Militarization , Gender, and Sexualty

On 15 July 2004, a public protest was staged in the state of Manipur, in India’s Northeast, to oppose the rape and custodial killing of a young Meitei woman, Thangjam Manorama, by soldiers of a counter-insurgency paramilitary battalion, the Assam Rifles, who suspected she was a militant. At this protest, several women appeared nude, holding a banner that read ‘Indian army rape us’. This analysis considers how we might read the nudity and the statement ‘Indian army rape us’. I argue that the language of law, human rights and women’s rights as human rights, are inadequate to analyze the protest and the events surrounding it because they do not situate the protest within larger political struggles in the Northeast. Further, such universalist approaches take categories like ‘Indian citizen’, ‘woman’ and ‘tribal’ as a given and do not allow for an engagement with how these categories are mutually constituted, or the law’s complicity in their constitution. Accordingly, concerns about contested notions of citizenship that are at the heart of the Manipur protest cannot be adequately addressed within this framework. Instead, I suggest a postcolonial feminist analytics as an alternative means to engage with the political questions raised by the protest.

The last decade has been a transformative period in Kashmir, the hotly contested and densely militarized border territory located high in the Himalayan mountains between India and Pakistan. Suppressed and unheard, Kashmiri political aspirations were subordinated to larger geopolitical concerns—by opposing governments laying claim to Kashmir, by security experts promoting bilateral peace settlements in the region, and by academic researchers studying the conflict. But since 2008, Kashmiris who grew up in the midst of armed insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare have been deploying new strategies for challenging India's state and military apparatus and projecting their legal and political claims for freedom from Indian rule to global audiences. Resisting Occupation in Kashmir analyzes the social and legal logic of India's occupation of Kashmir in relation to colonialism, militarization, power, democracy, and sovereignty. It also traces how Kashmiri youth are drawing on the region's long history of armed rebellion against Indian domination to reimagine the freedom struggle in the twenty-first century.
Resisting Occupation in Kashmir presents new ways of thinking and writing about Kashmir that cross conventional boundaries and point toward alternative ways of conceptualizing the past, present, and future of the region. The volume brings together junior and senior scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds who have conducted extensive fieldwork during the past decade in various regions of Kashmir. The contributors, many of whom were born and raised during the peak of the conflict in the 1990s, offer ethnographically grounded perspectives on contemporary social, legal, and political life in ways that demonstrate the multiplicity of experiences of Kashmiri communities. The essays highlight the ways in which this scholarly orientation—built through collaboration and dialogue across different kinds of borders—offers a new critical approach to Kashmir studies at this transformative and generative moment.

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.

The South African border war of the 1970s and ’80s was justified in cold war terms, as a fight against the ‘red danger’, but it was essentially a war in defence of the apartheid system. In need of soldiers to fight in the SADF, the government instituted conscription for all white males. By the 1980s the period of conscription was two years. Through a programme of propaganda, the government attempted to convince South Africans to support the war and compulsory military service. As has been the case with war the world over, the South African government and defence force regularly framed the war and support for it within gender terms. Conscripts were told that it was their duty to serve in the military to protect their families, particularly their mothers, wives or girlfriends and sisters. National service was seen as a rite of passage into manhood, turning immature boys into reliable fighters who could be trusted to defend their country and their families against external danger. The government’s propaganda about gender roles and the military were quickly taken up by the popular culture industry, so that militarised masculinity was popularised through the mainstream media in South Africa.
 
This chapter considers the gendered forms of popular culture representations in support of and in resistance to the war. For the government, the articulation of gender binaries was a critical foundation upon which to build support for the war. In response resisters tackled not only the injustices of the war in general but they undermined the gender binary logic of supporters of the war. This not only made support for the war questionable, but also made resistance more acceptable and courageous. It also posited alternative forms of desirable masculinity, as opposed to the militarised masculinity advocated by the state.

