Gender, Agency and War

The Maternalized Body in US Foreign Policy

Tina Managhan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136454523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

This book traces practices of militarization and resistance that have emerged under the sign of motherhood in US Foreign Policy.

Gender, Agency and War examines this discourse against the background of three key moments of American foreign policy formation: the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, the Gulf War of the early 1990s, and the recent invasion of Iraq. For each of these moments the author explores the emergence of a historically specific and emblematic maternalized mode of female embodiment (ranging from the 'hysterical' antinuclear protester to the figure of 'Supermom'), in order to shed light onto the various practices which define and enable expressions of American sovereignty. In so doing, the text argues that the emergence of particular raced, gendered, and maternalized bodies ought not to be read as merely tangential to affairs of state, but as instantiations of global politics. This work urges an approach that rereads the body as an 'event' – with significant implications for the ways in which international politics and gender are currently understood.

This book will be of much interest to students of gender politics, critical security studies, US foreign policy and IR in general.

1 The vicissitudes of life

Women’s complex entanglement with peace and war

Introduction

This chapter revisits the way that feminized, maternalized bodies have figured into International Relations – to the extent they have figured at all. It suggests that feminist encounters with the subject matter can be conceived as a mapping project – one concerned with mapping women onto/into this somewhat inhospitable landscape and, in the process, altering this terrain. My own work will proceed in this vein. Christine Sylvester has conceptualized this process using metaphors from the art world, reimagining IR as a painted canvas that can be drawn anew. Of particular interest for my work here is the distinction she makes between “outlining” and “inlining.”¹ The feminist project of outlining, as she describes it, is one of painting women in – taking a pristine image of battle or a portrait of the power brokers involved in an international accord and adding to it the clutter or detail that comes from “inserting women and their usual activities into the architectures of war,” diplomacy and other international relations.² It is a process of sighting and citing women in IR. The process of inlining, by contrast, “is abstraction devoid of recognizable subjects doing recognizable things.”³ Here the subject woman cannot be so easily known or perhaps so easily situated on/off the canvas: “The canvas is all colors, drips, swirls on top of swirls, strokes, scrapes, impastos defying flat surfaces …”⁴

Both projects are inherently political. The former takes getting women on the map as its chief concern. The latter, following from the first, takes as its concern the politics of the former – i.e. the politics of drawing women in when woman herself might best be understood as a relational construct always inherently bound with relations of power. It is here where ambiguity, difference and ambivalence clamour to the fore – with woman alternately staking her claim and refusing to be in a complex and shifting game of tug-of-war. In this chapter I argue that each alternative attempt at mapping women in/on/against the canvasses of international politics is always and necessarily a simultaneous process of mapping/remapping relations of power too. The process of outlining women, for example, is never far removed from the desire to seek out the patriarchal forms of authority that demarcate the spaces of global politics into masculine and feminine in ways that govern the international and the meanings attributed to the bodies that negotiate these zones. When the task is one of sighting and citing that which is excluded from view (woman) or that which may be present, but is marginalized or distorted within predominant frames (her interests and perspectives) – such that the task is really one of locating that which was always there, but kept hidden or removed from the page – questions of gendered power relations are necessarily brought into view.⁵ Power tends to be externalized in this image, or imagined as primarily in an exterior relation to the body such that even if some norms are believed to be internalized, there is a subject woman in remainder – clearly recognizable, with interests and perspectives – that needs to be brought to the fore. The inverse is also true: imagining power in an exterior relation to the body has enabled the subject woman to be – to appear on the canvas unproblematically.

