Feminist Curiosity Research Articles

Feminist Curiosity in International Relations: Perspectives, Voices, and Reflections Beyond the Canon

Resumo Como a curiosidade feminista aprofunda as reflexões epistemológicas e metodológicas nos estudos feministas nas RI, de modo a produzir pesquisas críticas e engajadas com as mulheres e os sujeitos generificados? A partir de uma discussão filosófica, argumento que a curiosidade feminista fornece o instrumental crítico para interpelar acerca do quem, onde e como nas pesquisas feministas e de gênero, estabelecendo, com isso, rumos epistemológicos e metodológicos alicerçados na natureza reflexiva dos feminismos. Ademais, apresento um panorama bibliométrico da produção feminista recente em dois periódicos brasileiros de RI, de modo a avaliar como a curiosidade feminista ali se manifesta. Concluo que a pesquisa feminista no país assume uma postura crítica vis-à-vis a literatura euroamericana, centrando-se epistemológica e tematicamente nas abordagens do Sul Global.

A Re-evaluation of the Androcentric Subject of European Philosophy

ABSTRACT This paper takes Cavarero’s arguments against the Homo erectus seriously and asks: how can we model an alternative to it? It proposes that a notion of the mimetically inclined subject is required, one that thickens Cavarero’s affirmative account of inclination by way of a new philosophical understanding of mimesis that includes habit and disciplinarity. Following Cavarero, the mother is positioned as a key figure to place nurturing and love at the centre of subject-making. However, they are shown to be a necessary but not sufficient step for the process of re-evaluation. An account of disciplinary mimesis which draws on a Nietzschean legacy in Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, together with Simone de Beauvoir’s account of woman as a situation, demonstrate the pitfalls of idealizing the mother. I argue that to challenge the particularized universalism of the European subject with an affirmative account of mimetic inclination, other figures which embrace Cavarero’s notion of relational vulnerability alongside the mother are required. The agonistic friend who practices an open, feminist curiosity is proposed as one such exemplar and, in closing remarks, I gesture to other necessary models in feminist and Indigenous thought that are key to remaking the androcentric subject of European philosophy.

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe about Gender and Global Politics

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe about Gender and Global Politics

A Tsunami of Love: Overcoming the Violence of Curiosity—The Lived Experiences of Young Adults Born with Variations of Sex Characteristics

This study provides insight into the experiences of young adults born with variations of sex characteristics to identify aspects of care and social support that need improvement. Semi-structured interviews with intersex youths in Switzerland were analyzed using interpretative, phenomenological analysis. Young adults desire timely, patient-centered information about their diagnoses. Peer support is key to delivering high-quality care but rarely systematically implemented. Intersex youth often face misrepresentation, stigma, and discrimination in medical settings and in society. Increased visibility alone cannot tackle these issues, but a feminist curiosity of care will enable health providers and society to overcome preconceptions of body normativity.

Feminist curiosity

AbstractWhat is feminist curiosity? Or better yet, how is feminist curiosity practiced, where is it practiced, and with whom is it practiced? In this essay, I develop a philosophical account of feminist curiosity by drawing on direct contributions from the feminist philosophical tradition, but also by interweaving scattered testaments to feminist curiosity from critical race theory, intersex studies, disability studies, and trans studies. What surfaces in this inquiry is an account of feminist curiosity that goes far beyond the act of asking feminist questions. Feminist curiosity proper, I suggest, reconfigures not simply what gets asked, but with whom, where, and how inquiry happens. Feminist curiosity is rooted in companionship (with self and others), reorients time (a visionary future, but also a material past and present), and resists oppressive forms of inquiry such as spectacularization and the presumptions of access. As such, feminist curiosity is committed not only to a relational world but to a relational investigation of that world.

Searching for “home,” writing to find it: A reflective account on experiences of othering in life and academia in times of generalized crises

AbstractCombining poetry with diary notes inspired by recent experiences of othering amid COVID‐19 travel restrictions, I create a nonlinear text, whereby my other voices intermingle with broader experiences of othering and vulnerability to raise issues of oppression and privilege in masculine social structures, including academia. I bring the collective force of different voices in this nonlinear account to propose the need to understand academic writing as an activist, embodied practice of reuniting which allows for the development of the necessary intersectional feminist curiosity for undoing systems of oppression and patriarchy that increasingly disqualify different bodies. I conclude that it is not only about what we write but also about how we write and thus how we learn to socialize ourselves through life and academia. Paying attention to these dynamics, I suggest, might make the return back “home” possible again with commitment and attachment towards one another to mobilize much needed social change, together, in solidarity.

