Racialization and Feminization in the War on Terror
Main content
Open seminar at Centre for Women's and Gender Research (SKOK)
Lecturer: Professor Mary Hawkesworth
Department of Women's and Gender Studies
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Traditional academic investigations of war seldom link armed conflict to practices of racialization or gendering. Construed as "organized violence between groups of people" (Osterud 2004, 1028), war has been studied in manifold and complex ways-but ways that offer little scope for concerns with race, gender, or sexuality. Feminist analyses that deploy race and gender as analytic categories illuminate new ways of understanding war, shifting the analytic frame from a focus on war as an instrument of statecraft and a means of destruction to war as a mode of production and reproduction. Nations are produced, contested, reproduced and transformed through war in ways that involve racialization and gendering. Indeed, practices of racing and gendering are integral both to statecraft and to insurrection. This paper explores how racial and gender power operate through new policies concerning securitization, war-making, nation-building.
