Feminist Geopolitics

At the Sharp End

Deborah P. Dixon, Sallie A. Marston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415819060
• eBook ISBN: 9781134916535
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Building on a trans-disciplinary, feminist project that foregrounds the bodies of those at the 'sharp end' of various forms of international activity, such as immigration, development and warfare, the chapters included in this book cover a variety of sites, concerns, and hopes. These range from the fraught geopolitics of marriage and birth in Ladakh, India, to the fate of detained migrant children in the U.S., and from the human rights abuses of women and children in Uzbekistan to the body politics of aid workers in Afghanistan. The collective aim is to expose the force relations that operate through and upon those bodies, such that particular subjectivities are enhanced, constrained, and put to work, and particular corporealities are violated, exploited, and often abandoned. Oriented around issues of security, population, territory, and nationalism, these chapters expose the proliferating bodies of geopolitics, not simply as the bearers of socially demarcated borders and boundaries, but as vulnerable corporealities, seeking to negotiate and transform the geopolitics they both animate and inhabit.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography.

Introduction: Feminist Engagements with Geopolitics

Deborah P. Dixon¹ and Sallie A. Marston^2
1 School of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland UK, G12 8QQ.
² School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona US, 85721.

Here, we introduce a themed set of papers that, using diverse feminist knowledges and practices, aims to expose the force relations that operate through and upon bodies, such that particular, ‘geopolitical’ subjectivities are enhanced, constrained, and put to work, and particular corporealities are violated, exploited, and often abandoned. Taken as a collection, what we hope these articles make clear are the manifold struggles within feminist analysis in regard to ‘researching with’ embodiment, agency, vulnerability, emotion, praxis and care.

Building upon a trans-disciplinary, feminist project that foregrounds, as an entry point for analysis, the bodies of those at the ‘sharp end’ of various forms of international activity, from immigration to development to warfare, the articles included in this themed set cover a range of spaces and concerns. Their collective aim is to expose the force relations that operate through and upon those bodies, such that particular subjectivities are enhanced, constrained and put to work, and particular corporealities are violated, exploited and often abandoned. Oriented around issues of security, population, territory and nationalism, these articles expose the proliferating bodies of geopolitics, not simply as the bearers of socially demarcated borders and boundaries, but as vulnerable corporealities, seeking to negotiate and transform the geopolitics they both animate and inhabit.

Through a theoretically diverse ensemble of knowledges and practices, feminist analysis has worked to bring to light the embodied, everyday, informal practices that make manifest the ‘place’ of traditionally disempowered people – such as women, children, immigrants, asylum seekers, prisoners and others – within all manner of ostensibly geopolitical landscapes. In this vein, a feminist approach to the conventional repertoire of geopolitics – nationhood, the state, borders, security, refugees, militarism and warfare – has sought to reconfigure these complex objects and practices, questioning their normativity within international relations and academia, their role in the production of marginality, and the everyday struggles of people to make sense of and negotiate their geopolitical existence. What this reconfiguration has led to, at the disciplinary level, is an increased awareness of the diversity of attitudes, emotions and behaviours that make up the ‘matter’ of the geopolitical. Indeed, over the past ten years, numerous scholars have sought to flesh out what Jennifer Hyndman calls a ‘feminist geopolitical imaginary’ by: complicating our understanding of key concepts such as corporeality, emotions, and ethics; exploring new objects of analysis such as trauma and violence, terrorism, security and conspiracy; and reaching out to other disciplines, including psychology and literary theory, as well as politics/political science and international relations, and postcolonial and development studies, to help animate these (see Table 1. for a partial summary of these lines of inquiry).

For us, what is most exciting about recent feminist approaches to geopolitics is their theoretical and methodological attention to the materialities of everyday life as they constitute the substantive foundations – the bodies, the subjectivities, the practices and discourses – of constantly unfolding geopolitical tensions and conflicts. The materialities that feminists work with are visceral, emotional, affective and (for some) trans-human. Put these careful engagements with material conditions together with a deep ethical concern to draw attention to a vulnerable corporeality, and it is not too surprising to find that such analyses are very much concerned with present and emerging real world events. The result of this commitment and concern is a productive diversity of cases issuing from a range of conceptual frameworks, political investments, methodological concerns and empirical orientations, some of which are represented in this themed set.

The empirical scope of these articles highlights the relevance of feminist analyses, not as a universalising framework, but as a project of universal reach; the depth of this work, founded upon a committed period of fieldwork, and the careful gathering of lengthy, in situ interviews, participant observation, focus groups, visual methodology and months spent in the archives, highlights a complex, feminist ethics of care. That is, at one level, this commitment to field work is very much embedded within a feminist concern to engage with others, to work through ethical issues of trust, responsibility, empathy and compassion. But, there is another, just as firmly embedded concern here, and that is to unsettle the implied fixity of social categories – the marginalised, the vulnerable. There is a desire here to allow the conditions of the site in which the researcher is engaged to help specify the subjectivities that are at work, and the ways they shift and settle under different stresses and pressures so that we are able to recognise how space and power are differentially experienced and embodied.

