Feminist geopolitics and the Middle East: Refuge, belief, and peace

Abstract

In this article, I draw on the work of feminist and critical political geographers to demonstrate what a feminist geopolitics can offer Middle East studies. I cite scholarship of feminist and critical geographers situated within and outside the region to address three key themes: “refuge,” “belief,” and “peace.” In each theme, I use the “body” as a starting point to convene a justice‐oriented methodology of studying and knowing the Middle East. A major objective and contribution of feminist geopolitics to geography has been to recenter political inquiry from the state to the fleshy matter of the body. A “corporeal geopolitics” understands that all bodies have geopolitical agency, that all bodies are vulnerable—albeit differentially—to politics, and that all bodies are connected within and formative of shared economic, social, and political processes across space. Here, I chart ways that a feminist geopolitical analytic focused on “bodies” can contribute to a more complex understanding of the Middle East, one that operates through specificity, accountability, and care.

Bodies and persons: The politics of embodied encounters in asylum seeking

“…As our discussion in the second section shows, embodiment can accentuate, for example, in situations of refugee status determination, detention, paperlessness, and border crossing, but manifest itself differently in each of these instances. In alignment with recent calls for attention to the body as a site and target of the politics of asylum and refuge (Clark, 2017;Hodge, 2018;Smith et al, 2016), we propose that the refugee body is the prime arena for the politicization of (forced) migration and the encounters it entails. This is so, we argue, because the body is at once the locus and the vehicle of political subjectivity -what Plessner calls 'personhood' and Agamben the indeterminate 'form-of-life'.…”

“…Coker, 2004;Haldrup et al, 2006;Ibrahim and Howarth, 2017;Scheel, 2013). Also in such situations refugees may find themselves reduced into generalized bodies, abstracted from personhood with needs, fears, preferences, relationships, ethics, views, responsibilities, abilities, and desires (Clark, 2017;Hayden, 2006). Without personal attributes, their experiences do not appear meaningful or in want of comprehensive understanding.…”

#LetThemStay#BringThemHere: Embodied politics, asylum seeking, and performativities of protest opposing Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders

“…Yet despite the body’s primacy as the object of border protection – the site of violence itself – reigning notions of the political as practiced and reified by government bureaucracies, private companies and non-government organisations, prioritise the institutional arrangements at the level of the nation-state. Similarly, political geography in many ways remains largely fixed on the nation–state as ‘the operative site and scale for geopolitical scholarship’ (Clark, 2017: 4). Gill (2010: 626) too refers to the ‘still-dominant body of thought [that] tends to essentialize the state’ and ‘foreground both its institutional forms and coercive powers’, even critiques of it.…”

“…More recently, Mountz (2018) highlights political geography’s reticence to embrace the body as a key site at which to explore space, power and politics. Challenging these scalar practices and interpretive modes, feminist scholars have led analyses that locate the affected and affecting body as ‘inextricable from and constitutive of geopolitics’ (Askins, 2015; Clark, 2017: 4; Dowler and Sharpe (2001); Dowler et al., 2014; Mountz and Hyndman, 2006; Pain and Staeheli, 2014; Smith et al., 2016). Pain and Staeheli (2014), for example, foreground an intimacy-geopolitics to articulate ‘the inseparability of politics from emotional geographies’ (2014: 346).…”

“…For these authors (Pain and Staeheli, 2014: 344), to make explicit ‘the already-thereness’ of intimate relations and practices in ‘global … processes and strategising, international events, policies and territorial claims’ is to problematize outright dominant geopolitical scripts (see also Sharp, 2011). Clark (2017: 1) similarly, recentres her analyses ‘from the state to the fleshy matter of the body’ referring to a ‘corporeal geopolitics’ grounded in the material world that simultaneously ‘transects and effaces scales and usefully dislodges the idea that the public (political) and private (personal) are distinct’ (2017: 4). Smith et al.…”