Ayşegül Keskin Çolak’a Armağan Tarih ve Edebiyat Yazıları, başlıklı kitap için kaleme alınan bu yazı Rahmi Turan ve Abdullah Turhan tarafından Günaydın gazetesi için yazılıp çizilen, daha sonra defalarca sinemaya uyarlanan Kara Murat anlatısının macerası ve içeriği ele alınmaktadır.
Kara Murat hikayesinin Rahmi Turan tarafından yaratıldığı bilinmesine rağmen, dönemin önemli bir gazetecisi olan Turan'ın hikayeyi hangi yazar ve tarihi romandan yola çıkarak uyarladığı ilk kez bu yazıda ortaya konulmaktadır. Çizgi romandaki söylemsel öğeler, cinsellik, şiddet ve milliyetçilik de ayrı başlıklar halinde incelenmiş, tarihi bir anlatı olan Kara Murat tarih ile ilişkilendilerek bir kez daha değerlendirilmiştir

Recently, scholars have called for a "critical ocean studies" for the twenty-first century and have fathomed the oceanic depths in relationship to submarine immersions, multispecies others, feminist and Indigenous epistemologies, wet ontologies, and the acidification of an Anthropocene ocean. In this scholarly turn to the ocean, the concepts of fluidity, flow, routes, and mobility have been emphasized over other, less poetic terms such as blue water navies, mobile offshore bases, high-seas exclusion zones, sea lanes of communication (SLOCs), and maritime "choke points." Yet this strategic military grammar is equally vital for a twenty-first-century critical ocean studies for the Anthropocene. Perhaps because it does not lend itself to an easy poetics, the militarization of the seas is overlooked and underrepresented in both scholarship and literature emerging from what is increasingly called the blue or oceanic humanities. This essay turns to the relationship between global climate change and the US military, particularly the Navy, and examines Indigenous challenges to the militarism of the Pacific in the poetry of Craig Santos Perez.

The perceived innocence and vulnerability of children has been a dominant theme in modern conceptualizations of childhood, particularly in the aftermath of the Second World War. A growing number of studies suggest however that a notion of children as capable of violent or even lethal conduct has not altogether vanished from post-World War II public discourse in Western Europe and North America, or indeed elsewhere in the world. China of the “Cultural Revolution’” period (1966–1976) is an illustrative case. The present article examines the portrayal of children as violent actors and the discursive militarization of Chinese childhood in PRC magazines of the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. It seeks to highlight the gendered aspects of the “belligerent child” trope in Chinese children’s media, while noting the distinctive depictions of militant boys and militant girls in the latter part of the Cultural Revolution period. These findings attest to the ambiguous nature of Chinese thinking about children and their capacities in the late Maoist period. They cast doubt on the frequently made argument that Cultural Revolution works produced the overall effect of “gender erasure” or, alternatively, of the extensive “masculinization” of Chinese women and girls. They further highlight the importance of critically examining how the different meanings of “being a girl” were produced, circulated, and, in turn, deployed in public discussions on national collectivity and political conflict in Maoist-era China.

This essay focuses on the issues of voice and representation, especially of people at the margins of the postcolonial nation-state. I ask what happens to political conversation and dialogue in situations of foundational inequality between two speaking positions, where the inequality has been engendered by the way in which the epistemic and political category of the nation-state has emerged. I place this discussion in the context of India’s Northeast, which has seen a history of failed political conversations. These issues of representation and voice resonate with larger debates within postcolonial and transnational studies.

The paper reflects on beauty pageants in the Ukrainian army in the past two years. It seeks to address the following questions: Why are beauty pageants held? Are they the best way to raise awareness of women’s roles in the national security sector? What do they mean for different actors – participants, audience, and organizers, as well as for military gender regime in general? How do gendered representations of female soldiers in official military discourse contribute to the state’s war effort?

A reflection on the different forms that violence against women takes in militarized societies like that in Assam in Northeast India. A young girl living with an abusive father is married off to an abusive husband. Like other women living with quotidian violence, she devises coping mechanisms: often the lines between reality and fantasy become blurred. The unbearable burden of a life abused (and its grim ending) can be made bearable only through recourse in the unreal and the magical.