It is when feminists start inlining, blurring identities and meaning – asking “Can we be certain that women exist anywhere coherently?”⁶ – that the relations of power governing the spaces of the political, the international and female from male become harder to decipher and trace. The remainder of this chapter sets out to offer an alternative framework for mapping power and female bodies in, on, and, more specifically through the canvasses of international politics such that women still appear, but not without problem. Woman does not exist coherently, but is constantly being produced anew – negotiated, subverted and embodied – by female bodies and sometimes male ones too. In the Derridean sense, woman can be thought of as “permanently ‘under erasure’ (sous ratour), deployed on the page for tactical reasons but subject to a dislocating textual force that denies [her] any kind of semantic or conceptual stability.”⁷ Of course, this is not to say woman can be re-invented in any form or even transcended. Here I take Wendy Brown’s point:

[P]oststructural feminism’s appreciation of the psychic coordinates and repetitions constitutive of gender locate much of its production in social norms and deep processes of identifications and repudiations only intermittently knowable to its subjects, even less often graspable, and thus unsuited to a paradigm of transformation premised upon seizing and eliminating the conditions producing and reproducing gender. Certain gender conventions or norms might be resisted, subverted or resignified but resistance and resignification are not equivalent to a transformation of the conditions of gendered erotics, conditions that are no longer posited as outside of its subjects, and hence are not ours to mastermind but at best only to resist or negotiate.⁸

Similarly, to quote Lene Hansen, “Language, and the construction of identity therein, is highly structured but it is also inherently unstable.”⁹ This chapter aims to come to terms with this – situating Western woman within the shifting, yet relatively stable discursive modern framework of power relations that Foucault has labelled biopolitics. This involves a process of outlining women-as-mothers and/or the ways in which woman has been articulated in relation to a set of caring practices. It also involves a process of inlining – a process of rendering the subject woman less coherent and less stable than any particular articulation of woman-as-mother (real or symbolic) would have it. It is a simultaneous process of outlining/inlining such that the female body that appears before us in and through the gendered landscapes of international politics is always political – always implicated in power relations – and never outside. Understood thus, we can move from a reading of women and IR to a reading of the maternalized body as international politics.

Beginnings: deposing the kings that make the rest of us subject

To be sure, feminist theorists, like Carol Cohn, have already effectively deconstructed the phallocentric rationality at IR’s heart by revealing it to be not only partial, but also emotionally invested and interested – the projection of male psyches that dream of autonomy and control over their social worlds. Here and elsewhere, it has been revealed (for those of us paying attention) that the Emperor has no clothes.¹⁰ To this extent, feminist critique has effectively castrated the king – the sovereign patriarchal figure of modern IR. And yet, within a tradition of feminist IR scholarship concerned first and foremost with women’s exclusion and marginalization from the canvasses of international politics, the search for kings retains some appeal – particularly within key texts that have sought to map women’s relationship to societal processes of militarization, peace and war. Here sovereign will or those with the power to manipulate, manoeuvre, falsify, constrain and distort for the purposes of their own reign have been sought out to be exposed as that which ultimately lies behind the militarization of women. Of course, much of current feminist scholarship aims to show that women’s entanglement with what we come to label “peace” and “war” is far more complex – as is the subject “woman” that the early literature claims to speak for. In various ways she is unravelling – or at least the idealized and depoliticized woman-as-mother imagined as peaceful and innocent – on the canvas before us. It is tempting to say that if she ever existed, she exists no more, but this would not be accurate. Claimed by nobody, often not even the outliners (particularly those who strive to draw in figures with far more complexity and depth than accorded in typical representations), she nevertheless continues to haunt female bodies and feminist and non-feminist understandings of women’s relationship to international politics. Woman, that is, persists despite the dislocations and dressings down.

Brown has argued that she is all the more resilient in the face of feminist hesitations to re-imagine her as other than power’s opposite – as non-innocent.¹¹ As noted previously, imagining the body-designated-female as existing in an exterior relation to power has enabled the subject woman to be. Some have argued that so long as this is the case, so long as she does persist in some form, even if (and maybe ideally) as incoherent and contrary to expectation, feminist hesitations are necessary. Attachments run deep and “why not?” some might add. Although Brown has offered one of the most scathing critiques of feminist identity politics, she also seems to recognize (as evidenced in the prior excerpt) that the subject woman enables many of us to be; there is no outside. This section will rehash some of the feminist “identity politics” debates – with an eye to thinking through how woman has been articulated in relation to power and the limitations of frameworks that would situate her as outside politics and outside the relations that constitute the international. It will also serve as a departure point for my own theoretical framework – i.e. for thinking through how we might rethink woman and power when the “canvas is all colors, drips, swirls on top of swirls, strokes, scrapes, impastos defying flat surfaces.”¹²

