Gender and Critical Geopolitics; Reading Security Discourse in the New World Disorder

Abstract

In the early 1990s a new generation of scholars has tackled matters of feminist perspectives on war, peace, and specifically the academic discipline of international relations. A similar confrontation between traditional scholarly themes and gender-sensitive analyses within critical geopolitics is now obviously necessary. Although authors such as Cynthia Enloc have written about global politics and the role of women in international relations in ways that are sensitive to the geographic dimension, many theoretical and practical implications of a gender-sensitive approach to geopolitics remain to be worked out. In this paper I argue that, among other issues, investigating the gendered assumptions in the study of international relations and foreign policy-making, in addition to more explicitly geopolitical reasoning, shows how political spatialisations render women vulnerable. In addition, examining the implications of militarised definitions of (territorial) citizenship, the use of masculinist notions of power, space, and security, and the representation of women in global conflicts, sheds light on the ‘taken-for-granted’ spatial aspects of the routine operation of power. By enlarging the scope of critical geopolitical analysis, greater attention to gender issues enhances the explanatory power of ‘big picture’ political geography, not least by focusing on the practical everyday implications of geopolitics for those who are so often written out of its scripts.