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Feminist fatigue(s): reflections on feminism and familiar fables of militarisation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2009

MARIA STERN and
MARYSIA ZALEWSKI
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Abstract

In this article we critically consider the idea that feminism has performatively failed within the discipline of International Relations. One aspect of this failure relates to the production of sexgender through feminism which we suggest is partly responsible for a weariness inflecting feminist scholarship, in particular as a critical theoretical resource. We reflect on this weariness in the context of the study and practice of international politics – arenas still reaping the potent benefits of the virile political energies reverberating since 9/11. To illustrate our arguments we re-count a familiar feminist fable of militarisation – a story which we use to exemplify how the production of feminist IR is ‘set’ up to ‘fail’. In so doing we clarify our depiction of feminism as seemingly haunted by its inherent paradoxes as well as explaining why it matters to discuss feminism within the locale of the academic study of international politics. We conclude with a consideration of the grammar of temporality that delimits representations of feminism and move to recast feminist failure as aporetic and concomitantly implicated in the process of intervening politically.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , July 2009, pp. 611 - 630
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2009

Introduction

Introducing Feminist Fatigue

Time marks a history of feminism, and in that, its progress or accomplishment.Footnote 1

Many have become unhappy about the certainties of voice and identity that animate theories of international relations.Footnote 2

Though the discipline of International Relations (IR) has utterly failed in its apparent inaugural task of explaining the causes of war in order to achieve its annihilation, the re-animated sense of global danger prevalent today has re-energised the field. Security, conflict, terrorism and war – although always pressing matters – have vigorously re-emerged as matters of vital and pervasive international importance. In this virile post 9/11 global political landscape,Footnote 3 feminist narratives are appearing weary;Footnote 4 ironically, however, this weariness coincides with a renewed urgency that we get our feminism ‘right’. The ‘feminist fatigue’ we gesture toward (and which pretends to be an accurate description of feminist IR in many conversations about the state of ‘the field’)Footnote 5 does not stem from the belief that gendered analyses of global political activities are insignificant in this newly energised international landscape. On the contrary, it has actually become much harder to ignore the workings of gender in the practices of international politics. For example, the reality of rape as a strategy of war has placed gender and sex firmly on the international agenda,Footnote 6 suggesting the services of feminism are sorely needed in order to understand and redress the gendered harms related to war, conflict and militarisation.

In this article we pick up on the contradictory threads running through the account above to re-consider the work of feminist scholarship in the study of international politics through the specific example of familiar feminist fables of militarisation. The rest of the article will proceed as follows. First, we will explain why we think it matters to have a discussion about feminism framed by its location within the disciplinary boundaries of the academic study of international politics. We then move to explain what we mean by the performative predicament of sexgender and the attached weariness inflecting feminist narratives; we then give readings of how this predicament plays out in what we call familiar feminist fables of militarisation. Finally, we return to the question of feminism's failure, working with the idea of failure as being part of the process of intervening politically.Footnote 7

In an associated move, we consider the grammar of temporality that haunts representations of feminism. We argue that this grammarFootnote 8 or logic of temporality glues feminism to a generational trajectory of activity always seemingly en route to proffering a solution to gender – unsurprisingly beckoning an unavoidable failing to ever arrive. We work with the spectre of feminist failure – which we suggest is one of the dominant motifs of feminism within contemporary IR theory – to accomplish two tasks. One is to interrogate the implications of the performative production of sexgender through feminism, which, although well discussed in feminist theory more generally, has not been adequately attended to in the field of International Relations. We link the discussion of feminism's reproduction of sexgender to the ongoing implicit and explicit expectation that a central task of feminism is to produce effective and productive knowledge in a conventionally recognisably temporal and political manner.Footnote 9 Feminism's ‘failure’Footnote 10 to ever ‘fully arrive’Footnote 11 is suggestive of unfulfilled expectations in this context. Our overall concern has to do with the multiple violences that persistently prevail in the construction of theories of international politics – and which can be traced through reading the production of feminist failure in IR, as demonstrated through our familiar narratives of militarisation. We ultimately suggest that failure to resolve the predicaments that feminist International Relations scholarship appears to face may be alternatively presented as a specific political and pedagogical stance which offers potential aporetic room for ‘thinking otherwise’Footnote 12 about the production of knowledge. In conclusion we reflect on the atmosphere of feminist anxiety, or melancholia,Footnote 13 that the article infers, culminating with the suggestion that failure and disenchantment are perhaps necessary to re-imagine the possibilities of unrecognisable interventions that lie at the heart of feminist political imaginations.

Feminism/International Relations

We are not offering a conventional audit of feminist work in International Relations in this article;Footnote 14 rather, our focus is primarily on one thread of the discursive production of feminism within the discipline of International Relations. Conducting an overview or audit of feminism usually involves measuring how traditional forms of feminism have fared in relation to and in competition with conventional theories of international politics. Such studies clearly privilege IR's boundaries but also tend to work with a very parsimonious definition of feminism.Footnote 15 Our approach works with a more expansive and malleable understanding of the practices and possibilities of feminism. Hence, it is not our intention to measure how far feminism has succeeded in the context of the discipline's conventional epistemological, methodological and political boundaries,Footnote 16 or to prove in some kind of neo-scientific way that IR has ‘got it wrong’, but rather to investigate some implications of the discursive representation and production of feminism within the discipline.

We argue that one of the dominant motifs or signatures of feminism within IR is one of decline and demise particularly in relation to feminism's theoretical and methodological potential.Footnote 17 These apparent tired limits of feminism within IR mirror a quandary facing feminist scholarship more generally.Footnote 18 Manifestations of this quandary include a certain lassitude inflecting narratives about gender weaved through feminism parsimoniously represented,Footnote 19 accompanied by a sense that feminism is becoming increasingly obsolete.Footnote 20 As noted above, we investigate this quandary in order to think more deeply, if tangentially through feminism, about the limitations and accompanying violence that marks the academic production of knowledge,Footnote 21 as well as to ponder feminism's own performative function in this regard.

Feminist scholars have consistently focused on the knowledge that authoritative accounts of the world accredited by academic institutions generates;Footnote 22 and as an historically hyper-masculinised discipline, IR has always been a significant empirical site to investigate, not least its role in discursively reproducing gender and related power structures, regimes and practices.Footnote 23 In this overly ‘manly [international] moment,’Footnote 24 it therefore remains important to reflect on the gendered power that pervades the construction and performance of scholarly investigations.Footnote 25 This entails continuing to scrutinise the discursive production of feminism in the context of its representation within the disciplinary boundaries of the academic study of international politics, especially as this is an arena which has embarked on a re-energised (re)turn toward hegemonic certainty.Footnote 26 In our investigation of this we have chosen to focus our inquiry on demonstrating how, in the production of feminist narratives of militarisation through IR, we can glimpse traces of how ‘organizational practices play a central role in recreating and entrenching gender hierarchies, gender symbols and gender identities.’Footnote 27

