ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on different methodological approaches for studying gender through private security and private security through gender. It focuses on recent scholarship in the wider field of security studies and global politics, and in current gender and private security scholarship. Gender is clearly important in shaping the practices and effects of security outsourcing in the twenty-first century, and in the provision of security services more generally. Similarly, security outsourcing informs the ways in which gender is practised, experienced, and reproduced. Feminist scholars from a wide array of scholarly homes have been exploring the interconnections between gender and security for several decades, and the field of Feminist Security Studies has been firmly established within international relations (IR). Feminist theory has taught that gender is not only produced through the social and political world; it is also productive of that world.
