Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice - Softcover

Sheperd, Laura J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1842779281 ISBN 13: 9781842779286

Verlag: Bloomsbury 3PL, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

In this highly original poststructural feminist critique, the author maps the discursive terrains of institutions, both NGOs and the UN, which formulate and implement resolutions and guides of practice that affect gender issues in the context of international policy practices. Drawing together theoretical work on discourses of gender violence and international security, sexualized violence in war, gender and peace processes, and the domestic-international dichotomy with her own rigorous empirical investigation, the author develops a compelling discourse-theoretical analysis that promises to have far-reaching impact in both academic and policy environments.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laura J. Shepherd is Lecturer in International Relations and International Law in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham. She has published on gender/ed violence and security in Millennium: Journal of International Studies (2005) and British Journal of Politics and International Relations (2007).

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Gender, Violence and Security

Discourse as Practice

By Laura J. Shepherd

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2008 Laura J. Shepherd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84277-928-6

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, vi, 
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS, vii, 
1 | INTRODUCTION, 1, 
2 | ANALYTICAL STRATEGIES, 16, 
3 | THE STATE OF THE DISCIPLINE(S), 34, 
4 | THE SECRETARY-GENERAL'S REPORTS, 79, 
5 | UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION 1325, 107, 
6 | EXPLORING THE NARRATIVES OF PRODUCTION OF UNSCR 1325, 133, 
7 | CONCLUSIONS, 160, 
NOTES, 175, 
REFERENCES, 184, 
INDEX, 210, 

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Women's bodies have actually become battle grounds ... the violence is all about destroying ... the inbuilt strength of a woman to build a community.

Ruth Ojiambo Ochieng, Uganda, 2006

We have documented ... systematic sexual violence, committed by the Burmese military as a weapon of war in the ongoing conflict ... where women are raped ... in order to terrorize the women, and the local community, morally, psychologically, and also physically.

Nang Charm Tong, Burma, 2006

We've had reports from women ... about some very difficult situations that lesbians have been going through. There is more violence towards them because they've broken away from the gender role expected of them. This is why there is more repression. ... they suffer direct repression on their bodies and their lives.

Elisabeth Castillo, Colombia, 2006

These personal narratives, provided by women reflecting on the difficulties of coordinating research on and activism against gendered violence, are disturbing to say the least. Taken from the website of Amnesty International's 'Stop Violence Against Women' campaign, the above testimonies draw attention not only to the crucial need to better the experiences of women who live under threat of violence, but also to the conceptual and practical impediments to combating violence against women in contemporary academic and policy environments. In the academic discipline of International Relations (IR), one of the most salient obstacles is the ways in which gendered violence has been conventionally and conceptually precluded as an object of study (Peterson and Runyan 1999: 115–17).

Feminist challenges to the well-defined and equally well-defended boundaries of IR have drawn attention not only to the potential of transgressing those boundaries but also to the importance of understanding (gendered) violence in relation to security. Turning the analytical focus of this research to gendered violence is motivated by two related concerns. '[Violence establishes social relationships ... it marks and makes bodies ... it constitutes subjects even as it renders them incomplete' (D'Cruze and Rao 2004: 503). This latter understanding of violence, as constitutive of subjectivity, has historically been absented from academic theorizing of security, where violence is conventionally conceived of as a functional mechanism within an anarchic international system. Second, given that violence 'marks and makes bodies', I seek to understand the types of body that are marked and made through violence that is specifically gendered – that is, violence that 'emerges from a profound desire to keep the binary order of gender natural or necessary' (Butler 2004: 35). stemming from a desire to formulate a theorization of security in relation to violence, I argue that studying the subjects produced through gendered violence in the context of debates over the meaning and content of security provides more coherent accounts of both violence and security.

The notion that identity is central to theorizing security has been well explicated by scholars critical of conventional, state-centric approaches to security. 'Recognising gender as a significant dimension of identity and security opens the door to non-state-based views of security and aptly illustrates how identity shapes individual and collective security needs' (Hoogensen and Rottem 2004: 156). However, most of these critical voices seek to interject into academic debates on security by broadening the accepted agenda of security – to include the recognition of multiple phenomena, from earthquakes to economic deprivation, as threatening to security – and proliferating the referent objects of security discourse, such that security is no longer solely the concern of states but also of communities, societies and individuals. While scholars of security have contested the parameters of debates about security, and feminist scholars of security have drawn attention to the importance of gender as a category of analysis, there is little work being done on the ways in which the organizational logics of security and violence are discursively constituted (see Shepherd and Weldes 2007).

CONTRIBUTIONS OF A FEMINIST POST STRUCTURAL 1ST

I identify myself as a feminist researcher, and recognize that this entails a curiosity about 'the concept, nature and practice of gender' (Zalewski 1995: 341). This curiosity questions the ways in which gender is made meaningful in social/political interactions and the practices – or performances – through which gender configures boundaries of subjectivity. In this book, I treat gender as a noun, a verb and a logic that is product/productive of the performances of violence and security I investigate here. I espouse a feminism that seeks to challenge conventional constructions of gendered subjectivity and political community, while acknowledging the intellectual heritage of feminisms that seek to claim rights on behalf of a stable subject and maintain fidelity to a regime of truth that constitutes the universal category of 'women' (Butler 2004: 8–11). While a feminist project that does not assume a stable ontology of gender may seem problematic, I argue, along with Judith Butler, that '[t]he deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated' (1999: 189).

A focus on articulation entails a further commitment to the analytical centrality of language – or, as I see it, discourse. Elizabeth Grosz argues that an integral part of feminist theory is the willingness to 'tackle the question of the language available for theoretical purposes and the constraints it places on what can be said' (1987: 479). To me, this aspect of feminist theory is definitive of my feminist politics. If 'men and women are the stories that have been told about "men" and "women"' (Sylvester 1994: 4), and the way that 'men' and 'women' both act and are acted upon, then the language used to tell those stories and describe those actions is not just worthy of analytical attention but can form the basis of an engaged critique. Furthermore, an approach that recognizes that there is more to the discursive constitution of gender – the stories that are told about 'men' and 'women' – than linguistic practices can enable thinking gender differently.

Alison Stone, reading Butler's work on feminism and political theory, argues that this type of approach constitutes a 'genealogical feminism', in which the organizational logics of feminism – historically assumed to be 'women' and/or 'gender' – are 'continually re-enacted through corporeal activities' (2005: 12). This approach allows for research that investigates the ways in which 'women' as subjects and objects act, speak, write and represent themselves, are represented, written about, spoken about and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Bloomsbury 3PL
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1842779281
• ISBN 13: 9781842779286
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 228
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland