Deploying Feminism

"Deploying Feminism tells the story of how the military has been delegated authority to advance gender equality while tackling increasingly complex threats. NATO, the world's foremost alliance, has embedded these ideas in the planning and execution of its missions. Indeed, Women, Peace and Security norms are being integrated into military processes, but not necessarily as intended. Armed forces value one thing above all else: operational effectiveness; they are trained to stay focused on mission objectives and lines of efforts. For troops deployed on NATO missions, this means seeking out women in their operating area to improve intelligence gathering activities. This helps the mission, surely, but are the women better off? Through military implementation, the focus on gender equality fades, there is a consistent distortion of Women, Peace and Security norms. Based on fieldwork in Iraq, Kosovo and the Baltics, this book details why and how these norms are militarized and put at the service of NATO's operational effectiveness"--

A detailed account, based on fieldwork and interviews, of how Women, Peace and Security norms are militarized and put at the service of operational effectiveness. International organizations and governments want to increase women's participation in military operations and peacebuilding. Gender equality is increasingly seen as the antidote to conflict, a key factor in achieving stability. While feminist activism inspired the emergence of these norms on gender and conflict, they were institutionalized through the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, with the military at the forefront of those changes. In Deploying Feminism, Stéfanie von Hlatky tells the story of how the military has been delegated authority to advance gender equality as part of their activities, while simultaneously tackling increasingly complex threats. Drawing upon fieldwork and interviews, she illustrates how NATO, the world's foremost alliance, has even embedded these ideas in the planning and execution of its missions. For troops deployed on NATO missions, this often means seeking out women in their operating area to improve intelligence gathering activities. While this helps the mission, does it help women and conflict-affected communities? Because of the military's focus on operational effectiveness above all else, von Hlatky argues that there is a distortion of WPS norms, as gender equality concerns fade into the background. Looking at NATO's ongoing operations in Iraq, Kosovo, and the Baltics, Deploying Feminism details the process by which Women, Peace and Security norms are militarized and put at the service of operational effectiveness. Further, it shows why an adjustment is necessary for gender equality to become a true planning priority.

"The 2007 first edition of this book proposed that Indigenous feminism was a valid and indeed essential theoretical and activist position, and introduced a roster of important Indigenous feminist contributors. The book has been well received nationally and internationally. It has been deployed in Indigenous Studies, Law, Political Science, and Women and Gender Studies in universities and appears on a number of doctoral comprehensive exam reading lists. The second edition, Making More Space, builds on the success of its predecessor, but is not merely a reiteration of it. Some chapters from the first edition are largely revised. A majority of the chapters are new, written for the second edition by important new scholars and activists. The second edition is more confident and less diffident about making the case for Indigenous feminism and in deploying a feminist analysis. The chapters cover issues that are relevant to some of the most important issues facing Indigenous people--violence against women, recovery of Indigenous self-determination, racism, misogyny, and decolonisation. Specifically, new chapters deal with Indigenous resurgence, feminism amongst the Sami and in Aboriginal Australia, neoliberal restructuring in Oaxaca, Canada's settler racism and sexism, and missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada."--.

The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda is celebrated as a landmark global framework for achieving gender equality in peace and security governance. Its power is visible in two decades of United Nations resolutions, national action plans, regional initiatives, and countless activist, academic, and philanthropic projects. Yet despite this vitality, it is haunted by failure, as a lack of political will and stubborn patriarchal resistance frustrate its promise. This book offers a groundbreaking critical account of the WPS agenda, exploring its evolution in relation to the wider politics of global governance and feminism. Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd argue that WPS is not a settled, cohesive policy but a field in flux, defined and disrupted by a growing number of national, supranational, subnational, and transnational agents who in turn act on an expanding catalogue of threats, from climate change to homophobia, challenging traditional boundaries of peace and security. Kirby and Shepherd reconceptualize WPS as a “policy ecosystem,” tracing interaction and contestation around the agenda across levels from the UN Security Council to military alliances to feminist activists. They combine analysis of a vast dataset of policy documents with key informant interviews and close readings of diplomacy, statecraft, the politics of indigeneity, counterinsurgency, antimilitarism, human rights, and the arms trade across the first twenty years of WPS. Far-reaching and incisive, Governing the Feminist Peace poses a provocative question: What if we abandoned the idea of the WPS agenda as a unified political project altogether?

Bringing together three generations of scholars, thinkers and activists, this book is the first to trace a genealogy of the specific contributions Indo-Caribbean women have made to Caribbean feminist epistemology and knowledge production. Challenging the centrality of India in considerations of the forms that Indo-Caribbean feminist thought and praxis have taken, the authors turn instead to the terrain of gender negotiations among Caribbean men and women within and across racial, class, religious, and political affiliations. Addressing the specific conditions which emerged within the region and highlighting the cross-racial solidarities and the challenges to narratives of purity that have been constitutive of Indo-Caribbean feminist thought, this collection connects to the broader indentureship diaspora and what can be considered post-indentureship feminist thought. Through examinations of literature, activism, art, biography, scholarship and public sphere practices, the collection highlights the complexity and richness of Indo-Caribbean engagements with feminism and social justice.

The evolution of surfing—from the first forms of wave-riding in Oceania, Africa, and the Americas to the inauguration of surfing as a competitive sport at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics—traverses the age of empire, the rise of globalization, and the onset of the digital age, taking on new meanings at each juncture. As corporations have sought to promote surfing as a lifestyle and leisure enterprise, the sport has also narrated its own epic myths that place North America at the center of surf culture and relegate Hawai‘i and other indigenous surfing cultures to the margins. The Critical Surf Studies Reader brings together eighteen interdisciplinary essays that explore surfing's history and development as a practice embedded in complex and sometimes oppositional social, political, economic, and cultural relations. Refocusing the history and culture of surfing, this volume pays particular attention to reclaiming the roles that women, indigenous peoples, and people of color have played in surfing. Contributors. Douglas Booth, Peter Brosius, Robin Canniford, Krista Comer, Kevin Dawson, Clifton Evers, Chris Gibson, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee, Scott Laderman, Kristin Lawler, lisahunter, Colleen McGloin, Patrick Moser, Tara Ruttenberg, Cori Schumacher, Alexander Sotelo Eastman, Glen Thompson, Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, Andrew Warren, Belinda Wheaton

First Published in 2016. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

Despite several decades of feminist activism and scholarship, women’s bodies continue to be sites of control and contention both materially and symbolically. Issues such as reproductive technologies, sexual violence, objectification, motherhood, and sex trafficking, among others, constitute ongoing, pressing concerns for women’s bodies in our contemporary milieu, arguably exacerbated in a neoliberal world where bodies are instrumentalized as sites of human capital. This book engages with these themes by building on the strong tradition of feminist thought focused on women’s bodies, and by making novel contributions that reflect feminists’ concerns—both theoretically and empirically—about gender and embodiment in the present context and beyond. The collection brings together essays from a variety of feminist scholars who deploy diverse theoretical approaches, including phenomenology, pragmatism, and new materialisms, in order to examine philosophically the question of the current status of gendered bodies through cutting-edge feminist theory.