Centering Security Studies Around Felt, Gendered Insecurities

Abstract

This article draws on two decades of work in feminist security studies, which has argued that gender is necessary, conceptually, for understanding the concepts of war and security; important, empirically, for analyzing causes and predicting outcomes in the field of security; and essential to finding solutions to insecurity in global politics. The work of feminist security studies suggests that one of the most persistent features of the global political arena is gender hierarchy, which plays a role in defining and distributing security. The argument in this article moves from talking about the security of gender to discussing the gendered sources of insecurity across global politics. It then builds on existing work in Feminist Security Studies to suggest a felt, sensed, and experiential notion of the security/insecurity dichotomy as a new way to think about global security (studies). A (feminist) view of “security as felt” could transform the shape of a number of research programs in security studies.