Laura Sjoberg

Agency, Militarized Femininity and Enemy Others: Observations From The War In Iraq

Abstract In this era of the increasing importance of gender, many conflicting images of women populate news headlines and political discourses. In the 2003 war in Iraq, Americans saw images of a teenage woman as a war hero, of a female general in charge of a military prison where torture took place, of women who committed those abuses, of male victims of wartime sexual abuse and of the absence of gender in official government reactions to the torture at Abu Ghraib. I contend that several gendered stories from the 2003 war in Iraq demonstrate three major developments in militarized femininity in the United States: increasing sophistication of the ideal image of the woman soldier; stories of militarized femininity constructed in opposition to the gendered enemy; and evident tension between popular ideas of femininity and womens agency in violence. I use the publicized stories of American women prisoners of war and American women prison guards to substantiate these observed developments.

Introduction to Security Studies: Feminist Contributions

In 1988, Millennium published a special issue on “Women and International Relations” now widely recognized as the start of a research program of feminist approaches to International Relations (ir)....

Gender, structure, and war: what Waltz couldn't see

This article theorizes Waltzs ‘third image,’ international system structure, through feminist lenses. After briefly reviewing International Relations (IR) analysis of the relationship between anarchy, structure, and war, it introduces gender analysis in IR with a focus on its theorizing of war(s). From this work, it sketches an approach to theorizing international structure through gendered lenses and provides an initial plausibility case for the argument that the international system structure is gender-hierarchical, focusing on its influence on unit (state) function, the distribution of capabilities among units, and the political processes which consistently govern unit interaction. It outlines the implications of an account of the international system as gender-hierarchical for theorizing the causes of war generally and wars specifically, with a focus on potentially testable hypotheses. The article concludes with some ideas about the potential significance of a theorizing gender from a structural perspective and of theorizing structure from through gendered lenses.

A(nother) Dark Side of the Protection Racket

This article builds on feminist readings of war and conflict generally and of the civilian immunity principle specifically to argue that gender is crucial to the story of how and why civilians are intentionally targeted by belligerents. It demonstrates that civilian victimization is directly linked to the gendered logic of the immunity principle. Particularly, we contend that civilian victimization is a logical extension of wars justified by protecting women and children, and that ‘civilian’ in ‘civilian victimization’ is a proxy for women. We make this argument in several steps. First, we introduce the literature about civilian victimization, acknowledging both its insights and its blindness to gender analysis. Second, we use feminist work on gender, war and militarism to present the case that civilian victimization in war is a product of gendered elements of the justificatory logics of war. We then provide examples of the gendered nature of civilian victimization (specifically targeting women in wars). The article concludes by arguing that seeing civilian victimization as a gendered phenomenon has important implications for theorizing war and conflict.

trans- bodies in/of war(s): cisprivilege and contemporary security strategy

This article explores a gendered dimension of war and conflict analysis that has up until now received little attention at the intersection of gender studies and studies of global politics: queer bodies in, and genderqueer significations of, war and conflict. In doing so, the article introduces the concept of cisprivilege to International Relations as a discipline and security studies as a core sub-field. Cisprivilege is an important, but under-explored, element of the constitution of gender and conflict. Whether it be in controversial reactions to the suggestion of United Nations Special Rapporteur Martin Scheinin that airport screenings for terrorists not discriminate against transgendered people, or in structural violence that is ever-present in the daily lives of many individuals seeking to navigate the heterosexist and cissexist power structures of social and political life, war and conflict is embodied and reifies cissexism. This article makes two inter-related arguments: first, that both the invisibility of genderqueer bodies in historical accounts of warfare and the visibility of genderqueer bodies in contemporary security strategy are forms of discursive violence; and second, that these violences have specific performative functions that can and should be interrogated. After constructing these core arguments, the article explores some of the potential benefits of an interdisciplinary research agenda that moves towards the theorisation of cisprivilege in security theory and practice.

Women fighters and the ‘beautiful soul’ narrative

This article explores womens presence in military forces around the world, looking both at womens service as soldiers and at the gendered dimensions of their soldiering particularly, and soldiering generally. It uses the ‘beautiful soul’ narrative to describe womens relationship with war throughout its history, and explores how this image of womens innocence of and abstention from war has often contrasted with womens actual experiences as soldiers and fighters.

