Lecture 11: War and Gender

Question 1

What is Gender?

Answer 1

Gender an empirical and an analytical category

Empirical refers to the embodied and ostensibly biological binary of male-female sex difference. Understood empirically, gender can be deploted as a variable to investigate, for example, how women and men are differently affected by, and differently participate in political and economic practices

Analytical gender refers to the signifying system of masculine-feminine differentiations that constitutes a governing code. Gender pervades language and cuture, systemically shaping not only who we are but also how we think and what we do. As historically constituted, the dichotomy of gender codes masculine qualities as oppositional to and more highly valued than feminine qualities.

Question 2

What trades are usually connect to Masculine and Femine?

Answer 2

Masculine
Strong, Assertive, Breadwinner, Dominant, Rational, Competitive, Tough, Ambitious

Feminine
Sensitive, passive, caregiver, submissive, emotional, cooperative, delicate, empathetic

Question 3

What are the effects of gender hierachy?

Answer 3

First, gender is relational, so that privileging who and what is masculinized is inextricable from devaluing who and what is feminized.

Second, the priveliging of masculinity does not privilege all men or only men. Gender with its lauded masculinity and denigrated femininity pervades language and culture and devalorizes all feminized statuses. The more an inidivual or a social category is feminized, the more likely that its devaluation is assumed, or presumed to be explained

Even though gender is divisble into masculinities and femininities it does not follow that gender-based expectations for human behavior are constant across time and place.

However, while “the exact content of genders shift with various and shifting socio-political contexts, gender subordination remains a constant feature of social and political life across time and space.

Question 4

What is WPS?

Answer 4

The adoption of United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 (UNSCR1325) on 31 October 2000 led to the establishment of the Women, Peace and Security agenda (WPS

This resolution is based on four core pillars: prevention, participation, protection, relief and recovery, all underpinned by gender mainstreaming.

Through these pillars, UNSCR1325 “reaffirms the important role of women in conflict prevention and resolution, peace negotiations, peacebuilding, peacekeeping, humanitarian response and post-conflict reconstruction. It stresses the importance of women’s equal participation and full involvement in all efforts to maintain and promote peace and security.

Question 5

What are the 4 WPS Pillars

Answer 5

1. Prevention focuses on preventing sexual and gender based violence
2. Protection involves protecting woman from sexual and gender based violence
3. Participation means increasing womens participation in peace processes and peacekeeping
4. Relief and recovery refers to improving the condition of women in the post conflict environment

Question 6

What is Critique on WPS?

Answer 6

Critics have been concerned about the disproportionate focus, relative to the other pillars, on protection issues.

Concerned about the marginalization of the conflict prevention agenda, peace activist Cora Weiss (2011) has proclaimed: ‘we can not pluck rape out of war and let the war go on. We must not make war safe for women. It is time to abolish war’.

Question 7

What is Just Warriors and Beatiful Souls

Answer 7

A way of framing war.

The just warrior is masculine, breave and reluctantly fights if it is necessary for the protection of the weak and innocent

Beatiful souls, are innocent and pure and therefore very vulnerable; their attributes of beaty and peacefulness correspond particuarly neaty with the traditional and still common view of ideal femininity. Their existence is essential for the existence of the ‘Just Warriors’ to be possible.

Human beings will do more terrible things and will endure more terrible things on behalf of others than they will do or endure for themselves alone.

Question 8

What is Engendering War?

Answer 8

Hunt and Rygiel 2006 developed the concept of (en)gendering war to disrupt and make visible the masculinized, militarized, racialized, sexcualized and classed dynamics through which war operates”. They argue that official war stories do political work: they camouflage interests, agenda, and politics that underpin war for the purpose of legitimating and gaining support.

The most familiar theme in war strories involves constructing the enemy as “Other”

Question 9

How was (En)gendering used in the War on Terror?

Answer 9

The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women

The promotion or protection of women’s human rights has been central to the bush administrations effort to legitimise the war on terror.

