Gender Matters in Global Politics PDF

CHAPTER 6 (Why) Gender Matters in Global Politics Laura J. Shepherd The title of this book can be read in two ways. It is ambiguous, and delib- erately so, as it seeks to draw attention not only to the subject matter of the book – ‘gender matters’ in global poli...

CHAPTER 6 (Why) Gender Matters in Global Politics Laura J. Shepherd The title of this book can be read in two ways. It is ambiguous, and delib- erately so, as it seeks to draw attention not only to the subject matter of the book – ‘gender matters’ in global politics – but also to a belief shared by its contributors: that gender matters in global politics. That is, it is impor- tant to pay attention to gender, as both an identity category and a relation of power, when we are trying to make sense of global politics. Partly, this is about investigating the representation, regulation, and disruptions of people’s bodies, which are necessarily gendered, though research on global politics has not always been terribly good at focussing on bodies. As Jindy Pettman argues, ‘it should be possible to write the body into a discipline that tracks power relations and practices which impact so directly and often so devastatingly on actual bodies’ (1997, 105). Our understanding of global politics is much improved through critical inter- rogation of the operation of gendered power, and the investigation of how that particular form of power works on and through bodies. This means paying attention to the practices of global politics, and seeing these prac- tices as simultaneously the practices of gendered bodies (that is, these practices are things that actual people do, and these people have/enact gendered identities) and practices that affect the experience of gendered embodiment (that is, practices of global politics interact with the ‘rules’ about gendered bodies and behaviours, which I discuss further below). In other words, global political practices have an impact – direct or indi- rect, immediate or delayed – on how actual people live in the world, even though discussions about global politics can feel quite far removed from discussions of everyday life. In addition to studying bodies and the significance of gender as an iden- tity category, which we can think of as the material dimension of gender, 60 DOI: 10.4324/9781003036432-7  ( W h y ) G e n d e r M at t e r s i n G l o b a l P o l i t i c s we also need to acknowledge gender as a relation of power, because the ideas that people have about gender, and bodies, and behaviour matter too and influence all of the stuff that we think about being related to global politics. This chapter, then, explores why and how gender matters and interrogates various conceptions of the body in global politics through the discussion of some key gendered practices and effects. In the first section, I explain how everyone has a theory of gender and expand upon the mate- rial and ideational dimensions of gender. I then present two sites of global political practice inhabited by (particular kinds of) bodies: social move- ments and nuclear science. IDEAS/MATTER: EVERYONE HAS A THEORY OF GENDER To understand what I mean by the claim that ‘everyone has a theory of gender’, it is necessary to explain both what I mean by theory and what I mean by gender. A scientific theory is supposed to explain and predict things about the world, and it is supposed to be both ‘objective’ and ‘value-free’. This has important implications for the study and practices of global politics, because International Relations as an academic disci- pline is usually described as a ‘social science’ (see Smith 2000). However, theory needn’t be seen as a tool or device. Rather than retaining a com- mitment to theory as a something that can be applied to the world as it exists independent of our interpretation of it, we can see ‘theorising [as] a way of life, a form of life, something we all do, every day, all the time’ (Zalewski 1996, 346). This is relevant to international relations scholars because it means that first, we are all theorising (not just the ‘theorists’) and second, that the the- orising that counts or that matters, in terms of affecting and/or creating international political events, is not confined either to policy makers or to academics. (Zalewski 1996, 346, emphasis in original) ‘Theorising’, in this context, means that the way we think about, and make sense of, the world is constitutive of that world – it creates that world. How we think we might be able to ‘solve’ certain problems of global politics, whether we think certain issues are problems in the first place and who gets to make these decisions: all of these affect and effect how we perceive the world we live in and therefore our responses to it. These responses in turn affect and effect our social/political reality; this is what is meant by ‘constitutive’. Theory is a practice rather than a tool to be applied and is something that informs our everyday lives. If we think of gender as some- thing we are ‘theorising’ – making sense of, enacting, constituting – daily, we can perhaps begin to see why gender matters. Ideas about appropriate and inappropriate gendered behaviours are wide-ranging, influential and sometimes unconscious, but because they affect and effect how we behave in the world, they are of interest to the scholar of global politics. 