2008/2 |
|
ÖZP 2008/2, 147-164 [CONTENT] [German]
Simona Sharoni (New York) This article examines critically the relationship between men, dominant conceptions of masculinity, and the processes and practices that are at play as masculinities become militarized and deployed to fight a war. Following a critical review of feminist and non-feminist literature on militarization and masculinities, the article focuses on the prospects for de-militarizing men and masculinities in the United States empire since 11 September 2001 and especially in the context of the US-led wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. The analysis distinguishes between the military as a system, militarization as a process, and soldiers as human beings. As war cannot be fought without militarized masculinities, soldiers’ war stories help de-mystify war, also work in turn to weaken, if not undo, the tightly constructed knot between masculinities and violence. Towards this end, a close reading of soldiers’ accounts is at the center of the article. A key conclusion of the article is that the process of de-militarization has to explicitly call into question and to de-legitimize all systems of domination and oppression, including sexism, racism, and homophobia, that have been used both explicitly and implicitly during the process of militarization. ÖZP 2008/2, 165-180 [CONTENT] [German] Saskia Stachowitsch (Vienna) Research on war and gender is often guided by categories such as "subjectivity", "identity", "construction," and "symbolic representation". Social structure, institutions, socioeconomic relations - in short: the material base of society - are rarely incorporated into research systematically. This article examines the impact of material factors, especially of gender specific divisions of labor in the civilian and military spheres, on gender ideologies. The article analyzes reporting on U.S. military women in The New York Times from 1990 to 2005 to show how social conditions influence cultural representations of masculinity and femininity. ÖZP 2008/2, 181-196 [CONTENT] [German] Laura Sjoberg (Blacksburg, Virginia)/Caron E. Gentry (Abilene, Texas) Robert Pape’s well-received book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005), presents what appears to be a gender-neutral study of both male and female suicide terrorists. Pape’s main argument is that suicide terrorism is a strategic and rational terror campaign against democracies. While the study argues that male and female suicide terrorists are rational individuals, it depicts women as motivated by emotion. Thus, this article argues that gender-neutral work is rarely gender-neutral and such studies fail to recognize the social and political impact of gender. Furthermore, we argue that the rational choice model presented by Pape furthers the gender divide by emphasizing values associated with masculinity over values associated with femininity. As an alternative, we propose three propositions to change the study of suicide terrorism to include both political and emotional motivations. We propose that gendered presentations of female suicide bombers reify stereotypical images of gender and of suicide bombers, that silence about the complexity of suicide bombers’ motivations does not erase the many variables that go into martyrs’ decisions, and that adding emotion to the study of suicide bombing counterbalances the narrowness of the "strategic actor" model. The essay concludes with evidence from the study of the Chechen "black widows" that demonstrates the explanatory value of these propositions. ÖZP 2008/2, 197-214 [CONTENT] [German] Wondwosen Teshome (Vienna), Jerusalem Negash (Vienna) The aim of this article is to explore the U.S.-led anti-terror war in Somalia and evaluate its impact on the status and role of Somali women. With the al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi (Kenya) and Dar es Salam (Tanzania) in August 1998, Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism became a major threat to the region. In response to this threat, the United States initiated an anti-terror war in East Africa, in particular in Somalia. In both the anti-terror war and the Somali civil war, Somali women’s participation has been significant. So far, however, no serious research has been conducted into women’s role in these conflicts or into the impacts of these conflicts on women in Somalia, a country already plagued by famine, political instability, ethnic war, and gender-based violence. Armed conflicts offer new opportunities and responsibilities in both domestic and public spheres that assist in redefining social relations between women and men. After conflicts, however, the changes in gender roles often do not persist and pre-war patriarchal gender roles re-appear in many societies. By investigating the case of Somalia, this paper examines the reasons behind the re-emergence of pre-war gender roles after conflicts.. ÖZP 2008/2, 215-228 [CONTENT] [German] Birgit Langenberger (Vienna) This article traces the discursive constructions of gender in the US war against Afghanistan. Its focus is on Laura Bush’s presidential address (Nov 2001), the document "What we are fighting for" (Feb 2002) signed by major US intellectuals in support of the war, and some US feminists joining them in the name of liberation of the women of Afghanistan (Jean Bethke Elshtain; Catherine A. MacKinnon; Feminist Majority Foundation). Yet this uncanny coalition between feminism and US patriarchal imperialism goes beyond mere strategic essentialism in which the differences between women are temporarily erased. Insofar as moral natural laws of the American Declaration of Independence (1776) constitute their shared symbolic framework, binary oppositions such as male/female, soldiers/ non-combatants, ir/regular warfare, civilized/savage are reified. Thus gender inequality by and in times of war results from its specific discursivization and categorization and cannot be attributed exclusively to an incomplete implementation of rights. |