Sexing War/Policing Gender

Motherhood, myth and women's political violence

Linda Åhäll

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317962281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Historically, there has been reluctance, from mainstream IR scholars as well as feminists, to seriously engage with women's agency in warfare. Instead, scholarship has tended to focus on women's activism for peace or to ignore women's agency altogether.

This book rectifies this omission by exploring the cultural understanding of actors, agents and structures of war and how can we make sense of attitudes towards women, agency and war today. By using a poststructuralist feminist perspective and by analysing empirical cases from a Western 'war on terror' cultural context, Ahall argues that all types of stories are informed by ideas about motherhood and maternal reproduction as the foundation of sexual difference. This does not only mean that women are judged/read/valued based on the shape of their, maternalised, bodies, rather than what they actually do, but, it means that ideas about motherhood, not motherhood itself, function to police contemporary gender norms and contemporary understandings of agency in war. Overall, this book argues that maternalist war stories function to reiterate traditional heteronormative gender roles. This is how a 'body politics' of war is not only policing gender norms but actually writing 'sex' itself. The body politics of war told through maternalist war stories is a process in which the sexing of war means the policing of gender borders, with motherhood acting as the border agent.

This work will be of interest to students and scholars in areas such as gender, political violence and international relations.

1 Stories of motherhood, agency and war

A distinctive and joint creation of philosophical abstraction and sexual fantasy, war’s body kills and suffers; it does not give birth.

(Sara Ruddick 2002: 204)

In this chapter, I explore how motherhood is commonly understood as agency in gendered stories of war and peace. The aim of the chapter is to contextualise the nuanced way of thinking about motherhood, agency and war that this book offers, i.e. to emphasise the value of a grammatical rather than material understanding of agency and use of motherhood as an idea rather than a practice.

Within the system of signs in war, there are certain myths about male and female identities that become accentuated; female identity is seen as life-giving, whereas male identity is seen as life-taking (Skjelsbæk 2001: 220). Thus, women are designated as non-combatants and, in effect, peaceful, because of the part they play in the reproductive process. Historically, it is predominantly women who in greater numbers have organised against militarism and committed themselves to working for peace. The historical association of women, resistance, peace and non-violence is long: according to Nira Yuval-Davies the image of women resisting wars has been in existence in the Western public imagination at least since Lysistrata was first shown in Athens in the fifth century BC (Yuval-Davies 1997: 94). Likewise, mothering as a series of daily acts and motherhood as an idea about what those acts together should stand for each have long political histories. Cynthia Enloe argues that it is difficult to make sense of any state, past or present, without taking seriously that state’s attempts to craft ideas about motherhood that pressure women as mothers to do certain things judged useful to the state (Enloe 2000a: 260).

At the same time, mothering and motherhood have also been key sites for women’s efforts to resist the state through participation in civil or peace movements. Some of the more prominent examples of women’s protest against war include movements such as the Women’s Peace Party that drew together over a thousand women during the First World War and subsequently founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF); The Greenham Common Peace Camp in Britain protesting against US military presence; the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina; Women in Black, an anti-war movement originated in Israel but also active in the former Yugoslavia; CodePink, a US organisation that among other things organises annual rallies on Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day against US involvement in current wars, to name a few.

Indeed, women peace activists often invoke the ‘natural’ peacefulness of women and thereby use gendered identities provided by traditional narratives of war as a platform for political action. In this way, the gendered nature of war creates a political space for women as peace activists; peace has become a subject that women could legitimately speak about (Steans 2006: 59). In particular, women’s legitimacy as peace activists has been, and continues to be, made through their roles as mothers, linking motherhood, peace and women’s rights (Segal 2008: 23; Steans 2006: 59). Since all women are perceived to be potential mothers, motherhood is an attempt at unifying women involved in such transnational political activity in order to overcome other potential barriers of race, class and religious differences among activists (Steans 2006: 59).

Despite the close links between peace and femininity visible in women’s political activism, however, most feminist scholarship in IR, due to a predominant constructivist orientation, is critical of such essentialist claims rendering women ‘naturally’ peaceful. What is more, some feminists are wary of the ‘patriarchal risks’ in relying on motherhood as a political idea and therefore question whether motherhood really is the best site from which to launch resistance to, for example, state militarism (Enloe 2000a: 260).