Challenging the ‘normal’: curious women conscientious objectors to military service in the male conscription system in Turkey

ABSTRACT This article investigates how gender roles shape, normalize, and reinforce militarism and vice versa. Drawing on in-depth interviews with nineteen conscientious objectors, it explores the impacts of militarism on society and offers a picture of women’s demilitarization attempts in Turkey. It applies Cynthia Enloe’s feminist curiosity to understand the link between militarism, gender, and conscientious objection. Recent works have applied Enloe’s feminist curiosity and brought about a feminist approach to critical military studies. Such works, illuminating as they are, have paid little attention to the case of Turkey, the only member of the Council of Europe that does not recognize the right to conscientious objection. Most importantly, current debates on resistance to militarism and the right to conscientious objection are centred on the case of Israel, where women are conscripted. This constitutes a significant lacuna in the literature which this article tries to fill by examining Turkey, where women are not conscripted yet they declare their conscientious objection. The article illustrates that conscription constitutes only one dimension of militarism and that militarism also affects women’s lives even though they are not subjected to compulsory military service. In so doing, it broadens the discussion on the right to conscientious objection by studying those who are previously assumed to be ‘irrelevant’.

The Cruel Optimism of Militarism: Feminist Curiosity, Affect, and Global Security

AbstractThis article asks: why do communities located at the periphery of the global security market continue to participate, even when they gain the least economically and politically? To answer this, we explore how militarism—an affectively felt logic that understands military service as desirable and/or inevitable—manifests through both affective relations and colonial structures. We focus on Gurkha communities in Nepal with a colonial military heritage of two hundred years with the British. Feminist and postcolonial research on militaries has demonstrated how war and global insecurity is framed through gendered colonial economies and discursive logics, shaping military systems and subjects. Yet what remains underexplored is the affective dimension of how militarism operates within, and in relation to, militarized communities outside the “West” whose identities and material conditions are structured through colonial histories. To address this gap, we operationalize Lauren Berlant's (2011) concept of cruel optimism to capture why these communities stay attached to militarism when the costs abound. We argue that militarism within the Gurkha context is both affectively felt and structurally experienced in such a way that it renders a military pathway to a good life as natural and desirable, despite evidence of the fragility and impossibility of pursuing this path.

Normalizing the Japan Self-defense Forces via Marriage

Feminist political scientist Cynthia Enloe urges us to always ask questions and be curious so as to prevent militarization occurring unremarked upon. Based on this advice, I turn my ‘feminist curiosity’ to the increasingly normalized idea of marriage between a civilian woman and a Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) soldier. I apply feminist critical discourse analysis to a matchmaking website that pairs JSDF men with civilian women and the monthly Ministry of Defense public relations magazine, Mamor. Analysis of data from these sources forms the foundation of an argument that these cultural products contribute to the normalization of the JSDF by, firstly, portraying the JSDF as a quirky place to work, but also as an institution in the business of protection (with only infrequent allusion to its war-making potential) and, secondly, by focusing on family and marriage — concepts that soften and sanitize the institution’s image.

Wounds: Militarized nursing, feminist curiosity, and unending war

Taking wartime nurses – and post-war nursing – seriously makes one think more politically about the wounds endured in wartime and what counts as a wartime ‘wound’. Thinking about wounds and the wounded, in turn, reveals how war-waging officials, and militarizers more generally, have tried in the past, and today still try, to shrink citizens’ awareness of militarism’s negative consequences. Nursing, nurses, wounds, and the wounded each continues to be gendered, influencing the workings of both masculinities and femininities in past and current wartimes and post-war politics. Feminist analysts have expanded the ‘political’ and multiplied ‘political thinkers’. Failing to absorb these feminist theoretical insights fosters the trivialization of nurses and other caretakers of the wartime wounded and their diverse political thinking. It is a failing with serious implications. Overlooking nurses and others who provide wartime care, combined with a lack of curiosity about wounds, perpetuates militarization and war.

What Does a Feminist Curiosity Bring to African Military History?

This essay uses feminist scholarship to engender African military history. It begins by examining the ways in which gender has—or has not—been integrated into African military history over the last ten years. Next, it analyzes some of the most influential feminist scholarship on gender and militarism in Africa today. Although most of this literature has not been produced by historians, it has much to teach us about how gender can be critically interrogated within our own work. The penultimate section considers the importance of cultivating a feminist curiosity and discusses what this type of critical thinking can bring to African military history. And finally, the conclusion reflects upon the future of the field, describing what needs to be done and how we might get there.

