Twisted Maternalism

Gentry, Caron E.

doi:10.1080/14616740902789609

Cited by 47 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Feminist scholars have pointed out how women's violence tend to be discussed in terms of violent women's gender: 'Woman' is not supposed to be violent (c.f. Elshtain 1995;Sjoberg andGentry 2007, 2008;Alison 2004;Gentry 2009). These News reported that the photos of England were "images that will haunt America's occupation of Iraq" and that "it is Lynndie England's face most linked to the horror" (Myrie, BBC news, 08/05/2004).…”

Section: Gendered Obsession About 'Woman' and Torturementioning

confidence: 99%

Affect as Methodology: Feminism and the Politics of Emotion1

Åhäll

2018

International Political Sociology

190

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Feminism often begins with intensity: you are aroused by what you come up against. You register something in the sharpness of an impression. Something can be sharp without it being clear what the point is… Things don't seem right. (Ahmed 2017: 22) "It didn't really gel", an established emotion scholar sympathetic to feminist scholarship said after we had both taken part in a workshop on emotion 1 research in International Relations (IR). I agreed. Four feminist scholars (out of 19) had been invited. The invitation meant recognition of feminist work as valuable when it comes to research on emotions, affect, passions and sensibilities in IR. And yet, my impression during the workshop was that it was as if we were speaking different languages. More generally, what was at stake was different understandings of 'the political' and, as a result, how to study the politics of emotion in IR. But more specifically, I began to think about how the active disinterest in feminist knowledge in IR more broadly is also often affectively felt. In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed discusses how sensation matters because "you are left with an impression that is not clear or distinct" (2017: 22). She goes on to argue, "a gut feeling has its own intelligence. A feminist gut might sense something is amiss. You have to get closer to the feeling" (2017: 27). My overall impression that something about the interactions during the workshop did not make sense was both an affective and emotional experience: following Ahmed, I wanted to get 'closer to the feeling'. To me (and I am sure other feminists in the room), the impression that our discussions during the workshop "didn't gel" was no surprise, perhaps even expected. But, my (non-feminist) colleague's reflection stayed with me because it touched on the much bigger issue of how feminist knowledge on global politics is often ignored more generally in IR. My experience at this workshop fed into previous experiences and my sense of irritation grew. It grew into this paper. Following Sianne Ngai's (2005) exploration of the critical productivity of negative affective senses (e.g. envy, shame, disgust and paranoia), I want to use my growing sense of irritation to think carefully about how (and why) "It didn't really gel." Feminist scholars have successfully drawn attention to the fact that gender matters in global politics. It is a good thing that it no longer make sense to exclude feminists from various academic spaces-this is not always the case, but the landscape is definitely changing. It is a good thing that many now realise that feminist research matters. And yet, after decades of 'including' feminist theory in IR, feminist knowledge remains marginalised. This is not a new observation (Tickner 1997; Steans 2003), but what concerns me is the continuing presence and force of this marginalization, and the way it makes itself felt at the levels of affect and emotion. Feminist scholars are increasingly invited into academic spaces, while feminist knowledge is, still, too often ignored. Non-femi...

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Section: Gendered Obsession About 'Woman' and Torturementioning

confidence: 99%

Affect as Methodology: Feminism and the Politics of Emotion1

Åhäll

2018

International Political Sociology

190

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“…While Gentry (2009), in her examination of Palestinian shahidas (suicide bombers) notes that women can actively claim their maternalism as a basis for political action in the public sphere, she sees passive maternalismwhere women as mothers become essentialized as symbols for national or geographic collectivities -as occurring more often. Passive maternalism is a 'concept applied by others' which 'infers women's perceived natural relational qualities, innate emotional decision-making and instinctive dedication to preservation' as the explanation for any public actions (Gentry 2009: 237 [emphasis in original]).…”

Section: Reproducing the War On Drugs And The Us Security State: Analmentioning

confidence: 96%

Victims and Vamps, Madonnas and Whores

Schemenauer

2012

International Feminist Journal of Politics

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This article explores how the US 'war on drugs' depends on certain notions of femininity and womanhood. In particular, I examine how female drug couriers from the Americas are constructed at US border sites of international airports in the 1990s. I find that female drug couriers are described in terms of victims and vamps -a take off of the madonna/whore dichotomy. The victim and vamp discourses, I argue, are the performative enactments of a security state that operates according to a racialized logic of masculinist protection. I hold in tension the circulation of the victim/vamp discourses with the story of Paula, a Colombian woman who was caught trafficking heroin in hidden compartments of her suitcase. I use Paula's story to call attention to the political work in dismissing women as agents in the international drug trade.---

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“…15 Feminists have been documenting how women are not simply victims, but also agents, which are actively involved in violent actions, for example, as part of the military engagements, in Rwanda (Lentin 1997) or Sri Lanka (De Mal 2003. More recently, there is a growing body of feminist writings about women who sexually abuse men (e.g., Gentry 2009;MacKenzie 2009;Sjoberg and Gentry 2007;Sjoberg 2016). Women are also active in promoting peace, such as in Afghanistan (Collett 1998), Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Bosnia-Herzegovina (Cockburn 1998), or Sri Lanka, and the successor states of Yugoslavia (Giles et al 2003), as well in many other parts of the world .…”

Section: Perpetrators and Victims: The Question Of Male-female Dichotomymentioning

confidence: 99%

Feminists against Sexual Violence in War: The Question of Perpetrators and Victims Revisited

Korač

2018

Social Sciences

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This article reflects upon feminist activism and analyses of sexual victimisation of women in war during the 1990s. It critically examines the reasons for the continuation of this type of violence against women, despite its recognition as a war crime; the recognition that marked one of the significant achievements of feminist activism during the last decade of the 20th century. The discussion points to the centrality of sexual violence in war for the system of gender based violence (GBV) against both women and men in war. It argues that a relational understanding of the gendered processes of victimisation in war is critical. This approach enables an acknowledgement that sexual violence in war and rape, as one of its expressions, is a violent political act that is highly gendered both in its causes and consequences, and, as such, it affects both women and men. This article provides an overall argument for the need of feminist scholarship and activism to engage with these differently situated experiences and practices of victimisation in war, to ‘unmake’ it.

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Twisted Maternalism

Cited by 47 publications

References 14 publications

Affect as Methodology: Feminism and the Politics of Emotion1

Affect as Methodology: Feminism and the Politics of Emotion1

Victims and Vamps, Madonnas and Whores

Feminists against Sexual Violence in War: The Question of Perpetrators and Victims Revisited

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