This article examines the effects of rumors within the Mexican and U.S. governments’ militarized war on drugs. Focusing on a period during which Mexican drug organizations were strengthened and violence increased, the article follows the lives of Mexican sex workers and their clients, as well as American missionaries living in a prostitution zone in Reynosa, Tamaulipas. Borders between narco-controlled and state-controlled territory were shifted in and through the bodies of Reynosa’s residents as a contagion of performative rumors came to occupy la zona. As residents told or listened to stories about torture and murder at the hands of narcos, their perceived vulnerability increased and fear came to predominate. In this article I theorize how rumors of violence shaped affective atmospheres of terror and altered spatial practices in a drug-war zone. Feelings of bodily risk first affected vulnerable populations and later spread to people who had previously felt secure in border zones. These narco-stories not only circulated terror but also allowed people to achieve intimacy and maintain social bonds through the shared experience of terror.

O que explica a ausência de políticas de gênero nos documentos oficiais da defesa brasileira? Para responder, o artigo emprega a técnica de rastreamento de processo, com especial enfoque na busca de evidências empíricas. Sugere-se que tal ausência é resultado, também, da influência militar na política. Isto é, os desafios das mulheres militares brasileiras, como o acesso limitado a certas armas e especialidades, restrições nas formas de ingresso, problemas de infraestrutura e a inexistência de uma legislação que as ampare, são reflexos dos interesses das elites políticas e sua relação com os líderes militares, os quais nem sempre possuem vontade política para introduzir a questão de gênero na agenda, esforçando-se para manter a organização imune das mudanças sociais.

After an exchange of ideas with professor and activist Cynthia Enloe, a renowned field researcher, honorary member of the Gender Justice Legacy Wall of the International Court of Crimes in The Hague, and author of several books about the militarization of the women's lives, without hiding her excitement she allowed me, with the permission of her University of California Press editor, to translate to Spanish the preface of her book "Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives" (one of my favorite ones in terms of methodology and academic writing style).

Soni Sori, Kawasi Hidme, Linga Kodopi and Sukul Nag held the tricolour flag and led a ragtag band including social activists, organisers of political parties, trade unionists, teachers, lawyers, journalists, scribes, artists, filmmakers and academics. All these were seekers of wisdom pertaining to various facets of Bastar including its rich culture, the clouds of mining that loom large over it and aspects of militarisation. The tricolour was hoisted in village Gompad, on the August 15, 2016, around 8:30 am, close to where the Madkam Hidme was laid to rest. Her corpse being since exhumed for postmortem and presently lying in some sarkari (government) morgue somewhere in India, lies buried. The tricolour has never been hosted in Gompad before.

This text argues for a special new "mother-citizen" concept that was practiced in the USSR, with its connection between Soviet Motherhood, the state, with its patriarchal militarism, and the politicized notion of motherhood. Hence, post-Soviet motherhood and its political outlook should be understood in its historical context.

This commentary brings geopolitical economic sensibilities about sexual difference, possession, and the Machine into conversation with Lewis' cyborgic uterine to make three analytical points. First, transcalar uterine thinking has long existed, seasoned by geopolitical economic circumstance. Uterine thinking in nonmechanized agrarian contexts has circulated primarily through imaginaries of maternal fertility, the material expanse of which exceeds the limits of biological mother and child. The Machine gained authority over the agrarian by feeding off, and replacing, the maternal, of which the uterine is only part. By addressing geopolitical economic difference, Lewis's analysis would be enriched by an abundance of gestational thinking that operates beyond the Machinic cyborg. My second and related analytical point has to do with how Lewis locates the uterine as a gestational prize that anyone should be able to have; as long as the uterus remains rooted in sexual dimorphism, the male-born body is potentially unfree. Thus, even as she speaks of how gestation need not be contained by a real uterus, she considers its absence in the biological male body a source of potential deprivation that, for freedom's sake, would best be undone. This undoing would limit the geographical possibilities for queering the maternal. My third point emerges out of the second and has to do with how unconscious desire has historically geographically depended on sexual dimorphism, not the uterus. I'm not sure, but it seems that the interiorized cast of Lewis' cyborgic uterine makes it difficult to theorize relational attachments-her 'holding and letting go'.

This chapter deepens our understanding of how the protection of women was instrumentalized by the Canadian Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The plight of women and girls in Kandahar was used to justify increased spending on military campaigns, and encouraged increased militarization of the development and diplomatic branches of the whole-of-government approach.