ECONOMIES OF KNOWLEDGE/POWER REPRODUCTIONS

At the forefront of IR theory, critical feminists in FGPE and FSS challenge dominant notions of what the “international” (that is, a way of bringing into view the world as a single, unified entity, articulated in space and developing over a shared and linear notion of time) is and ought to be, how and what institutions emerge, and with whom as their imagined public. This work has stretched our grammars/logics of gendered accumulation regimes and genealogies of violence. In problematizing such knowledge systems and their re/production, IR feminists have provided us with insights into how to understand the co-constitution of international relations and the international order (Enloe Reference Enloe2004; Peterson Reference Peterson2003; Rai and Waylen Reference Rai and Waylen2013; Steans Reference Steans2013; Tickner Reference Tickner1992).

And yet, the gendered and racialized separations and specializations of the state's institutions and the market in world politics inform the formation of the different feminist schools of thought and their conversations/tensions/nonconversations. Here, property, possession, and military/police might are the co-constitutive primary values of our global order and the constitutive material of the legal regimes that guide these relations, including the possible insistence on the segregation/specializations of FGPE and FSS. Insisting to focus on questions separately from the ways grammars and categories becomes part of certain knowledge/power economies and regimes, preventing us from questioning the unacknowledged and complicit agreements in the re/production of feminisms and their analytic bounded separations/prioritizations. Why is it that some reading modalities demand we zoom in to narrower categories of violence such as “gender-infused violence,” “threatened violence in any economic transformation,” work (i.e., not idleness), interstate conflict (True Reference True2015), instead of racialized violence? Why is it that others zoom in on the notion of a linear stream of progress instead of the multiple actors’ practices that generate the possibility of meaning and value of existence otherwise? One wonders whether and when such work sanitizes the existing and emerging multiple scalar violences entangled with the fabric of our assembled imperialist order. Insisting on this division prevents us from asking—and beyond the epistemological differences/tensions that have emerged over time—about the shared frameworks, values, fragilities, and desires toward notions of re/production, labor-power, value, and in/security that have been preserved across this segregation/specialization.

Global politics are never just “economic” or “security” issues. In our times and globally, when race/sexuality/gender/nation are being coproduced as a response and challenge to dominant forms of value in the form of coercive interventions of militarization and police powers, we are forced to confront the way IR feminisms in their different iterations ask questions (see, for example, Black Lives Matter; also Rai and Waylen Reference Rai and Waylen2013), albeit narrowly punctuated as exploitation and noncompensation, conflict and war. What are the stakes in rereading from the vantage point of slavery/settler colonialisms the process of primitive accumulation, as a moment of genesis, which, “like a concave mirror, returns the image of the capitalist mode of production in its totality, by illuminating … certain fundamental but hidden characteristics of the functioning of ‘normality’”? (Mezzadra Reference Mezzadra2008, 134) (what is normal within certain boundaries of knowledge production; what kinds of value and in/security do such knowledge production accord to the slave/the colonized?). What can such a reading concretize as theoretical possibilities with regard to the temporality of world capitalism, the production of labor power as a commodity, and the possibilities for rethinking of the state/security question? What does such a focus allow for the possibility of IR feminist interventions, and in relation to conceptions of a truly global nonviolent world in theory and practice? Next, I point to how a compositional FSS/FGPE approach with slavery/colonization at the center interrupts normative knowledge/production regimes, including what/when is an issue a problematic.

VALUE/VALUATION AND SECURITY/ACCUMULATION REGIMES

Our times feature conversations on environmental degradation (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2016; Burke, Fishel, and Mitchell Reference Burke, Fishel and Mitchell2016; Mitchell Reference Mitchell2016), highlighting how an emergent politic is characterized by the coproduction of morbidity and surplus value. Although advances in biotechnology, from genetically modified organisms to gene editing, from geo-engineering to reducing carbon emissions, “have given us tools to tinker with life itself” (Jasanoff Reference Jasanoff2016), these inventions (and their corresponding degradations) are unevenly distributed.

Environmental experiments and extermination policies of state bodies, genetic laboratories, military, police agencies, and corporations under the political and economic support and racist social oppression by the upper classes and international corporate elite profitably designate and select flesh, bodies, races, gender, nations, marginalized populations and multiple ecologies as nature for access and generation of value/surplus value. Race, flesh, gender, nations, etc., are constituted as the technologies of hierarchically dividing humanity from nonhumans and the international order by sieving through those who deserve to live and which bodies to turn into the sites of violence with impunity (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2016; Wilderson Reference Wilderson2003). FGPE and FSS can grapple with how such production and sorting through of value/valuations and nonvalue/devaluations of biological reproduction work to generate a certain power privilege and security through and within the corporations, the state, the international organizations for some and not others. FGPE and FSS may ask questions about whether capitalism promotes economic extractions as racism. Do idle people, for example, challenge the legitimacy of corporations that presume that their only possibility is work and extraction of value? How so? For instance, a major category such as work is problematized by antislavery feminists as they argue that claims to a fair and equal production do not stand. The system depends on the co-constitution of the “slave,” her work and being and extraction for its possibility. What notions of violence are imagined and embodied in the market's and state's authority practices toward the ordering and zoning of peoples in the private and public realms? We might ask questions about how the colonial and racist archives’ “accumulated erasures, projections, fabulations and misnamings” (Sharpe Reference Sharpe2016, 12) and methods force people into positions that run against what they live everyday, what and how they know.

