This essay expresses my gratitude for the spirit of inclusiveness shown by the first generation of Feminist Security Studies (FSS) scholars. I would like to see FSS remain a large tent, for in constructing boundaries for FSS, we may unintentionally make it smaller than it really is. Indeed, I would like to explore the value of inclusiveness to FSS by undertaking a bit of autobiography. I was a poor candidate to wind up as part of this field; the story of how FSS insights upended my academic life may be instructive as we endeavor to help others in the academy see the connections between gender and security studies that we ourselves see.
FSS calls us to see security as related in many important ways to issues of gender and sex. In most circles, that is now a self-evident statement requiring little justification. When I went to graduate school, however, not only was it not self-evident, but it was also not even possible to notice such a relationship in the fields of IR and security studies. As Tickner has termed it, I inhabited a “womanless world” during my doctoral program: I could, and did, finish the program without women or their concerns ever being mentioned by any of my professors in any of my classes. If the proverbial martian had taken these classes, then the alien would never have even known there were women on the planet.
As can be imagined, I found this completely natural even though I was a woman myself. The world of women and the world of national and international security seemed not to inhabit the same conceptual universe at all. But life has a funny way of making you see what your professors do not teach you.
As part of my efforts to get through school financially, I wound up in the 11th Special Forces Reserve (which was disbanded after the Cold War) as a wheeled vehicle and power generator mechanic. This was not your modern, more “PC” military. I joined a unit where the men had joined because they were Special Forces (SF) Vietnam veterans who missed the killing and who went together as groups during their summer vacations to fight for kicks as white mercenaries when Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia.
Three incidents (out of many) still haunt my mind from those days. I remember a Christmas party for 2nd Battalion, to which all the battalion's A teams were invited—teams whose members looked on those at their headquarters as being less manly. They brought their challenge of manhood: After the toasts, they brought out a raw, dead baby pig and dared the ranking officer to eat a hunk of it. If he could not, then he was not really “SF.” I will never forget the look on that man's face as he realized not only that he had to eat it but also that he had to eat it with gusto in order to keep his manhood and his leadership. Doing something he fully understood was stupid, gratuitous, and possibly harmful was simply the price of being a man, and he squared his shoulders to the task.
The second memory concerns “jump school” at Fort Benning, Georgia, where troops learn to parachute. The black hats, or drill instructors, basically left the few women alone and tried to ignore us. But they placed bets on which men they could get to discharge on request (DOR) (i.e., quit). I remember one black hat putting his boot in the back of “his” target and pushing down as the man did push-ups so that his face was repeatedly smashed into the dirt. But what pricked my mind was what he said as he did this: “Hey, Priscilla, you ready to DOR? Hey, Jennifer, had enough?” Cowardly weaklings were women. When a man did DOR, there was a ritual: They assembled us in the dark at 5 a.m., played “The Ballad of the Green Berets” on the speaker, and paraded the quitters in front of us. On command from the black hats we were to yell insults at them, and they were then led away.
It is the third incident, much less spectacular than the first two, however, that causes me the greatest pain when I remember it. Back in those days, you had to run five miles in your combat boots within a certain time in order to stay in the unit. On the appointed day, I started running and was doing fine. Not the fastest, not at the very back. About halfway, I caught up to the supply sergeant, a friend of mine about 10 years older. I said, “Hi, Jesse!” as I joined him. When he looked at me, I saw sheer horror on his face. For a brief instant, I could not comprehend what was happening. Without even acknowledging me, he turned and sprinted away from me as fast as he could run. Then it all made sense. Maybe he could joke around with me, but when push came to shove, I was not really his peer. Rather, I was a woman he had to beat at all costs in order not to feel humiliated as a man.
I wish I could say that these incidents were all it took for me to open my eyes to the intimate relationship between gender and sex and our definitions of security. But it was actually women who helped me understand how warped were our conventional understandings of security and how to obtain it. The first woman was my daughter Ariel, born in 1987. The other women are well known to my readers: Ann Tickner, Sarah Ruddick, Cynthia Enloe, Spike Peterson, Carol Cohn, Christine Sylvester, Jan Jindy Pettman, and others. The Women—I think of them capitalized—opened in me my own woman's eyes that had been made blind by the conventional and very masculinist concepts used in IR and security studies.
