(Re)framing the Relationship between Discourse and Materiality in Feminist Security Studies and Feminist IPE

Abstract

While feminists usually try to ground the meanings that they study, theorizing the mundane or the everyday may very well represent a detour—or even a dead end—if bread-and-butter issues related to the security and economic well-being of ordinary women and men are ignored. What value does feminist theorizing (even if it draws from women's lived experiences) have in war-affected contexts where meeting immediate needs is paramount? At what point does the theorizing of the body under such circumstances become a means to satisfying intellectual fetishes? Theorizing the everyday is messy because it has to contend with the immediate social setting in which popular culture is inseparable from the economic materiality of the conditions of oppression.

Feminist Global Political Economy and Feminist Security Studies? The Politics of Delineating Subfields

“…In this conversation, FGPE and FSS emerge as different from each other along several lines of demarcation. These include assumptions about FGPE's emphasis on the importance of materiality in relation to FSS's focus on the power of discourse (Elias and Rai 2015, 428; Hudson 2015, 414; Meger 2015, 417–18). Others distinguish the fields along the lines of their empirical research topics.…”

“…In contrast, FSS is portrayed as narrowly focusing on the acts of violence (such as rape), thereby missing underlying causes (Meger 2015, 417; True 2012, 29) or the continuum of violence that spans “peace” and “war” (Cockburn 2013; True 2015, 421; see also Kelly 2012). Relatedly, for some (Elias and Rai 2015; Hudson 2015), another deep fault line between FGPE and FSS falls along a familiar structuralist/poststructuralist divide; FGPE, according to these accounts, largely embraces structuralist ontologies (cf. De Goede 2006), epistemologies, and methodologies, while many FSS projects tend to embrace poststructuralist ones.…”

“…What is striking in the rich scholarship associated with both subfields is the composite creativity displayed in seeking to unravel webs of complex social, political, economic, and cultural processes, relations, practices, and subjectivities; find linkages; and hone in on pressing problems that refuse the spatiotemporal coordinates and the orders that circumscribe our imaginaries. We find scholarship that asks questions about violence in all its myriad forms and that interrogates the “continuum of violence” (Cockburn 2013; True 2012); that takes as its point of departure the “everyday” (see Elias and Rai 2015; Parashar 2014); that embraces structural as well as poststructural ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies (Hudson 2015; Sjoberg 2015); that traces processes of embodiment in relation to security and economic practices (Elias and Roberts 2016; Wilcox 2015); that focuses on materiality (Abdelnour and Saeed 2014; Agathangelou 2004); that gleans insight from theories and methodologies recognized as belonging to FGPE and FSS (Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2016), as well as much more.…”

Introduction: (Re)integrating Feminist Security Studies and Global Political Economy: Continuing the Conversation through Empirical Perspectives

“…Attempts to integrate feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist global political economy (GPE) were first meticulously studied in the Critical Perspectives sections of the June 2015 and December 2017 issues of this journal. Although the debate has gained presence in workshops, at international conferences, and even on dedicated websites, the diverse contributions have remained rather theoretical (e.g., Bergeron, Cohn, and Duncanson 2017; Hudson 2015). The aim of these Critical Perspectives essays is to take the integration of FSS and GPE one step further by presenting empirically grounded contributions that help us contextualize the existing theoretical debates.…”

Navigating to Subsistence: The Gendered Struggles in the Postwar Everyday and Their Implications for Peace

“…Located near the borders with Serbia and Croatia, it started as a “free-trade zone” at a roadblock created by NATO-led peacekeepers, “bringing together the warring parties.” The market was both unregulated and protected, and human trafficking and prostitution soon started taking place alongside trading, with the direct involvement of peacekeepers (Haynes 2010, 1781–96). Arizona, then, was a site where dynamics about idealized militarized masculinities and prostitution (Sjoberg 2015) and conflict-related gender-based violence (Hudson 2015) played out daily.…”