Introduction
Are the causes of violence rooted in sex and gender relations bound by evolutionary forces? Security studies scholars who rely on evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology contend that they are. They argue that there is an evolutionary basis for violence and war, attributable to male competition for sex with females.Footnote 1 We suggest that the idea that national and international conflict has an ‘origin’ in ‘male-female conflict over reproduction’ requires an uncomplicated (and inaccurate) assessment of sex and of gender, leading to a host of problematic assumptions and recommendations for policy practice.Footnote 2 We also argue that the simplified importation of some of the insights of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology into International Relations (IR), especially as they concern sex, sexuality, gender, and reproduction, leads to highly suspect operationalisations of sex and unavoidable reliance on heterosexual reproduction and filiation, as well as the state’s regulation of each.Footnote 3 Thus, while its proponents claim that evolutionary science constitutes a ‘scientific meta-theoretical paradigm designed to understand human nature’ with no ‘political agenda’, we argue that this paradigm builds on normatively and practically problematic premises and, as a result, impoverishes the range of potential responses to violence and inequality.Footnote 4
In this article, we focus on the subset of evolutionary theorising self-identified as Feminist Evolutionary Analytic (FEA). As coined by Valerie Hudson and her co-authors, FEA is the product of a constellation of security studies scholars, such as Rose McDermott, Bradley Thayer, and Mary Caprioli who, along with Hudson, link the insights of evolutionary psychology and biology to the study of violence from an explicitly feminist perspective.Footnote 5 We focus on FEA for two reasons. First, it is influential. FEA is referenced in the halls of the United Nations, promulgated in the opinion pages of the New York Times, invoked in the Washington Post as justifying mainstreaming gender in foreign policy, celebrated by the feminist Gloria Steinem, and increasingly cited in security studies research on the causes of violence.Footnote 6 Second, distinct from other uses of evolutionary theorising in security studies, FEA scholars claim to provide a path to ending violence; namely through gender equality.Footnote 7 FEA scholars argue that promoting women’s cultural, legal, and institutional equality can alter the acceptance and licensing of male (evolutionary) violence, the primary cause of conflict.
We agree with the goals of gender equality and reducing violence. However, we see an inherent contradiction in FEA’s arguments. FEA scholars advocate gender equality and strong family law as a means to alter something (male propensity for violence) that they contend remains the biological ‘ultimate cause’ of that violence.Footnote 8 As an analytic, FEA’s opposition to violence in international politics is not disputed. But, its basis in a reductive understanding of change and a binary account of gender is deeply problematic. This, we argue, leads to counterproductive and misguided policies, such as FEA’s ‘Responsibility to Protect Women’ linked to the establishment of a list of ‘state sponsors of gender terror’.Footnote 9 As FEA achieves a greater public profile, evinced by a recent opinion piece in the New York Times reminding President Trump and Secretary of State Tillerson that ‘women’s rights are tied directly to national security’, it is all the more crucial to subject FEA and its claim to provide a theory of the causes of and solutions to violence to sustained critical engagement.
We offer this accounting in four sections. First, we provide a brief overview of the argument that reproductive interests are the ‘origins’ of violence. Second, we break down the essentialist and heteronormative understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality forwarded by FEA.Footnote 10 Third, we argue that FEA’s claim to provide a ‘social’ solution to a putatively ‘biological’ problem lacks historical and substantive context, leading to the mistaken identification of the state and institutions as primarily neutral and corrective bulwarks against male violence. We conclude by outlining what is at stake if we fail to correct for this direction in feminist, IR, and security research.
Reproductive interests and the origins of violence
Evolutionary approaches to explaining political behaviour are growing both in popularity and complexity.Footnote 11 Proponents suggest that the comparative advantages of evolutionary approaches include accounting for change,Footnote 12 evaluating psychology,Footnote 13 providing causal depth and precision,Footnote 14 and demonstrating the relevance of biology to the social sciences.Footnote 15 One of the most common applications of this approach seeks to explain the causes of violence.
Most basically, according to evolutionary theorising, humans have two instinctual drives – for survival (food, water, and sometimes shelter) and for reproductive success. Both inspire competition among men. Men compete over scarce essential resources and scarce access to preferable women for reproduction. In this story, men (who can afford promiscuity because sperm are cheap) look to mate with the ‘best’ women, and compete (often violently, but always aggressively) for them. The salient feature and fundamental difference of men and women is their sex-specific role in reproduction; namely, men aggressively compete and women receptively reproduce.
Thus, Azar Gat argues global politics is fuelled by ‘the struggle for reproduction’.Footnote 16 This struggle, which involves competitive ‘access to sexual partners of reproductive potential’, is a condition of possibility both for war and for gender-based violence. Thayer suggests that warfare contributes to states’ fitness in a Darwinian sense because victors attain ‘status, coalition allies, and members of the opposite sex’, with whom they may reproduce.Footnote 17 Consequently, forms of ‘[d]eadly violence … [are] … regularly activated by competition over women.’Footnote 18 This interpretation of sex-specific roles in reproduction suggests that because ‘natural selection will eventually “phase” out genotypes or traits that minimize reproductive success’ while preserving and favouring traits that maximise reproductive success, those who are most aggressive are more likely to survive.Footnote 19 As a result, competition for women explains conflict among states.Footnote 20
That is why Bradley Thayer suggests that evolutionary biology can confirm and deepen realist hypotheses about how conflict works.Footnote 21 Thayer compares hegemonic states to alpha male gorillas, suggesting that ‘dominant’ states worry about ‘challenges’ and therefore will ‘kill other males, or drive them off’.Footnote 22 He means this comparison literally (not metaphorically), using evolutionary biology’s interpretation of males’ collective need for reproductive success to posit that war is caused by competition for access to women. Relatedly, Thayer and Hudson contend ‘that the life sciences can offer insights into suicide terrorism in the Islamic context’ because ‘suicide terrorism as a cultural practice could not exist without … evolutionary motivations’.Footnote 23 According to Thayer and Hudson, (presumed male) suicide bombers are driven by a combination of the lack of reproductive opportunities for non-alpha males in this life and the expectation of access to virgins to achieve reproductive success in the next life.Footnote 24 They argue that these evolutionary pressures, compounded by female scarcity due to polygyny, make ‘becoming a shaheed the most effective response to the human evolutionary conundrum’ in much of the Islamic world.Footnote 25 David Goetze and Patrick James take this analysis one step further, suggesting that male martyrs are not only looking for individual reproductive success in the next life, but are also looking to contribute to the reproductive success of others of their kind in this life.Footnote 26
Other IR scholars have explicitly challenged some of the underlying assumptions of the ‘application’ of evolutionary work to global politics. Some have argued that the importation of evolutionary theorising relies on flawed biological logics and/or misinterpretations of evolutionary psychology.Footnote 27 Others voice concerns that this work underspecifies basic key concepts (environments, populations, and individuals), and is unclear on notions of random variation, selection, and inheritance.Footnote 28 Similarly, Duncan Bell notes how evolutionary IR theorising ‘either effaces or erases’ the complexity of international political processes, comparing it to Social Darwinism in its tendency ‘to naturalize a particular political objective’.Footnote 29 Feminist work on reproduction brings into question many of the assumptions inherent in evolutionary security theorising.Footnote 30 However, none of these scholars’ critiques explicitly analyse the interpretation of sex, gender, and sexuality forwarded by security studies evolutionary theorising or integrate the debates within the history of evolutionary theorising in their critique. Moreover, none have subjected FEA to sustained analysis nor drawn out its implication for international politics.
