Militarism Versus Feminism

This valuable collection examines closely the construction of male and female identity around the theme of collective violence. Why did such violence get "moralized" for men in the case of warfare-but not for women? Women, Militarism and War presents alternatives to both "business as usual" thinking and excessively utopian or naive feminist accounts. Contributors: Jane Bethke Elshtain, Sheila Tobias, Amy Swerdlow, Carol Cohn, Mary C. Segers, Linda K. Kerber, D'Ann Campbell, Kathleen Jones, Joyce Berkman, Cynthia Enloe, Janet Radcliffe Richards and Sara Ruddick

Feminist Praxis against U.S. Militarism provides critical feminist and womanist analyses of U.S. militarism that challenge the ongoing U.S. neoliberal military-industrial complex and its multivalent violence that destroys people’s lives, especially women and other vulnerable populations. It highlights the intentional critique of U.S. militarism from feminist/womanist perspectives that seek to show the ways in which gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, and violence intersect to threaten women’s lives, especially women of color’s lives, and the broader environment upon which women’s lives are dependent. Most of all, this volume challenges the readers to understand the U.S. as the warfare, counterterror, carceral state and its devastating effects on the everyday lives of women, especially women of color, locally, nationally, and globally. This volume also helps readers understand the racialized gendered impacts of U.S. militarism in conjunction with the ongoing global economies of dispossession and militarized violence across the borders of nation-states. Interrogating U.S. military interventions in “other” countries can show how the U.S. War on Terror directly affects U.S. “domestic” affairs and daily lives in the United States.

This compelling, interdisciplinary compilation of essays documents the extensive, intersubjective relationships between gender, war, and militarism in 21st-century global politics. Feminist scholars have long contended that war and militarism are fundamentally gendered. Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives provides empirical evidence, theoretical innovation, and interdisciplinary conversation on the topic, while explicitly—and uniquely—considering the links between gender, war, and militarism. Essentially an interdisciplinary conversation between scholars studying gender in political science, anthropology, and sociology, the essays here all turn their attention to the same questions. How are war and militarism gendered? Seventeen innovative explanations of different intersections of the gendering of global politics and global conflict examine the theoretical relationship between gender, militarization, and security; the deployment of gender and sexuality in times of conflict; sexual violence in war and conflict; post-conflict reconstruction; and gender and militarism in media and literary accounts of war. Together, these essays make a coherent argument that reveals that, although it takes different forms, gendering is a constant feature of 21st-century militarism.

Written by one of the world's leading feminist scholars, this masterful and provocative book considers the ways women's desires to be patriotic yet feminine and men's fears of being feminized explain how militarism is being globalized—and thus what it will take to roll back militarization anywhere. Through explorations of how governments think so narrowly about "national security," of how postwar reconstruction efforts have marginalized women, of how ideas about feminization were used to humiliate male prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and of why "camo" has become a fashion statement, Cynthia Enloe unravels militarism's both blatant and subtle workings. Focusing her lens on the "big picture" of international politics and on the small picture of women's and men's complex everyday lives, Enloe challenges us to recognize militarism in all its forms.