It also needs to be pointed out that similarly to how women have used traditional perceptions of gender roles in their protesting as peace activists, women also frequently utilise existing stereotypes to pursue their political objectives in warfare. Albeit this is nothing new, it is feminist scholarship that has noticed how women are not only exploiting their label of innocence in becoming spies and smugglers but also using motherhood as an explicit strategy for political violence. For example, in Northern Ireland it was women who had central responsibility for transporting, moving, hiding, cleaning and storing weapons and explosive materials simply because they were much less likely to be stopped and searched (Alison 2004: 457). In Sierra Leone, women were found smuggling weapons through military checkpoints in bags of women’s underwear or hidden on their own or their children’s bodies (Coulter 2008: 63–4). In Sri Lanka, Tamil nationalist women have utilised cultural expectations related to their behaviour and dress to gain access to targets as suicide bombers, hiding belt bombs under saris or dresses, as a female Black Tiger combatant did in the 1991 suicide-bomb assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (Alison 2004: 456). In addition, as the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) is often disguised under the women’s clothing to make her appear as if she is pregnant and thus beyond suspicion or reproach, Mia Bloom argues, notions of femininity and motherhood are complicated (Bloom 2007: 143). Also, as this particular ‘strategy of motherhood’ has been seen in various places, Mia Bloom argues, feigning pregnancy unites women suicide bombers in places as diverse as Turkey and Sri Lanka (ibid.: 152). ‘The advent of women suicide bombers has transformed the revolutionary womb into an exploding one’ (ibid.: 143).

In this chapter, Caron Gentry’s distinction between ‘active’, ‘passive’ and ‘twisted’ maternalism is offering a rough structure (Gentry 2009) as I go through how stories of motherhood, agency and war are typically told. In the first section, I build on above all Sara Ruddick’s work on a Maternal Peace Thinking. This maternalist position is linked to women’s peace movements and agency is understood as ‘active’. The second section discusses motherhood and agency in gendered stories of war and shows how maternalist war stories are linked to militarism and nationalism. The third section focuses on maternalist stories in agency in political violence and, more specifically, on how representations of female terrorist attacks are not only gendered but rely on maternalist narratives which ultimately deny the individual women any agency of their acts. I conclude the chapter by discussing how my grammatical rather than material approach to agency and treatment of motherhood as an idea rather than a practice facilitates the telling of alternative stories of motherhood, agency and war.

Maternal peace thinking

Within IR it is contributions to standpoint feminism, sometimes referred to as ‘difference feminism’ that have most noticeably theorised and politicised motherhood. By shifting the study from abstract states to how real living women are impacted by economic and security structures within and across state boundaries, a feminist standpoint offers a way to critique traditional approaches to the study of war and peace and to tell alternative war stories (Steans 2006: 48, 58). It is ‘a superior vision produced by the political conditions and distinctive work of women’ (Ruddick 2002: 129). In particular, such a woman’s work often comes back to mothering, care and nurturing and these scholarly contributions are, therefore, often referred to as maternalist. Here, I touch upon the work of Nancy Chodorow (1978) and Carol Gilligan (1982) but in particular I focus on the work of Sara Ruddick (1989), arguably the most relevant for the development of a feminist standpoint that in my reading have forged a link between motherhood, agency and peace.¹

Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering is a psychoanalytic study of how and why mothering remains to be seen as a ‘natural’ fact and why it is ‘naturally’ linked to women. Chodorow argues that it is because women are the primary caretakers that mothering is reproduced as ‘naturally’ linked to women. This creates a focus on social relations and care rather than on women’s capacity to give birth. And, as a result, being a mother is not only bearing a child – ‘it is being a person who socializes and nurtures. It is being a primary parent or caretaker’ (Chodorow 1978: 11).

With In a Different Voice (1982), Carol Gilligan builds on Chodorow and claims that women’s experience of interconnection shapes their moral domain and gives rise to a different moral voice. Gilligan calls this an ethic of care, which is contrasted to a (male) ethic of justice. It is in the different voice of women, Gilligan argues, that the tie between relationship and responsibility lies. The origins of aggression on the other hand lie in the failure of connection (Gilligan 1982: 173).