Yet, FEA’s specific importation and interpretation of evolutionary theorising and its explicit policy recommendations are precarious and flawed foundations upon which to predicate either peace or equality. In particular, we argue that FEA’s interpretation of evolutionary theorising grounds what is, in the end, a highly disquieting conception of the link between heterosexual reproduction and state regulation which, in turn, justifies expansive and martial state powers.
Sex, gender, sexuality in FEA
FEA proponents Valerie Hudson and her co-authors argue that ‘we can no longer speak of achieving national and international security without speaking, in the same breath, about the security of women’.Footnote 31 The links between these concepts, they argue, have been overlooked because the evidence provided lacks ‘acceptable conventional empirical warrant’ and ‘hard data’.Footnote 32 Consequently, the turn to evolutionary theory functions in their work as an explanatory move, and, as the authors make clear, an explicit justificatory one – providing the ‘ontological foundation’ for both rational actor models and policy credibility.Footnote 33 Still, their depiction of existing scholarship and their reframed evolutionary account is highly contested and relies on a narrow understanding of both evidence and data.Footnote 34
FEA, in agreement with security studies evolutionary theorising, invokes the ‘primal character of violent patriarchy’ as both the cause and outcome of gender inequality.Footnote 35 The description of patriarchy as ‘primal’ derives from a specific understanding of sex, while violent patriarchy is grounded in a particular interpretation of gender. Work that uses sex as an explanation for violence characterises sex as an empirically measurable proxy for gender, and then defines gender equality as ‘the equality between the genders and between the sexes’, such that sex and gender mirror, or can be taken as each other because gender simply lays over sex as the ‘natural’, and ‘self-evident’ substrate.Footnote 36 Gender is both taken for and rooted in the predicate of a self-evident sex, while sex is construed as a dichotomous, oppositional category. Both sex and gender identification are presumed clear, coherent, complete, and whole.
In this formulation, the dichotomies of masculine: feminine, male: female, man: woman, penis: vagina, and sperm: egg describe the same thing. Unlike the work of other security studies evolutionary theorists, such as Gat,Footnote 37 who use sex and gender interchangeably, FEA scholars look to distinguish gender from sex even as they are measured the same way. In FEA, gender accounts for the non-material (for example, the cultural or the social), while sex accounts for the material (for example, the biological or the natural). In this rendering, sex remains transparent, stable, and easily intelligible. This work relies on a system of separate but complementary sex the emergence of which is dated to the eighteenth century.Footnote 38 FEA scholars argue that certain behaviours are heritable (aggression, male promiscuity), but do not show in any precise detail how this is so, while also simultaneously assuming that the function or meaning of contemporary traits are the same as they were in the evolutionary past. In her assessment of evolutionary psychology, Janet Hyde writes: the ‘basic arguments are that evolution occurred over millions of years, and, voila, we have a certain pattern of gender differences in the 21st century. But, evolution can act only through genes … evolutionary psychology fails to specify which genes … are responsible for the patterns.’Footnote 39 Therefore, not only is the imposition of a two-sex system historically anachronistic, but even by the terms of their own arguments they are unable to explain its persistence.
Putting aside for a moment the significant point of the historical specificity of the emergence of a binary sex system FEA anachronistically takes as originating in the early Pleistocene era, Peter Hatemi and Rose McDermott explain the reasoning of FEA:
While it may be possible to socially influence one’s sexual identity or gender roles, it is certainly impossible to socialize ovaries and childbearing on to a male, or sperm production onto a female. Using biology and the human organism as a potential starting point for universal human similarities as well as individual differences, a biological model can offer answers for why sex provides variation in addition to ‘gendered’ socialization.Footnote 40
Notably, conditions of and responses to intersex, for example, sex chromosome mosaicism, demonstrate that we, in fact, do ‘socialize’ the ‘impossibility’ of such against evidence otherwise.Footnote 41 For example, ‘a genetic (XY) male with an “inadequate penis” (one that a physician believes will be incapable of penetrating a female’s vagina) is made female even it if means destroying his reproductive capacity’.Footnote 42 Further, childbearing and ovaries are not necessarily linked, but are socialised to be linked, that is, all women are considered ‘potentially pregnant’, while ‘histories of endocrinology research demonstrate understandings of ovaries and testicles – what they are and what they do hormonally – were explicitly “socialized” to be oppositional rather than continuous’.Footnote 43 Notwithstanding this evidence, within FEA sex is held to be self-evident and a biological model is a neutral heuristic for understanding it. Consequently, FEA argues that sex provides a universal and dichotomous explanation – females have fundamental commonalities, as do males, and can be differentiated from each other on the basis of such while remaining homologous to each kind.
