Gendering (in)security: interrogating security logics within states of exception

Abstract

This collection contributes to debates which seek to move feminist scholarship away from the reification of the war/peace and security/economy divides. However, rather than focusing on the terms of the debate, we foreground the empirical reality of the breakdown of these traditional divisions, paying particular attention to the 'state of exception' and other frameworks akin to it. In doing so, contributors to this special issue trouble the ubiquitous concept and practices of '(in)security' and their effects on differentially positioned subjects. By gendering (in)securities in 'states of exception' and other paradigms of government related to it, especially in postcolonial and neo-colonial contexts, we provide an approach which allows us to study the complex and interrelated security logics which constitute the messy realities of different-and particularly vulnerable-subjects' lives. In other words, we suggest that these frameworks are ripe for feminist interventions and analyses of the logics and production of (in)securities as well as of resistance and hybridisation.