Lioness. Dir. and prod. by Meg McLagan and Daria Somners. Room 11 Productions. Chicken &amp; Egg Pictures, Impact Partners, 2008. 82 mins. (www.lionessthefilm.com)

Raimon, Eve Allegra

doi:10.2307/27694543

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The idea behind VSOs was that as security, local governance and stability improved, local communities would be more likely to support their government and the US forces and less likely to back the insurgency. Much is made of the physical superiority and 'alpha' status of these women (Lemmon, 2015). At the same time, reminding us of the gendered subjectivities constantly at play, CSTs were told that '[w]e are not at war to pass out blankets and hugs.…”

Section: Cultural Support Teamsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘Women helping women’: Deploying gender in US counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Head

2023

Security Dialogue

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Central to the goal of ‘hearts and minds’ counterinsurgency is the need for knowledge, understanding and influence in relation to local populations. Building on feminist scholarship on counterinsurgency, the article focuses on the ‘female engagement’ work undertaken by four programmes developed by the US military between 2003 and 2014. The article offers three key arguments. First, it maintains that the gendered subjectivities of Iraqi and Afghan women and US female counterinsurgents are constructed as strategic assets and as vulnerable subjects. Second, these programmes reveal the extent to which gendered counterinsurgency is constituted and regulated by emotional and embodied norms and rules for both female soldiers and civilians. Third, it suggests that the discursive construction of ‘winning hearts and minds’ works to render less visible the violence of gendered counterinsurgency practices. Although gendered counterinsurgency mobilizes a relational ontology predicated on the emotional labour required for developing knowledge of the Iraqi and Afghan ‘other’, female engagement activities cannot escape the logic of instrumental reasoning within which they are located. Ultimately, recognizing the policy of female engagement as central to forms of knowledge production reveals the extent to which the violences of war rely on a complex set of gendered and affective relations.

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Section: Cultural Support Teamsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the same time, reminding us of the gendered subjectivities constantly at play, CSTs were told that '[w]e are not at war to pass out blankets and hugs. I need you to find out where the bad guys are, as quick as you can' (Lemmon, 2015).…”

Section: Cultural Support Teamsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Women helping women’: Deploying gender in US counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Head

2023

Security Dialogue

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Witnessing: Virtual Conversations

Angel-Ajani

Dean

McLagan

2021

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

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This special feature presents curated excerpts from two virtual conversations that the editors (Liana Chua and Omri Grinberg) held with anthropologist and author Asale Angel-Ajani, historian Carolyn J. Dean and anthropologist and filmmaker Meg McLagan on the theme of witnessing. Beginning with the participants’ reflexive discussions of how they came to work on witnessing, the conversations delve into several intertwined questions and debates. These include the politics and impacts of witnessing; the performativity of witnessing and the subjectivities involved; the evolving place and practice of witnessing in the contemporary post-truth, digitally saturated milieu; the ‘dark side’ and other problematics of witnessing; how different disciplines witness and represent witnessing; and the question of what scholars can do to witness or bear witness in the present.

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Lioness. Dir. and prod. by Meg McLagan and Daria Somners. Room 11 Productions. Chicken & Egg Pictures, Impact Partners, 2008. 82 mins. (www.lionessthefilm.com)

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

‘Women helping women’: Deploying gender in US counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

‘Women helping women’: Deploying gender in US counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Witnessing: Virtual Conversations

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