Feminist Security Studies (FSS) is quickly becoming a recognized area of research. Recent articles in Security Studies (Sjoberg Reference Sjoberg2009) and International Security (Hudson et al. Reference Hudson, Caprioli, Balif-Spanvill, McDermott and Emmett2008/9) specifically address the contributions of FSS to the field of security studies, a network of scholars working in FSS is regularly represented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, and the terminology has been used in many recent publications (e.g. Hansen Reference Hansen2009; Shepherd 2010; Sjoberg and Martin Reference Sjoberg, Martin and Denemark2010; Wibben Reference Wibben, Cavelty and Mauer2009, 2011).Footnote ¹ Given the proliferation of feminist security scholarship, which is based on a variety of feminisms, feminist scholars should begin to debate the content and scope of their research. Not only is there now enough material to do so, but there also are some real differences in feminist scholarship—and these differences matter.Footnote ²

To this author, a feminism where “anything goes” is not going to “do the trick,” especially as feminist scholars engage traditional IR. When Carmen Vasquez says she does not think it is funny when feminists claim there are as many feminisms as there are feminists (quoted in hooks Reference hooks1984), I have to agree. Ideally, feminism emerges in response to a particular political moment, a particular economic, social, and symbolic order. Feminist scholarship, in close collaboration with feminist activism, has the task of articulating grievances emerging as a result of that order and ways to promote change within it. Consequently, feminist scholarship is infused with the contradictions between feminist ideals, feminist activism, and everyday resistance to a particular order, which demand a constant adjustment of strategies and should propel the feminist scholar to continually address her own bias. Feminist knowledge is always situated knowledge also because of what is seen, studied, or theorized and how depends on where one stands. The soccer mom in Ohio, the graduate student of feminist IR, the female soldier in Israel, or the schoolgirl in Afghanistan experiences the impact of U.S. security policy differently, as would males in the corresponding situations. Their analyses and recommendations will be shaped by their standpoint.

Certainly, not all feminists need to, or could, agree on everything such that there would be a single feminist position. There are, however, some basic commitments that are not negotiable, chief among them that feminism is a political project committed to emancipation/ empowerment and broader social justice. FSS, like feminist IR more generally, needs to dig deeper than a simple addition of women or gender would allow for. It needs to ask feminist questions and develop a feminist curiosity (cf. Enloe Reference Enloe2004). The first task of a feminist security scholar should be to develop a willingness to listen, to consider another view of the world. An empathetic listener must be willing to accept vulnerability, “to suffer alienation and self-disruption” (Lugones and Spelman Reference Lugones and Spellman1983, 576). She must be willing to suspend her own framework of meaning to “accept that some events ‘resist simple, straightforward comprehension’; they ‘demand witness but defy narrative expression’” (Apfelbaum, quoted in Andrews Reference Andrews2007, 40). Embracing empathetic listening techniques (cf. Sylvester Reference Sylvester1994), and the slippage in positionality that accompanies them, are of fundamental importance to the feminist project. This necessitates a certain fragmentation of subjectivity within feminist IR in order “not to replicate the oppressive categorizations and exclusions of the metanarrative” (Jabri and O'Gorman Reference Jabri and O'Gorman1999, 7).

It is, above all, feminists' methodological commitments (cf. Tickner Reference Tickner, Ackerly, Stern and True2006, 22–29) that distinguish feminist security studies from other approaches. The difference in scope and contents of critical security studies, which tackle many of the same issues and, for the most part, embrace an emancipatory agenda, illustrates this.Footnote ³ First, critical security scholars tend not to ask feminist research questions, and “the definition of problematics [is] a chief culprit in creating the racism, classism, and androcentrism of science to which feminists and others object” (Harding Reference Harding1986, 239). Second, while they deepen their levels of analysis to include humanity or the individual, they do not base their research on women's experiences, nor do they interrogate gender as part of a matrix of power where it intersects with other markers such as class, race, nation, religion, sexuality, and more. As a result, non-feminist critical security scholars find themselves with strikingly different research agendas, findings, and policy recommendations. Feminist security scholars, with their unique methodological choices (including the recognition of the performative nature of gender/sex), can counter the prevalence of bodiless data in security studies by highlighting personal stories.

Basing their research on women's experience, feminists challenge security studies (and IR) at their base by bringing identity into the political arena.Footnote ⁴ Doing so, they violate one of the most fundamental tenets of liberalism: “Liberalism's universal citizen has no identity: he is abstract, eschewing the particularity of identity. Identity politics challenges this by bringing the particular into politics” (Hekman Reference Hekman, Taylor and Vintges2004, 197). The insistence on the particular, anchored in the commitment to theorizing on the basis of everyday experience of gendered (and classed, raced, sexualized, etc.) subjects, inevitably provides for different kinds of security narratives than those traditionally told in the discipline of IR. “Violence that is poorly understood through the lenses of the dominant logic of security,” writes Maria Stern, “could be better understood if we began asking questions about the damage that can occur at the confluence of competing identity claims and the efforts at securing subject positions” (2005, 11). Studying the everyday experiences of violence by variously located subjects, feminists find that questions of identity and security are fundamentally interwoven; any security narrative is also a narrative of political identity (Peterson Reference Peterson and Peterson1992; Stern Reference Stern2005, Reference Stern, Ackerly, Stern and True2006; Sylvester Reference Sylvester and Forcey1989, Reference Sylvester1993). FSS, then, needs to investigate identity and security as mutually constitutive and shifting, even as some aspects are more enduring than others—and seemingly incommensurable (Wibben Reference Wibben2011).

An FSS that adheres to these principles would ask security scholars to abandon the search for security as traditionally conceived and acknowledge: that we are always already insecure, that there is no escape from our fundamental condition of vulnerability—and ultimately, from death.Footnote ⁵ This poses a major challenge to security scholars, traditional and critical, as well as to many feminists who have a tendency to exhibit an awkward do-goodism in the imperialist tradition of “saving natives.” In the 1970s and 1980s, Black, Chicana, lesbian, and Third World feminists (cf. Combahee River Collective [1983] 2000; Lorde Reference Lorde1984; Mohanty Reference Mohanty1988; Moraga and Anzaldúa [1979] 1983) challenged liberal feminists to reconsider their facile assumptions about all women and their tendency to homogenize the Third World—yet, IR (including some IR feminists) still engages in the same practices? A decade into the twenty-first century, it is time to recognize that no culture is as homogenous as we assume it to be and that we do not have all the answers. “I do not think that you have any obligation to understand us,” María C. Lugones noted almost 30 years ago. “You do have an obligation to abandon your imperialism, your universal claims, your reduction of us to yourselves simply because they seriously harm us” (Lugones and Spelman 1983, 576).

Since there is an emerging subfield of FSS, I would propose it should be resolutely feminist—and anti-imperialist. It is my contention that feminist aims and the scope of their concerns explode the confines of security studies at every possible turn (cf. Wibben Reference Wibben2011). The push to establish FSS as a subfield of security studies as is, which risks the securitization of ever more issues while relinquishing input into addressing them, is a dangerous one. Alternatively, we might locate FSS in the borderlands of security studies, so that our discussions can remain embedded in feminist debates within and outside of feminist IR. Feminist security scholars need to take traditional conceptions of security seriously because they have serious implications, but they also need to challenge their relevance and reveal their limit(s).