In evolutionary theorising, the size and number of the respective gamete, with eggs larger and fewer in comparison with the smaller and more numerous sperm, is the premise of sex-based difference.Footnote 44 Gamete size establishes the basis for defining sex, and results in a fundamental asymmetry between the sexes, with males allocating resources to mating and females to offspring. This transpires because eggs are more time-consuming and sperm is cheap; therefore, men (who are investing less) will engage in competition with other men to have sex with women, while women will be more selective.Footnote 45 Further, because ‘copulation costing the male virtually nothing may trigger a nine-month investment by the female, then the original costlier investment on the part of women will be protected by greater allocation of resources to offspring’.Footnote 46 As a result, ‘female reproduction is limited by access to resources while male reproduction is limited by access to mates’.Footnote 47 For this reason, one of the founding evolutionary theorists, Robert Trivers, called women the ‘limiting sex’.Footnote 48 It is this limit of potential mates – which rests on the unexamined dual predicate of scarcity of females and self-interest maximising males – that necessitates and promotes violence. Embedded within this explanation is the antecedent postulate that sex is only binary (only males and females exist) and sexuality is functionally reproductive.
Joan Roughgarden takes explicit issue with this reading of evolutionary theorising.Footnote 49 Her critique is threefold. First, while she agrees that ‘in biology, male function and female function are unproblematically defined in terms of gamete size’, there is no necessary correlation or causation with behaviour nor does it necessarily qualify the organism as either male or female. Second, she argues that the ‘expensive egg cheap sperm principle’ is an error based on ‘an accounting mistake that Darwin did not make’.Footnote 50 Third, therefore, ‘social violence is not nature’s baseline state, but a special case of failing to strike a successful bargain … for access to reproductive opportunity’.Footnote 51 She, along with others,Footnote 52 challenges this interpretation of ansoiogamy (a form of sexual reproduction with two differently sized gametes) as identifying sex, explaining sexual practice, and predicting social organisation, underscoring that interpretations of sex and the heuristics by which we grasp it are neither self-evident or neutral, but are highly contested and partial. In other words, the simple narrative of evolutionary theory invoked by FEA as settled is, in fact, deeply debated.
It is precisely this point that Bradley Thayer misses in his response to Duncan Bell and Paul MacDonald’s critique of his ‘sociobiological’ work. He sees his assumptions as objective science.Footnote 53 Likewise, McDermott states: ‘natural selection is not a theory; it is a fact’, and therefore not up for critique or debate even when evolutionary scientists themselves debate it.Footnote 54 This is Mary Poovey’s specific critique of the modern invocation of ‘fact’; namely, that it has ‘come to be seen as preinterpretive or even somehow non-interpretive at the same time that they have become the bedrock for systematic knowledge’.Footnote 55 Our argument is not against the existence of natural or sexual selection, it is about how it is interpreted and used. After all, it is precisely this evidence of complexity, variation, or contestation FEA specifically reads out of its accounts that makes its implications so dire. In the following three subsections, we analyse FEA’s use of sex, gender, and sexuality to illustrate this point, building on literature from feminist theory, evolutionary biology, and social policy, among others. We provide an original analysis of the theoretical foundations of FEA to demonstrate that its claim to offer an ‘ultimate cause’ of male violence and, thus, gender inequality is rooted in a fundamentally oversimplified understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality which leads to flawed policies for world peace.Footnote 56
Sex
FEA’s evolutionary relationship among sex, gender, sexuality, and violence relies upon sex as discrete, binary, and self-evident. Gender is related to sex but does not affect FEA’s understanding of sex itself, which remains unaffected by and prior to gender. This presumption of sex as the substrate or foundation of gender has been actively and consistently critiqued by scholars who suggest that what we know about sex is, indeed, gendered from the start.Footnote 57 Demonstrating how our understanding of sex and sex difference is a complex intersectional event shaped as much by scientists as these scholars are shaped by it – they critique the ways in which sex is organised and interpreted according to extant discourses of gender, which (still) insist on a discrete and binary distinction.Footnote 58
For one, non-human species contain polymorphisms of feminine males, masculine females, masculine males, and feminine females all together, and/or gender-crossing behaviour.Footnote 59 Likewise, there exists in human cultures multiple categories of individuals, for example, the kothi, hijra, sarimbavy, or twin-spirited, who embody variation and manifestation of non-binary and non-aligned sex and gender expressions.Footnote 60 Anne Fausto-Sterling draws on historical evidence to argue that the presumption of dimorphic sex is enforced by disappearing ‘people of mixed sex’, in part through ‘scientific methods (which) classified them out of existence’.Footnote 61 This is because ‘the possession of a [single] sex is a necessity for our social order’, therefore ‘the specter of intersexuality as spurred us to police bodies of indeterminate sex’.Footnote 62 As Paisley Currah notes, ‘the notion of embodied genitals’ of ‘dichotomous sexed persons provides a foundation for moral and disciplinary imperatives’ in the service of other goals.Footnote 63 One example of this is the demand for binary classification by sex on identity documents and in practice as a means to screen and predict potential threats, most notably at airports and borders, and, therefore, presumably ensure national security.Footnote 64 Collectively, what these scholars document is that sex does not stand alone as the ‘unmediated representation of the body itself’, and is neither universal or unchanging, undermining the essential predicate upon which FEA theorising depends.Footnote 65 This documentation matters because FEA scholars insist upon a universal dichotomisation of sex which, in turn, informs and justifies a universal dichotomisation of gender.