The war on terror has also generated narratives about male protectors and female protected: they construct a clear division between the war front a masculinist domain in which masculinity is affirmed in the heroic actions performed on the battlefield and the home front a feminised realm of domesticity and peace.

Question 10

How was (En)gendering used in the Afghan war?

Answer 10

*Afghanistan has witnessed the use of ‘women as a moral excuse for the implementation of violence’ (Fluri2009, p. 244), at least since 1979.

*The Soviets had claimed to ‘liberate’ Afghan women from the ‘patriarchal social structures’ of traditional Afghan society.

*Also Mujahideen groups that represented the patriarchal social order of Afghanistan employed the ‘saving women’ rhetoric; they claimed that they were ‘“protecting” women from the military and ideological invasions of the Soviets’

Question 11

How was the 9/11 response (En)gendered

Answer 11

• George W Bush’s forceful response involved also his desire to establish a hypermasculine image of himself and the US
• It is well-known that Bush had personal reasons for enhancing his Militarist/Manly identity
• He had avoided serving in vietnam wasi invested in the image of being a “Guys guy” and arguably hoped to redeem his father’s failure to oust sadam in the First Gulf War
• For many americans, the identity and power of the US had been feminized by its defeat in vietnam, made more humiliating by losing to a people stereotyped as ethnically / racially inferior
• Feminization anxiety was also fueled by the increasing visibility of women in politics and the workplace and the growing strength of LGBT political movements
• Yearning to remasculinize the nation was already present and readily tapped by Bush and his advisers at the nation responded to 9/11 and its spectacular demonstration of U.S. vulnerability to penetration by Foreign Men

Question 12

How was the ukrainian conflict (en)gendered?

Answer 12

Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin portrayed the conflict as one between traditional masculine values represented by Russia and a feminized Ukraine that supports women’s and queer rights.

The image that has been created is ‘of an inescapable conflict between Europe, the West (and the ‘puppet regime’ in Ukraine) on one side and Russia as the global defender of the natural gender identities on the other’ (Kratochvíland O’Sullivan 2023, p. 348)

Ukraine and its media and supportive social media generally portray Ukraine and its armed forces as pro-women.Images of Ukrainian female soldiers as well as female civilians resisting Russian invasion have been widely propagated.

The music video of the song ‘Stefania’ by the Ukrainian KalushOrchestra, that won the 2022 Eurovision contest, is filled with images not only of ‘traditional war tropes of women as mothers’ but also of resilient female soldiers (Kratochvíland O’Sullivan 2023, p. 347)

However, even in Ukraine, many transgender women have been wrongly held as ‘men posing as women to escape military service’ and humiliated on social media (Farbar 2023).

Question 13

What is Gender Mainstreaming?

Answer 13

The process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programs in all areas and at all levels.

It is a strategy for making women as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programs in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality… gender mainstreaming does not replace the need for targeted, women specific policies and programs or positive legislation, nor des it substitute for gender units or gender focal points

Question 14

What are the 4 elements of Gender Mainstreaming

Answer 14

• Gender Parity Numerical concept related to gender equality. Gender parity concerns relative equality in terms of numbers and proportions of women and men, girls and boys, and is often calculated as the ratio of female-to-male values for a given indicator
• Gender Equality Equal rights, responsabilites and opportunities of women, men, girls and boys
• Gender Balance Human resources and equal participation of women and men in all areas of work, projects or programmes
• Gender Essentialism Defining women and men by biological gender

Question 15

How to apply gender mainsteaming in the military context?

Answer 15

• Gender Parity: The need to increase the number of women in national militaries at all levels
• Gender Equality: The need to reassess eligibility requirements for senior roles in the military to ensure female leadership
• The need to reassess the institutional design of the military to make it more gender equal e.g. training, physcial requirements, equipment, social norms etc.

Question 16

What is the role of gender in the military?

