Victoria Basham

What is Critical Military Studies

In the summer of 2011, this journal’s founding editors came together at an interdisciplinary conference on “Military methodologies”, at Newcastle University. The conversation that ensued was an att...

Gender, race, militarism and remembrance: the everyday geopolitics of the poppy

This article offers a feminist analysis of how British military violence and war are, in part, made possible through everyday embodied and emotional practices of remembrance and forgetting. Focusing on recent iterations of the Royal British Legion’s Annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the emotionality, and gendered and racial politics of collective mourning provide opportunities for the emergence of ‘communities of feeling’, through which differently gendered and racialised individuals can find their ‘place’ in the national story. I aim to show that in relying on such gendered and racial logics of emotion, the Poppy Appeal invites communities of feeling to remember military sacrifice, whilst forgetting the violence and bloodiness of actual warfare. In so doing, the poppy serves to reinstitute war as an activity in which masculinised, muscular ‘protectors’ necessarily make sacrifices for the feminised ‘protected’. The poppy is thus not only a site for examining the everyday politics of contemporary collective mourning, but its emotional, gendered and racialised foundations and how these work together to animate the geopolitics of war.

Harnessing Social Diversity in the British Armed Forces: The Limitations of ‘Management’ Approaches

This article explores how the British Ministry of Defences aim to accommodate and harness a demographically diverse workforce is undermined by the ways it seeks to manage this change. By focusing on policy discourses identified as the ‘diversity blind’ and the ‘management imperative’ approaches, and on insights from research with British military personnel, the article demonstrates how policy discourses can expose individuals to harassment and undermine the militarys social legitimacy. It is only by examining what it is that the military is trying to protect – its white, heterosexual, masculine identity – that it becomes clear how status quo power relations remain intact.

Liberal militarism as insecurity, desire and ambivalence: Gender, race and the everyday geopolitics of war:

The use and maintenance of military force as a means of achieving security makes the identity and continued existence of states as legitimate protectors of populations intelligible. In liberal democracies, however, where individual freedom is the condition of existence, citizens have to be motivated to cede some of that freedom in exchange for security. Accordingly, liberal militarism becomes possible only when military action and preparedness become meaningful responses to threats posed to the social body, not just the state, meaning that it relies on co-constitutive practices of the geopolitical and the everyday. Through a feminist discursive analysis of British airstrikes in Syria and attendant debates on Syrian refugees, I examine how liberal militarism is animated through these co-constitutive sites, with differential effects. Paying particular attention to gender and race, I argue that militarism is an outcome of social practices characterized as much by everyday desires and ambivalence as by fear and bellicosity. Moreover, I aim to show how the diffuse and often uneven effects produced by liberal militarism actually make many liberal subjects less secure. I suggest therefore that despite the claims of liberal states that military power provides security, for many militarism is insecurity.

Encounters with the Military: TOWARD A FEMINIST ETHICS OF CRITIQUE?

This conversation developed from a panel titled “Interrogating the Militarized Masculine: Reflections on Research, Ethics and Access” held at the May 2013 International Feminist Journal of Politics conference at the University of Sussex, UK.

Encounters with the Military

This conversation developed from a panel titled “Interrogating the Militarized Masculine: Reflections on Research, Ethics and Access” held at the May 2013 International Feminist Journal of Politics conference at the University of Sussex, UK.

Telling geopolitical tales: temporality, rationality, and the ‘childish’ in the ongoing war for the Falklands-Malvinas Islands

Anniversaries of war often present opportunities for the telling and retelling of tales about the geopolitical; tales of a nation’s sovereignty, its identity, its security, and how these are imagined and reimagined through the notion of specific conflicts, their histories, beginnings, ends, and aftermaths. By examining the case of the ongoing ‘war’ over the Falklands-Malvinas and a particular set of stories where the ‘childish’ has come to characterize relations and differences between Britain and Argentina, this article explores how the temporality of ‘the anniversary’ can enable certain claims, about the rationality of war, as a means of safeguarding sovereignty, identity, and security, to become commonsensical. The article argues that more attention should be paid to geopolitical tales of supposedly ‘adult’ and ‘childish’ characters because these constructions have the potential to normalize violence as a commonsensical act of strong, adult nations; as an integral part of their national stories that obscures the aggressive role of the state in normalizing and perpetuating violence.

Critical Military Studies as Method: An Approach to Studying Gender and the Military

Basham and Bulmer offer an introduction to the ways that Critical Military Studies (CMS) asks new questions about gender and its relationship with military institutions, militarisation and military power. The chapter argues that a CMS approach challenges feminists to interrogate the limits of established feminist concepts such as ‘militarised masculinity’ and to recognise that gendered boundaries routinely fail and are contested by people in proximity to military power. It concludes with an exploration of the ways in which a CMS approach to gender and the military opens up space to think differently about resistance and feminist praxis within and outside the academy.

War is where the hearth is: gendered labor and the everyday reproduction of the geopolitical in the army reserves

ABSTRACT The feminized imaginary of “home and hearth” has long been central to the notion of soldiering as masculinist protection. Soldiering and war are not only materialized by gendered imaginaries of home and hearth though, but through everyday labors enacted within the home. Focusing on in-depth qualitative research with women partners and spouses of British Army reservists, we examine how women’s everyday domestic and emotional labor enables reservists to serve, constituting “hearth and home” as a site through which war is made possible. As reservists – who are still overwhelmingly heterosexual men – become increasingly called upon by the state, one must consider how the changing nature of the Army’s procurement of soldiers is also changing demands on women’s labor. Feminist IPE scholars have shown broader trends in the outsourcing of labor to women and its privatization. Our research similarly underscores the significance of everyday gendered labor to the geopolitical. Moreover, we highlight the fragility of military power, given that women can withdraw their labor at any time. The article concludes that paying attention to women’s everyday labor in the home facilitates greater understanding of one of the key sites through which war is both materialized and challenged.

Encounters with the military : toward an ethics of feminist critique?

This conversation developed from a panel titled “Interrogating the Militarized Masculine: Reflections on Research, Ethics and Access” held at the May 2013 International Feminist Journal of Politics conference at the University of Sussex, UK.