ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the broader academic and political context of the debates, as well as particular pieces of work, drawn from the feminist literature on security, which highlight the language/materiality relationship. Feminist scholars have played an important role in the reintroduction of materiality to discussions of security. The human security discourse, in its liberal form, highlights the importance of protecting individual bodies. International relations and security studies appear to be forever turning, in which the turning itself is a part of a dance with mystical powers. In the first turn, that which had been given the label security, i.e. the state, was named a potential source of insecurity. Starting from the perspective that the logic of security is different for those who historically have been located outside sovereignty, the chapter explores several different forms of political self-sacrifice, among them the human bomb, hunger strikes, self-immolation and forms of nonviolent resistance.