61 L aur a J. Shepherd Figure 6.1 Can you make sense of these signs? Source: Photograph by Tim Mossholder (retrieved from https://unsplash.com/photos/UcUROHSJfRA and reproduced under the Unsplash Licence). An example might help clarify the issue. Look at the image in Figure 6.1. Imagine that these signs are fixed to doors, and you must pick one of the doors. Can you make sense of those signs? If you can then you have a theory of gender. You have a theory, or an understanding, of what the signs signify and of their social importance, because to make sense of these signs – and assuming that these are the only options available to you – you have to accept that there are two types of people and that each type of person is represented by one or the other figure in the sign. If you identify yourself as part of the group signified by the picture on the right, you would not (apart from in unu- sual circumstances) go through the door on the left, and vice versa. We know what the signs mean, and even though they bear no necessary relevance to the way we look, today or ever, they order the way we act in the world. This may seem like a trivial example to some people, but the regulation of bodies and the spaces they can access through enforcing the ‘rules’ that these signs are presumed to communicate is part of the broader constructs of gender that inform how we make sense of the world – and how we are in turn ‘made sense of’ by others. As Judith Butler says, ‘[d]iscrete genders are part of what “humanizes” individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right’ (1999, 178). Doing gender ‘right’ means adhering to the gender ‘rules’ of the space and time you occupy. Gender ‘rules’ do vary over time, and according to socio-cultural context; within countries and even within cities, there are spaces in which gender ‘rules’ are more and less rigid, and communities that have different ‘rules’ about how certain bodies are expected to behave. 62  ( W h y ) G e n d e r M at t e r s i n G l o b a l P o l i t i c s Historically, for example, gender has been regulated by a very powerful assumption about the duality of gender in the Anglophone world: it has been assumed that humans (and most other living things, for that matter) can be assigned either ‘M’ or ‘F’, although gender categories need not be confined to these two, of course – there are infinite possible genders and ways to perform gender, and the gendered identity a body is assigned at birth may not be the gender with which that individual identifies later in life. The ‘pluralities inherent in gender(s)’ (Weerawardhana 2018, 189) cannot be contained even within a categorical schema that recognises non-binary or queer identities; Indigenous gender theorists and gender theorists of colour have drawn attention to the problematic imposition of colonial categories of gender on Indigenous ways of knowing gender, such as Two-Spirit, mixed blood and muxes (Driskill et al. 2011, 2–3; Mirandé 2016; Morgensen 2012). The assumption of duality (which we can also understand as a ‘rule’ about the binary nature of gender) is best described as an ontological com- mitment to dimorphism: the assumption that human beings can be easily and unproblematically divided into two (di) distinct categories based on their physical forms (morph). This informs the ways in which we think about the body and the ways in which we think about a host of social and political events and relationships that have to do with the body and how bodies (can/should or can’t/shouldn’t) behave – for example, marriage ceremonies, parenting, sports, even eating. Unless we are aware of gender ‘rules’ and how our own behaviour conforms to or breaks those rules, we are not usually even aware most of the time that our preconceptions about bodies influence how we dress in the morning, what we eat, what sports or subjects we think we should or shouldn’t learn at school, and who we and other people should and shouldn’t have sex with, on the basis of the identity category into which we have been sorted at birth. These categories, and the multiple ways in which the categories are reinforced over a lifetime, are manifestations of gender theories. Some theories of gender suggest that ‘M’ and ‘F’ are ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ categories and thus perceive a rigid separation between sex and gender but with a one-to-one relationship between the two, such that male (‘M’) bodies (sex) have essentially masculine characteristics (gender). Other theories of gender propose that sex is biological, but gender is cultural, which frees up the relationship between sex and gender while still retain- ing a distinction between them; according to this view, it is possible to be assigned female at birth (sex) but masculine in character or practice (gender). In this chapter, I subscribe to the idea that gender as a system of regulation, or ‘rules’, conditions how we think of sex. That means that sex as a category is constructed through the ideas that we have about gender – including the idea that gender is meaningfully binary. As Butler explains: Consider the medical interpellation which … shifts an infant from an ‘it’ to a ‘she’ or a ‘he’ and in that naming, the girl is ‘girled’ …. But that ‘girling’ of the girl does not