither does wearing kohl or colourful sandals.”

The tension in Anglophone reporting about Afghanistan surfaces yet again when grappling with the openness with which men enter into relationships with other men. On the one hand, given the ease with which male-male relationships are discussed in Kandahar one may be forgiven for thinking that Kandahar is exceptionally tolerant, on the other hand the language used by the reporters hints that these relationships are not consensual and even if they are, there is always an undertone of coercion. Indeed, while Tim Reid notes that there seems to be no “shame” or “furtiveness” about their conduct, and others are baffled by the forwardness with which marines are being propositioned, he also says that these young boys are “marked for life”. The contradiction and paradoxes are rife; Reid’s piece is titled “Kandahar comes out of the Closet” although Michael Griffins, also of The Times avers: “in Pashtun society, man­‐woman love was the one that dared not speak its name: boy courtesans conducted their affairs openly.”

In another instance, faced with estimates from her informants that “between 18% and 45% of men [in Kandahar] engage in homosexual sex,” an LA Times reporter Maura Reynolds observed dryly that this is “significantly higher than the 3% to 7% of American men who, according to studies identify themselves as homosexual”. Indeed this “excess” homosexuality makes Afghans suspect and much more likely to be called queer “paedophiles” and “sodomizers” as opposed to gay men or homosexuals. It is telling that the term “bisexual” is not once used to describe these men who often have wives and themselves admit that they like both men and women. As Reynolds’ local contact, Daud himself tells her: “I like men but I like girls better”.

In the final analysis, the (western) assumption that homosexuality is a “minority identity” and therefore must be connected with secrecy is challenged in the Afghan context. The openness and lack of secrecy surrounding same sex relationships in Afghanistan is what confounds most Western observers. Yet again, it is the desire to make sense of, to make legible, these foreign practices that leads to a series of stereotypes and contradictions. That Afghan men may have polymorphous sexual desires or engage in polyamorous relationships is a possibility that lies beyond the purview of the average Anglophone reporter. The messy complexities of a repressive society with its members participating in fluid sexual relationships are too great to comprehend – they are written off as unnatural aberrations in a culture characterized by (in the words of one reporter) “gynaeophobia”.

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.

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.