The wrong turn (5): the swerve, Rosemary Bechler

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:45:07 +0000

I think I can put my finger on the place where this wrong turn was taken. Of course, these things don't happen at one discreet moment in time, and they gather their effect from frequent, daily repetition. No doubt there were wider and all sorts of contingent reasons for the closing down of certain options, but I want to concentrate on the choices that women activists made back then, the ones I think should be reversed.

Read more on similar themes from 50:50

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In J.A Tickner's first, pathbreaking book, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, the swerve I am concerned with first appears as part of a proper concern with women being treated, not as agents in their own right, but as victims:

‘In international relations, this devalued femininity is bound up with myths about women as victims in need of protection; the protector/protected myth contributes to the legitimation of a militarized version of citizenship that results in unequal gender relations that can precipitate violence against women.'

Tickner explains that some feminists have responded by criticising the privileging of military values in society and calling for a recognition of the equal contribution that women make. But she adds that this recognition is unlikely to be forthcoming until myths that perpetuate views of women as victims rather than as agents are eliminated. She says no more about why this must be the order of events. One such myth, she continues, 'is the association of women with peace, an association that has been invalidated through considerable evidence of women's support for men's wars in many societies...'. Now, of course, if it is factually incorrect, there is no more to be said about the association of women with peace. But Tickner doesn't leave it there. She supports her assertion by drawing a historical analogy with ‘the Victorian view... that women were disqualified from participating in the corrupt world of political and economic power by virtue of their moral superiority'. The result of this, she avers, 'could only be the perpetuation of male dominance', adding revealingly, ‘ The association of femininity with peace... also contributes to the claim that women are naïve in matters relating to international politics...'.

There is a muddle here about what we should be defending as gender activists which, for clarification, needs to go back to the stigmatisation of the third term in the gender dichotomisation process. After all, Tickner is unlikely to be recommending corrupt practises to her fellow activists. In fighting off the attribution of weakness and victimhood, as she is quite aware, she needs to find a way forward which is not simply a confirmation of the superior status of a certain kind of military strength. What she needs to do is to distance herself from the misleading constraints of a false gender dichotomy, weakness:strength. This would permit her to acknowledge that by no means always, but quite often, women do oppose wars and counter military values, because their experience as the care-givers in society gives them a different perspective on what matters and what is possible. The third term here, to be rescued from stigmatisation, is an increasingly important one in a globalising world with an environmental crisis. It is vulnerability and the recognition of vulnerability, interconnectedness and interdependency - as a strength.

Of course Tickner was writing long before the insights of Judith Butler's seminal essay on Precarious Lives (2004) in which she points out that ‘all human bodies are fundamentally dependent and vulnerable', and that our common condition is precisely this shared helplessness, which is as evident in the susceptibility of our desires and attachments to rejection and loss, as in our enduring physical injurability. In the United States in particular, the debate around the ‘protector/ protected' myth at the time took the form of a vigorous campaign by the National Organisation of Women (NOW) for the integration of women into combat roles in the armed forces. Obtaining the right to fight, they thought, would address the problem of women's ‘second-class citizenship', rights to equal treatment and equal opportunities. If women joined men as ‘defenders', NOW argued, the asymmetrical relationship between protector and protected would end, and with it the acts of violence ‘on behalf of' women which this permitted'. At the time, critics of this stance and of ‘militarism' bitterly complained that NOW's repudiation of ‘archaic notions of women's role' had turned into nothing more than a tribute to ‘archaic notions of men's role'. Looking back over the intervening decades in which we have seen an increasing number of women entering the military, it seems to have left more or less intact the social order in which, as Cynthia Enloe puts it, ‘women are symbols of the hearths and homes that the armed forces claim to be defending.'

Nevertheless, amidst all the far-reaching insights of this first stock-taking of ‘Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security' - this was a major,missed opportunity. It was an opportunity to defend the care-giving values associated with femininity from attack. As importantly, it was a failure to demonstrate the lack of contradiction between asserting the different perspectives women can bring to their societies at the same time as you fight for equal opportunities within its institutions. Perhaps the best account of this dual effect of ‘equal but different' is Chantal Mouffe's description of the democratic play of equality and liberty which, since the French Revolution, has radically changed our societies by liberating successive constituencies. This is an area of confusion that has bedevilled the feminist debate ever since the 1980s, and never more so than in our attitudes to conflict and power. We can see why from Tickner's final comment. It returns us to her initial preoccupation with the opportunities for women in the academic field of international relations: even at the end of the Cold War, you were asking to be regarded, not as a visionary but as a naïve wimp, if you dared to suggest that international politics could only benefit from a break with war-mongering. It was difficult to do, but was it either wrong or ultimately escapable?

