“Why Do People Hate You, Mommy?” Militarized Masculinities and Women in Postwar Kosovar Politics

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholarship on gendered political inequality after war pays surprisingly little attention to an otherwise ubiquitous concept in feminist security studies: militarized masculinities. Through qualitative fieldwork in Kosovo, I trace the ways through which militarized masculinities negatively influence women’s postwar political participation. However, I also find that the hegemony of militarized masculinities recently started to be contested as military backgrounds increasingly become associated with negative, instead of heroic, attributes. While this creates a competition for hegemony, it does not constitute a shortcut to emancipation. Instead, I find that militarized masculinities created path dependencies that uphold patriarchal domination beyond the hegemony of militarized masculinities.