War, Gender, and Military Studies

Abstract

In the 1980s United States, there arose a new field of study which was loosely called war and gender. In hindsight, it now appears that simultaneously, but without mutual awareness, feminists had been turning their attention to the most male of all occupations: war. By the mid-1990s it became clear that this rubric was too accommodating and that much of the focus was in fact on women in the military (some might reverse the chronology). Most recently, research and policy-making concerned with violence against women have been connected with both fields of inquiry as the links between legitimate and illegitimate violence on the global, state, and individual levels are being recognized. The war and gender scholars, examples of whose work can be found in Lamia Rustum Shehadeh's Women and War in Lebanon, and Susie Jacobs, Ruth Jacobson, and Jennifer Marchbank's States of Conflict: Gender, Violence, and Resistance are interested in experience, and their analytical perspectives are drawn from psychology, history, literature, and cultural