Gilligan argues that while an ethic of justice proceeds from the premise of equality and that everyone should be treated the same, an ethic of care rests on the premise of nonviolence and that no one should be hurt (Gilligan 1982: 174). It is this distinctive form of ethics that has been echoed in writings that articulate a female political consciousness grounded in difference and the virtues of women’s private sphere, primarily mothering. Amongst such maternalist theorising, Sara Ruddick’s A Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (2002 [1989]) has most clearly emphasised the links between motherhood, agency and peace.

Ruddick argues that there is a peacefulness latent in maternal practice which means that a transformed maternal thinking could make a distinctive contribution to peace politics (Ruddick 2002 [1989]: 137). Although mothers are not intrinsically peaceful, Ruddick argues, maternal practice is a ‘natural resource’ for peace politics: Mothers have supported their boys and their leaders, but in the contradiction of maternal and military aims there is a dangerous source of resistance; the rhetoric and passion of maternity can turn against the military precisely because, as is shown in the next section, the ideology of militarism depends on it. ‘A peace-maker’s hope is a militarist’s fear’ (ibid.:157).

Ruddick combines a women’s politics of resistance, which she defines as identified by three characteristics: its participants are women, they explicitly invoke their culture’s symbols of femininity and their purpose is to resist certain practices or policies of their governors, with motherhood and a feminist politics (ibid.:222). Although neither a women’s politics of resistance nor a feminist politics is inherently a peace politics, Ruddick argues that each instructs and strengthens peacemaking: ‘Both politics are intricately connected to mothering, yet each also challenges just those aspects of maternal practice that limit its public, effective peacefulness’ (ibid.: 222). Thus, Ruddick argues, separately and in combination they transform maternal practice into a work of peace (ibid.: 222).

Ruddick argues that by combining motherhood, with a politics of resistance and standpoint feminism, a new political identity can be constructed: the feminist, maternal peacemaker who draws upon the history and traditions of women to create a human-respecting politics of peace (ibid.: 245). As illustration, Ruddick uses the political resistance of the Madres (mothers) of Argentina to its military regime and the similar resistance of Chilean women to the Pinochet dictatorship (ibid.: 225). She calls these women the daughters, the heirs of Kollwitz’s Mater Dolorosa:²

As in Kollwitz’s representations, a mother is victimized through the victimization of her children. These women are themselves victims … Yet there is a sense in which, by their active courage, they refuse victimization … The Latin American mater dolorosa has learned how to fight as a victim for victims, not by joining the strong, but by resisting them.

(Ibid.: 233)

The maternalist position, predominant in Ruddick’s work and through the activism of the women’s peace movement mentioned above, might be critiqued for expressing biological determinism and essentialism as it tends to link mothering and an ethics of care to (heterosexual) women and ‘real’ mothers only.³ However, Ruddick emphasises the distinction between women’s biological capacity to give birth and their social work in mothering as she argues that the work of mothering does not require a particular sexual commitment or that there is any reason why mothering work should be distinctly female. Ruddick notes that while most mothering has been undertaken by women, there have always been men who mother. When mothering is construed as gender-free work, Ruddick suggests, birth-giving and mothering appear as two distinct and quite different activities (ibid.: xii). In other words, Ruddick is still critical of women’s ‘natural’ peacefulness:

There is nothing in a woman’s genetic makeup of history that prevents her from firing a missile or spraying nerve gas over a sleeping village if she desires this or believes it to be her duty … War is exciting; women, like men, are prey to the excitements of violence and community sacrifice it promises.

(Ibid.: 154)

Although distinctly maternal desires and capacities for peacemaking exist, it is through maternal efforts to be peaceful rather than an achieved peacefulness that Ruddick finds ‘resources for creating a less violent world’ (ibid.: 136). Crucially, Ruddick does not argue that women are naturally peaceful in an ideological sense but interested in the material political agency of mothers (male or female).

