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Beyond Sex/Gender: The Feminist Body of Security

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2012

Lauren Wilcox
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota

Extract

What makes Feminist Security Studies such an exciting field for me is the depth and diversity of feminists grappling with key issues of the politics of war, peace, and security who are also concerned with sovereignty and autonomy, the meaning and nature of violence, and the connections among violence, subjectivity, and embodiment. Feminists across the disciplines have done much to render problematic the equation of bodies and subjects for their own political purposes, a political/theoretical move that has enormous implications for the way in which we think about the practices of security. In thinking through and even beyond “gender,” feminists in security studies are poised to ask the question of how we might rethink not only how security practices are gendered, but also how the very nature of “security” has lent itself to particular conceptions of “the body” (Butler 2004).

Type
Critical Perspectives on Gender and Politics
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2011

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References

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