To carry this enquiry forward we therefore offer a doubly layered and interlocking reading of the general discursive production of feminism within IR, as exemplified in stories of militarisation. We work with the paradox of feminism's apparent failure within IR given that, at this historical juncture, the nexus of feminism and global politics calls for harder work to mitigate the harms produced through gender and that feminist work is globally abundant.Footnote 28 The idea that feminism has apparently failed in regard to its own normative ambitions given that global gendered inequality remains endemic calls for careful reflection.Footnote 29 Though all certainly do not ascribe to the belief that the task of feminist scholars in IR is to accurately map gender relations in order to prescribe solutions to gender(ed) violence, the idea that this is the purpose of feminist work – however diffusely articulated – is nonetheless widespread.Footnote 30 And clearly feminist scholars/activists have not shied away from this remit; indeed quite the opposite, as they/we have seemingly eagerly grasped apparent opportunities to alter unjust gendered structures and practices. Such normative projects have indeed been perceived to be the hallmark and raison d'être of much feminist activity.Footnote 31 Correspondingly, feminist scholars have traditionally been expected to respond to the task of ‘doing something’, hopefully practical and tangible, about the disadvantages which have ensued from cultural constructions of gender.Footnote 32 Indeed, in our view it is increasingly politically and pedagogically required by what we call the burgeoning ‘gender industry,’Footnote 33 for feminist scholars to strive towards providing effective knowledge to this end, including, for example, the formulation of policy,Footnote 34 especially policies for gender mainstreaming,Footnote 35 or through the delivery of academic programmes in universities or to meet institutional research auditing and funding requirements.

The second layer of our reading of the production of feminism within IR invokes another interrelated and crucial aspect of feminism's own apparent failure, namely the performative production of sexgender through feminist work. A common argument in relation to sexgender is that feminist scholarship performatively reproduces the sexed identities and attached gendered harms it sets out to eviscerate.Footnote 36 This seemingly unfortunate but significant paradox, so lucidly crystallised by Butler,Footnote 37 Scott,Footnote 38 and Riley,Footnote 39 has been nonetheless under-investigated in IR and therefore invites our exploration here. Consequently we now move to more fully clarify what we mean by the sexgender predicament and go on to reflect on the relationship between this predicament and the feminist fatigue in IR that this article addresses.

Gender […] is the apparatus through which binary sex is produced.Footnote 40

Performativity describes [the] relation of being implicated in that which one opposes.Footnote 41

In this section we clarify what we mean by the problem of sexgender and how it transpires in the context of feminist narratives within IR – which we will exemplify below with a recounting of a familiar feminist reading of militarisation. To re-iterate, the primary reason for investigating this is that we suspect part of the reason for the aura of disillusionment around feminism – especially as a critical theoretical resource – is connected to the sense that feminist stories repeat the very grammars that initially incited them as narratives in resistance. To explain; one might argue that there has been a normative feminist failure to adequately construct secure foundations for legitimate and authoritative knowledge claims upon which to garner effective and permanent gender change, particularly in regard to women. But for poststructural scholars this failure is not surprising as the emancipatory visions of feminism inevitably emerged as illusory given the attachments to foundationalist and positivistic understandings of subjects, power and agency. If, as poststructuralism has shown us, we cannot – through language – decide the meaning of woman, or of femininity, or of feminism, or produce foundational information about it or her;Footnote 42 that subjects are ‘effects’ rather than ‘origins of institutional practices and discourses’;Footnote 43 that power ‘produces subjects in effects’;Footnote 44 or that authentic and authoritative agency are illusory – then the sure foundations for the knowledge that feminist scholars are conventionally required to produce – even hope to produce – are unattainable. Moreover, post-colonial feminisms have vividly shown how representations of ‘woman’ or ‘women’ which masquerade as ‘universal’ are, instead, universalising and inevitably produced through hierarchical and intersecting power relations.Footnote 45 In sum; the poststructural suggestion is that feminist representations of women do not correspond to some underlying truth of what woman is or can be; rather feminism produces the subject of woman which it then subsequently comes to represent.Footnote 46 The implications of this familiar conundrum are far-reaching as the demands of feminism in the context of the knowledge/political project of the gender industry are exposed as implicated in the re-production of the very power from which escape is sought. In short, feminism emerges as complicit in violent reproductions of subjects and knowledges/practices.

How does this recognisable puzzle (recognisable within feminist theory) play out in relation to the issues we are investigating in this article? As noted above, the broad example we choose to focus on to explain our claims is militarisation; partly chosen as both authors have participated in pedagogic, policy and published work in this generic area, and partly because this is an area in which the demand for operationalisable gender knowledge is ever-increasing. Our suggestion is that the increasing requirementFootnote 47 for knowledge for the gender industry about gender and militarisation re-animates the sexgender paradox which persistently haunts attempts to translate what we know into useful knowledge for redressing (and preventing) conflict, or simply into hopeful scenarios for our students.

The recognition of the importance of understanding the connections and relationships between war, conflict, militarisation and gender now far exceed the relatively small circles of ‘feminist IR’ or feminist Peace studies. Numerous policy reportsFootnote 48 and theoretical/empirical inquiriesFootnote 49 have argued, indeed insisted that gender is an integral component to the make-up of the complex reality in which conflict (armed and not) and militarisation are situated. This has typically led to welcome calls for the inclusion of both gender and women in thinking about questions of security, armed conflict, conflict resolution militarisation and peace building.Footnote 50 Yet despite the seeming impossibility – at least for poststructural and post-colonial scholars – of responsible translation; how can we purport to ‘know’ how gendered discourses will work and how men and women will act, or be? – generalised renditions of feminist narratives of militarisation continue to be generated with a certain amount of ease, even though much of the scholarship upon which the generic storyline rests is both nuanced and rigorous. We suggest that the ease with which the main story line is repeated invites careful reflection. However, we pause here to stress that our aim is to tread carefully through the political-theoretical puzzle that emerges through the production of sexgender through feminism, especially given the potential for (yet another) dismissal of feminism, or for undermining the long-overdue attention to gender in the realm of ‘security’ and ‘war’. We therefore cautiously move to re-read the problem of sexgender in the context of feminist narrations of militarisation. As the main source for our feminist fable below, we draw on a policy report which provides an archetypal overview of academic and policy literature on gender and armed conflict written for the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).Footnote 51 We do so because we want to recount a generalised story – a ‘discursive formation’Footnote 52 – the main plot of which is regularly retold in classrooms and whose traces arguably constrain the storylines of feminist IR scholarship more generally. Our suggestion is that, as noted above, despite the vast amount of nuanced and excellent feminist scholarship available,Footnote 53 the sexgender predicament provokes an evisceration of the complexities illustrated in these works.

