Jesse Crane-Seeber

I have struggled with how to live as a feminist man. In terms of my fascination with war, my relationships with women, and my status as a scholar, I have wondered, would a more feminist version of me be less warlike, less cis-hetero? Am I not a good enough feminist? Rather than a simple individual failing, perhaps feminism is somehow incomplete. Yet who am I to point it out if it is? My fascination with war is only one of many places where a feminist-movement super-ego stands in complicated relation with my other internal selves. Through a series of vignettes, this piece explores the failures, attempts, surrenders, and other moves that I have adopted in my long dance with feminism. An uncomfortable room: 2012-14

ABSTRACT Fieldwork with U.S. veterans showed me many things I never expected. As good fieldwork should, it disrupted my questions and showed me answers I was not seeking. Drawing on that experience, this essay reflects on the bodies of soldiers, particularly the ways they are medicated and surveilled. Looking into everyday life reveals how the twin logics of the ‘war on terror’ and ‘war on drugs’ concatenate, showing a side of the state security apparatus that is underappreciated.

Are all-male panels (AMPs) a symptom of continuing gender inequality that needs calling out? Undoubtedly. Does ensuring the presence of women on every panel, or even creating all-women panels, offer an effective solution? I’m unconvinced. Insisting that all panels should include women finds support because it is a direct and tangible response to a persistent phenomenon, made infinitely more frustrating by the blithe thoughtlessness that underpins its recurrence. It appears to be a small but welcome and quantifiable step toward correcting the chronic underrepresentation that women in the majority of professional fields still experience. However, settling for this quick fix has some potentially serious side effects for gender equity and diversity. Apparent practicality aside, a “just add women” response to AMPs risks perpetuating not only the notion that gender is binary, essentialized and visible, but also that gender parity between women and men should to be prioritized over other axes of diversity. The binary categorization of gender utilized in the AMP discourse, in which “woman” is the sole logical other of “man,” closes down space for other (non-western, non-binary) gender identities. It also reduces “women” to a reified identity husk, with the complexity and multiplicity of individual identity stripped out in favor of a single monolithic generic label. Gender binarism is a deficient basis on which to try and address difference and inclusivity. In the case of AMPs, it is compounded by reliance on visible markers of gender – principally appearance, but also names and gendered pronouns – to determine whether panelists are men or women. This further reduction of gender identity to what is not only visible but intelligible to the viewer is deeply

This essay examines links between sexuality, sexiness, and militarized bodies. While scholars have persuasively established links between militarization, hyper-masculine identities, and sexual assault, I want to trouble the soldier as an object of desire, not merely as a subject imposing violence. This paper analyses the fetishism of militarization to argue that the relationship between soldiers’ bodies and the state might be usefully understood using theoretical categories derived from kink communities. While few would dispute that dominance and submission are involved in all hierarchical social relations, I follow Foucault in arguing that communities that eroticize these roles have broadly applicable insights into the productivity of power. Combining theoretical arguments with empirical illustrations of how fetishism and militarization concatenate, I demonstrate how to think critically about the relationships between gender, war, desire, and agency. I do so because, like it or not, war is sexy in contemporary US culture.

While we applaud Hudson, Bowen, and Nielson (2011) for demonstrating the correlation between two modes of contemporary sexist oppression (inequality in family law and violence against women), we are concerned about how they embed a contested narrative of human evolution into otherwise straightforward findings. We argue that claims about human evolution are unnecessary to their argument, and, more importantly, that the version of feminist evolutionary analysis they describe is less feminist than it could be.

I have struggled with how to live as a feminist man. In terms of my fascination with war, my relationships with women, and my status as a scholar, I have wondered, would a more feminist version of me be less warlike, less cis-hetero? Am I not a good enough feminist? Rather than a simple individual failing, perhaps feminism is somehow incomplete. Yet who am I to point it out if it is? My fascination with war is only one of many places where a feminist-movement super-ego stands in complicated relation with my other internal selves. Through a series of vignettes, this piece explores the failures, attempts, surrenders, and other moves that I have adopted in my long dance with feminism. An uncomfortable room: 2012-14

Fieldwork with U.S. veterans showed me many things I never expected. As good fieldwork should, it disrupted my questions and showed me answers I was not seeking. Drawing on that experience, this essay reflects on the bodies of soldiers, particularly the ways they are medicated and surveilled. Looking into everyday life reveals how the twin logics of the ‘war on terror’ and ‘war on drugs’ concatenate, showing a side of the state security apparatus that is underappreciated.

This essay examines links between sexuality, sexiness, and militarized bodies. While scholars have persuasively established links between militarization, hyper-masculine identities, and sexual assault, I want to trouble the soldier as an object of desire, not merely as a subject imposing violence. This paper analyses the fetishism of militarization to argue that the relationship between soldiers' bodies and the state might be usefully understood using theoretical categories derived from kink communities. While few would dispute that dominance and submission are involved in all hierarchical social relations, I follow Foucault in arguing that communities that eroticize these roles have broadly applicable insights into the productivity of power. Combining theoretical arguments with empirical illustrations of how fetishism and militarization concatenate, I demonstrate how to think critically about the relationships between gender, war, desire, and agency. I do so because, like it or not, war is sexy in contemporary US culture.

Page 1. 218 Contesting Essentialist Theories of Patriarchal Relations: Evolutionary Psychology and the Denial of History This essay emerges from an ongoing mother-son dialogue about contemporary gender relations and their genesis in the history of patriarchy. ...