Yet, feminist scholars have been quick to point out that Ruddick’s Maternal Peace Thinking is problematic as it risks perpetuating the idea of women-as-peacemakers (Pankhurst 2004). J. Ann Tickner argues that women’s political organising with peace is not necessarily a good thing as ‘peace is frequently seen as an ideal, and even uninteresting, state with little chance of success in the “real” world’ (Tickner 2002: 337). In this sense, the association of women with peace renders both women and peace as idealistic, utopian, and unrealistic and this is profoundly disempowering for both (ibid.: 338). Similarly, making peace feminine masculinises war. As long as peace remains associated with women, this may reinforce militarised masculinity. Thus, even though Ruddick’s argument is not biologically essentialist in its use of gender, the association of predominantly women with universal practices of mothering, care and peace is still problematic as it reinforces traditional binary constructions of what certain bodies should or should not do. And, this is political.

Militarised maternalism/maternalised militarism

Cynthia Enloe defines militarisation as a specific sort of transforming process by which something becomes controlled by, dependent on, or derives its value from the military as an institution or militaristic ideas and criteria (Enloe 2000a: 291). Importantly, however, militarisation should not be seen as some form of top-down forcefully imposed ideology. Instead, as Enloe points out in numerous works, militarisation is about culture, ideas, values: ‘The more militarisation transforms an individual or a society, the more that individual or society comes to imagine military needs and militaristic presumptions to be not only valuable but also normal’ (ibid.: 3). Therefore, ‘[a] militarizing maneuver can look like a dance, not a struggle, even though the dance may be among unequal partners’ (ibid.: 10).

Moreover, if militarised beliefs and values already are rooted in a society, the military itself may only have to provide legitimation, ‘an encouraging nudge here, a supportive nudge there’ (Enloe 2000a: 171). In other words the practices and performances of militarisation involve cultural as well as institutional, ideological, and economic transformations (ibid.: 3). In her works Enloe also powerfully demonstrates where and how these practices take place and she shows just how wide-spread and overarching militarisation is as the list of what can be militarised is virtually endless: toys, jobs, the profession of psychology, fashion, faith, voting, local economies, condoms, and movie stars (ibid.: 4). Crucially though, Enloe argues, what has been militarised can be demilitarised. But she also warns that what has been demilitarised can be remilitarised (ibid.: 291).

Enloe is also careful to point out how militarisation relies on support from women. If militarisation were oppressive for all women in all situations, Enloe argues, militarisation would not be so potent a political process (Enloe 2000a: 297):

It is precisely because militarization holds out such advantages to some women some of the time that it has been difficult to see the maneuvers of decision makers and difficult to detect militarization’s fundamentally patriarchal consequences.

(ibid.: 298)

As mentioned above, one of the iconic images of motherhood in relation to war has been the ‘grieving mother’; mothers have been assigned a central role in patriarchally inspired war stories (Enloe 2000a: 249). For militaries at war, mothers are potential opponents as their children are drafted with the risk of being killed- and thus a potential threat to the war effort. By mobilising mothers into maternal organisations, the state or non-state military attempts to redirect and control mothers’ anger at the drafting or death of a son or daughter (Elshtain 1995; Bayard de Volo 2004: 718). Mussolini’s Italian fascist regime elevated the widows and mothers of dead soldiers to a special status. Israel’s government has bestowed special state pensions on women who have lost either husbands or sons in its wars (Enloe 2000a: 193). Military widowhood can be an ideological boon to militarism, but it can also be a liability to the military itself. Widows can be used to symbolise the ‘supreme sacrifice.’ By encouraging all women in the country to identify with each military widow or grieving mother, a government can try to turn the governments’ soldiers into ‘our boys,’ deserving of all women’s support (ibid.: 193). For example, as Cynthia Weber noted with regards to President Bush’s construction of the people involved on the fourth aeroplane hijacked on 11 September, 2001:

The President’s transformation of Todd Beamer from one courageous passenger into the iconic figure of all heroic Americans who opposed the terrorists on 9/11 and who would continue to do so afterwards seemed to be welcomed by most Americans. So was the transformation of his wife Lisa into the iconic figure of patriotic wife and mother whose personal loss of her husband was something Americans, including Lisa, seemed to understand as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Kyle Grayson
• Introduction: securitising feminism or feminist security studies?
• 1 Stories of motherhood, agency and war
• 2 Gender, security and popular culture: a methodological approach
• Cast: empirical cases and supporting roles
• 3 Victimised objects
• 4 Heroic subjects
• 5 Monstrous abjects
• Conclusion: making feminist sense of maternalist war stories
• Bibliography
• Index