Feminist fatigue(s): familiar feminist fables re-considered

In familiar feminist fables of gender and militarisation, gender conventionally materialises as if it were real (in a foundational sense) yet our critical feminist theorising tells us it is a construction. We ‘know’ that when we speak woman, we re-constitute her, we construct and delimit her through our stories about her; a paradox indeed. If an apparent move is made toward gender (usually there is an assumption that this is different from, more advanced than, or more inclusive than feminist theorisations of woman) then gender metamorphoses into masculinity or femininity, or on the relations between the two in order to show how they act on, impact, influence or provide roles for the sexed body. ‘Opening’ the feminist agenda to include ‘men’ and ‘masculinity’ does not alter this dynamic. Masculinity tends also to become a (gender) ‘thing’ which we have learned, understood, imported, conveyed, tried to change; more inflections of paradox. ‘Gender’ becomes reduced to either ‘women’, ‘men’, or ‘femininity’, ‘masculinity’; and crucially we lose sight of the productive power involved – productive of the paradox mentioned above, as well as other related paradoxes such as perpetrator-victim,Footnote 54 security-insecurity,Footnote 55 and even war-peace.Footnote 56 We suggest that being attendant to how the ‘move’ from sex to gender and the ‘move’ from a focus on ‘women’ and ‘men’ to looking at constructions of masculinity and femininity and the hierarchical relations between the two may not be as large a step away from feminism parsimoniously defined as is usually imagined. Indeed it is perhaps not a step ‘forward’ at all, as we shall illustrate. This side-step invokes the spectre of anxiety as it raises questions about the possibility of responsible feminist political interventions, given the paradox with which we grapple.

Importantly however, we suggest the sexgender paradox or aporia can never be successfully resolved; ‘an aporia is not a contradiction which can be brought into the dialectic, smoothed over and resolved into the unity of the concept, but an untotalisable problem at the heart of the concept, disrupting its trajectory, emptying out its fullness, opening out its closure.’Footnote 57 As such we see the production of sexgender as irresolvable – as a perpetual conundrum. We return to this point in our conclusion. To reiterate: through the following critical reading of a familiar feminist fable of militarisationFootnote 58 we illustrate the logic which produces the paradox of feminism that demands (but ultimately belies) resolution. We explore how feminist narratives are not able to fulfil their supposed transformative promise since attempts to transgress the discursive frameworks in which they are framed are haunted; thus ensuring the failure of feminist stories. Failure, in this sense, is judged in feminism's (in)ability to resolve its inherent contradiction.

We want to remind readers – given this point gets lost so readily – we are not suggesting all is lost for feminism. We want to be clear that we are not presenting an argument that feminism has ‘truly’ failed and the custodians and neo-custodians of bounded disciplinary practices were right all along. Instead we reflect on the supposed failure of feminist International Relations, not to rescue it from its alleged short-comings, but to inquire into the temporal and methodological logic that conjures this sense of failure, and concomitantly, anxiety, as inevitable. Embedded in this logic is a notion of failure as something inherently bad, disappointing, poorly executed. The supposed failure of feminism fits snugly within the thrall of current logics inhabiting western neo-liberal institutions which imply failure is the result of ‘miscalculation’ or ‘mismanagement’, neatly eviscerating any sense of ‘institutional and rhetorical embedding of bourgeois, white, masculinist, and heterosexual super-ordination.Footnote 59 In contrast to the perception of failure and the anxiety this produces as a negative impasse, we instead suggest a re-conceptualisation of failure as offering political possibility.Footnote 60

We now go on to offer an example of the performative narration of feminist fables of militarisation. ‘[…] once upon a time, [we] feminists re-wrote the dominant story of war, peace and militarization […]’ Footnote 61 In this story both men and women, and masculinity and femininity appear as central characters. It reads as follows:

The logic of militarisation, in part, depends upon particular articulations of ideal types of masculinity and femininity, whereby through the discourses of war, men are cast as the heterosexual masculine-citizen-soldiers who protect the peaceful and worthy women and children/the home/the nation from foreign danger. Indeed, the stereotypical associations of men and masculinity with violence and war, and women and femininity with care-giving and peace, privilege a certain type of masculinity which is imbibed through the processes of learning how to be a good soldier. The military and the protectors of women and children and the nation (with the men as soldiers) are cast as strong masculine heroes, whilst, through the gendered discourses of militarisation, enemy men are routinely feminised. Discourses of militarisation and gendered discourses are co-constitutive and also interact with myriad other discourses such as those that reinforce racism, nationalism, classism, heterosexism. Hence militarisation depends on ‘men’ and ‘women’ being, acting, identifying, even thinking as men and women as constituted through these intersecting discourses. If ‘men’ are not men, and ‘women’ are not women, then the rationale driving militarisation might unravel.

To us as critical feminist IR scholars, this basic story line has made a great deal of sense. It offers explanations and indicates points of entry for intervention to redress many of the injurious effects of war/militarisation. However, the sexgender problematique is deeply embedded in this storyline; it is not resolved by the feminist move from men to ‘men’ or the move from women to ‘women’. Thus, although the story incrementally appears as coherent and thus seems to have the potential to offer useful gendered knowledge to a range of needy institutions, it necessarily unravels and simultaneously re-constitutes itself in its own gendered image. To explain, let us look more closely at the idea that dominant narratives around war and militarisation need ‘men’ to be men and ‘women’ to be women (that is, seemingly knowable real subjects); while feminism requires that men be ‘men’ and women be ‘women’, (transferring sure knowing from bodies to constructed gender).

Men to ‘men’

In the mainstream boys into men tale (which the feminist story refutes) gender is largely seen as inseparable from sex insofar as gender roles appear predestined, or at least prefigured through biology. Only the proper conditions are needed to provide an atmosphere conducive for biology to reach its full potential. This narrative reproduces the notion that boys are biologically and ontologically prior entities which will follow a certain predestined development into men (also a known category) if given the right conditions. These conditions reside in their being in society, presumably including a civilian space where they can be nurtured by mothers and later wives. In this mainstream story, the army/military however, is a special domain which is separate from the homeland; the private sphere of the civilian life.Footnote 62 We will return to this thread of the story below. Here, we want to revisit how the problem of sexgender is seemingly resolved in the feminist story which resists these mainstream plots – a resolution which ultimately fails.

In feminist readings, the focus instead becomes placed on socially produced masculinity instead of on sex/biology. Trouble resides in gender (as a learned attribute); not in the natural essence of man. This feminist story thus successfully shifts attention away from an essentialist reading of men's violent nature towards masculinity as a construction. We have seemingly left sex behind. However, sex haunts genderFootnote 63 in this feminist tale and bodes for the predicament explained above in which we do not (cannot) successfully resolve the sexgender dilemma. Our ‘progression’ is not as sure as it may seem. This story relies on our knowing the subject: men (as opposed to ‘men’ constructed through workings of gender). We seem to take for granted that we know who/what men are, and the problem lies instead in what types of masculinity (good peaceful ones, or violent militarised ones) these men will learn. Here we talk about man as real and a pre-given subject who is separate from, and victim to the workings of gender. Furthermore, we claim that gender is a construction but treat it as not only real, but also as a diseased or afflicted accessory to the body that could be cured. We promise that if only we could do gender (read: produce masculinities) differently (based on our sure feminist knowledge), then real women and real men will live happily ever after.

But the problem of sexgender discussed above troubles this tautological move. A shift in focus on ‘sex as destiny’ to gender (understood as the masculinity that sexed bodies adopt, adorn or learn) remains within the framework which sets the two as somehow different and contentious and also as ontologically prior to the workings of (gender) discourse. Let us look a little deeper at the assumptions embedded in this move to help explain why all of this matters.

What might be at play in the claim that war needs men to be ‘men’? The feminist war story tells us that the desirable type of masculinity that is produced within the military celebrates violence, order, masculine-coded obedience,Footnote 64 and domination. It serves to form soldiers along strictly disciplined codes of behaviour that designates any deviance from the norm as inferior, feminine, effeminate and dangerous. Boys/men undergo a form of indoctrination, which includes humiliation and breaking-down of the civilian (feminised) boyish identity, and then the building up of the macho-soldier.Footnote 65 They are forced to follow orders which prove their loyalty to the military; often these orders entail acts which form and cement a self-identification as a macho-soldier who is a part of the nation-state project.Footnote 66

Following this logic, the masculinity that men have learned causes harm to others, but also causes harm to him. He emerges as not only a perpetrator but also as a victim of gender. For example, for men who have learned a violent behaviour directly connected to being a man in the hyper-masculine heterosexual military space, a return to the expectations of civilian life after participating in military activities (man as provider, father, husband, equal member of community) can be exceedingly difficult. This problem, it seems, is compounded when boys have literally grown up and become violent men while in the military.Footnote 67 This feminist story rejects the basic premises of the (also) familiar mainstream tale that the army makes men out of boys, briefly recounted above.

A reasonable feminist response might entail making peace between the sexed body and its gender identities. Feasibly, policy (which hints at its foundation in sure knowledge) could be suggested to help this along and as such perhaps teach men a different masculinity. Yet this logical step occasions unease. We sense that this logic bodes for a repetition of that which we are resisting. Once again we slip into a focus on the sexed body as real when we meant to focus on the discursive power of gender which, as we know, also produces ‘sex’. We glimpse the violence embedded in the move to construct and delimit man by ‘speaking’ him. That he is also produced through myriad intersecting vectors, such as race, class, religion further disrupts our logical reasoning. On the other hand, we know we must also contend with the very real people who have come to act violently and to try to attend to harmful identities, behaviours and ways of thinking. Our anxiety seemingly translates into our inability to provide transformative prescriptions for the field of International Relations, our students, or the policy community which is increasingly desirous of our feminist scholarship/knowledge for practical (employable) implementation.

Women to ‘women’

In our tales of gender and war, women (and the feminine) are stereotypically associated with peace and are relegated to the domestic, private sphere of reproduction: social reproduction in terms of the caring for family, household, cultural tradition, subsistence agriculture and the biological reproduction of future citizens. Women are also seen as inherently in need of protection and men are cast as the protectors of both women and the nation. Assumptions about biological differences inform the different roles, identities and activities prescribed for men and women by dominant gender (and nationalist) discourses. Because of the supposed ‘naturalness’ of these attributes, our feminist stories tell us, women are often written as the sacrificing mothers/wives/daughters, while men are the producing and protecting fathers/husbands/sons. Hence, women's association with the private sphere has authorised their subordinate positions and made them particularly vulnerable to the effects of poverty and violence.Footnote 68

In the re-telling of this story, we are similarly bothered by the traces of the predicament (and the attempted resolution) introduced above. We discern a similar reduction of all that we know that gender does to a confining attention to the subjects that its discursive power produces. Simply, we talk of women in our efforts to spare her the deleterious effects of violent masculinities and the paucity of the positions to which she is consigned through the logics of militarisation. We construct her through our separation of her from the misled constructions of femininity that bind and harm her. If only we could free her from the confines of her femininity (which is, of course, constructed in relation to the masculinity depicted above), if only we could construct her femininity differently, then perhaps we could move her out of harm's way.

But our feminism has also taught us to be wary of any sure representations of her. To be sure, the discovery and documentation of ‘the true’ has been the hallmark of much traditional feminism. Why – feminists asked – why are so many descriptions of women, unkind or downright misogynist? How is it the case that so many of the roles women perform and inhabit – from slaves, to beauty queens, to housewives, to victims of domestic or military violence – are damaging to and for women? Remedies for these gendered oppressions have included replacing, renewing and rejuvenating images of women and the roles prescribed for them. Calls for a focus on empowerment of women and attention to the intersections of her multiple identities gives us the sense that somehow we can still ‘capture’ and ‘rescue’ her if we are sensitive enough to multiplicity and to her own voice and story which imbues her with contextual meaning.Footnote 69

Yet still our language defies us and our representations of her end up reifying those many representations of her that are to stand for her. Because surely she lurks somewhere behind all of these representations? Any picture of her we may have painted – no matter how sensitive to her differences and multiple identities occasions anxiety. We know we are doing her injustice, yet it is her we are worried about, not ‘all those signs and symbols’ that represent her.Footnote 70 And we must somehow know her if we are to protect, safeguard, make visible, celebrate – her. And we forget again how bodies become sexed through gender and instead remain in the framework that produces sex and gender as distinct.

These moves become even more apparent when we explicitly speak of the violence which we ‘know’ to harm her. Surely, we are wary of casting her as a victim,Footnote 71 yet even in our attempts to focus on how she is indeed empowered, we face the same predicament (or its mirrored reflection) described above regarding men as ‘men’; in our speaking her, we delimit her, fix her and treat her as real and apriori. At the same time, we reify the construction femininity which weighs like a heavy cloak on her shoulders. Our imagination of an alternative construction for both her femininity and the subject woman, upon which this femininity acts, is glaringly bereft in relation to the certain vastness of her potential. Our language defies us and we are unable to translate any of our fledgling deconstructions of her into sure (enough) knowledge that would somehow construct something different. And so, we ‘fail’.

Feminism, temporality and failure

Feminism itself is our most challenging other.Footnote 72

The widespread acceptance of the need for gendered stories of international political practices might be judged as a measure of feminist success; yet there is an unrelenting set of voices, formally and informally, within the field of International Relations that details and oftentimes bemoans the inability of feminism to deliver the transformative balms it had seemed to promise.Footnote 73 Feminist scholarship in International Relations materialises as seemingly stuck in its time of potential, inadequate to theorise successfully, or to ‘keep up’, and unable to arrive.Footnote 74 In these final sections we turn to offer some reflections on how this seemingly sticky scenario might be usefully mined for political/pedagogic insights, particularly in the light of our preceding discussion of familiar feminist fables of militarisation.

To recap: in this article we have explored the paradox of feminist's discursive failure within IR consequent to feminism's inadequacy as unguent for today's gendered harms and, secondly, we have explored the performative production of sexgender through our reading of feminist fables of militarisation. In this concluding discussion, we return to these two threads, first, in relation to the temporal scene within which feminism has become entrenched; and secondly in relation to the spectre of failure and anxiety. It might be more institutionally strategic to ignore ‘feminist anxiety’ as paying (too much) attention to this readily invites accusations of melancholicFootnote 75 marginalisation.Footnote 76 But we argue that it remains important to pay attention to the conceptual, methodological and political architecture that makes a world meaningful even if this implies there ‘is no reassurance at the end’.Footnote 77 As such we have taken up an alternative invitation to ‘linger longer in anxiety’Footnote 78 and thereby resist circumvention of the scene of anxiety. Our hope is that our reflections work to ultimately encourage its reconfiguration through alternative refractions.