As Brown and Barbara Cruikshank have pointed out, it is at least somewhat ironic that it is often critical theorists and feminists – those most critical of the language of national interest and absolute versus relative gains (the language of executive decision-makers) – who figuratively re-instate the sovereign forms of power that make the rest of us subject. Cruikshank explains that in the postwar period democratic theorists on the left, confronted with the problem of political apathy in the face of persisting inequality, became driven by that which was not visible, but was presumably there: objective interests, latent resistance, and that which was subverting them both, power. In her words, “Though not visible or intelligible, a face was surely looking behind the shadow appearance of political apathy and inaction.”¹³ The task was to make power accountable, to assign it a face, to find the sovereign decision-maker responsible and to make his intentions and ambitions known: “Radical democrats believed that to reveal the truth of power, to assign it a face, would be to transform quiescence into a confrontation”¹⁴ which was itself taken to be “both a possibility and a measure of democratic freedom.”¹⁵

Within such an emancipatory project, Brown has argued that truth becomes strategically positioned as power’s opposite and speaking truth to power becomes the ultimate aim. But, for this logic to function, power must be constantly rediscovered in its sovereign forms; the once-castrated king must live on as the target of ridicule and critique – as the raison d’être of identity politics. One result, according to Brown, is that the subject of identity politics becomes invested in its own subjection.¹⁶ Further, binary oppositions between truth and power, the powerful and the powerless, and men and women that many critical theorists and feminists would otherwise eschew are nevertheless re-invoked. We can see evidence of this when Cynthia Enloe, for example, says “militarization … requires men’s and women’s acquiescence, but it privileges masculinity.” It may, but my own feminist hesitation (coming from a slightly different angle than that noted above) kicks in when and if this may becomes a must – when the category of people referred to as women are presumed to bear interests or an identity that actually or always potentially positions them at odds with the objectives of the patriarchal military state.¹⁷ Within such a framework, as I will later demonstrate, woman tends to be outlined in relation to the language of co-optation and acquiescence – i.e. in relation to a power that prevents women from recognizing their interests or hides from view their alternative and potentially powerful female ways of knowing. If militarism always privileges masculinity, power is at work when women are militarized. What is interesting to note is that the woman made present (the woman who is sketched into the canvasses of IR) within this frame is, in fact, never actually present anywhere. She exists only if she could be fully realized. Power, by this logic, constrains, but it is also the case that she cannot be fully imagined without it. Subjects need their kings in order to be.

So, what about when women are not militarized? What about those instances when women take their care-giving practices, their being situated outside the corridors of government decision-making, and their supposedly resultant moral authority and epistemic privilege to mobilize in the service of “peace”? Is this a moment of freedom or yet another manifestation of power’s hold on female bodies? As Laura Shepherd has pointed out, within the United Nations’ literature and documentation on women and war, women are recognized as “unproblematically agential” only in terms of “peace processes and reconstruction programmes undertaken in post-conflict zones” – a fact that seems to problematize agency as conventionally understood.¹⁸ The flip side of this, as demonstrated by Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry, is that women’s agency is then denied when women commit acts that might otherwise be referred to as political violence – in cases of prisoner abuse scandals and female suicide bombers, for instance.¹⁹ In these cases, what they describe as mother, monster, and whore narratives function to delimit these acts as separate from both rational expressions of agency and normal/idealized expressions of femininity: “As “femme fatales” women’s political violence is not seen as driven by ideology and belief in a cause, but instead, as a perversion of the private realm” – ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reading international relations through bodies, reading the maternal body as political event
• 1. The vicissitudes of life: Women’s complex entanglement with peace and war
• 2. Shifting the gaze from hysterical mothers to “deadly dads”: Spectacle and the antinuclear movement1
• 3. (M)others, biopolitics and the Gulf War
• 4. Grieving dead soldiers, disavowing loss: Cindy Sheehan and the im/possibility of the American antiwar movement
• Conclusion: The maternal body as alibi – understanding the centrality of the maternal body to sovereign representation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index