Gendering Counterinsurgency

Performativity, Embodiment and Experience in the Afghan 'Theatre of War'

Synne L. Dyvik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317438397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book analyses the various ways counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is gendered.

The book examines the US led war in Afghanistan from 2001 onwards, including the invasion, the population-centric counterinsurgency operations and the efforts to train a new Afghan military charged with securing the country when the US and NATO withdrew their combat forces in 2014. Through an analysis of key counterinsurgency texts and military memoirs, the book explores how gender and counterinsurgency are co-constitutive in numerous ways. It discusses the multiple military masculinities that counterinsurgency relies on, the discourse of 'cultural sensitivity', and the deployment of Female Engagement Teams (FETs). Gendering Counterinsurgency demonstrates how population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine and practice can be captured within a gendered dynamic of 'killing and caring' – reliant on physical violence, albeit mediated through 'armed social work'. This simultaneously contradictory and complementary dynamic cannot be understood without recognising how the legitimation and the practice of this war relied on multiple gendered embodied performances of masculinities and femininities. Developing the concept of 'embodied performativity' this book shows how the clues to understanding counterinsurgency, as well as gendering war more broadly are found in war's everyday gendered manifestations.

This book will be of much interest to students of counterinsurgency warfare, gender politics, governmentality, biopolitics, critical war studies, and critical security studies in general.

1 Performing gender in the ‘theatre of war’

IR has traditionally studied war as a structural, strategic, or ideologically driven phenomenon, rather than something analysed through its connections to people and their experiences. Neo-realists tend to explain and study war on a systemic level where ‘international anarchy’ becomes a permissive cause of war. Liberals on the other hand largely analyse war through theories of ‘democratic peace’ and often attribute war as a failure of international cooperation (Sjoberg, 2013: 110). Many feminists in IR on the other hand argue that it is impossible to grasp the meanings, feeling, and practices associated with the dual concepts of war and security outside of its gendered manifestations (Peterson, 2010; Sjoberg, 2013, 2016). While feminist approaches to war and security come in various forms (Sjoberg, 2013: 4–5; Sylvester, 2013), they tend to want to unveil the gendered and racial underpinnings of much of IR scholarship (Kronsell, 2012: 110) through shifting the gaze from the disembodied to the embodied.

There are numerous ways in which this can be done. However, critical and/or poststructuralist feminist approaches to IR often use a form of discourse analysis to unpack and deconstruct dominant gendered discourses performed by states, militaries, institutions, and mainstream IR scholarship as a means to show how our constructions of the world impact on what policies are made possible. Through emphasising their ‘artificiality and fluidity’ (Duncanson, 2013: 16), categories like ‘women’, ‘men’, ‘soldiers’, and ‘war’ can all be interrogated and deconstructed. These moves enable feminists to point to how gender functions through spaces, sites, and events that on the surface are not seen to have anything to do with gender. When gender is studied in this way, it is treated as simultaneously a noun, a verb and a logic that is both a product of and productive of particular practices (Shepherd, 2008: 3). Gender is studied analytically, meaning that it is treated as more than an ‘added value’ or a particular ‘perspective’ (Cockburn, 2010; Peterson, 2010). This means that instead of only studying gendered effects or consequences of a particular policy, there is recognition that gender is also constitutive of that policy to begin with. Crucially, this type of critical feminist analysis maintains that gender is ‘systemic’ so that ‘manifestations of gender are less individual “choices” than effects of institutionalized codes, norms and rules’ (Peterson, 2010; 18).

As outlined in the introduction, the feminist analysis of the war in Afghanistan that this book advocates is one that underlines the intimate relationship between performativity and embodiment. What this means is discussed theoretically here and then analysed through the course of the book. After developing this theoretically this chapter proceeds to link this specifically to an analysis of militarism and counterinsurgency. This framework offers a more rigorous analysis of counterinsurgency than the most prevalent of critical approaches to population-centric counterinsurgency, namely biopolitical readings. This is because it captures the crucial gendered dimension to the dynamic of ‘killing and caring’ that population-centric counterinsurgency’s kinetic and non-kinetic practices engage in. The management, not only of the population in this sense, but also counterinsurgents embodied and performed femininities and masculinities is a vital enabler for population-centric counterinsurgency as it was practiced in Afghanistan.