This latter point is worth stressing because it works against the tendency to collectivise and demarcate feminist analyses as a de-centring of patriarchal relations and subjectivities manifest in various sites, including academia. This tendency is important, to be sure, but it misses the manifold struggles within this feminist cohort in regard to thinking through conceptual issues of agency, vulnerability, emotion, embodiment, praxis, and their accompanying methodological issues. And so it is time, we think, to provide something of a ‘snapshot’ – partial and particular, yes, but also passionate and compelling – of feminist engagements with the geopolitical. We mean by this no essentialism of one or the other, nor an implied disjuncture between them. Rather, we mean to introduce feminist appraisals of geopolitical bodies, and the subjectivities and corporealities that are at work here, an appraisal that extends to the corpus of feminist inquiry itself.

Sarah Smith’s piece examines the ways that geopolitical conflict in Ladakh, India (in the contested state of Jammu & Kashmir) reverberates through women’s (and frequently men’s) bodies as they are caught up in the intimate issues of sex and birth. As she argues, ‘when population becomes part of a territorial struggle, the body itself becomes a geopolitical site’ (Smith, p. 12). In Ladakh, marriage between a member of the Buddhist majority and the Muslim minority is socially regulated because religious identity has become so deeply politicised around the tenuous territorial status of the state. The result is that love and desire become geopolitical forces that play out across the bodies of young people as their communities attempt to discipline them and thus defend both religious and territorial boundaries. Through interviews, survey data, and participatory oral histories, Smith shows how territorial struggles are not just about control over abstract state space or land based borders and boundaries but are, more viscerally, about control over the marked bodies that inhabit those spaces.

Lauren Martin explores how children’s subjectivity is constructed by the apparatus of immigration law emerging through a post-9/11 U.S. anxiety about secure national borders. Through a close examination of the Fifth Circuit Western District Federal Court’s ruling on a lawsuit around migrant children’s detention in a Texas facility, she interrogates the struggle that ensued between U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) and the federal court’s authority to challenge immigration enforcement practices. Using the detained children as her central analytical object, she shows how geopolitics and children’s rights come into conflict as different elements of the state apparatus struggle over executive power and territorial sovereignty, the spatiality of immigration enforcement, and immigration law as foreign policy. With detained migrant children figured as vulnerable objects and their parents as criminal security threats, Martin describes how the different parties in conflict in the lawsuit produce different geopolitical visions premised on these configurations of children ’s and families’ legal subjectivities.

Anxiety about security and vulnerable borders also shapes Nathalie Koch’s piece where she has focused attention on Uzbekistan and its post-independence nation-building efforts revolving around militarism and national security. Using documentary evidence (newspaper accounts and presidential speeches) surrounding a popular uprising against the state for attempting to bring nearly two dozen Andijon businessmen to trial for purported terrorist activities, she delineates the ways that President Karimov and other state actors operate to produce a discursive field in which Uzbekistan is constantly under threat of being attacked. The uprising resulted in the massacre of an undisclosed number of protestors who were deliberately misidentified as ‘foreign terrorists’ with the military, who opened fire on the domestic crowd, cast as ‘protectors’ of the national body politic, particularly women. Koch shows how this rhetorical environment displaces the deep domestic problem of widespread poverty. In so doing, the regime invokes geopolitical anxieties about ambiguously identified outside forces to divert attention from women’s constrained economic mobility and its human rights abuses of all Uzbeks but especially of women and children.

Also taking up questions of security and gender, Jennifer Fluri investigates international aid and development workers in war-torn Afghanistan and the ways in which their bodies, and those of Afghan people with whom they interact, become contested sites where geopolitical tensions unfold. Invoking a concept Fluri calls ‘corporal modernity’ – ‘the body as a gendered public space and the site of socio-political representation’ (Fluri, p. 79) – she explores, through interviews, surveys, focus groups and eld observations, how the bodies of international workers as well as local people became sites of contestations over modernity, progress and the place of Afghanistan in the contemporary world. At issue in these contestations are both international conceptualizations of modernity as well as local concerns about the problematic influence of these notions of modernity on Afghan culture and religious integrity. The result of these contestations is that bodies – men’s and women’s as well as foreigners’ and local people’s – become sites of both symbolic and material geopolitical tension through the ramifications of dress, mobility, immobility and other types of socio-spatial practice.

Alison Mountz’s piece centres on the manner in which asylum seekers’ bodies, sequestered outside of the territory of the nation-state, becom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Introduction: Feminist Engagements with Geopolitics
• 2. 'She says herself, "I have no future"': love, fate and territory in Leh District, India
• 3. The geopolitics of vulnerability: children's legal subjectivity, immigrant family detention and US immigration law and enforcement policy
• 4. Security and gendered national identity in Uzbekistan
• 5. Armored peacocks and proxy bodies: gender geopolitics in aid/development spaces of Afghanistan
• 6. Where asylum-seekers wait: feminist counter-topographies of sites between states
• 7. Transnational ways of seeing: sexual and national belonging in Hedwig and the Angry Inch
• 8. Scouting for Girls? Gender and the Scout Movement in Britain
• Index