Answer 16

• Cynthia Enloe pointed out that women’s integration into state and other military groups does not change the gender basis of those groups
• Women who join war fighting and peacemaking do not do so in armies or negotiations that are suddenly gender neutral because they are willing to include women. Instead they join groups whose terms, premises, and behavioral norms are already defined in terms of the masculine values that they have prized before the inclusion of women.

Question 17

What is the Role of Gender and peace agreements?

Answer 17

Where women serve as signatories of peace agreements, there is a greater likelihood of increasing provisions around women’s rights and they are more likely to be implemented (Adjei, 2019

Studies have shown that excluding women from peace talks can prolong the conflict or contribute to reigniting a conflict (Myrtinnen, 2016

1992 and 2018, women made up 13% of the negotiators, 3% of the mediators and only 4% of the signatories in major peace processes (CEFR, 2014

Only three women have served as chief mediators at the international level

Between 1990 and 2018 only one fifth of peace agreements included references to women, girls or gender

This number is going down. By 2018, only 4 (or 8%) of agreements contained provisions mentioning women compared with 39% in 2015.

Africa leads: between 2000-2012, 28 interstate treaties were signed in Africa and women were mentioned in 30% of them, compared with only 19% in peace treaties in other parts of the world.

Question 18

What is the role of women in experiencing War?

Answer 18

Women are the majority of civilian casualties of war before during and after conflict

Approximately 80% of today’s civilian casualties are womenand 80% of all refugees and internally displaced people worldwide are women and children.

They make up the majority of refugees displaced from homes, farms, and sources of livelihood.

They are the primary targets of those who use rape and forced pregnancy as weapons of war

in 1992 bosnia estimated in the war that 14k women were raped, and the EU estimates 20k.

In Rwanda, the figures are much higher - betwen 250k and 500k

Women also experience hardship and discrimination as members of state militaries and insurgent groups, which often replicate and exaggerate social inequalities.

After the Iraq War, in which nearly 300,000 women served, the US military published several studies highlighting the “military’s traditional and deep-seated hostility towards women” and the sexual violence inflicted on female soldiers. The study found that 30% of military women were raped while serving, 71% were sexually assaulted, and 90% were sexually harassed.

Question 19

What is Race?

Answer 19

• Perhaps the better question is when did the concept of “race” take root in Western society
• Racial explenations began in the 18th century with the attempt by european thinkers to explain the somatic and cultural diversity of peoples encountered in the early stages of European imperialism and settler colonialism Bader 2021
• Race is not only a marker of phenotypical difference, but of status, class, and political power -Hanchard
• Racism is the belief, practice, and policy of domination based on the specious concept of race (Henderson, 2014)

Question 20

What is the role of Race and War?

Answer 20

Even by conservative estimates well over four million non-white men were mobilised into european and american armies during the first wold war, in combatant and non-combatant roles.

In First World War studies, the non-european aspects, like the non-european sites of battle, remain ‘sideshows’

Question 21

What is the role of race and representation of war?

Answer 21

• Ukraine’s former deputy general prosecuter David Sakvarelidze stated “it is really emotional for me because i see european people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed, children being killed every day with putins missiles.
• On CBS news, senior correspondent Charlie D’Agata reporting from Kyiv stated: “With all due respect, this not a place like Iraq or Afhanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively european city where you wouldnt expect that/
• “European” has become a code word for white and a justification of the primary reason that people should care about the conflict, displacement, and killing. Bloody conflicts in Syria, Somalia, and other places have not received the wide-reaching international media coverage—or urgent international government action—that the invasion of Ukraine has inspired.

Question 22

What is the role of Racism and Orientalism in war?

Answer 22

Effects on Military:
In the interwar period, vulgar stereotypes existed among US officers about the Japanese’ poor eyesight and balance(Porter 2008), thereby underestimating Japanese combat abilities.

Ideologies of race and gender are often intertwined(intersectional)

Self styles “Racially superior groups - from the ancient greeks to the twentieth century Germans - often bequethed exceptional masculine and paternal traits to their own races, and degraded their enemy races with feminized and infantilized traits”

“Alligning race and gender served a self promoting, self fulfilling narrative about superiority that in turn justified violent subjugation of the inferior other.”