The idea of failure, perhaps especially in relation to feminism, and the anxiety it tends to generate, is sturdily temporally located. The sense that feminism has ‘not yet arrived’ is conjured through the very framing of the anxious implication that we must transgress along a linear path towards … something; neatly dovetailing with the conventional view of academic feminism as a politics and theory that aims to fulfil its political mission by reproducing social activism simultaneously setting the standard of political judgement as a ‘trajectory of movement.’Footnote 79 But a movement to where; from where? The ‘real’ story of gender and war/militarisation? The ‘true’ ‘identity’ or ‘objectives’ of (an original) feminism? Measurable evidence of success? A feminised discipline? (Surely not). A gender-mainstreamed international political landscape? The grammar of temporality suggests the necessity/inevitability of some form of on-going and moving (forward) feminist struggle which seems to necessarily imply the solving of the paradoxes inherent in feminist discourse – sexgender being one of these. The concomitant sense of feminism having to achieve is suggestive of the need to make feminism legibly effective; theoretically water-tight – even to find the ‘solution’ to gender – all inevitably beckoning the unavoidable failing to ever arrive, or even of having (perhaps predictably) entered a stage of demise, or decay. This ‘timely’ structure around feminism is regularly unreflectively accepted without question and infuses many feminist stories,Footnote 80 and stories about feminism. But as Kath Weston reminds us, ‘one does not automatically “see” events in temporal dimensions […] there is a kind of work involved […] to cast a molten world into the contours of time.’Footnote 81 What effect does the work of ‘stabilizing temporal formulations’Footnote 82 around feminism have in relation to the ways we learn to think about feminism and in the particular context of the fatigue which sparked our curiosity?

In an influential 1989 essay, Nancy Hartsock, in an exemplary standpoint move, demonstrated the depths of masculinist anxiety that as embodied beings, men come to recognise that ‘they could just as well have been born male or female, or dog, cat or fish.’Footnote 83 Man, Hartsock claimed, has difficulty admitting that he does not stand alone, that he is not in control and this produces excruciating anxiety.

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings an excruciating inner yearning for life […] and with all this yet to die […] What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food […] it takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make such an individual, and then he is only good for dying.Footnote 84

Hartsock claimed that this passionate, agonised, masculine plea persuasively demonstrated how masculine (‘men's’) desires for power over life – or rather death – are in stark contrast to feminine/feminised (‘women's’) interaction with the ‘messiness’Footnote 85 of everyday life/death. This feminist standpoint analysis has been influential in feminist theory generally, and in IR; a generic claim emanating from this genre is that ‘women’ – given their culturally constituted attachment to life and care giving – are not marked by the masculinist urge to dispel the fact of being ‘only good for dying.’ This kind of insight has been used to make many arguments about the differences between the ways ‘women’ and ‘men’ or the ‘feminized’ act in international politics; a classic example being Sara Ruddick's work on peace.Footnote 86 Indeed traces of this storyline about peace marks the gendered story of militarisation (and the attendant move from ‘sex’ to ‘gender’) we re-counted above.

Hartsock's story gestures towards the desolation of masculine anxiety in the face of the inevitability of decay, death and eventual nothingness. It also helps indicate the myriad often violent edifices (epistemological, methodological, mythical, political) constituted to obfuscate this nothingness – one example being the manufacture of sure and stable forms of knowledge that academic disciplines market. The sense is that woman's constituted closer affinity with living/dying conjures other ways of navigating though the messiness of life and the disorderedly constitution of knowledge making. Can this gendered narrative tell us anything about feminism and its temporal/spatial capture in disciplinary settings? Perhaps that feminism becomes discursively produced through a prism of seemingly inevitable corporeal decay; indicating one effect of stabilising feminism within the confined contours of time. Feminism – performatively presenting as woman, in all her messy constituted complexity and excess – becomes inveigled in a birth-ageing-death scenario. Feminism metamorphoses into the essentialist body of woman ‘we’ thought we had discarded. A necessary effect of this is that feminism, as a viable theoretical resource and successful normative project, materialises as doomed to expiration.

There are two interlaced ways in which we might see how this emerges currently; each we suggest partly emerging as a consequence of and partly productive of the stabilising temporal formulations attached to feminism. One is that feminism comes to be understood as indelibly secured to its imaginary uni-identity and past (giving life to the constant demand: what is the definition/solution/genesis [of feminism] – there must be one …) and secondly as necessarily and always related (reduced) to a particular type of a political protest movement with comprehensive, transparent and transformative goals and objectives. Understood in this way, feminism's failure to achieve these imagined inaugural goals, together with its failure to successfully resolve its sexgender performative practices (re)positions feminism in temporally limited ways. As Hawkesworth explains; ‘feminism [becomes] condemned to temporary and fleeting manifestations, for the institutionalization of feminist principles and mobilization within institutions remains forever beyond reach.’Footnote 87

Inexorably, feminism, as an effective intellectual, theoretical and practical force, becomes (re)produced as having reached an inevitable sell-by-dateFootnote 88 with swathes of feminist scholarship regularly posthumously tethered to the alleged decade of origin,Footnote 89 unforgivingly flattening out feminism in order to fit the ‘contours of time.’ This has dramatic effects. The very comfortable envisioning of feminism in this register carves feminism and its paradigmatic otherness into a legible historical form welded to progressive understandings of time. This acts to ‘pedagogically correct’ the ‘failure …[…] of words to mean the same thing across time and context.’Footnote 90 If there is no ‘temporally singular or coherently knowable – and knowing – feminism’Footnote 91 what it institutionally ‘becomes’, perhaps tells us something about the disciplinary/political production of feminism as temporary and temporal; to be fleeting; to be failed.

Conclusion

Given that feminism lacks a single origin as much as a single definition, it can also have no single moment of ending.Footnote 92

Thinking about the failure of feminism and accompanying anxiety is unavoidably difficult given any discussion of feminist failure will always be ‘overwritten by the sense that failure consigns women to the domestic, narcissistic, or irrecuperably sentimental once again.’Footnote 93 Feminism is indelibly marked by these residues of ‘embodied femininities,’ produced, in part, by its own performative practices. These emblems of discursive ‘weakness’ have surely been exacerbated in the context of a re-energised international political and academic environment swimming, if not yet drowning, in a masculinised mix of power, danger and threat.Footnote 94 It might not seem ‘the time’ to be working intellectually with the ‘repeated failures’ and ensuing agoniesFootnote 95 around feminism that inhabit the questions we raise; as Robyn Wiegman suggests, ‘it is not easy to confront repeatedly the failure of the words we use to know or those we know to use […] in terms of something precise, indeed enabling.’Footnote 96 Moreover, feminism is a political and intellectual project which is constantly transforming.Footnote 97 This inevitably makes it difficult to sustain a relationship with feminism. This task is made more complicated when feminism is persistently tethered to mythical foundational moments and immovable meanings.

