What makes Feminist Security Studies such an exciting field for me is the depth and diversity of feminists grappling with key issues of the politics of war, peace, and security who are also concerned with sovereignty and autonomy, the meaning and nature of violence, and the connections among violence, subjectivity, and embodiment. Feminists across the disciplines have done much to render problematic the equation of bodies and subjects for their own political purposes, a political/theoretical move that has enormous implications for the way in which we think about the practices of security. In thinking through and even beyond “gender,” feminists in security studies are poised to ask the question of how we might rethink not only how security practices are gendered, but also how the very nature of “security” has lent itself to particular conceptions of “the body” (Butler Reference Butler2004).

Feminists disaggregate bodies and subjects through the concept of gender: This concept represents a questioning of the correspondence between sexed bodies of men and women and ideational constructs of women and men in representational practices. Feminists have recognized the relationship between the materiality of bodies and the sociality of representational practices as a key concern in terms of securing an end to gender subordination. From this problem stems the “sex–gender system,” a concept that feminists have used to differentiate between the natural/biological concept of sex and the social/cultural concept of gender. This formulation is certainly useful for analyzing the working of gendered discourses in international security, especially against those who would assert various biological deficiencies of women as justification for their exclusion from traditional realms of international politics.Footnote ¹ Theorizing practices of international security as gendered has allowed feminists to question the naturalness of militarization as based not on necessity but, rather, on socialized gender roles, namely, masculine gender identity. Feminists in security studies have shown, for example, that rape as a tool of warfare is not a natural or inevitable consequence of war, but is the result of gender identities and gendered constructions of state and nation. Feminists have also used the concept of gender to argue that not only are practices of international security based on certain gender discourses, but that the ways in which we study security are also gendered—that the knowing subject is an embodied subject.

Security studies, in ways that are both obvious and undertheorized, is largely about violence and bodies. Security studies has implicitly theorized bodies as natural, biological entities only relevant insofar as they live, suffer, or die by the various practices of violence of interest to security scholars. The lack of explicit theorizing of the body in security studies is not accidental; rather, the theoretical apparatus and practices we associate with international security need to deny the material/discursive production of bodies in order to operate as they do. Feminists have often focused on the bodies in international relations, analyzing the body as the focal point central to practices of security and international relations—the body of the soldier, the body as a weapon, the body of the rape victim, the body that is to be protected by the laws of war. Such bodily focus is quite distinct from prevailing international security practices and the disciplinary ways of knowing those practices in IR feminist scholarship. In its politically motivated theorizing of bodies in a way that seeks to undermine the association of women, racial others, and other marginalized groups with nature and the body, IR feminist scholarship can provide the basis for rethinking of bodies not only as vulnerable to violence but also as constituted by practices of international security. A body that can be killed or tortured is a body that is the product of discursive practices in international security, for example, the gendered and racialized discourses of “terrorist” as a subject.

The sex/gender distinction between sexed bodies and gendered subjects is an immensely powerful move, but this move is also limiting and problematic. The sex–gender distinction reproduces the culture/nature dichotomy, such that one's sexed body is considered a blank slate for the inscription of gender identity through socialization. On its own, one's sexed body is considered arbitrary and without inherent political meaning. Feminist critics of the sex–gender distinction, such as Butler (Reference Butler1990, Reference Butler1993), Gatens (Reference Gatens1996), Grosz (Reference Grosz1994) and Barad (Reference Barad2007) have argued that the focus on gender as a social construct accepts the materiality of sex. This privileging of “gender” or the social or cultural over what is taken to be “natural” reinstates the privilege of the masculinity of the mind, the culture, and the political over the femininity of the body, nature, and the private sphere. This means that theories about the body at the level of cultural interpretation, representation, or even “shaping” or “molding” are not sufficient to overcome the culture/nature dichotomy that relegates women and the feminine to the body and passivity. As such, the category of “gender” is perhaps limiting as a core concept for feminists, especially those in security studies who are concerned with the ways in which bodies are too often subject to violence. As Gatens (Reference Gatens1996, 51) writes, “All history and culture can do, on this model, is intervene as a mechanic intervenes into the functioning of an already constituted machine.”