Question 23

What is the effect of Race, Gender and War: Example: Imperialism and Colonialism

Answer 23

• Justification of colonial wars repeatedly used characterizations of the colonized as femine: weak, passive, irrational, disorerly, unpredictable, lacking self-control, and economically and politically incompetent.
• European power wielders could then justify military interventions by casting themselves in favorable masculist terms: as uniquely rational, sexually and morally respectable, and more advanced economically and politically.
• In colonial wars, “civilization” became a code word for European superiority. Through this lens, military interventions were perhaps a regrettable but none theless a necessary component of “enlightening” and “civilizing” primitive, unruly (feminized) “others” and to ‘save brown women from brown men‘ (Spivak).

Question 24

What is the role of Race, Gender and War in the war on terror?

Answer 24

Prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib (Iraq 2004)

The abuses reported included urinating on detainees, pounding wounded limbs with metal batons, pouring phosphoric acid on detainees, and tying ropes to the detainees’ legs or penises and dragging them across the floor.

The infliction of violence by US soldiers against the male “Other” here serves to feminise them by making them discursively (as well as physically) powerless, and simultaneously reassert the superiority of US masculunity.

Orientalist set of presuppositions about the ‘Arab mind’. Mainstream responses to the photos (including ‘Expert Commetary’) revolved around the humilation the male victims must have suffered in a honour-based society - not the terror, fear or pain, bubt a sense of dishonour in terms of the implications, in Arab society.

Lyndiee England, became a scapegoat for the Abu Ghraib scandal, painted as not a real women, as embodying something other than the ideal of femininity that the US aspired to project.

Her appearance and other indicators of her lack of conformity to the traditional feminine ideal type allows her actions to be written of as something other than indicative of an endemic attitude within the US military.

Question 25

What is CRSV?

Answer 25

Conflict Related Sexual Violence (CRSV): Rape, sexual slavery, forced
prostitution, forced pregnancy, forced abortion, enforced sterilization, forced
marriage and any other form of sexual violence of comparable.

Question 26

What is SEA?

Answer 26

Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (SEA): Perpetrators are UN peacekeepers and
victims local population, represents a fundamental failure of protection.

Question 27

What is SV?

Answer 27

Sexual Violence (SV): a range of sexual acts against a child, including but not
limited to child sexual abuse, incest, rape, sexual violence in the context of
dating/intimate relationships, sexual exploitation, online sexual abuse, and noncontact sexual abuse

Question 28

What is GBV?

Answer 28

Gender Based Violence (GBV): Violence directed against a person because of
that person’s gender or violence that affects persons of a particular gender
disproportionately.

Question 29

What are the Key Components and recommendations on UN1325?

Answer 29

WPS = Woman Peace and Security

The Four Pillars of 1325/WPS:
1. Prevention
2. Protection
3. Participation
4. Relief and recovery

Key components and recommendations are:

Preventing sexual and gender-based violence in armed conflict (and post
conflict space).

Protecting against sexual and gender-based violence in armed conflict (and post
conflict space).

A gender perspective &
more women mediators in peace negotiations.

The consideration of women in Disarmament, Demobilization and
Reintegration (DDR) and Security.

Question 30

What is Gender Mainstreaming

Answer 30

The process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels.

It is a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal
is to achieve gender equality.
So f.e. designing institutions in a way to ensure that gender equality is present

Question 31

What is gender parity, equality, balance and essentialism?

Answer 31

Gender Parity
The need to increase the number of women in national militaries at all levels.

Gender Equality
The need to reassess eligibility requirements for senior roles in the military to
ensure female leadership.
The need to reassess the institutional design of the military to make it more
gender equal e.g. training, physical requirements, equipment, social norms etc.

Gender Balance
An equitable distribution of life’s opportunities and resources between women
and men, and/or the equal representation of women and men.

Gender Essentialism
Is responsible for gender stereotypes about women and men.