end there; on the contrary, that founding interpellation 63 L aur a J. Shepherd is reiterated by various authorities and throughout various intervals of time to reenforce or contest this naturalized effect. (Butler 1993, 7–8) Assigning ‘sex’ (and again, this is often – consciously or otherwise – within the dimorphic frame which presumes humans can be sorted into two ‘sex’ categories) is a ‘medical interpellation’, according to Butler, which means it is a form of intervention: an altogether human and social practice, rather than a reflection of the ‘natural’ or essential qualities of the body. Put sim- ply, the shape of the infant’s body at birth is interpreted through the ideas that we already have as a society about the relationship between body and identity; this informs the categorisation of the infant, and from that moment forward the infant is regulated by rules, norms and expectations about how they should behave. In this way, bodies are expected to take on the gendered characteristics appropriate to their designated identity cate- gory from birth, and it can cause great stress and dysphoria when these expectations cannot be met. The regulatory ideals of gender are extremely powerful, and – as noted above – people who ‘fail to do their gender right’ (Butler 1999, 178) fre- quently find themselves facing social sanctions. Thankfully, in many contexts over the past few years, we have seen the recognition of gender categories beyond ‘M’ and ‘F’, and the space for people to identify not only with genders that do not necessarily align with the categories they were assigned at birth but also with categories that transcend the gen- der binary altogether: nonbinary, gender nonconforming or queer are just a few examples of identity categories which confound the assumption of duality informing how the body is often interpreted. The proliferation of gender categories, and the shifting of gender ‘rules’, will hopefully con- tinue, affording freedom for all individuals to identify in ways that are meaningful and authentic to them, because bodies that are perceived as transgressive are not what have to be explained. Rather, the requirement that they explain themselves should itself be investigated. For it is this requirement that naturalizes nontransgender and nonintersex bodies and obscures the processes whereby all bodies are understood through complex systems of meaning. (Valentine and Wilchins 1997, 221, emphasis added) These systems of meaning are how ideas about gender become the material reality of gender identity and gender presentation – and, in turn, different forms of gender identity and gender presentation shape the systems of mean- ing through which we make sense of bodies and ways of being in the world. If we accept that gender is the social meaning attached to the shape of our bodies, we can begin to understand why it is that feminist scholars of global politics insist that gender is not something we add to our inves- tigations but rather is integral to how we understand the world. That is, you cannot ignore the ways that gender informs and shapes the practices 64  ( W h y ) G e n d e r M at t e r s i n G l o b a l P o l i t i c s of world politics; gender is a ‘lens’ we can use to reveal insights about how the world works (Runyan and Peterson 2014, 6). This means we can conceive of gender not only as a noun (as an identity category) and a verb (a way to look at the world, as in the phrase ‘gendering global politics’) but also a logic, which is produced by and productive of the ways in which we understand and perform global politics. The crucial insight of this book is that these assumptions about bodies are intrinsically, inherently related to the study and practices of global politics, because global politics is studied and practiced by gendered bodies. Conventional contemporary theories of International Relations do not speak much of bodies because the individual does not matter – only col- lectives of individuals, known as ‘nations’ feature, and only then inso- far as they are assumed congruent with the state (hence ‘nation-state’). Admittedly, in classical realist theory, representations of state behaviours draw heavily on ideas relating to ‘human nature’ (Morgenthau 1952, 963). Classical realism claims as its antecedents theorists of ‘human nature’ such as Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes, and appeals to logics of ‘human nature’ to explain self-interest and rationality as ‘evidenced’ by the unitary state. However, the ‘human nature’ under discussion is, on closer inspec- tion, the nature of ‘man’ (see Morgenthau 1973, 15–16). ‘Men’ feature, then, but only inasmuch as they are abstract universalised individuals; men as embodied subjects do not enter into discussion. This is largely due to the conventional understanding of the body as natural rather than social or political. However, as Chris Weedon explains, ‘[t]he appeal to the “nat- ural” is one of the most powerful aspects of common-sense thinking, but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies history and the possibility of change for the future’ (1997, 3, emphasis in original). Gender, and the body more specifically, are stubborn sites of power, of ‘common-sense thinking’, and this is part of the reason we need to pay close attention to ideas about gender and