Embodied performativity

The practice of war is intimately connected to performances and embodiments of gender, race, and sexuality. In order to analyse these, a series of moves are applied to deconstruct powerful discourses that enable and legitimate particular gender performances. Herein, power is seen to work through a series of technologies that are not necessarily immediately visible, but which create the common sense ‘truth’ about sex, gender, and bodies – and this is what needs to be questioned and picked apart (Jegerstedt, 2008: 75).

The doing rather than the having of gender is central to understanding gender as performative. In Butler’s framework, identities are ‘fictional’ in the sense that they do not exist prior to the power–knowledge nexus, and that they ‘produce the identity they are deemed to be simply representing’ (Gill, 2008; 17). Because the ‘ideal is never accomplished, it must always be attempted again’ such that we end up with a series of repetitive performances (Loxley, 2007: 124). In this sense, performativity can be understood as a ‘reformulation of Foucault’s concept of discourse’, where the performative aspects of discourse work through repetitions and citations which in turn produce, regulate, and destabilise the subject (Jegerstedt, 2008; 83). Therefore, in the strictest sense, the gendered body has no ‘ontological status’ beyond the various acts that bring it into reality (Butler, 1999: 185). To study the production of subjects in discourse, therefore, requires one to view subjects as being continuously subject to and participants of those productions, in other words, they are both produced and productive, both discursively constituted and embodied.¹ Butler (1993: xvi–xvii) writes:

To claim that the subject is itself produced in and as a gendered matrix of relations is not to do away with the subject, but only to ask after the conditions of its emergence and operation. The ‘activity’ of this gendering cannot, strictly speaking, be a human act or expression, a wilful appropriation, and is certainly not a question of taking on a mask; it is the matrix through which all willing first becomes possible, its enabling cultural condition. In this sense, the matrix of gender relations is prior to the emergence of the ‘human’.²

Because ‘doing gender’ is a performative act, it is also fundamentally a social act, enabled through collaboration with others. However, thinking of gender as performative is not simply a reformulation of the distinction between a biologically grounded ‘sex’ and a socially constructed ‘gender’, as the former neither exists independently, nor neutrally of the latter. In the words of Elizabeth Grosz (1994: 18), it is ‘not clear how one can eliminate the effects of (social) gender to see the contributions of (biological) sex. The body cannot be understood as a neutral screen, a biological tabula rasa onto which masculine or feminine could be indifferently projected’. Rather, people perform their gender in accordance with recognisable cultural, social, and historical boundaries, and the possibilities are not, as in the logical extension of the sex–gender binary would suggest, infinite.

Crucially, gendered performances are not neutral in terms of value or status. The gendered matrix does not exclude, but rather includes, a gendered hierarchy. States, institutions, militaries, places of work, schools, families, and society more widely offers rewards and acknowledgements for ‘correct’ gendered performances in accordance with what is deemed appropriately ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’. This dual pair, while rarely universally recognisable and internally coherent, does not exist on equal terms in relation to one another. Through thinking of gender as a particular kind of logic in this way, one can begin to understand how policies, states, practices, individuals, and emotions are imbued with gendered hierarchies ‘where those things understood as female and feminized are often devalorized and infantilized’ (Sjoberg, 2016: 2).

However, while gender is constituted through discourse, this crucially does not mean that it is disembodied. Rather, a variety of feminine and masculine performances are constantly being acted and reacted on and by physical bodies through a series of ‘identifiable linguistic and non-linguistic practices that constitute our understanding of gender’ (Shepherd, 2010: 13). When the term gender is used in this book it therefore applies to a range of embodied practices, interwoven with race, class, and sexuality, which become intelligible when characterised as various forms of masculinity and femininity. This is in keeping with Butler’s concept of performativity, which was never meant to be radically disconnected from people’s physical bodies. In Butler’s work, performativity is related both to gender identity, as in Gender Trouble (1999), but also to the repetitive act of how bodies become constituted as matter, as illustrated in Bodies that Matter (1993).³ In the latter the emphasis is on understanding the body less as a construction and more as a materialisation ‘that stabilises over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface we call matter’ (Butler, 1993: xviii). In this framework therefore, performativity and embodiment is intimately linked. Because gender is viewed as something simultaneously embodied and performed, it is also fluid and dynamic. This is visible in the many ways of being ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, depending on time and context. Throughout this book, attention is placed on the various forms of femininity and masculinity that are performed at various stages and depending on context. Throughout this book, this is referred to as embodied performativity.

