Feminist Security Studies has focused on expanding the referent object to individuals and nonstate collectives, looking beyond the military sector to include questions of identity, and uncovering (in)security in unexpected places. An important part of this debate is over silence, particularly about how certain individuals are silenced and how they might be brought into view. This article looks at the ways images can be used to make gender-specific security problems visible. It holds that text, images, and practices interact to construct (in)security and it outlines a tripartite text-image-practice model for analysing these interactions. Through a case-study of the British women's suffrage movement it illustrates the potential of the text-image-practice model. The suffrage movement leveraged visuals, militancy, and practices like hunger striking to resist attempted silencing by the government across textual, verbal and visual planes. Using the suffrage campaign, the article shows how posters were used to try to silence Suffragettes and how Suffragettes resisted that silencing. Thus, it demonstrates that images are important sites of feminist resistance and security politics that can also communicate a politics of the body. The article also offers an illustration of how historical cases of gender insecurity and resistance as well as their visualisation can be brought into Feminist Security Studies.

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Feminist scholars have provided important analyses of the gendered and racialised discourses used to justify the Global War on Terror. They show how post-9/11 policies were made possible through particular binary constructions of race, gender, and national identity in official discourse. Turning to popular culture, this article uses a Queer feminist poststructuralist approach to look at the ways that Ms. Marvel comics destabilise and contest those racialised and gendered discourses. Specifically, it explores how Ms. Marvel provides a reading of race, gender, and national identity in post-9/11 USA that challenges gendered-racialised stereotypes. Providing a Queer reading of Ms. Marvel that undermines the coherence of Self/Other binaries, the article concludes that to write, draw, and circulate comics and the politics they depict is a way of intervening in international relations that imbues comics with the power to engage in dialogue with and (re)shape systems of racialised-gendered domination and counter discriminatory legislation. Dibujando miedo a la diferencia: raza, género e identidad nacional en Ms. Marvel Comics

Focusing on the case of ‘Gay Clown Putin’, this article theorizes memes as visual interventions in international politics. While not all memes are political interventions, Gay Clown Putin is an iconic meme that is part of the international response to Russian state-directed political homophobia that emerged after the gay propaganda law was passed in 2013. How it has circulated and the attention it has received make it apt for exploring memes as visual political interventions that challenge national security discourses. Here, I provide three readings of Gay Clown Putin that suggest different possibilities for how the meme might work politically. In so doing, I deepen international relations’ engagement with queer theory by bringing in the politics of play that works through a queer epistemology that embraces deviance. Bringing memes to the study of international security, I show how the collection of images making up the Gay Clown Putin meme provides space for understanding the visual politics of security.