This section includes a conversation started at the “Gender and Security: Theory and Practice” Working Group meeting on Tuesday, February 15, 2010, the day before the 2010 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association. We, as convenors of the Working Group, asked six self-identified feminist scholars to participate in a roundtable to open the meeting discussing the state of the field.  We asked them to think about a couple of questions in particular: What is Feminist Security Studies? What is the relationship between Feminist Security Studies and International Relations (IR) or its Security Studies subfield (in the United States or abroad)? What is the relationship between theory and practice in Feminist Security Studies?

In her recent article, “Women, the State, and War,” in a special issue of this journal discussing the thought of Kenneth Waltz, Jean Elsthain asserts that she was “never entirely convinced that defining the state as a gendered category helped us to account for very much where statecraft and war were concerned,” and concludes that, across Waltz’s three levels of analysis, “there is no compelling evidence of gender determination.”  While acknowledging that feminist work has contributed to understanding the empirical realities of women’s subordination, including but not limited to sexual exploitation, wartime rape, and sex-selective abortion, Elsthain distinguishes usefulness of that analysis from the less useful identification of “man, the state, and war” as gendered.  She asks: “does ‘gender’ as a category of analysis or as the central feature of a logic of explanation alter in significant ways Kenneth Waltz’s famous ‘levels of analysis’…?” and answers in the negative.

Though feminist scholars have critiqued the gender-exclusivity of using the “levels of analysis” to frame International Relations (IR) theorizing, this article takes as a starting point Elsthain’s assertion that they can provide leverage on the question of whether (and how) gender analysis significantly changes IR theorizing. However, I use very different tools to think about this question, and (perhaps relatedly, though not necessarily) come up with a different answer.  Particularly, the account of gender as a category of analysis in the article omits (both in substance and in citation) the great majority of feminist work in IR and (likely as a result) does not reflect that work’s complicated understandings of the meaning of gender and its role in global politics. This article looks to evaluate the utility of using gender to think about global politics at Waltz’s three levels of analysis, acknowledging the contributions of feminist work in IR. After introducing gender as a category of analysis, this article looks at people, the state, and the international system, in Elshtain’s terms, “what does ‘putting gender in’ do, if anything?”         

Recently, the United States Supreme Court upheld a Congressional ban on “partial-birth” abortions that does not contain an exception for women’s health, chipping away at the rights contained in Roe v. Wade. As more stringent abortion laws in more states hold through court tests, fans of abortion rights in the United States are increasingly concerned about a coming overturning of the case that made abortion legal in our country. Some argue that these recent decisions repudiate Roe, but this article proposes instead that Roe v. Wade was decided on inappropriate grounds, and that abortion is not a privacy issue but a gender subordination issue. This argument begins by demonstrating the genderings in the Roe opinion and its progeny.  For example, the Court Roe found it necessary to reference Ms. Roe’s marital status not once but several times in making the decision to allow her to have an abortion. This brings up the question exactly where Roe’s protected private is – certainly, it was not in her entitlement to privacy for her love life. Is privacy inside a woman’s head? Is it inside her womb? Is the government not already present in those places? Feminists have long wondered if the word private carries with it implications of shamefulness as it is used in the Roe decision, and have been critical of the public/private divide.

Many gender rights in the United States (for example, abortion) were originally granted to women in terms of their constitutionally protected right to privacy. Even though the language has evolved from strictly privacy to a liberty/autonomy framework, important elements of the privacy framework remain.  Other rights have been consistently denied to women because the law is powerless to interfere in the private sphere. This article mounts a general critique of the public/private dichotomy and its gender-subordinating implications as it is applied in the law.  It then evaluates privacy as a ground for gender rights by looking at the role that privacy jurisprudence has played in abortion jurisprudence. Next, the article contends that the problem is not with the public/private dichotomy alone, but with the preservation of the individual (rather than the gender) as the location of rights and relegation of gender-based rights to a sphere where they are both considered less important and pliable. These inspirations for both the privacy and liberty/autonomy frameworks serve to maintain gender subordination, even when they appear to be employed for women’s benefit, an analysis of abortion policy demonstrates.

This article explores women’s presence in military forces around the world, looking both at women’s service as soldiers and at the gendered dimensions of their soldiering particularly, and soldiering generally.  It begins with an overview of the use of the “beautiful soul narrative” to describe women’s relationship with war throughout history, describing which women’s innocence of and abstention from war. It then points out that this stereotypical narrative often contrasted with women’s actual experiences as soldiers and fighters throughout the history of warfare. It then discusses women’s contemporary involvement in the making and fighting of wars, relating those experiences to gender-based expectations of women’s behavior (particularly the “beautiful soul” narrative) and the gendered nature of warfare. It concludes with some insights, looking forward, for women’s participation in military conflict.