the body in global politics. ‘Formerly, the body was dominantly conceptualized as a fixed, unitary, primarily physiological reality. Today, more and more scholars have come to regard the body as a historical, plural, culturally mediated form’ (Bordo 2003, 288). This claim is a useful starting point for thinking about the body in global politics: How, and in what ways, is the body mediated? How, and in what ways, are bodies regulated? How have our understand- ings of ‘appropriate’ gendered behaviours (and bodies) changed over time? How do variously located practices of global politics mediate and situate bodies differently? In the following section, I give two examples of politi- cal events and processes that revolve around gender and the body, to show how analysis of global politics needs to interrogate these sites of power. OF SCIENCE AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Christine Sylvester argues that we are socialised into believing in the identity categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in part through the repetition of stories that are told about men and women; we learn to behave in 65 L aur a J. Shepherd accordance with these stories – for example, ‘Boys don’t cry’ and ‘That’s not ladylike’ (1994, 4). Similarly, Cynthia Weber calls these stories ‘unconscious ideologies’, which she describes as ‘the foundations of our ideological and political thinking that we place beyond debate’ (2005, 4). Weber suggests, and I agree, that drawing these unconscious, ‘common- sense’ stories about gender and the body back into debate can be pro- foundly unsettling as it can threaten our own ideas about being in the world (see also Peterson and True 1998). But it is an important analytic, by which I mean that interrogating these stories helps us to see how gen- der is working to regulate, order and organise social, cultural and polit- ical practices – how ideas about gender and the body are shaping and informing material events and phenomena. In the study of global poli- tics, we should pay attention to the stories that are told about gendered subjects, as well as attending to the positioning and marking of bodies: stories of loving mothers and manly men (because ‘gender is not a syno- nym for women’; see Carver 1996). Accordingly, I offer two accounts of bodies in global politics in this section: bodies in social movements and bodies as scientists. Bodies in social movements My analysis of social movements begins with the body, in particular the female body, and behaviours that are assumed to be appropriate to it (or not). In this section, I discuss several social movements that involve women mobilising explicitly as women in different social movements to effect political change and explore some of the possible explanations for the success (or lack of success) that these social movements enjoyed. I suggest that movements involving women acting in accordance with social norms and rules about feminine behaviour are more likely to be validated and supported than movements in which women transgress those norms and rules. In 2020, then-President Donald Trump dispatched federal officers to break up Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests across the USA. In Portland, Oregon and other locations, community organisations and individuals mobilised to defend the protestors. One organised form of defence was the ‘Wall of Moms’: a group of women who assembled to create a human barricade between the BLM protestors and the police forces. The ‘Wall of Moms’ was mobilised in one area of Portland by a woman called Bev Barnum, who posted an expression of support for the BLM movement on Facebook and encouraged her friends to join her in a physical demonstra- tion of solidarity. Barnum deliberately appealed to gender norms in her expression of support, writing ‘We moms are often underestimated. But we’re stronger than we’re given credit for. … Let’s make it clear that we will protect protesters without the use of violence’ (quoted in McGreal 2020). When the ‘Wall of Moms’ congregated, they chanted ‘Feds stay clear, moms are here’, deliberately deploying motherhood as a political 66  ( W h y ) G e n d e r M at t e r s i n G l o b a l P o l i t i c s identity and drawing on the associations among gender, maternality, pac- ifism and protection as a means of legitimating their actions. Similarly, in Kenya, women leveraged the symbolic power of moth- erhood to protest widespread gender-based violence and extra-judicial killings across the country. The Mothers of Victims and Survivors Network was founded in Mathare, Nairobi, to draw attention to the vio- lence women suffered not only at the hands of people in the community but also at the hands of local police. Mama Victor, one of the women involved in forming the organisation, reported that she formed the net- work ‘to provide strength, comfort, and purpose to other women whose loved ones were killed by police’ (Wadekar 2020). The idea that women – and in particular mothers – are uniquely capable of providing ‘strength, comfort, and purpose’ is part of what makes the political mobilisation as mothers effective. These are two contemporary examples of social movements that organise around the identity of motherhood, but there are many more such examples throughout history. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, for example, congregated in the Plaza from 1977 onwards, to protest the illicit arrest and capture of their (biological and symbolic) relatives; their organisation had profound implications for the social movements and for the study and practices of gender in global politics. The women at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the UK dur- ing the early 1980s campaigned for the removal of US nuclear weapons from the Greenham Common military base drawing on symbols and practices of motherhood. Although these were local social movements, both attracted the attention of and, in the case of the former, support from the international community. (Besides, problematising the divide between politics designated international and that designated domestic or ‘everyday’ is an important analytical contribution of feminist scholar- ship in IR.) In the remainder of this section, I identify three sets of com- mon practices through which the women associated with each movement reaffirmed their identities as mothers. The first of these is biologically determined separatism. Second, I discuss the question of boundaries and political space and third, the role of ‘the child’ as metaphor and physi- cal embodiment of vulnerability informing the politics enacted by these groups. These social movements were explicitly ‘women only’ at times. From Greenham, the opinion that ‘women-only actions offered a more com- plete guarantee of nonviolence’ (Liddington 1989, 235) echoes the state- ments made five years previously by women in Argentina: ‘We endure the pushing, insults, attacks by the army …. But the men, they never would have stood such things without reacting’ (Mariá Adela Antokoletz cited in Arditti 1999, 35). In terms of the protest by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, it was both justified and justifiable: the junta in power at the time, influenced by the Catholic family-oriented values of a tradi- tional Argentine way of life, was less likely to ‘disappear’ mothers than fathers. This was in keeping with the gender expectations of the time that 67 L aur a J. Shepherd idealised motherhood and the family in the hope of rebuilding society in an image pleasing to the eyes of the regime. The ‘Wall of Moms’ in the USA deployed the same imagery and drew on the same gender stereotypes as the women organising almost 50 years previously, acting in concert as women in the hope that the forces of the state would be dissuaded from using violence against them. The question of boundaries is a second element common to these groups. These social movements were comprised of women who would not ‘sit still and keep at home’ (Rowbotham 1972, 16) as women were expected to do, leaving the realm of formal politics to masculine or masculinised subjects. Instead, they used their weapons of protest – their bodies, and specifically their female bodies – in a carefully articulated statement of female agency. Initially the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo organised their protests in socially sanctioned ‘women’s spaces’, ‘using feminine/maternal public parks and tea houses as places to make plans and exchange infor- mation’ (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996, 157). Taking their protest to the steps of the government buildings in the Plaza de Mayo altered the social and spatial impact of the movement. By associating themselves with the Plaza de Mayo, which is deeply significant in Argentine history and politics, the Mothers achieved recognition and a public space for their political protest. This, however, is not the same thing as saying that the Mothers ‘moved in’ to that public space; the Plaza de Mayo was occu- pied by the Mothers just once a week. In contrast, the Peace Camp at Greenham Common was a permanent fixture. The women involved in the camp inhabited an altogether more liminal space. They had left their fixed houses for tenuous settlements on common land; the mothers at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp did ‘move in’ to that public space, both with and without their children by their sides, in a confron- tational bid to challenge notions of home and security in the shadows cast by missile silos. The permanence of their move is reaffirmed in the memories recorded by the women who lived there: ‘women who have been there … say they will never be the same’ (Elshtain 1995, 241). The wom- en’s refusal to return ‘home’ at the end of each day was interpreted as the challenge to public order that it intended. Instead of questioning that order, however, the widespread response in UK media coverage of the events was to question the behaviour of the women. ‘The question of women’s roles as mothers was used frequently as a stick of castigation with which to beat the Greenham women: if they were so fond of chil- dren, why were they not at home with them?’ (Young 1990, 68). Finally, the third practice that helped construct the collective identity of ‘mother’ for the women in question was a commitment to child-centred politics. While the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo searched for their niños desaparecidos, their disappeared children, the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was dedicated to ensuring a better life for the chil- dren of the future. Similarly, in the Nairobi neighbourhood of Kayole, one community organiser, Faith Kasina, commented that the women organise as women in the hope of creating better lives for the children they bring into the world (quoted in Wadekar 2020). The same key terms 68  ( W h y ) G e n d e r M at t e r s i n G l o b a l P o l i t i c s resonate across the diverse contexts: the movements sought to offer chil- dren protection, to provide them with security and to honour a notion of maternal care. The symbols used to denote this child-centred commitment are also similar. The Association of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo adopted a white headscarf, symbolising a baby’s nappy, as their emblem of col- lective identity. As one mother suggested, ‘a gauze shawl, a diaper … will make us feel closer to our children’ (cited in Bouvard 1994, 74). The whiteness signifies peace and innocence as well as life, in a tacit refusal to don the black mantilla worn as part of traditional mourning dress in Argentina. The symbolic function of the baby’s nappy rein- forces the notion of maternal care mentioned above, as well as evoking thoughts of birth, thus life and hope. Similarly, nappies and toys pinned to the fence at Greenham Common were among the many symbols of ‘mundane’ domesticity deployed in contrast to the high-powered high politics of a nuclear base. These symbols sought to idealise motherhood and legitimise the presence of the protestors. This is by no means an unproblematic view, but a culturally intelligible narrative nonetheless; the children of tomorrow represented by a soft toy pinned to a hard wire fence being protected, cared for, mothered by the women at the Peace Camp, who felt ‘a special responsibility to offer them [the children] a future – not a wasteland of a world and a lingering death’ (cited in Liddington 1989, 227). There are some striking similarities across the cases I have discussed here, although they are separated by almost 50 years. The presence of women’s bodies as the substance of protest is legitimised in all cases by the women claiming the political identity of ‘woman’ and, specifically, of ‘mother’. This, of course, underscores the relationship between feminin- ity and maternality and reaffirms the gender norms that dictate that it is women, and only women, who mother, an idea which is worth exploring further (see, for example, Hall, Weissman, and Shepherd 2020). Further, the protests were effective in part because the women leveraged those ste- reotypes about femininity and maternality: the Portland women and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were largely able to avoid sanction by state security forces by tapping into cultural discourses about motherly love, pacificism and nurture. Thus, the gendered politics of social movements is an interesting site at which to explore the work that bodies (are made to) do in world politics. Bodies in science In this section, I turn from social movements to discuss bodies in sci- ence, a second set of significant bodies which become visible through feminist interrogations of weapons technology and strategic culture. In 1987, Carol Cohn published an analysis of ‘nuclear strategic thinking’ in the ‘almost entirely male world’ of ‘distinguished “defence intellectuals”’ (Cohn 1987, 678–679). This article remains one of the most significant 69 L aur a J. Shepherd accounts of the effect of gender, gendered language and bodily images on the study and practices of global politics. Cohn also draws our attention to the complex intersections of race, gender and class, referring to ‘white men in ties discussing missile size’ (Cohn 1987, 683) in a typically snappy turn of phrase. The gendered imaginings used to make sense of the new weaponry are obvious and inscribe a link between violence and masculinity that feminist scholarship has long sought to problematise. When the first fusion device was tested in the United States of America in 1952, the telegram reporting its success to authorities – describing an explosion about a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 – read ‘It’s a boy!’ (Easlea 1983, 130; see also Cohn 1987, 701).1 Admittedly, that was back in the 1950s; surely we can expect to see contemporary defence experts refusing to deploy the gendered met- aphors employed by their ancestors? On the contrary, Cohn reports that defence intellectuals continue to construct their language, which Cohn names ‘techno-strategic discourse’, using a gendered framework. Cohn witnessed a country without tested nuclear capacity being referred to as a nuclear ‘virgin’ (Cohn 1987, 687). Similarly, phrases such as ‘more bang for the buck’, ‘the Russians are a little harder than we are’ and the assertion that ‘you’re not going to take the nicest missile you have and put it in a crummy hole’ all contribute to the ongoing masculinisation of nuclear weapons technology (Cohn 1987, 683–684). As one scientist reported: At one point, we re-modelled a particular attack, … and found that instead of there being 36 million immediate fatalities, there would only be 30 million. And everybody was sitting around nodding, saying, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great, only 30 million’, when all of a sudden, I heard what we were saying. And I blurted out, ‘Wait, I’ve just heard how we’re talking – Only 30 million! Only 30 million human beings killed instantly?’ Silence fell upon the room. Nobody said a word. They didn’t even look at me. It was awful. I felt like a woman. (quoted in Cohn and Ruddick 2004, 416–417) Feeling ‘like a woman’ compromised not only this interviewee’s mascu- linity, but also his professionalism: the underlying assumption is that women (irrational, emotional creatures) have no place in the hard-headed world of defence strategy. Cohn later extended her ground-breaking analysis to the social media exchange between then-President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, regarding the size and functionality of the lat- ter’s ‘nuclear button’ (2018). Cohn argues that their spat, which involved Trump tweeting ‘I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!’, was motivated by ‘their need for the world to believe that they are manly men’ (2018), demonstrating the continued importance of gender analysis to under- standing nuclear politics. 70  ( W h y ) G e n d e r M at t e r s i n G l o b a l P o l i t i c s Similarly, others have explored how ideas about gender, and particularly masculinity, affect other domains of science, including climate politics. Cara Daggett, for example, develops the concept of ‘petro-masculinity’ to understand the complex interactions among race, gender and climate politics. Daggett argues that misogyny and climate denial are ‘mutually constituted, with gender anxiety slithering alongside climate anxiety, and misogynist violence sometimes exploding as fossil violence’ (2018, 28). In her analysis, Daggett explores how a political economy reliant on fossil fuel combustion is reinforced by, and reinforces, specific ideas about authori- tative masculinity, particularly in the US context. To acknowledge the ill effects of anthropocentric climate change is thus configured as ‘unmanly’; in turn, ‘manly men’ live lives that force the continued consumption of fossil fuels – working industries reliant on coal or gas, driving inefficient trucks or SUVs, heating or cooling large homes that purport to reflect social status. Associating these trappings of a particular lifestyle (which is heavily inflected by race and class as well as gender) with the successful performance of masculinity is one of the ways in which bodies matter in popular discourse on science. Crucially, this kind of sharp gender analysis draws attention to the ways in which gender as a relation of power operates in world politics by not only interrogating the actions of physical bodies but also by asking what work gender is doing to organise and make sense of scientific discourses and discourses about science. The rationality employed and deployed by the communities in which Cohn has conducted her research is literally dis-embodied, amounting to the denial of human experience in the nar- ratives of the defence intellectuals: ‘it is not only impossible to talk about humans in this language, it also becomes in some sense illegitimate to ask the paradigm to reflect human concerns’ (Cohn 1987, 711–712). It is pre- cisely these ‘human concerns’ to which researchers working on these topics wish to draw our attention, facilitated by a nuanced and convincing anal- ysis of the ways in which bodies, and particularly masculine bodies, man- ifest and are made sense of within the domains of science and technology. PROBLEMATISING ‘BODIES THAT MATTER’ 2 This chapter has provided an overview of the ways in which it is possible to conceptualise sex/gender and introduced you to some illustrations to show how and why gender matters in global politics. There is more to gender than bodies, and there is more to bodies than materiality. Each of the following chapters focuses on and interrogates the operation of gendered power and the association with, and effects of, gendered identity categories. In its entirety, this book encourages you to develop a ‘feminist curiosity’ (Enloe 2007, 1) about the study and practices of global politics. Challenging the assumptions of conventional theories and approaches, unsettling that which was previously taken for granted, even (perhaps especially) such things as ‘human nature’ and the body – these are among the ways in which a feminist curiosity works. 71 L aur a J. Shepherd Discussion questions 1. Why should the study of global politics attend to the practices of bod- ies? How, and with what effects, are bodies regulated in global poli- tics? Discuss, using contemporary examples. 2. What have been the most significant shifts in gender ‘rules’ in global politics in recent years? 3. Can you imagine a world without gender identity categories? Is a ‘post-gender’ world a good thing? Notes 1. The nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 was named ‘Little Boy’. 2. This subheading is borrowed from Butler’s (1993) text of the same name. Further reading Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge. Feinberg, Leslie. 1993. Stone Butch Blues. Ann Arbor, MI: Firebrand Books. Mirandé, Alfredo. 2016. “Hombres Mujeres: An Indigenous Third Gender.” Men and Masculinities 19 (4): 384–409. Rice, Carla, Karleen Pendleton Jiménez, Elisabeth Harrison, Margaret Robinson, Jen Rinaldi, Andrea LaMarre and Jill Andrew. 2020. “Bodies at the Intersections: Refiguring Intersectionality through Queer Women’s Complex Embodiments.