Gender
FEA assumes that knowing a person’s sex allows one to know that person’s gender and vice versa. For example, McDermott characterises gender as the ‘predictable psychological consequences’ of sex difference.Footnote 66 Notably, by presuming homogeneity and lack of differentiation within categories of sex and gender, and the coherence of sex and gender, FEA often speaks of ‘counterintuitive’ findings of female enforcement/violence against other females.Footnote 67 Feminist scholarship has been documenting this for years, because the phenomenon is not counterintuitive if one begins with the possibility that sex/gender identification is not given and does not lead to sex/gender alliance/conformity.Footnote 68 As Cordelia Fine et al. and others note, arguments such as these evidence a suspect reliance on the presumption that ‘there is a unidirectional, causal pathway from genders to behavior via hormones and brains and that evolution has left us with brains and mental processes strongly reminiscent of our Paleolithic ancestors’.Footnote 69 Judith Butler points out, even ‘assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of “men” will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that “women” will interpret only female bodies’.Footnote 70 There are not just males and females, there is also sex/gender diversity and plurality, consequently ‘labelling someone a man or a woman is a social decision’.Footnote 71 FEA acknowledges once that there are individuals who ‘reject’ these norms, but treats it as an exception rather than as a fundamental challenge to its logic.Footnote 72
When it comes to differently sexed bodies, ‘exceptions are not there to prove the rule; they have meaning in and of themselves’.Footnote 73 Keller notes that recognition of exceptions rejects (sex/gender) ‘division as an epistemological prerequisite’.Footnote 74 If sex dichotomy is not necessary, it is possible to understand that neither sex nor gender are given or reinforced by nature, but are instead historical, and political. By insisting upon a divide of sex and gender (the former natural and given, the latter cultural and constructed), FEA work specifically calls upon the normative pairing of nature and sex to buttress the normative pairing of culture and gender, for example, gender follows unproblematically and seamlessly from sex. In this sense, holding gender as separable, but deriving from sex, as FEA must do to root the ultimate cause of violence in the conflict over reproduction while also simultaneously allowing for its modification, institutes a causal relationship (for example, sex determines gender) that is unfounded and deeply problematic.Footnote 75 Further, FEA relies upon unified ‘causal or expressive lines of connection among biological sex, culturally constituted genders, and the expression or effect of both in the manifestation of … sexual practice’.Footnote 76 In other words, for FEA the kind of sex one is defines the kind of sex one does.
Sexuality
Heterosexual sex in the service of reproduction is the only form of sex FEA recognises. As Betsy Crane and Jesse Crane-Seeber write in their short critique of FEA’s construct of male/female sexuality, FEA ‘makes women’s sexuality appear, if anything, as a source of male jealousy and competition in human sexuality’, and limits women’s sexual agency and value to the extent to which they may, in Luce Irigaray’s terms, bring their sex to the market and control its exchange.Footnote 77 In this story, males engage in physical aggression in intrasexual competition for females. Because males seek variety and inherently tend towards polygamy, the number of females will always be insufficient even if males satisfice. Thus, females are perennially fought over and exchanged as commodities who literally and figuratively bear value insofar as they bear children. They are evolution’s conscripts and conduits, all undeniably female, all interested in reproduction, and all inflexibly heterosexual.
In FEA, sex refers to anatomical identity, to a division of male and female, and sexuality to heterosexual reproduction and filiation. Crane and Crane-Seeber point out how ‘the differential investment hypothesis presumes an exchange of female sexuality for male protection of a “wife” with children, naturalizing monogamous nuclear families’.Footnote 78 The assumption that sexual desires and pursuits must be sex-differentiated, heterosexual, and reproductive is deeply embedded in FEA because FEA privileges the heterosexual family as the social solution to biological violence, which, in turn, relies on a necessary and coherent relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality. The basis for world peace is, according to FEA, the normalisation and privileging of the heterosexual, reproductive family.
Recollect, according to FEA, the cause of violence is the evolutionary legacy of reproductive hierarchies of dominance and aggression organised around ‘alpha males’ without heterosexual, reproductive families.Footnote 79 FEA consistently refers to heteronormative males and male sexualities as ‘demonic’, aggressive, and combative.Footnote 80 This approach presents a toxic picture of masculinity and, as Hudson et al. make clear, because of this common evolutionary legacy, we must now consider if and how ‘human collectives are at the mercy of male sex hormones’.Footnote 81 Even as Hudson et al. are careful to specify that ‘this is not to say that all men are aggressive, or that all men coerce women’, they do not allow this to overturn their essential characterisation of male ‘temperaments’ as ‘biologically predisposed’ to sex-seeking violence.Footnote 82
In this way, though its characterisations of sexuality, FEA naturalises and fixes men and women in relations of domination and subordination through a recourse to reproductive imperatives and resources since ‘human males … code the primal difference … as a hierarchy’ where ‘the naturally selected goal is control and domination of the subordinate female’.Footnote 83 Consequently, because it draws upon and recapitulates the hierarchy it seeks to repudiate, and once again implicates biology as a form of primal causality, this suggests that the theoretical premise of FEA work not only remains disengaged from other interpretations of reproduction but also negates its claimed potential to serve as a corrective for gender subordination.
To begin, even if it were possible to modify or control for FEA’s ‘primal violent patriarchy’ it remains that sexuality does not work like FEA assumes it does. Male sexuality is not solely promiscuous and heterosexual. Female sexuality is not necessarily conservative or heterosexual. People do not have sex only to reproduce. As Jennifer Terry observes, such presumptions relegate any analysis of ‘non-reproductive sexual behaviour … [to] … mainly with how it thwarts, disturbs, or, in the best light, merely supplements heterosexual reproduction’.Footnote 84 Lee Edelman helps us to identify FEA logic as a form of ‘reproductive futurism’, which not only straightjackets sexual desire into heterosexuality, but also dictates a certain allowable form of heterosexuality – the sort where sex functions for reproductive success.Footnote 85 Within this construct, any other forms of sex or sexuality, be it intersex, queer, or non-reproductive, are maladaptive and are destined for failure. Non-reproductive sex may exist, but within evolutionary logics it has no purpose in its perverse ‘sterility’.Footnote 86 But if, on the average, men do not want sex with (more) women, all women are not selective about sex with men, male mating strategies are not violent, and reproduction is not the goal of all or even most sexual encounters, then the premises of the relationship between heterosexual sex drive and violence begin to wear away.Footnote 87
We see these problems with FEA’s understandings of sexuality most clearly in what its proponents identify as the ‘First Difference’, a poorly specified concept but one that is fundamental to both the explanation of male propensity for violence and its potential solution.Footnote 88 Hudson et al. explain that the First Difference, or baseline for human differentiation, is a ‘universal phenomenon’ where ‘human beings are divided into two roughly equal-sized groups … involved in the production of the future of their group in the form of offspring’.Footnote 89 According to FEA, the First Difference arises from and contributes to the ‘first conflict’, which is the ‘clash of reproductive interests between males and females’.Footnote 90 At both the individual and species level, the First Difference can be attributed to ‘women got pregnant and men did not’.Footnote 91
The First Difference is a source of the First Other: ‘the very first other that any child experiences is the parent that is not anatomically like them’.Footnote 92 It is (embodied) oppositional sex that distinguishes between self and other. This holds true universally and, as such, is a primary and permanent means of organising the world.Footnote 93 For men, the First Other is a woman, and for women it is a man, but ‘woman’ defines the very notion of the First Other.Footnote 94 While the First Other and the First Difference appear to be separate from, and antecedent to, culture and society, the primary learning mechanism for understanding and sorting the First Difference is cultural and occurs between fathers and mothers within ‘rich families, poor families, in families of different races and different religions, this First Difference is there for every human being born’.Footnote 95 The repetition of a heterosexual reproductive logic within constrained and competitive resources and distribution remains, as does a highly particular yet fundamentally unclear formulation of subjectivity and sociality.