In this introduction, I provide a brief discussion of what it means to approach IR from a feminist perspective and a brief overview of questions of epistemology and method in feminist theorizing. I then give a summary of some of the accomplishments of and common themes in Feminist Security Studies to this point and situate feminist work in the larger field of Security Studies. Finally, I introduce the articles in this special issue as analyses of traditional issues in Security Studies through feminist lenses, explorations of the roles that women play in conflict and conflict resolution, and introductions of new or previously neglected issues to Security Studies as a result of taking gender seriously.  

Particularly, I assert goal of improving the quality and quantity of conversations between Feminist Security Studies and Security Studies more generally, in order to demonstrate the importance of gender analysis to the study of international security and to expand the feminist research program in Security Studies. This work not only challenges the assumed irrelevance of gender; it argues that gender is not a sub-section of Security Studies to be compartmentalized or briefly considered as a side issue. Rather, I contend that gender is conceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international security. As such, accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship cannot be produced without taking account of women’s presence in or the gendering of world politics.

It is important to note at the outset that there is not one feminist perspective on terrorism – but many. Like women are different; feminists are different. Like there is variety among IR theories, there is variety among IR feminist theories – IR feminist realism, liberalism, constructivism, critical theory, post-colonialism and post-modernism. Since this short discussion piece cannot cover comprehensively IR feminisms’ various potential contributions to the study of terrorism, I choose to I present a collage of feminist perspectives on the question of terrorism. Some of these feminist perspectives are related or complementary, others are divergent and sometimes conflicting. What they share is being inspired by various observations of gender subordination in global politics.

Feminist approaches to explaining terror might appropriate feminist insights on the incompleteness of human autonomy, the unrepresentativeness of rationality, and the limited utility of strong analytical distinctions between these categories.  Feminist theory can present different readings of terrorism. Nancy Hirschmann’s work on relational autonomy might be used to argue that the decision to commit terror is part agent, part structure – how much of each is based on questions of relative power. Catherine MacKinnon’s work on gender as a derivative difference could inspire the argument that the agency an actor has in a decision to commit terror is both wholly decisional and wholly socially constrained. Christine Sylvester’s (2002) work on empathetic cooperation provides a way to see that it is possible that even the divide between terror/counterterror and the west/Islam can be bridged. Katharine Moon’s work on individuals as bargaining chips in international security can be used to find actors other than ‘terrorists’ and state leaders in international terrorism. Lisa Prugl’s work on the process of constructing gender roles could help understand the gendered constitution of terrorist subjects. Amy Allen’s work on defining alternative strategies of power from the political margins might help to understand ‘terror’ as a tool of the powerless and the powerful.   Anne Fausto-Sterling’s work can be used to analyze the gendered terrorist body as a symbolic manifestation.

Robert Pape (2005) proposed a theory of suicide terrorism which characterized it as the strategic choice of rationally motivated liberation organizations.  While Pape’s model “includes” both men and women suicide bombers, it does not include the gender-based insights of feminist theory critiquing the rational actor model, the tendency of traditional International Relations theory to ignore the individual, and the portrayal of the international arena in terms of characteristics traditionally associated with masculinity (e.g., rationality, objectivity, calculation, competitive strength) while marginalizing characteristics traditionally associated with femininity (e.g., emotion, experience, personal connection, desperation).

Starting at Cynthia Enloe’s (1993) argument that “the personal is international, and the international is personal,” this article argues that a human-centered, relational autonomy approach inspired by feminist principles is more accurate than either gendered narratives or the strategic actor approach for explaining (not just women but all) suicide terrorism. The first section of the article is a feminist critique of major political science work on suicide terrorism.  The second section presents alternative suppositions about the causes of suicide terrorism based on feminist observations.  The article concludes with case studies from Palestinian and Chechen conflicts that illustrate the empirical “value added” and theoretical importance of gender-based approaches to the study of suicide terrorism.

In the 1991 Gulf War, the United States deployed women soldiers to a combat zone for the first time. At that time, Cynthia Enloe observed new militarized femininities; stories about women’s roles as soldiers told on the basis of their gender. Women soldiers’ gender marked their identity on the battlefield and in the report from the war zone.  If the 1991 Gulf War saw an unprecedented number of female soldiers deployed into the war zone, the 2003 war in Iraq saw double that percentage of female participants. Not only was a larger percentage of the United States military force female in 2003, women soldiers accounted for a substantial number of the stories of the war, both in the media and in public life more generally.

In this era of the increasing importance of gender, many conflicting images of women populate news headlines and political discourses. 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 women’s agency in violence.

Cynthia Enloe described this article as imporant, because it "shows us here the analytical rewards of paying close attention to any women who under any circumstances become the wielders of violence, while we also track how those women wielders of violence are portrayed and how they are understood by those of us who consume the representations of the portrayers."