This problem is related to what Stern and Zalewski (Reference Stern and Zalewski2009, 612)refer to as the “performative predicament of sexgender.” This predicament is of gender still applied to sexed bodies, and reifying gendered subjectivities, thus describing how particular constructions of gender victimize women. Overcoming this problem does not mean abandoning gender or feminist theorizing more broadly; rather, this problem can be addressed in thinking through feminist struggles about complex and nuanced ways in which bodies and subjects are mutually implicated, but not reducible to one another. What I find to be the most crucial insight of feminist theorizing that is often obscured by work hindered by the “sex/gender predicament” is that our bodies are profoundly unnatural. I would argue that feminist theory is at its most powerful when it calls into question accounts of the “biological body,” in whatever form they take, to analyze the relations of force, violence, and language that compose the deeply unnatural bodies of humans. Feminists have examined the complexities of embodiment as the basis of human subjectivity, both enabling speaking and acting in the world, but also limiting the human subject by vulnerability to violence, illness, and eventual death.

Because of their work in demonstrating how bodies are produced by social and political relations, feminists are rather uniquely positioned to theorize about war, violence, and vulnerability, without necessarily reducing these concerns as something that specifically affects women or men as sexed bodies. If there is no such thing as a “natural body” outside of the knowledge practices that constitute bodies, then how can we draw the line between what is natural to the body and what is a human contrivance? Feminists have done much work on how our bodies are always already vulnerable to the other, and to the social and political construction, but are also resistant through regimes of desire and materiality. Bodies are also not just vulnerable because they are essentially public—they can be seen, touched, and injured by others. Bodies are vulnerable because they are the part of the subject exposed to the other, and thus vulnerability to all kinds of violence is embedded in the subject. Even if we could imagine a body in a “state of nature” outside of sociality, then that body is still not self-sufficient, capable of existing without outside intervention.

This is what I believe Butler (Reference Butler2009, 30) has in mind when she describes bodies as ontologically “precarious”; not only do bodies depend on their relations with others for their very existence, both in terms of defining the boundaries between bodies and in terms of the care necessary to sustain life, but bodies will also necessarily cease to be, and are thus at risk of death at any time. Bodies are precarious precisely because they do not, and cannot, exist independently of their environment, be it an environment defined in physical or social/political terms. Humans, as always already produced in relationality to others who are similarly produced, are vulnerable to each other in ways that surpass physical violence. Feminist theory has long articulated, in many diverse ways, the precariousness of our bodies and our subjectivity against masculinist visions of surety, closure, and mastery. These insights have provided feminists with a great deal of creative and incisive thinking about the challenges for thinking, writing, and acting in a world in which precariousness is often met with action to “secure” some at the expense of others.

Because of these concerns, feminists could perhaps do more to engage with other critical scholars (many of whom are similar to the mainstream literature in treating feminist scholarship as marginal).Footnote ² Campbell's Writing Security ([1992] Reference Campbell1998) is an example of one of a relatively few works of critical IR that incorporates feminist perspectives. Campbell uses the arguments of feminists Cocks and Butler that bodies are not “natural” but, rather, are the result of boundary-producing practices as the basis for his argument that states, like bodies, do not exist outside of similar boundary-producing practices that differentiate between self and other. Likewise, feminists' unique perspective on questions of embodiment, the relationship between the material and discursive, and the workings of power make excellent contributions to the burgeoning critical literatures on security and biopolitics. Feminist contributions based on the concept of gender as constitutive of practices of security and security studies have made huge strides in our understanding of the subtle and not-so-subtle power of gender discourse in our world over the last several decades. But due to the richness of feminist philosophy, we have even more to say.