FEA work repeatedly cites Jacques Derrida in support of their understanding of the crucial role of difference, despite the fact that Derrida upends the account of the First Difference and has an entirely distinct understanding of the concept of difference itself.Footnote 96 As he writes, ‘when we speak here of sexual difference, we must distinguish between opposition and difference. Opposition is two, opposition is man/woman. Difference, on the other hand, can be an indefinite number of sexes.’Footnote 97 Therefore, FEA’s reading of gender as the ‘primary formative fixed’ difference is precisely contrary to what Derrida argues.Footnote 98 After all, Derrida was concerned to deconstruct binary oppositions which, he argued, reduced multiplicities of difference to hierarchical binaries with the masculine/male as primary or first logic, which he calls phallocentricism – a move FEA makes when identifying male violence as the ultimate explans for social order. Further, for Derrida the divide between naturalness and its foils is unsustainable. ‘Nature’ is not an independent origin or referent by and through which knowledge can be discovered and legitimated; there is no ‘originary naturalness’.Footnote 99
Notwithstanding the cite to Derrida, FEA ‘comes down squarely in favor of the primacy of nature’ with the First Difference and the first conflict functioning as self-evident fact.Footnote 100 But, as we have demonstrated through our discussion of sex, gender, and sexuality, ‘there are no entities or events that can legitimately lay claim to being biological and not also’, among others, ‘cultural, or economic, or psychological or historical’.Footnote 101 Both compulsory heterosexuality and the ‘First Difference’ logic of the relationship among sex, gender, and violence are theoretically and empirically problematic, but are required for FEA’s proposed solution for world peace. In other words, FEA’s solution dictates heterosexual reproduction in heteronormative families, which, as we show in the next section, has a particularly violent history of its own.
The ‘social’ solution to ‘biological’ difference
Out of the range of security studies evolutionary theorising, only FEA straightforwardly offers a solution to the ‘evolutionary legacy’ of male violence. Yet, both its premise and its solution are unsatisfactory due to a series of theoretical missteps. Analytically, the errors about sex, gender, and sexuality are those outlined above – holding sex as prior to and outside of the power relations, defining gender as essentially keyed to sex, constructing reproductive heterosexual sexuality as both routinised and compulsory, and forwarding an ahistorical universal definition of both sex and gender. These apply both to the premise and the solution but weigh heavily on the argument that male reproductive violence can be socially ‘solved’.
This is because, as undeveloped and unspecified as it is, the ‘First Difference’ forms the pivot of the FEA argument that evolutionarily inspired ‘biological’ male violence in global politics can be solved ‘socially’ rather than being path-dependent. FEA theorists see distinctions in how the ‘First Difference’ may be resolved. If it is solved inequitably ‘corruption and violence’ will result; if solved equitably, peace will result.Footnote 102 FEA work argues that handling the First Difference through reconstituted cultural and legal institutions might decrease corruption and violence, and facilitate a more equal, less violent resolution. Consequently, it is this interaction among the first conflict, the first Difference, and the first Other that makes possible ‘the equation of women and states’, whereby ‘the attitudes towards women become templates for attitudes towards states’.Footnote 103 In this view, social events and social forces remain ‘proximate causal mechanisms’ while the ‘ultimate’ causal mechanisms are that set of naturally selected anatomical differences.Footnote 104
As such, FEA treats the forces of sexual selection as ahistorical, universal, and unmediated – a ‘disjunctive and biological binarism’ of sex from which gender and sexuality are said to both emerge and coalesce in a heterosexual reproductive rubric.Footnote 105 This elides the fundamentally imbricated and socially variable conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality, each of which are ‘mobilized in a constitutive and productive relation to those other modes of organizing political life’.Footnote 106 Moreover, these very same elemental concepts of sex and reproduction are not devoid of politics or context in their original formulations in evolutionary biology. Misreading and oversimplifying them has not only analytical problems, but also political ones. Politically, FEA’s missteps involve a failure to explicate and contextualise evolutionary theorising, which in turn, results in naïve policy positions and the corresponding reduction of gender equality to its functional value for international and domestic security.
As Donna Haraway reminds us, the narrative of evolutionary theory is itself a product of its time and context, developed in functional and capitalist idioms, while the very discourses of survival, worth, and value in relation to individuals and populations and their ‘reproductive capital’, as Foucault carefully pointed out, effects a particular orientation towards regulation and administration of each – biopolitics – of which eugenics is but one example.Footnote 107 FEA’s failure to acknowledge such histories is troublesome, especially considering that one of its proponents suggests that when we find genetic markers that ‘raise the risk for certain populations to react with higher frequency to environmental assaults with violence, this information can aid in national security policy’.Footnote 108 Not only can such genetic markers inform national security policy, but such information might also intimate modes of ‘prophylactic treatment’ of ‘high-risk populations’.Footnote 109 In other words, FEA suggests that the state may ostensibly impartially identify, through genetic testing, those individuals deemed to be threats and, in turn, justify targeted interventions and treatments to minimise those risks. Indeed, it was the belief in hereditary predispositions that rationalised the eugenics programmes in the United States – to ensure that those deemed socially deviant (Mexicans, Native Americans, African Americans, disabled) and potentially criminal were unable to reproduce.Footnote 110 The vision of ‘race betterment’, popular in the US in the early twentieth century, continues to silently structure the sorts of claims of prophylactic treatment made by Hatemi and McDermott, while the screening and management of perceived risk of certain population for violence cannot be disentangled from policies of racial incarceration.Footnote 111
Engaging with this history of evolutionary theorising also highlights how the heterosexual reproductive rubric central to FEA is not primordial but is enmeshed in racialised notions of sexuality and sexualised notions of race that construct forms of sexuality and reproduction as perverse or productive, degenerate, or desirable. The language of ‘fitness’ that governs the rules of sexual selection has been used by states and institutions to control the reproduction of those seen as less ‘fit’ – often not only in the name of species survival, but also in terms of species ideal refinement.Footnote 112
More specifically, we see in some iterations of FEA these sorts of orderings where the failure to temper the ‘evolutionary legacy of male dominance’ is associated (incorrectly, even on the terms set out in the work) with Islam.Footnote 113 According to some FEA scholarship, evolutionary male violence and dominance can, in part, be undermined through ‘the prohibition of polygyny (and) the elimination of early marriage for girls’.Footnote 114 Failure to do so is implied as unique to Islamic states (though it is neither universally true of Islamic states nor limited to those states).Footnote 115 This inference, however, undergirds a claim that ‘primitive’ Islamic states, indexed under the term of ‘Islamic Civilization’, have not yet ‘advanced’ to counter this evolutionary legacy in the way progressive, Western states have done so and, instead ‘embrace’ it.Footnote 116 Consequently, the tired and disabused colonial trope of Islamic civilisations as backwards and regressive, in need of ‘a good breath of Western logic, education, or liberalism’, is reformulated once again as an argument for gender equality and against violence.Footnote 117 Here, we can partially contextualise President Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’, which states ‘the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred … including “honor” killings, and other forms of violence against women’.Footnote 118 Institutionalised as such in a capitalist, imperial, racist, international context, claims about the relationship among sex, gender, and violence cannot be anything but always and already politically situated, reflecting and forwarding a particular vision of political futures.
