Making Gender Making War

Making Gender, Making War is a unique interdisciplinary edited collection which explores the social construction of gender, war-making and peacekeeping. It highlights the institutions and processes involved in the making of gender in terms of both men and women, masculinity and femininity. The "war question for feminism" marks a thematic red thread throughout; it is a call to students and scholars of feminism to take seriously and engage with the task of analyzing war. Contributors analyze how war-making is intertwined with the making of gender in a diversity of empirical case studies, organized around four themes: gender, violence and militarism; how the making of gender is connected to a (re)making of the nation through military practices; UN SCR 1325 and gender mainstreaming in institutional practices; and gender subjectivities in the organization of violence, exploring the notion of violent women and non-violent men.

From Pakistan to Chechnya, Sri Lanka to Canada, pioneering women are taking their places in formal and informal military structures previously reserved for, and assumed appropriate only for men. Women have fought in wars, either as women or covertly dressed as men, throughout the history of warfare, but only recently have they been allowed to join state militaries, insurgent groups, and terrorist organizations in unprecedented numbers. This begs the question - how useful are traditional gendered categories in understanding the dynamics of war and conflict? And why are our stories of gender roles in war typically so narrow? Who benefits from them? In this illuminating book, Laura Sjoberg explores how gender matters in war-making and war-fighting today. Drawing on a rich range of examples from conflicts around the world, she shows that both women and men play many more diverse roles in wars than either media or scholarly accounts convey. Gender, she argues, can be found at every turn in the practice of war; it is crucial to understanding not only ‘what war is’, but equally how it is caused, fought and experienced. With end of chapter questions for discussion and guides to further reading, this book provides the perfect introduction for students keen to understand the multi-faceted role of gender in warfare. Gender, War and Conflict will challenge and change the way we think about war and conflict in the modern world.

A state's ability to maintain mandatory conscription and wage war rests on the idea that a "real man" is one who has served in the military. Yet masculinity has no inherent ties to militarism. The link between men and the military, argues Maya Eichler, must be produced and reproduced in order to fill the ranks, engage in combat, and mobilize the population behind war. In the context of Russia's post-communist transition and the Chechen wars, men's militarization has been challenged and reinforced. Eichler uncovers the challenges by exploring widespread draft evasion and desertion, anti-draft and anti-war activism led by soldiers' mothers, and the general lack of popular support for the Chechen wars. However, the book also identifies channels through which militarized gender identities have been reproduced. Eichler's empirical and theoretical study of masculinities in international relations applies for the first time the concept of "militarized masculinity," developed by feminist IR scholars, to the case of Russia.

Gender roles are nowhere more prominent than in war. Yet contentious debates, and the scattering of scholarship across academic disciplines, have obscured understanding of how gender affects war and vice versa. In this authoritative and lively review of our state of knowledge, Joshua Goldstein assesses the possible explanations for the near-total exclusion of women from combat forces, through history and across cultures. Topics covered include the history of women who did fight and fought well, the complex role of testosterone in men's social behaviours, and the construction of masculinity and femininity in the shadow of war. Goldstein concludes that killing in war does not come naturally for either gender, and that gender norms often shape men, women, and children to the needs of the war system. lllustrated with photographs, drawings, and graphics, and drawing from scholarship spanning six academic disciplines, this book provides a unique study of a fascinating issue.

Will war ever end? Women across the world are proving that they can oppose patriarchal capitalist violence

This book advances the claims of feminist international relations scholars that the social construction of masculinities is key to resolving the scourges of militarism, sexual violence and international insecurity. More than two decades of feminist research has charted the dynamic relationship between warfare and masculinity, but there has yet to be a detailed account of the role of masculinity in structuring the range of volatile civil conflicts which emerged in the Global South after the end of the Cold War. By bridging feminist scholarship on international relations with the scholarship of masculinities, Duriesmith advances both bodies of scholarship through detailed case study analysis. By challenging the concept of ‘new war’, he suggests that a new model for understanding the gendered dynamics of civil conflict is needed, and proposes that the power dynamics between groups of men based on age difference, ethnicity, location and class form an important and often overlooked causal component to these civil conflicts. Exploring the role of masculinities through two case studies, the civil war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002) and the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005), this book will be of great interest to postgraduate students, practitioners and academics working in the fields of gender and security studies.

This vibrant collection of essays reveals the intimate politics of how people with a wide range of relationships to war identify with, and against, the military and its gendered and racialised norms. It synthesises three recent turns in the study of international politics: aesthetics, embodiment and the everyday, into a new conceptual framework. This helps us to understand how militarism permeates society and how far its practices can be re-appropriated or even turned against it.

"Nimo's War, Emma's War is unique in examining the gendered dimension of the Iraq war, particularly its impact on ordinary Iraqi and American women, thereby revealing an important long-term cost of the conflict. Cynthia Enloe's approach and analysis are extremely original and innovative."--Nadje Al-Ali, author of What Kind of Liberation?: Women and the Occupation of Iraq "Nimo's War, Emma's War is Cynthia Enloe's darkest and most strikingly conceived text to date. War is not 'in' Iraq and Afghanistan, where foreign militaries confront local people, rather it is everywhere, most particularly in 'peacetime' domestic spaces, 'civilian' employment, marital bedrooms and high schools."--Terrell Carver, author of Politics, Language and Metaphor "Cynthia Enloe has pioneered the subject of women, militarism, and war in a series of revelatory books, including Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War, and Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives. Nimo's War, Emma's War is her best one yet."--Chalmers Johnson, author of The Blowback Trilogy "Brilliantly researched, vividly written, Cynthia Enloe has gifted us with a new and different story of modern warfare. Entirely gripping and profoundly humane, every page raises new issues. To factor in Nimo and Emma--all the women and families touched by the carnage and agony of war, is to see the bitter range of tragedy community by community. To read this book is to ask: What are we doing to our children--all our children, combatants and civilians? How do women cope with post-war wounds and violence--agony, wreckage, displacement? Cynthia Enloe's book is essential reading for all students and journalists, public citizens and peace activists, who seek women's dignity, healthy societies, humane alternatives to the insanity of careless military destruction."--Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of The Declassified Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt (vols I & II, III forthcoming)

This book offers a feminist analysis of military sacrifice and reveals the importance of a gender perspective in understanding the idea of honourable death. In present-day security discourses, traditional masculinised obligations to die for the homeland and its women and children are challenged and renegotiated. Working from a critical feminist perspective, this book examines the political and societal justifications for sacrifice in wars motivated by human rights and an international responsibility to protect. With original empirical research from six European countries, the volume demonstrates how gendered and nationalistic representations saturate contemporary notions of sacrifice and legitimate military violence. A key argument is that a gender perspective is necessary in order to understand, and to oppose, the idea of the honourable military death. Bringing together a wide range of materials – including public debates, rituals, monuments and artwork – to analyse the justifications for soldiers’ deaths in the Afghanistan war (2002–14), the analysis challenges methodological nationalism. The authors develop a feminist comparative methodology and engage in cross-country and transdisciplinary analysis. This innovative approach generates new understandings of the ways in which both the idealisation and the political contestation of military violence depend on gendered national narratives. This book will be of much interest to students of gender studies, critical military studies, security studies and International Relations.