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 46 (1): 177–200. Wilcox, Lauren. 2014. Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. References Arditti, Rita. 1999. Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina. London and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bordo, Susan. 2003. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, revised edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bouvard, Marguerite Guzman. 1994. Revolutionising Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, revised edition. London: Routledge. 72  ( W h y ) G e n d e r M at t e r s i n G l o b a l P o l i t i c s Carver, Terrell. 1996. Gender is not a Synonym for Women. London and Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Cohn, Carol. 1987. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12 (4): 687–718. Cohn, Carol. 2018. “The Perils of Mixing Masculinity and Missiles.” The New York Times, 5 January 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/ 05/opinion/security-masculinity-nuclear-weapons.html Cohn, Carol and Sara Ruddick. 2004. ‘A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction.” In Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives, edited by Sohail H. Hashmi and Steven P. Lee, 405–435. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daggett, Cara. 2018. “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47 (1): 25–44. Driskill, Qwo-Li, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley and Scott Lauria Morgensen. 2011. “Introduction.” In Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature, edited by Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley and Scott Lauria Morgensen, 1–30. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Easlea, Brian. 1983. Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists and the Nuclear Arms Race. London: Pluto Press. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1995. Women and War, 2nd edition. London and Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 2007. Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link. Plymouth and Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Hall, Lucy B., Anna L. Weissman and Laura J. Shepherd (eds). 2020. Troubling Motherhood: Maternality in Global Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liddington, J. 1989. The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism and Anti- Militarism in Britain since 1820. London: Virago. McGreal, Chris. 2020. “‘I Wanted to Take Action’: Behind the ‘Wall of Moms’ Protecting Portland’s Protesters.” The Guardian, 22 July 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/21/trump-federal- agents-portland-protests-moms Mirandé, Alfredo. 2016. “Hombres Mujeres: An Indigenous Third Gender.” Men and Masculinities 19 (4): 384–409. Morgensen, Scott Lauria. 2012. “Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction.” Settler Colonial Studies 2 (2): 2–22. Morgenthau, Hans. 1952. “‘Another ‘Great Debate’: The National Interest of the United States.” American Political Science Review 46 (4): 961–988. Morgenthau, Hans. 1973. Politics Among Nations, 5th edition. New York: Knopf. Peterson, V. Spike and Jacqui True. 1998. ‘“New Times” and New Conversations.” In The ‘Man’ Question in International Relations, edited by Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart, 14–27. Boulder, CO: Westview. 73 L aur a J. Shepherd Pettman, Jindy. 1997. “Body Politics: International Sex Tourism”. Third World Quarterly 18 (1): 93–108. Radcliffe, Sarah A. and Sallie Westwood. 1996. Remaking the Nation: Identity and Politics in Latin America. London: Routledge. Rowbotham, Sheila. 1972. Women, Resistance and Revolution. London: Penguin. Runyan, Anne Sisson and V. Spike Peterson. 2014. Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium, 4th edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Smith, Steve. 2000. “The Discipline of International Relations: Still an American Social Science?” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 2 (3): 374–402. Sylvester, Christine. 1994. Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Valentine, David and Wilchins, Riki Anne. 1997. “One Percent on the Burn Chart: Gender, Genitals and Hermaphrodites with Attitude.” Social Text 15 (3/4): 215–222. Wadekar, Neha. 2020. “Mothers, Sisters, Wives: Kenyan Women Lead Fight against Police Violence.” The New Humanitarian, 3 September 2020. https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2020/09/03/ Kenya-women-gender-police-violence Weber, Cynthia. 2005. International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction. 2nd edition. London, Routledge. Weedon, Chris. 1997. Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. 2nd edition. London: Blackwell. Weerawardhana, Chamindra. 2018. “Profoundly Decolonizing? Reflections on a Transfeminist Perspective of International Relations.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 16 (1): 184–213. Young, Alison. 1990. Femininity in Dissent, London: Routledge. Zalewski, Marysia. 1996. ‘“All These Theories Yet the Bodies Keep Piling Up”: Theories, Theorists, Theorising.” In International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, edited by Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski, 340–353. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 74