Feminist Interrogations of Terrorism/Terrorism Studies

It is important to note at the outset that there is not one feminist perspective on terrorism, but many. As women are different, feminists are different. As there is variety among IR theories, there is variety among IR feminist theories – IR feminist realism, liberalism, constructivism, critical theory, postcolonialism and postmodernism. Since this short discussion piece cannot cover comprehensively IR feminisms’ various potential contributions to the study of terrorism, I choose to present a collage of feminist perspectives on the question of terrorism. Some of these are related or complementary, others are divergent and sometimes confl icting. What they share is being inspired by various observations of gender subordination in global politics. The fi rst set of observations in this collage is inspired by one of the oldest questions in feminist IR – where are the women? Women are underrepresented in the study of the perpetration and consequences of the actions that fall within our traditional understandings of terrorism. Most recent work on terrorism omits women altogether. Several recent important books on terrorism, including Bruce Hoffman’s Inside Terrorism, Ken Booth and Tim Dunne’s edited Worlds in Collision, and Walter Enders and Todd Sandler’s The Political Economy of Terrorism, do not contain a listing for ‘women’ in the index or serious discussions about the gender dynamics or impacts of terrorism. Much work on terrorism treats the ‘terrorist’ as a subject gendered male by defi nition. Both media presentations and scholarly work that do acknowledge women ‘related to’ terrorism in some way or another portray them in very gendered terms. Scholars are increasingly recognizing, for example, that women participate in terrorism as terrorists, a role that is not a new development. Still, even work which explicitly addresses women’s terrorism frequently characterizes participants as women terrorists rather than as terrorists who happen to be women – placing their gender at the forefront of accounts of their motivation. For example, Mia Bloom’s work on women suicide terrorists links their motivation almost exclusively to their status as rape victims. While Robert Pape claims women, like men, are rational actors when they commit acts of terrorism, one of his case studies explains that a woman suicide terrorist was acting rationally when she blew herself up, because it was the practical alternative in her society for woman who was unlikely to marry or have children because she had been raped. In our recent book, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics, Caron Gentry and I argue that women’s agency in their political (or even criminal) violence is denied even by those claiming to study women as women because women’s incapacity to commit acts of terror is essential to maintaining our current idealized notions of women and femininity.

Looking Forward, Conceptualizing Feminist Security Studies

In previous work, I characterized Feminist Security Studies as pluralistic, but transformative: Research in Feminist Security Studies reformulates mainstream approaches to traditional security issues, foregrounds the roles of women and gender in conflict and conflict resolution, and reveals the blindness of security studies to issues that taking gender seriously shows as relevant to thinking about security. Together, these works, as a research program, show that gender analysis is necessary, conceptually, for understanding international security, important for analyzing causes and predicting outcomes, and essential to thinking about solutions and promoting positive change in the security realm. (Sjoberg 2009a, 184; see also Sjoberg 2006, 2009b; Sjoberg and Martin 2010.)

Gender, the State, and War Redux Feminist International Relations across the ‘Levels of Analysis’

In her recent article, ‘Women, the State, and War,’ in a special issue of this journal honoring Kenneth Waltz, Jean Elshtain explores the question of what if anything it does to ‘put gender in’ to analysis of Waltz’s three ‘images’ of International Relations, and determines that gender is not definitive or causal in war theorizing. This article suggests that, while the question is an important and appropriate one to ask, the evidence that Elshtain brings to bear and the tools she uses to answer the question are inadequate to the task and not reflective of the current ‘state of the field’ of feminist International Relations. Addressing the question of if gender ‘alters in significant ways’ ‘man, the state, and war,’ this article provides theoretical and empirical examples from the young but rich field of feminist International Relations to present readers with the substance of feminist claims and the warrants behind feminist arguments. It urges International Relations to decide on the question of the relevance of gender by taking work in the area seriously, and suggests that the discipline might be convinced that acknowledging gender is crucial if scholars engage with the literature that sees ‘man, the state, and war’ as gendered.

Seeing sex, gender, and sexuality in international security:

This essay examines the roles that sex, gender, and sexuality can play in the study of international security. It makes the argument that “hard” security pressing questions like wars, genocides, and terrorist attacks and issues of gender, sex, and sexuality are linked. It begins by providing information about the recent and ongoing conflict in Libya as a case study. Then, it explores some of the questions that feminist and queer scholars have asked about international security in turn: where are the “women” in global politics? Where is “gender” and what does it matter? How do gender dynamics influence war and conflict? Do issues of sex and sexuality matter to war and conflict? If so, how? What tools are available to study these questions and produce answers in any given political situation?