But as feminist scholars we remain consistently and passionately interested in the possibilities of political intervention and thus in the ongoing manoeuvres to stabilise the political interventions of feminism. Attention to these manoeuvres remains important given the increasing inter-connectedness of the gender industry (academia, NGOs, international organisations and so on). Simply: feminist fatigue matters in light of the very real harms that warring and militarisation constitute. Yet inevitably, attempts to measure feminism's ‘success’ in the so-called ‘real world’ – whether this relates to ‘academic disciplines,’ or ‘out there’ – necessarily collides with manifestations of the productive power of sexgender. Sexgender, as we have discussed it above, emerges as simultaneously undecidable and monolithic.Footnote 98 Recent feminist work on UNSCR 1325Footnote 99 and Amnesty InternationalFootnote 100 persuasively demonstrates how the sexgender category that these institutions work with (increasingly using academic feminist work as a basis for their analyses and potentially influential policy recommendations) in the service of ameliorating gender (which inexorably tends to mean women …) inevitably fails. And so we return to failure.

Failure is conventionally perceived to be evidence of inadequacy; poor execution of goals/aims/objectives – generally illustrative of malfunction. Refracted through the conceptual framework of aporias we might re-imagine feminist failure as bringing possibility – the hope of rupturing the hegemony and assumptions of powerful political concepts – of thinking and creating new social, ethical, economic relations outside their oppressive structures of the hegemonic political epistemological order.Footnote 101 Read in this way, the aporetic character of the sexgender paradox does not mark the failure of feminism but suggests a new potential to experience and imagine otherwise. As such, opening up the vulnerability of compromised terms may lead to ‘unexpected possibility.’Footnote 102

We did not promise comforting reassurances consequent to our discussion of the complexities and paradoxes relating to feminist fatigue and our familiar fables of militarisation. Rather, our discussion is suggestive of an open-ended conclusion and future; as surely nothing – as Robyn Wiegman observes – serves to guarantee knowledge as political progress.Footnote 103 This daunting thought crystallises some of the anxieties tugging at the heart of academic feminism's enquiries. Yet, importantly, our exploration of the sexgender paradox as productive of (and re-produced by) familiar fables of militarisation does more than simply reiterate the importance of exploring the seemingly hidden openings in aporias. At the very least, recognising the traces of the delimiting logics which haunt feminist narratives allows us to glimpse something different than the familiar contours of international politics and the subjects and harms it – as both field of study and realm of practice – reproduces. Further, feminism's failure to surpass its inhering paradox helps – if fleetingly and slightly – to further disclose the frantic and violent composition of disciplinary demands to produce the impossible: usable sure knowledge.

Ultimately, the incommensurability of critical feminist scholarship and conventional knowledge practices – exemplarily depicted through the production and narration of feminist narratives disciplined through International Relations – attests – (paradoxically) – to feminism's continuing vigour as a site of formidable resistance. In the spirit of the resistance persistently inhering in the ‘feminist fatigue’ we have explored above, what we offer here is a brief, ephemeral glimpse into the economy of violence that marks the institutional production of knowledge. Attention to this economy through attending to the traces of delimiting grammars allows us to notice that, despite the deeply etched grooves that induce us to slide into the production of feminist comfort stories – which both occasion our unease and elicit our weariness – these grooves are lined with always shifting and numerous snags, tears and portals, inviting alternative paths. Where this politics/pedagogy of surpriseFootnote 104 leads to is at yet unknown and, as such, currently ‘uncapturable;’ beckoning alternative ways of reading, seeing, thinking and imagining for which mainstream pedagogical practitioners are scarcely prepared.

References

1 Robyn Ferrell, Copula: Sexual Technologies, Reproductive Powers (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 49.

2 Karena Shaw and R. B. J Walker, ‘Situating Academic Practice: Pedagogy, Critique and Responsibility’, Millennium, 35: 1 (2006), pp. 155–65, p. 157.

3 Zillah Eisenstein, Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism, and the West (London: Zed Books, 2004); Zakia Salime, ‘The War on Terrorism: Appropriation and Subversion by Moroccan Women’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 3:1 (2007), pp. 1–24.

4 Judith Squires and Jutta Weldes, ‘Beyond Being Marginal: Gender and International Relations in Britain’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9:2, (2007), pp. 185–203; Janet Halley, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

5 Squires and Weldes, ‘Beyond’; Christine Sylvester, ‘Anatomy of a Footnote’, Security Dialogue, 38:4 (2007), pp. 547–58; Reflections on the Past, Prospects for the future in Gender and International Relations; Marysia Zalewski, Ann Tickner, Christine Sylvester, Margot Light, Vivienne Jabri, Kimberly Hutchings, and Fred Halliday, ‘Roundtable Discussion: Reflections on the Past, Prospects for the Future in Gender and International Relations’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 37:1 (2008), pp. 153–79.

6 The UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, has spurred widespread local and global policy engagement for its implementation. Numerous reports have since documented the instance of sexual violence as an important matter for the Security Council, and for world security and peace-building more generally. See for example, Elisabeth Rehn and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Women, War and Peace – The Independent Expert's Assessment on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Women and Women's Role in Peace-Building, (New York: UNIFEM, 2002); Council of Europe, Democratisation, Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding: The Perspectives and the Roles of Women, (Council of Europe, 2003); International Alert, Protection of Civilians: Gender Considerations for Disarmament, Conflict Transformation and the establishment of Human security, (London: International Alert, 2003); International Alert, Engendering Peace, (London: International Alert, 2004); UNIFEM Report on the Status of Implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, (New York: UNIFEM, 2003); United Nations, Women Peace and Security at a Glance – Security Council Resolution 1325, (New York: United Nations, 2003); United Nations, Faces – Women as Partners in Peace and Security, (New York: United Nations, 2004); UN Security Council, Resolution 1325, (New York: United Nations, October 2000) UN Security Council, Women Peace and Security: Report of the Secretary General, (New York: United Nations, October 2004).

7 For further discussions on the political potential of failure see Judith Butler and William Connolly, ‘Politics, Power and Ethics: A Discussion Between Judith Butler and William Connolly’, Theory & Even,t 4:2 (2000); available at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v004/4.2butler.html (accessed 10 March 2006); Ewa Plonowska Ziarek ‘From Euthanasia to the Other of Reason’ in Ellen K. Feder, Mary C. Rawlinson, and Emily Zakin (eds), Derrida and Feminism (New York and London: Routledge, 1997); Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism, (New York: State University of New York, 1995).

8 Cressida J. Heyes, ‘Introduction’, in Cressida J. Heyes (ed.), The Grammar of politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 1–17.

9 Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005).

10 Though we are not suggesting that feminism has really failed – we will not continually use inverted commas around ‘failure’ to indicate this.

11 Kath Weston, Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age (London: Routledge, 2002).

12 On ‘thinking otherwise’ see Robyn Wiegman, Women's Studies on It's Own, (Duke University Press, 2003); Anthony Burke, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War Against the Other, (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 30–1; Jacques Derrida, ‘Sending: on representation’, Social Research (1982) 49.2, pp. 294–326; Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

13 Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

14 See Jill Steans, ‘Engaging from the margins: feminist encounters with the ‘mainstream’ of international relations’ British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 5:3 (2003) pp. 428–54; also Squires and Weldes, ‘Beyond’.

