ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a range of critiques of both traditional and critical security studies from diverse feminist and gender perspectives. It begins by examining the gendered politics of security studies as a field that has typically marginalised women and the significance of gender structures more generally. A variety of responses to these issues are explored, beginning with liberal and standpoint feminist perspectives that attempt to make women more visible in the context of international security. The move to increase the visibility of women is not free from controversy, however. Some gender theorists, particularly those associated with poststructuralist thought, question the very possibility of referring to the views and experiences of ‘women’ per se. Concerned with avoiding the essentialised categories of ‘man’and ‘woman’, this alternative work deconstructs gender claims, problematises sex and gender as discursive construct, and politicises the (re)production of different gendered subjectivities. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the various ways in which feminist and gender approaches have stimulated new lines of enquiry in critical security studies.
Women and gender structures have long been marginalised in the study of security. In part this is due to their relative invisibility on the terrain mapped out by dominant traditional perspectives. Yet, ‘critical’ work, including other perspectives in Part I of this book, has also been charged with taking gendered assumptions for granted. Over the past three decades, this gender bias has been identified, interrogated, and resisted by a collection of feminist and gender approaches within the field. This scholarship is nevertheless far from united in terms of its aims, method, or implications and reflects an array of related positions in political theory. Most notably, writers influenced by poststructuralism have questioned the liberal feminist move to simply ‘bring’women into security studies. For some poststructural gender theorists, for example, the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are radically unstable and caution should be taken in essentialising and universalising notions of ‘female’ (and ‘male’) experience. Liberal standpoint feminists have countered this by emphasising the focus on what they consider to be the unique subjugation of women as a strategy for generating political programmes. As we shall see, there is increasing diversity of scholarship associated with feminist and gender perspectives. Yet, while it is important to note that there is no consensus about what a ‘critical’ response to gender inequalities should be, these debates have opened up new and important terrains of research in critical security studies relating to broader issues involving identity, violence and justice.