This lack of engagement with the history of evolutionary theorising is highly problematic as it informs the very logic by which FEA precedes, but so too is its lack of engagement with critical feminist critiques of the state and institutions as instrumentalising attention to gender equality solely in terms of use value. Hudson et al. do recognise that the ‘state is a double-edged sword for women’, and ‘unleashing the power of the state in the lives of women can have devastating consequences’.Footnote 119 But, they do not integrate this insight into their advocacy for state-based solutions to provide women ‘equal opportunities’. FEA’s critical miscomprehension of how a reliance on the state to ameliorate the ‘evolutionary legacy of male violence’ – made specifically in terms of its own civilisational arguments with its emphasis on the centrality of heterosexual reproduction in heteronormative families – facilitates increased and racialised surveillance, regulation, and legalisation of a highly specific interpretation of sex/gender/sexuality, not only domestically but internationally.Footnote 120 Within their formulation, the pursuit of what FEA calls the ‘inestimably valuable policy agenda’ of women’s security as tied to the security of states is not neutral.Footnote 121
Scholars such as Wendy Brown and Angela Davis have clearly outlined how interventions from the state ostensibly in response to ‘unmitigated male violence’ are not only differentially administered according to race, class, and other lines, but also risk codifying what Wendy Brown termed a ‘state of injury’ (or what FEA work repeatedly refers to as wounding) as the only position from which a claim for recognition can be made.Footnote 122 As Brown notes, ‘historically, the argument that women require protection by and from men has been critical to legitimating women’s exclusion from some spheres and confinement in others’, and in regulating the protection of some women to the detriment of others. Footnote 123 Kristin Bumiller argues that in the ideological framework of a neoliberal state, feminist analyses of violence are appropriated insofar as they advance the role of ‘experts’ and ‘administration’ and, as such, are reliant on ‘the language of surveillance, diagnosis and control’.Footnote 124 In her contemporary work on the co-optation of domestic violence movement in the service of a racialised carceral state, Beth Richie delimits how ‘welfare policy can be used to coerce poor woman of color to a one-size-fits-all heteropatriarchal model of kinship relations’.Footnote 125 She further details how ‘generalized vulnerability based on gender … does not incorporate other dimensions of power imbalance’, crucially those manifested through race, class, and sexuality, and fails to adequately comprehend the imbricated workings of state and social power manifested through economic exploitation and political disenfranchisement.Footnote 126
Such a one-size-fits-all monological model is the foundation of the argument FEA makes in regard to family law. Hudson et al. contend that ‘dominance over female by males is at the foundation of historical family law because of our common evolutionary legacy … in which powerful males made family law in the image of their own reproductive interests’.Footnote 127 Therefore, ‘for almost all of human history, family law looked very much the same across all cultures’.Footnote 128 In this view, reproductive interests continue to function transhistorically and universally – ‘unseen and yet determinative, gender relations underpin all macro level phenomena within a society’.Footnote 129
Yet, as Janet Halley demonstrates in her discussion of the evolution of family law, even among traditional European states, there was no template.Footnote 130 Rather, as she, Laurel Weldon and Mala Htun note, family law was always reorganised, rearticulated, and redefined over time, influenced heavily by competing conceptions, both subtle and complex, of the meaning of sexuality and reproduction.Footnote 131 Htun and Weldon explain that marriage, for example, changed from a contract to a status, while motherhood was first legally conceptualised as deriving from marriage rather than from childbearing. These interpretations and formulations of family law, touching on sex, sexuality, and kinship, cannot be disregarded as simple reflections of a fixed and universal gender inequality grounded in an unchanging reproductive rubric as FEA suggests. For in FEA’s formulation not only is gender ahistorical, but history is epiphenomenal. Family law was not (and is not) an effect of fundamental and permanent features of sex, sexuality and kinship, but of the organisation and interpretation of them: ‘juridical systems of power produce the subjects they come to represent’.Footnote 132 As Halley concludes, there is no such thing as an ‘original, essential, mystical, transtemporal and transpatial’ family, rooted in heterosexual reproduction.Footnote 133 And, when it appears, we should recognise its historicity and delineate its ‘ideological investments’.