FGPE and FSS can grapple with the propositional assumptions they share about subjects, species, value, security, land, violence, and freedom: how are certain notions of the “human” tethered to value extraction? And others to value theft? Or how does the agricultural industry come to value (and simultaneously ignore those less than humans’ inhabitants who do not possess legal rights) the indigenous populated lands as sparse and mainly for logging and converting to farmland or for sale to realtors worldwide? What form of violence do these enclosures and mostly liberal moral assumptions about territory, land, work coproduce? What form of deaths, privileges and in/security do they make possible?

States, militaries, and corporations depend on our feminist disciplinary inquiry in the making of the international order. The familiar and abstract notions that the state is responsible for its citizens’ security and that the market should produce fair and democratic work for all become useful propositions toward the management and governmentality of peoples. Some humans and workers have value; their lands, institutions, and property ought to be secured and protected. Others are selected for access or left to death (and when they work cannot be true workers); they do not register as humans, so violence can happen to them and their ecologies with impunity (i.e., they are seen as empty anyway). A feminist compositional reading, of and by FSS and FGPE, with an attention to race/colonial/neo-colonial apparatus, interrupts normative notions about security and economy, and allow us to consider how we go about producing dominant notions about the zoning of ecologies and people (i.e., those who work and are deserving citizens; those who are idle/criminals/lazy), their management, imprisonment, and decimation. This global materiality could be problematized from the viewpoint of those whose value is extracted daily and whose existence and ecologies are being policed, criminalized, and killed.

BEYOND FORCE AND TOWARD A BROADER NOTION OF VIOLENCE: SLAVERY AND COLONIALISMS

The incessant coproduction of insecurity and accumulation regimes does not merely depend on sovereign force (i.e., state and military) and market relations (i.e., work/re-production). Rather and from the vantage point of slavery and the “racial calculus and … political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago” (Hartman Reference Hartman2007, 6) and continue in our times, we are able to recognize that state force and corporations as forms of exploitation evade broader notions of violence. The insight that even feminists have been “drafted into the service of destructive force[s]” (Saunders Reference Saunders2008, 67) to “do … violence to [blacks’] own capacities to read, think, and imagine otherwise” (Sharpe Reference Sharpe2016, 13) is a major reason that FGPE and FSS ought to speak to a broader notion of violence. It is also pivotal to acknowledge that the entanglement of slavery/indigeneity/colonialism and the erection of a capitalist (and carbon-based) set of practices are co-constitutive of a broader notion of violence (i.e., imperiling, skewing life opportunities, subjecting some to premature death and devaluation) and order.

While it remains important to analyze violence by “consider[ing] a broad range of materialities” (Hudson Reference Hudson2015, 416), we also need to theorize how valuation and ideas about wage-earning capacities become entangled with the transfer of capital and whiteness to “successful” states linking simultaneously freedom and power with the management of global authority and “failed” states with authoritarianism/obsolete reproduction/rape. Similarly, these grammars of the body politic inscribe themselves on ecologies and people differentially based on a race, sexuality, ability, class, and “reproductive” calculus. Slavery/settler colonialisms seem to always be coded as institutions of the past making racial domination and reproduction “obsolete” possible by naturalizing the penetration of feminized/heteronormativized bodies. And capital economy is coded as forward looking/generative/masculinized/racialized as white. But a decolonial/feminist/queer compositional reading (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2013; Peterson Reference Peterson2014) ruptures normativized reproductions of meaning and value and grapples with tensions in feminist research programs to understand how labor, capital, and ecologies coded as political economy, and security and juridical contracts as security studies, become bounded objects erected as independent areas or fields drafted for dominant projects (i.e., in the name of a stronger nation; in the name of democracy, or fair military/corporative policies). Moreover, the very distinction between economic and noneconomic violence is in crisis—that is, normative notions of production/reproduction are equally problematized and demand new directions, the design and creation of new social imaginaries and organizing practices.

With the emergence of financialized accumulation regimes inscribed in the very fabric of our everyday lives, entire communities’ efforts are militarized/policed in their challenge of corporations’ and states’ authority simultaneously challenging their own existence. These regimes zoom in at a molecular register of the body/body politic, albeit with asymmetrical interventions, altering the very material infrastructure of bodies and forms of existence, including the international and political itself: what is security and what is the market and work, when the coproduction of biofinance and capitalist order penetrate our everyday?

A feminist compositional reading that inquires about value/valuations could place FGPE and FSS and its products (i.e., what is social reproduction and what is security when and where) in a poetic relationship to each. It could also allow them to examine how the state/civil society segregation becomes possible and what notions allow for distinctions and tensions between immediate (noneconomic) and mediated (economic) violence that make these notions/practices possible. This reading of and by FGPE and FSS could highlight how modernity's assemblage of knowledge/power has recruited us and our work to invest and participate in a mode of a certain human sociality by differentiating one sort of human (i.e., the European from the rest; the productive man from the reproductive woman; the queer from the heterosexual) from the other. However, these distinctions pivot on complex negotiations of reproduction within indigenous environments under biofinancialization modalities and vice versa.

By asking FGPE and FSS to reconsider the sexual division of intellectual labor, labor, value/valuation, capital, and security through this compositional approach and to reflect on how economic quandaries are not settled through financial means but through social, existential, and techno-scientific transformations, we might generate research that illuminates naturalizations and tensions amidst their intellectual productions and those that mainstream IR dismisses. A compositional FGPE and FSS practice could place untimely world political moments and products in poetic relationship to each other rupturing anachronistic bracketing to imagine a more truly global ecopolity.