The turning point came at an American Political Science Association meeting being held in Washington, DC, right before the end of the Cold War. I was in the audience for a panel on the future of NATO, a panel populated by bright young security gentlemen. An audience member stood during the question-and-answers session and said that he was unfamiliar with NATO's Follow-On Forces (FOF) strategy in the event of a conventional clash with the Warsaw Pact. One of the bright young men adjusted his glasses and answered, “Oh, the FOF strategy is simply a set of swift, penetrating thrusts to the enemy's rear!” Now, my graduate school self would simply have nodded, as all the others in the audience did at that point. But The Women had changed me, and I was not the same. I began to giggle, not because it was funny but because it was just such an insane and unseen conflation of gender and military strategy, so insane that one would either have to laugh or give up in disgusted despair. And I could not stop giggling. I made a spectacle of myself and had to leave the room, with all eyes following me. I had my moment such as Cohn describes in her pathbreaking essay “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” and I could never go back (Cohn Reference Cohn1987). I had seen it—not just seen it, but understood what it meant and what its consequences were for states and their citizens.
And I knew I had to act on what I now saw. Ruddick (Reference Ruddick, Elshtain and Tobias1999, 235) described the path well: “A path bounded on one side by inauthenticity and on the other by subversion. To be ‘reasonable,’ when reason is described as not female and rationality is said to depend upon overcoming ‘female’ attachments and obligations, requires of a woman ‘a radical disidentification from self.’ On the other hand, if a woman who has learned to be reasonable tries to reason in a different voice she may find she cannot be heard as reasonable.” At the same time, Ruddick (Reference Ruddick, Elshtain and Tobias1999, 235) insists that we “must make the ear of man listen.” This is not because men are our enemies; it is because men and women were meant to be friends and partners in governing humankind. If we can make the ear of man listen, as our women's ears have listened to men all this time, then might we not come to a fuller, more functional understanding of security and how to obtain it?
I believe we will; I do not think it is right or good to assert “you just don't understand” to the other sex. Indeed, FSS must be willing to make the case to IR and security studies any way that case can be most easily understood. My research shows that there is a strong relationship between the security of women and the security of states. If I have to make that case through careful historical process tracing (Hudson and Den Boer Reference Hudson and Den Boer2004), large-N aggregate statistical testing (Hudson et al Reference Hudson, Caprioli, Ballif-Spanvill, McDermott and Emmett2008/9), GIS mapping (Caprioli et al. Reference Caprioli, Hudson, McDermott, Ballif-Spanvill, Emmett and Stearmer2009), or any other accepted empirical methodology (WomanStats Database n.d.) in order to be persuasive to researchers in my fields of study, then that is precisely what I will do. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said, “I always thought that there was nothing an antifeminist would want more than to have women only in women's organizations, in their own little corner empathizing with each other and not touching a man's world. If you're going to change things, you have to be with the people who hold the levers” (Bazelon Reference Bazelon2009).
While I do not believe it is only men holding the levers, I hope in the future it will always be both men and women holding them, and that means we must be able to communicate and be persuasive across the divide of sex. Indeed, one of the most eloquent exponents of the need to take gender and sex seriously when we talk about security and conflict is David Winter, whose Reference Winter2000 essay was a major influence on my own thinking in this area. Scholars such as Richard Wrangham, Malcolm Potts, Bradley Thayer, Theodore Kemper, James Boone, and Stephen Rosen have also offered significant insights that helped me tremendously in my FSS research. What FSS should seek is a busy two-way street of contribution in the realms of theory and research.
If there is any suggestion I would make concerning FSS, it would be to exhort its adherents not to do unto others what has been done unto them in the past. Do not exclude, do not refuse to engage, do not define the boundaries of FSS and say who is “in” and who is “out.” After all, it was because I believed that The Women would welcome me and value my contributions that I found the strength to open my eyes.
It is my hope that FSS will continue to be a vibrant and inclusive contributor to the fields of IR and security studies, informing those at their very foundations. May there come a time when no professor would think to teach IR or security without seamlessly integrating a discussion of women, gender, and sex. Let there be no more womanless worlds and no more womanless security for the generations of young scholars who come after us.