The recent debate in France over the establishment of pacts of civil solidarity (PACs), a legal form of civil unions between two adults, can bring into focus the complex and precarious effects of calling on the state and family law to identify and correct for inequality, as well as the consequences of evolutionary theory in politics. In addressing this highly complicated debate over PACs, which involved interlocking claims for recognition of equal rights by different groups – women, immigrants, and homosexuals – we are following FEA’s suggestive repeated citations of the philosopher Sylvíane Agacinski who was intimately involved.Footnote 134 This debate circulated around what Camille Robcis terms ‘familialism’, for example, the promotion of normative heterosexual family, in which evolutionary theory, structuralism, and psychoanalysis converged to argue for the privileging of heterosexual reproduction.Footnote 135 As Robcis notes, during the debate ‘gender, sexuality, and kinship’ were positioned as if ‘they were the universal trans-historical structures upholding the public’, mirroring the logic of the First Difference.Footnote 136 The threat of homosexual reproduction, either through adoption or reproductive technologies, was identified as symbolically, culturally, and institutionally corrupting the state and its institutions because it disrupted what Agacinski calls a ‘natural heterosexuality’.Footnote 137 As she argued, ‘a homosexual marriage would make individuals of the same sex parental couples which would call in to question the difference between the sexes and institute the fiction of ‘homosexual fertility’.Footnote 138 Further undergirding this claim was that homosexual (or any single sex) parenting undermines the very psycho-social framework that the child requires in order to ‘know’ and understand sexual difference and, therefore, gain an orientation of the world. Consequently, homosexual parenting pathologised the child and, in terms of FEA, puts at risk the possibility of world peace.
Accordingly, recognition of homosexual marriage or reproduction forces the disappearance of what both FEA and Agacinski deem as vital to human organisation and the founding of the state, the interaction of the First Other and the First Difference in heterosexual procreation. And, since according to FEA, it is the child who learns to negotiate the First Difference differently, and thus pave the way to world peace, neither can it risk the potential pathologisation of the child. Likewise, Agacinski dismisses all same sex institutions – be they found in parliaments or in marriage – as incapable of representing or ensuring equality because equality is fundamentally rooted in sex complementarity evidenced by the heterosexual couple.Footnote 139 So, too, does FEA insist upon sex complementarity; namely, the ‘two halves’ of humanity providing a ‘necessary counterpart’ for each to ‘flourish in a true partnership’ – the hallmark of which is when women’s ‘contributions to the marriage and to the family’ are ‘deeply appreciated’.Footnote 140
By tracing this citation in tandem with FEA’s reliance on the First Difference/First Other and its construction of sex/sexuality, we document how FEA entrenches an inherently conservative and prohibitive formulation of the family, necessarily heterosexual in both form and expression, which muddies equality with sex complementarity, and reaffirms not only the state’s right, but its prerogative, to ensure a specific form of reproduction.Footnote 141 Perhaps this is why FEA scholarship finds itself having a significant amount in common with traditionalist interpretations of sex, gender, and heterosexuality, such as those forwarded by the Holy See in the debate about the Rome Statue for the International Criminal Court.Footnote 142
Importantly, it is this understanding of role of what FEA calls the ‘good state’, which will be mobilised in their advocacy for the Responsibility to Protect Women (R2PW), and its complementary list of ‘state sponsors of gender terror’. The R2PW is an explicitly ‘feminist hawk’ position, or a ‘Fempolitik’, which would justify the use of force to ‘protect and liberate women from severe oppression’.Footnote 143 We will not rehearse in detail the critiques of such invocation of women’s rights and liberties to justify military force and intervention, but suffice to say that we have seen this before. Obviously, actions like the invasion of Afghanistan, ostensibly to protect women, are congruent with this approach and indeed dictate it. Yet, as Helen M. Kinsella and others have argued elsewhere, we should not mistake how the claim to ensure the ‘rights and liberties’ of women obfuscates the fundamentally coercive focus on women as (biopolitical) objects of control for the ultimate goal – namely, control of the territory in/through control of the population. ‘Doubly situating women in the crosshairs, as both subject to and objects of force, and, insidiously, as a “force multiplier” for all sides, knowing and controlling the women becomes the difference between winning or losing.’Footnote 144
Thus, the logic of FEA validates an expansive form of militarism, which explicitly identifies reproduction as a site of state intervention domestically and internationally – promoting a ‘managed sexuality for the health of the state’.Footnote 145 Indeed, we already have evidence of these possible effects in international and domestic responses to trafficking, which ‘invariably lapsed into the use of sexual and moral surveillance techniques over women while also betraying a visceral concern over border security’, as part of what Ratna Kapur describes as the ‘sexual security regime’.Footnote 146 When combined with FEA’s intense focus on demography, specifically the threat posed by a ‘surplus’ of young, single males, we can see that what is at risk, at the very least, is a perpetual governmentality, a perpetual regulation of sexuality by those ‘powerful states’ who are locked in a ‘zero sum’ game.
Further, beholden to the logic of evolutionary theorising, women are figured and traded as commodities not only in a reproductive economy, but in the economy of international security to be exchanged and bartered, in terms of protection and regulation, and in the service of world peace. For example, in Security Council Resolution 1325, the primacy of peace and security as motivating factors for the adoption of the resolution is clear. Nowhere in Resolution 1325 is the safety and participation of women an end in itself. Resolution 1325 outlines several explicit ways that the inclusion and protection of women furthers the goal of international peace and security, and its ‘sister’ resolutions develop this rationale.Footnote 147 Although scholars of these resolutions are rightly mixed in their assessments, there is general agreement that these resolutions are strategic on the part of states insofar as they advance already identified goals, thus the potentially emancipatory power of recognising and addressing women’s unique experiences and contributions during armed conflict, their ‘substantive political content’, are made subservient to bureaucratic and state goals.Footnote 148 Inclusion comes at the price of instrumentalisation, and protection comes at the price of participation.