The second example of ‘the swerve' somewhat complicates the plot. To my initial surprise, we are referred to an early work by my revered fellow colleague in Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Lynne Segal, entitled, Is the Future Female: troubled thoughts on contemporary feminism? (London Virago 1987). Tickner had posed herself the question: did a secure future depend on the substitution of values associated with femininity for those which characterise ‘hegemonic masculinity". In short, should feminists celebrate gender difference? Segal in this book, as she reports, ‘claims that this type of thinking is dangerous and divisive and unlikely to achieve the major goal of feminism, which should be to work for the equality of women...'. Back in the late 1980s, Segal was chiefly concerned to counter the ‘manicheanism' and essentialism of radical feminism which described women as innately pacific in stark contrast to their masculine counterparts. She feared that such an insistence on essential difference could only undermine cooperation between the sexes and exacerbate the inducement to men to fight for fear of appearing unmanly. It is a theme to which she has returned interestingly in recent months, with what I see as an altogether more fruitful insistence on the need that soldiers and young men have for protection from gender violence.

But once again we have here the wrong choice of opponent muddying the argument. It is no more likely that soldiers will be recruited by radical feminists than that the US military-industrial complex exists chiefly in order to humiliate women. And again the casualty of this wrong choice is an underestimation of the potential force for change in the world we live in of women's critique of war and violence and the forms of hard power which depend on them. On this score, the result in Tickner's first book is a sufficiently uncertain conclusion to bury this challenge to the status quo for all practical purposes: ‘Taking care not to elevate these feminine characteristics to a position of superiority, we can regard them as an inspiration to our thinking about ways to build better futures...

By the time Tickner was writing her second book in 2001, she is more decisive about her conclusion: such an emphasis on gender difference ‘in a male-dominated society' can only contribute to a devaluation of ‘women' and ‘peace'. Moreover, ‘It continues to render women's voices as inauthentic in matters of foreign policymaking.' In later commentaries on developments in the field, such as Jill Steans' Gender and International Relations (Polity Press, 2006), this debate dominates the chapter on ‘Feminist Perspectives on War and Peace' and is still unresolved. Standpoint thinkers such as Carole Gilligan, Dorothy Dinnerstein and Sara Ruddick, who are said to ‘champion the women/peace nexus' are ranged against Micaela di Leonardo and Janet Radcliffe Richards, who express deep concern that the idea of women's difference will be used to discriminate against women in the fight for equality.

There were much worthier opponents waiting in the wings - but again the response was seriously misleading. In 1998, Francis Fukuyama addressed himself to the question of ‘Women and the Evolution of World Politics' in the influential journal, Foreign Affairs. Fukuyama maintained that the then emerging gender gap in support for (US) national defence spending was evidence that women are more peaceful than men. Women, he announced, are different, as the ‘feminization' of politics and the shift to, ‘a less status and military-power-oriented world', at least in the world's democracies, attested. Deploying a mixture of socio-biology and free-market economics derived from social Darwinism, together with neorealist IR theory, Fukuyama promoted the essentialist argument that the competitive, war-prone nature of international relations is indeed largely determined by masculine biology: ‘female chimps have relationships; male chimps practise realpolitik.' Here was an essentialist argument that denied the possibility of gender change worthy of our attention and, historically, ripe for the taking. But it was more than that - it was also an important acknowledgement that the feminist intervention in international relations thinking had by this time touched a nerve.

Regrettably, for prominent gender analysts at the time - this was a ‘political backlash' that only confirmed their worst fears, to be greeted by denial and retreat. Why were these commentators so unaware of the compliment to themselves? In the same essay, Fukuyama refers to demographic changes in which elderly women were predicted to form powerful voting blocs in democratic countries by the mid-twenty-first century. He clearly foresaw the distinct possibility that a hitherto prevalent strategic/ instrumentalist rationality in foreign policy might now have to give way to a more pacific and cooperative orientation, because of a shift in gender relations. He was of course, dead against such an outcome, arguing that democracies continue to live surrounded by a barbaric world where ‘toughness and aggression in international politics' is necessary. The military must maintain combat readiness, which in turn necessitates sex segregation, lest disruption should occur in the requisite male bonding.

9/11, unfortunately, was soon to shift the goalposts once again. But a list of ‘rogue states' and a couple of wars later, isn't it time to revisit what Fukuyama recognised - that women in the world who espouse peace rather than war might be a redoubtable agency of change? Of course we still have to be vigilant about the use of ‘the protector/ protected myth' to bang the drums of war, as in the west's ‘rescue' of Afghanistan women. Far from wars being fought to protect women and children, to the extent that they generate in the rubble refugee crises, mass rape and rampant prostitution, together with a legacy of general brutalisation and domestic violence, they have disproportionately savage effects on women. (According to the United Nations Human Development Report, there has been a sharp increase in the proportion of civilian casualties of war from about 10% at the beginning of the twentieth century to 90% at its close, with women amongst the worst sufferers although they only constitute 2% of the world's regular army personnel.) But surely our response to this should not be to deny that women worldwide are often victims who need protecting, but, as Lynne Segal suggests, to include men in the same category, recognising ‘the gendered targeting of men, both as the anticipated perpetrators and the constant victims in the staging of violence' and - together - to look for the new agencies and the changes to the old ones that can secure both.

Meanwhile, whatever the outcome to the US elections, I would like to invite feminists of all generations to put our heads together in pursuit of a new clarity on these issues - to see if there isn't something we could do in this dangerous world to find a better way forward. Now is assuredly an opportune moment for such an effort.

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The wrong turn (5): the swerve, Rosemary Bechler