15 Squires and Weldes, ‘Beyond’.

16 Marysia Zalewski, ‘Distracted reflections on the production, narration, and refusal of feminist knowledge in International Relations’ in Brooke. A. Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True (eds), Feminist Methodologies for International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2006).

17 See also Sylvester, ‘Anatomy’.

18 See Squires and Weldes, ‘Beyond’; Halley, ‘Split Decisions’; Brown, ‘States of Injury’; Robyn Wiegman, ‘Feminism, Institutionalism, and the Idiom of Failure’ differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 11:3 (2001); Robyn Wiegman, ‘On Being in Time With Feminism’ Modern Languages Quarterly, 65:1 (2004).

19 Wiegman, ‘Feminism, Institutionalism’; Mary Hawkesworth, ‘The Semiotics of Premature Burial: Feminism in a Postfeminist Age’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 29:4 (2004); Halley, ‘Split Decisions’; Weston, ‘Gender’ p. 1.

20 Squires and Weldes, ‘Beyond’.

21 Shaw and Walker, ‘Situating Academic Practice; Hawkesworth, 'Feminist Inquiry’.

22 Hawkesworth, ‘Feminist Inquiry’, p. 6.

23 Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations and Gender Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

24 Eisenstein, ‘Against Empire’.

25 Kevin Dunn, ‘Interrogating White Male Privilege in International Relations’ in Jane Parpart and Marysia Zalewski, (eds), Rethinking the Man Question; sex, gender and violence in International Relations (London: Zed Press, 2008).

26 Jenny Edkins and Maija Zehfuss, ‘Generalising the international,’ Review of International Studies, 31 (2005) pp. 451–72.

27 Mary Hawkesworth, Feminist Enquiry (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2006). p. 213.

28 Hawkesworth, ‘Feminist Inquiry’

29 Ackerly, Stern, and True, ‘Feminist Methodologies’, p. 240. See also Weston, ‘Gender in Real Time’ and Ferrel, ‘Copula’.

30 See discussion in Craig Murphy, ‘The promise of critical IR, partly kept’, Review of International Studies, 33 (2007), pp. 117–33.

31 Hawkesworth, ‘Feminist Inquiry’.

32 Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004).

33 For example, Universities, students, policy makers, NGOs.

34 See, for example, Maria Stern and Malin Nystrand, Gender and Armed Conflict, (Stockholm: SIDA, 2006).

35 See special issue on ‘Comparative Gender Mainstreaming’ International Feminist Journal of Politics 7:4 (2005); Pedagogy Forum, International Studies Perspectives, 8:3 (August 2007).

36 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993); Brown, ‘States of Injury’.

37 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995); Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: London, 2004).

38 Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

39 Denise Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (London: The MacMillan Press, 1988).

40 Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler (Oxford: Polity press, 2007), p. 32.

41 Butler, ‘Bodies That Matter’, p. 241.

42 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, (New York: Routledge, 1978); idem, ‘Sending: on representation’.

43 Wiegman, ‘Feminism, Insitutionalism’, p. 119.

44 Wendy Brown, Politics out of History, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 62.

45 Seyla Benhabib, ‘Sexual Difference and Collective Identities: The New Global Constellation’, Signs 24:2 (1999), pp. 335–61; bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984); idem, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1989); idem, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1999); Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000); Valentine M., Moghadam (ed.), Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in an International Perspective (Boulder: Westview, 1994); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, (New York: Routledge, 1995); A. Loomba Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998); Chandra Talpade Mohanty ‘Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism’ in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (ed.), Chandra Talpade Mohanty Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 1–47; idem, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’ in Mohanty, Russo and Torres (eds), pp. 51–80; Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak,, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in C.Nelson, and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1998), pp. 271–313.

46 Lloyd, ‘Judith’, p. 26.

47 As academics we are not freelance researchers but increasingly accountable workers.

48 See for example, Amnesty International's ‘Stop Violence Against Women’ campaign (http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/A-year-in-campaigning/Stop-Violence-Against-Women (accessed 1 August 2007); ‘Eliminating World Poverty: Making Governance Work for the Poor’ (June 2006) see http://www.dfid.gov.uk/pubs/files/mdg-factsheets/genderfactsheet.pdf (accessed July 2007); Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC), Paper 20: Gendering Demilitarization as a Peacebuilding Tool, (Bonn: Bonn International Center for Conversion, 2002); Tsjeard Bouta, and Georg Frerks, Women's Roles in Conflict Prevention, Conflict Resolution and Post-Conflict Reconstruction (Netherlands: Conflict Research Unit, Netherlands Institute of International Relations (‘Clingendael’) (2002); Eugenia Date-Bah, et al. Gender and Armed Conflicts, (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2001); Judy El Bushra, Women Building Peace – Sharing Know How, (London: International Alert, 2003); Amani El Jack, Gender and Armed Conflict – Overview Report, BRIDGE, (Brighton: Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, 2003); Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Engendering Peace Agreement Processes: Preparation for the Commission on the Status of Women 2004, (New York: Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1325 Peacewomen E-news, Issue 33, 2003); Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Gender and the Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations 2004 Meeting (New York: Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1325 Peacewomen E-news, Issue 39, 2004); Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, No Women, No Peace: The Importance of Women's Participation to Achieve Peace and Security, (New York: Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1325 Peacewomen E-news, Issue 40, 2004); see also http://www.international-alert.org/women/; http://www.un.org/womenwatch/l.

49 See for example, Brooke Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jaqui True, (eds), ‘Feminist Methodologies’; Elisabetta Addiss et al., Women Soldiers, Images and Realities (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994); Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); idem, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993): idem, Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link, (Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, inc., 2007); Carol Cohn, ‘War, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War’, in M. Cooke and A. Woolacott, (eds), Gendering War Talk (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001); Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland, (eds), Gender and International Relations (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991); Tamara Mayer, Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing The Nation (London: Routledge, 2000); Caroline Moser and Fiona Clark, Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence (London: Zed Press, 2001); Helen Kinsella, ‘Understanding a War That Is Not a War: A Review Essay’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 33:1 (2007), pp. 209–32; Jane Parpart and Marysia Zalewski, (eds), Re-thinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations, (London: Zed Press, 2008); Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics (London: Routledge, 1996); V. Spike Peterson, ‘Transgressing Boundaries: Theories of Knowledge, Gender, and International Relations,’ Millennium, 21:2 (1992); V. Spike Peterson and A. Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999); Véronique Pin-Fat, and Maria Stern ‘The Scripting of Private Jessica Lynch: Biopolitics, Gender and the ‘Feminization’ of the US Military’, Alternatives, 30:1 (2005); Betty Reardon, Sexism and the War System (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Betty Reardon, Woman and Peace: Feminist Versions of Global Security (New York: SUNY Press, 1993); Jill Steans, Gender and International Relations (Piscataway, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Ingrid Skjelsbaek, and Dan Smith, Gender, Peace and Conflict (Oslo: Prio/Sage Publications, 2001); Laura Sjoberg, Gender, Justice and the Wars in Iraq: A Feminist Reformulation of Just War Theory (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006); Maria Stern, Naming Security – Constructing Identity: ‘Mayan-women’ in Guatemala on the Eve of ‘Peace’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Christine Sylvester, Feminist International Relations in a Post Modern Era, Cambridge Studies in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); idem, Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); J. A. Tickner, Gender in International Relations:, Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); idem, Gendering World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Jean Vickers, Women and War, (London: Zed Press,1993); Sandra Whitworth, Feminism in International Relations: Towards a Political Economy of Gender in Interstate and Non-governmental Institutions (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 1994); idem, Men, Militarism, and UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 2004); Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart, (eds), The “Man” Question in International Relations (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998); Marysia Zalewski ‘Well, what is the feminist perspective on Bosnia?’, International Affairs, 71:2 (1995), pp. 339–56; idem, Where is Woman in International Relations?: ‘To Return as a Woman and Be Heard’, Millennium, 27:4 (1999) pp. 847–67; idem ‘Distracted reflections’; idem, Do We Understand Each Other Yet? Troubling Feminist Encounters With(in) International Relations' British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9:2,pp. 302–12.