Similarly, Megan MacKenzie’s work on the Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) programmes in postconflict Sierra Leone provides an example of the problems of policy based the assumptions of FEA work.Footnote 149 MacKenzie documents that international actors looking to reconstruct Sierra Leone recognised the existence of female fighters in the conflict and therefore decided that there should be a DDR programme for female soldiers as well as male soldiers. Despite that progressive recognition, the organisations treated women’s violence as anomalous, both for the general population of women and for each individual woman who engaged in political violence. As such, the programmes offered to women who were in the process of disarming emphasised needs traditionally associated with femininity, including but not limited to marriage and reproduction prospects. The best estimates suggest that most of the women who fought in the conflict in Sierra Leone bypassed the DDR process, given both its public nature and that the incentives it provided did not match their needs. This is because, whether it is in Sierra Leone or New York, people do not fall into strict categories of female/feminine and male/masculine, and they do not seek nor occupy traditional sex roles in heterosexual reproduction to the exclusion of other roles, in sex or in life. Those sorts of policies replicate the errors of the assumptions upon which they are based. Consequently, they are ineffective in resolving the challenges for which they were formulated. Rather, such polices evince what Sara Ahmed calls ‘sticky attachments’.Footnote 150 Namely, ‘neo-feminist scholarship performatively injects a sense of normality back into the feminist/gender/IR interruption by reasserting traditional erotic economies and heteronormative arrangements, partly by invoking logics which work through a series of “sticky attachments” to highly emotive gendered narratives.’Footnote 151
Significantly, such sticky attachments also work in equally powerful ways to justify male violence. Recollect, that after the abuses by UN peacekeepers came to public attention in the 1990s, the UN’s top official in Cambodia Yasushi Akashi played down the gravity of the allegations, saying, ‘Boys will be boys’, and it was ‘natural’ for young men to ‘chase young beautiful things of the opposite sex’.Footnote 152 Although Hudson et al. repetitively state that is not their argument; they do not confront how FEA’s argument about the ‘evolutionary legacy of male violence’ provides a rationale and justification for the naturalness of male violence as the ‘ultimate cause’.Footnote 153 Politically, what FEA risks is embedding in already regressive institutions, such as the UN, is an essentialism and a ready defence and explanation, indeed a legitimation, of inaction, for example, ‘boys will be boys’ or ‘evolution made me do it’. This is not a minor concern.
FEA’s neglect of these possibilities would simply be faulty academic work if it were not so appealing, both across the academy and to those in the policy world who have started looking for ‘feminist’ foreign policies that use women to make peacekeepers less likely to commit crimes,Footnote 154 that use women’s and queer rights as axes of superiority,Footnote 155 and that claim to look out for women in the interest of peace and counter-extremism.Footnote 156 If women’s rights are invoked to counter the ‘evolutionary legacy’ of male violence, then these rights are inevitably reduced to instruments, such that even insomuch as the policies are ostensibly made for women, they are actually geared to and subsumed by other ends, where women benefiting from them is an ancillary goal, and the primary goal is the improvement of international peace and security (in UN terms) and the reduction of violence (in FEA scholars’ terms).
Indeed, this is most recently captured by the phrase ‘feminism as counter-terrorism’, which is only made legible and legitimate without an analysis of the political context in which it emerged and the policies that it sanctions. As Fionnuala Ní Aoláin argues, ‘sporadic references to women’ in counterterrorism policies ‘serve important legitimacy and symbolic functions’ for subsequent policies which, in fact, because of ‘the wider legitimacy conferred on the use of multilateral force … the increased status and deference given to maintaining and extending international security regimes’, result in increased risk and insecurity to women – who, in the discourse of counter terrorism, appear solely as wives and mothers.Footnote 157 These are among the perverse results of using instrumentalised and essentialist accounts of gender in security discourses.
Conclusion
We have disputed and challenged the interpretation and use of evolutionary theory that informs FEA and outlines its negative normative implications and practical effects. The effects include promoting state ‘managed’ heterosexual/heteronormative sexual and familial relations and a dismissal and denigration of alternative forms of sexuality and familial relations. We have argued that FEA’s theoretical foundation is, in fact, a regulation of sexuality not in the service of gender equality, but in service of gender complementarity. To be clear, we are not advocating against the rights and inclusion of women in global politics. Quite the opposite. We are arguing that the instrumental and highly specified basis for rights and inclusion is actually a form of deformation of both, a certain kind of caging and therefore exclusion. Further, we showed how FEA’s presumption that sex and gender are universal, homogenous, and descriptive categories rather than heterogeneous and productive ones, combined with its faith in the benevolent paternalism of the state, renders it unable to anticipate, account for, or mediate repressive outcomes or to identify coercion, social control, predation, and repression as fundamental to the state’s promise of protection and recognition, and not as an aberration of it. Power does not merely act upon these categories but produces them.
FEA is unable to account for this, in part, because power in FEA is ultimately grounded in, and returns to, the physical power of males. FEA argues that ‘women accede to male dominance hierarchies because of the one terrible threat which never goes away’.Footnote 158 While we certainly note the function of the ‘rape script’ as Sharon Marcus termed it, Joan Scott also helps us to identify how such a construction assumes a ‘consistent or inherent meaning for the human body – outside social or cultural construction – and thus the ahistoricity of sex/gender itself’.Footnote 159 According to FEA, women’s rights intervene only insofar as they curb or constrain the evolutionary legacy of male violence, which remains fundamentally unchanged, while women are everywhere constituted the same, as always already potential and passive victims.
To invoke nature in the service of politics is always a risk. We argue that paying attention to FEA shows how a particular interpretation of reproduction becomes ‘not only the genetic original and the first material, but also the sole controlling reference’, such that ‘politics is anything but able to dominate nature … to its ends, so itself “emerges” informed in such a way that it leaves no space for other constructive possibilities’.Footnote 160 First, FEA trivialises (as we discussed earlier) the multiple intersections of race, class, or disability-related oppressions with and related to both gender oppression and gender emancipation. Second, FEA’s presumption of an absolutely homogenous category of women united by the threat of male violence also erases different forms and histories of gender and violence, domestically and internationally. It does so as it explicitly hitches itself to an expansive militarised hegemonic state politics in which ‘national security is the foremost concern, the stakes are zero sum, and the most powerful states are the only ones that matter’.Footnote 161 Thus, third, FEA’s promotion of a specific form of gender equality (which is more accurately phrased and understood as gender complementarity) as a counter-evolutionary ‘social’ answer to ‘biological’ violence trades off with the ability to see other, more radical, and potentially more solvent, adaptations to address the problem of violence – from radical economic change to weapons disarmament. And, finally, if ‘women’s rights are a fundamental pillar’ of this vision of international politics, then women’s rights are devoid of any emancipatory or revolutionary potential – they exist in the service of a bellicose state which, contrary to FEA’s claim, all but ensures the continuation of violence.Footnote 162 Therefore, as we have argued, it is vitally necessary to grasp precisely what is at stake when we frame our responses to violence as response to a ‘evolutionary legacy of male violence’ because the specific importation and interpretation of evolutionary theorising introduced and defended by FEA and its explicit policy recommendations are precarious and flawed foundations upon which to predicate either peace or equality.