Embodiment is a term that at the very basic level recognises we access the world through our bodies (Richardson and Locks, 2014: ix). As people we are bounded creatures, and this affects how we approach the world, live in it and react to it. The spatial and temporal surroundings we happen to inhabit at any given point provides us the basis for our experiences, which in turn shape emotional responses, outlooks, practices, and our sense of self. As a theoretical perspective and methodology of enquiry, embodiment is therefore closely related to phenomenology, which emphasises that our perceptions are what provide us access to the world (Merleau-Ponty, 2002; see also Levinas, 1979). As a conceptual framework, this challenges the Cartesian dualism of mind–body through its insistence that life is experienced and made sense of on, through, and between embodied selves. Rather than reducing human experiences to the faculties of the mind, or alternatively to instinct and ‘raw’ biology, situating embodiment and performativity as intimately connected enables an approach that recognises the importance of one’s own and others’ embodied selves as vital for those experiences in the first place, as well as the performative communication of that experience.

Embodiment is a particularly useful concept to capture the writing of wartime experience in military memoirs in three specific, but interwoven levels – on, through, and between embodied selves. Military memoirs chart the embodiment of war on the body through the marks that war bodies carry with them. These include scars, scratches, wounds, amputations, sunburn, but also particular haircuts, grooming regimes, and tattoos. Military memoirs also speak of war experiences through the body in the way that war is performed and narrated to a wider audience by reference to a range of bodily and visceral emotions and senses such as thirst, hunger, fatigue, fear, joy, desire, and excitement. This is a central part of combat narratives in particular (Dyvik, 2016a). However, military memoirs also speak of the embodiment of war happening between embodied selves. The coming together of individuals as a collective unit frames the way that war is made sense of with reference to processes of militarisation, notions of ‘brotherhood’, ‘knowing’ what others are doing and ‘sensing’ their presence in particular ways (Dyvik, 2016a).

While sensory regimes, emotions, and embodied experiences may easily be deemed to be purely instinctive and immediate, this would be an analytical mistake. First, processes of militarisation and practices of war are deeply and intimately bound up with gendered performances. The making of soldier embodiments, the building of a military force, and the centrality of particular bonding rituals bound up with historically exclusive gendered notions of ‘brotherhood’ mean that these embodied experiences will always be mediated by powerful gendered discourses of meaning, comprehension, and expectations of what militarisation and war has in store. Second, any literary or oral narration of said experience will always be bounded by and made intelligible to others through discourse. This is not to take away the often deeply felt uniqueness and individuality of wartime experiences that military memoirs describe, but to recognise that the communication of embodied experiences will always be performative. How these experiences are narrated, in what order, which words are used and who is offered a central role in them therefore give us important clues in unpacking the various threads in a web of gendered knots.

The philosopher James Mensch (2009) argues that taking embodiment seriously means accepting that it affects the totality of our understanding and that the concept necessitates two interlinked recognitions. First, that to be embodied is to be physically situated in the world. We are all uniquely thrust upon the world, and whatever we live our lives doing; this is a condition that is maintained throughout our lifetime. It is not something we grow out of or can escape. The centrality of being physically situated in a space forms a central part of all military memoirs (Dyvik, 2016b). They are narratives of experiences from particular places, ones that are only immediately accessible by being situated in that space. This becomes even more important to recognise when military memoirs chart the challenge of coming to terms with the ‘over there’ versus ‘here’. As in Jacob Siegel’s short story ‘Smile, There Are IED’s Everywhere’:

Over there things were clear … and after the bomb goes off and you make it out okay, what about the silence after that when it’s still ringing in your ears like a bell from somewhere else? How are you going to hear your old self through that, whatever you thought you wanted? All that fear and heat, satisfaction and lust, that’s what your dreams are made of. Look around you, man, this is not what I was coming back to. This is just dirt and steel and other people.

(Scranton and Gallagher, 2013: 4)

However, this physical situatedness is only part of what embodiment as a concept captures. The second central part to the concept of embodiment is the recognition that ‘our need for the world is also a need for one another’.

Our embodied nature is such that we can neither be nor be conceivably without one another. As Aristotle expressed this, a single individual ‘may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts’. Apart from the board and the other pieces, the piece has no sense. This does not mean that humans in their interdependence are identical to one another; like the pieces on the board, their very positionality as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Performing gender in the ‘theatre of war’
• 2 Gendered invasions
• 3 Gendering the ‘kinder, gentler’ war
• 4 Embodying combat and fighting in counterinsurgency
• 5 A ‘woman’s touch’ to counterinsurgency
• 6 Producing masculinities, justifying withdrawal
• Conclusion
• Index