50 See notes 49 and 50 above. See also, for example, Scott Burchill; Andrew Linklater; Richard Devetak; Jack Donnelly; Matthew Paterson; Christian Reus-Smit; Jacqui True, Theories of International Relations, 2 (New York: Palgrave, 2005).

51 Stern and Nystrand, ‘Gender and Armed Conflict’.

52 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, (New York: Pantheon, 1972). We gesture towards this ‘discursive formation’ in footnotes 49 and 50.

53 See, for example, notes 49 and 50.

54 Moser and Clark, ‘Victims, Perpetrators or Actors?’

55 Stern, ‘Naming Security’.

56 See note 49 and Kinsella ‘Understanding a War That Is Not a War’.

57 Burke, ‘Beyond Security’, pp. 30–1.

58 As noted earlier – largely reproduced in Stern and Nystrand, 2006 which we suggest is an exemplar of many similar storylines.

59 Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 53.

60 See note 8 on the politics of failure.

61 Stern and Nystrand and notes 49 and 50.

62 See Pin-Fat and Stern, ‘Scripting Jessica’.

63 Lacquer, Making Sex; Butler, Gender Trouble; Bodies That Matter; Undoing Gender.

64 Hooper, ‘Manly States’.

65 Sandra Whitworth, ‘Militarized Masculinity and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ in Jane Parpart and Marysia Zalewski (eds), ‘Rethinking the Man Question’, pp. 109–26.

66 Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997).

67 See, for example, Rachel Brett and Irma Sprecht, Young Soldiers: Why they Choose to Fight, (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004); Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern,‘Making Sense of Violence: Voices of Soldiers in the DRC’ in Journal of Modern African Studies, 46:1(2008); Paul Higate (ed.), Military Masculinities: Identity and the State (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2003); Michael S Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and R.W. Connell, Handbook of Studies on Men & Masculinities (London: Sage Publications, 2005); Theodore Nadelson, Trained to Kill: Soldiers at War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Mats Utas, ‘Fighting (in) the badlands of modernity: youth combatants and the Liberian Civil War’, Journal of Social Sciences & Management, 1:1 (2007), pp. 37–44.

68 The division public-private is both inappropriate and potentially harmful as an ideal and as a way of making sense of societies where these spheres blur. See Georgina Waylen and Vicky Randall, Gender, Politics and the State, (London: Routledge, 1998) as well as Pin-Fat and Stern, ‘Scripting Jessica’.

69 See, for example, discussions in Ackerly, Stern and True, ‘Feminist Methodologies’.

70 Weston, ‘Gender in Real Time’.

71 Moser and Clark, ‘Victims, Perpetrators or Actors?’

72 Wiegman, ‘On Being in Time’, p. 164.

73 For commentaries on this see: Robert O. Keohane, ‘Beyond Dichotomy: Conversations Between International Relations and Feminist Theory’, International Studies Quarterly, 42:1 (1998), pp. 193–97; J. Ann Tickner, ‘Continuing the Conversation …’ International Studies Quarterly, 42:1, (1998), pp. 205–10; International Studies Perspectives, Pedagogy Forum, International Studies Review, Forum on Gender and International Relations, 5:2 (2003); R. Charli Carpenter, ‘Gender Theory in World Politics: Contributions of a Nonfeminist Standpoint?’, International Studies Review, 4:3 (2002), pp. 153–65; Squires and Weldes, ‘Beyond Being Marginal’. See also Roundtable discussion in Millennium, forthcoming and Sylvester, ‘Anatomy’.

74 Weston, ‘Gender in Real Time’; Clare Hemmings, ‘Telling feminist stories’, Feminist Theory, 6 (2005), pp. 115–39.

75 Brown, ‘Edgework’.

76 Squires and Weldes, ‘Beyond’.

77 Vicki Kirby, Judith Butler: Live Thinking (Continuum: London, 2007), p. 130.

78 Shaw and Walker, ‘Situating’.

79 Wiegman, ‘On Being in Time’, p. 121.

80 Hemmings, ‘Feminist Stories’.

81 Weston, ‘Gender in Real Time’.

82 Wiegman, ‘On Being in Time’, p. 164.

83 Nancy Hartsock, ‘Masculinity, Heroism, and the Making of War’ in Arienne Harris and Ynestra King (eds), Rocking the Ship of State (Bolder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1989), p. 136.

84 Ernest Becker quoted in Hartsock, ‘Masculinity’, pp. 136–7.

85 Dorothy E Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989).

86 Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Ruddick, ‘The Rationality of Care’ in. J. B. Elshtain and S. Tobias Savage, MD, (eds), Women, Militarism, and War (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990).

87 Hawkesworth, ‘The Semiotics of Premature Burial’, p. 972.

88 See Squires and Weldes, ‘Beyond’.

89 See Hemmings, ‘Telling feminist stories’.

90 Wiegman, ‘On Being in Time’, p. 165.

91 Ibid., p. 165.

92 Misha Kavka, ‘Introduction’ in Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001) p. xi.

93 Wiegman, ‘Feminism Institutionalism’, p. 110.

94 Anthony Burke, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War against the Other, (New York: Routledge, 2007); Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart, ‘Rethinking the man question, sex, gender and violence in international relations’ in Parpart and Zalewski, ‘Rethinking’.

95 Wiegman, ‘On Being in Time’.

96 Ibid., p. 161.

97 Ibid., p. 163.

98 Ellen K. Feder and Emily Zatkin, ‘Flirting with the Truth’ in Derrida and Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 24.

99 Laura Shepherd, Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice, (London: Zed Press, 2008).

100 Robin Redhead, Reading the Visual: Gender, Human Rights and International Relations, unpublished PhD dissertation (2007).

101 Burke, ‘Beyond Security’.

102 Butler, ‘Undoing’, p. 421.

103 Wiegman, ‘Feminism Institutionalism’, p. 7.

104 Grosz, ‘Time Travels’.