What a Feminist Curiosity Contributes to the Study of Development

This essay explores the various ways that women and gender have been included in international development thinking and practice by tracing the origins of the field of gender and development alongside its central debates, concepts, and accomplishments. This overview demonstrates that feminists have expanded the scope of development research and practice to include issues previously ignored but now recognized as central to development, and have provided more nuanced accounts of development by probing the underlying assumptions of development policy. In so doing, it argues, feminists have exposed the gendered nature of transnational flows and transformations, and have tracked their effects down to the level of diverse women and men’s daily lives. Drawing on the contributions in this special issue, this essay then highlights the multiple advantages of applying what Cynthia Enloe labeled a “feminist curiosity” to the study of development. By refusing to take the current state of affairs as natural or given, and refusing to accept as trivial women’s diverse lives and experiences, the papers in this special issue go beyond highlighting how international development efforts differentially affect women and men to demonstrating how women, men, and gender ideologies in particular places—whether development agencies, academic institutions, or local communities—critically shape international development itself.

Twenty-five years of Bananas, Beaches and Bases: A conversation with Cynthia Enloe

Cynthia Enloe’s book Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics brought a new approach to the study of war, conflict and political economy, an approach informed by and starting from a feminist curiosity. Such a starting point allows for recognition of the diverse, often disregarded gendered dynamics of militarization. A feminist curiosity facilitates making visible the politicization of everyday life via what Enloe calls a bottom-up approach to research and investigation. This account of a conversation between feminist scholars draws attention to the means by which researchers exercise the sociological imagination in their work on labour, militarism and war; the theorizing of gendered militarization; the role for feminist activism around conflict and sexual violence as well as solidarity politics; and the life cycle of Bananas, Beaches and Bases.

Democratic curiosity in times of surveillance

AbstractTaking my cue from feminist curiosity and literature on the everyday in surveillance studies, I am proposing ‘democratic curiosity’ as a tool for revisiting the question of democracy in times of extitutional surveillance. Democratic curiosity seeks to bring into analytical play the social and political power of little nothings – the power of subjects, things, practices, and relations that are rendered trivial – and the uncoordinated disputes they enact. Revisiting democracy from this angle is particularly pertinent in extitutional situations in which the organisation and practices of surveillance are spilling beyond their panoptic configurations. Extitutional surveillance is strongly embedded in diffusing arrangements of power and ever more extensively enveloped in everyday life and banal devices. To a considerable degree these modes of surveillance escape democratic institutional repertoires that seek to bring broader societal concerns to bear upon surveillance. Extitutional enactments of democracy then become an important question for both security and surveillance studies.

Rethinking Everyday Militarism on Campus: Feminist Reflections on the Fatal Shooting at Purdue University

hoW doEs onE militarizE a Can of tomato soup? This simple question, posed by Cynthia Enloe in her important book Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (2000), is what brought together the three authors of this article in August 2013. We were each on an academic journey, coparticipants in a graduate seminar titled “Gender, War, and Militarism” at Purdue University, trying to figure out the ways in which militarism affected our lives. Alicia C. Decker came to the seminar as a feminist scholar who had been writing about militarism for several years. Summer Forester arrived as a second-year doctoral student with a deep interest in feminist security studies, informed largely by her own experiences living and working on a military base in Florida. And Eliot Blackburn came to the seminar as a first-year master’s degree student with a feminist curiosity about citizenship and belonging, but also with a more personal connection to the subject— his father was a naval officer who had spent many years away from his family in service to the nation. Together, over the course of the ensuing semester, we explored how militarism, as a gendered ideology, and militarization, as a gendered process, have shaped the world around us. We spent a great deal of time thinking about the militarization of everyday life. Enloe taught us that something as mundane as tomato soup can be militarized if it “becomes controlled by, dependent on, or derives its value from the military as an institution or militaristic

Building a Complex and Emancipatory Unity: Documenting Decolonial Feminist Interventions within the Occupy Movement

Building a Complex and Emancipatory Unity: Documenting Decolonial Feminist Interventions withinthe Occupy Movement Molly Talcottand Dana Collins During week six of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York City's Zuccotti Park, Angela Davis spoke to the Occupiers with enthusiasm in a much-circulated video. Her speech was narrated through the "people's mic" (where people repeat the speaker's words verbatim and in unison), and she issued a vital challenge to the young movement: "We have come together as the 99 percent. There are major responsibilities linked to your decision to assemble here in community. So, how can we be together? How can we be together in a unity that is not simplistic and oppressive? How can we be together in a unity that is complex and emancipatory?"1 It is this enormous yet promising challenge—the building of a complex, emancipatory unity among diverse collectives of activ ists— that has intrigued us as witnesses to the growth of the Occupy movements that sprang up in the United States in 2011 and that continue to exist, expand, and morph. As we discuss below, the ethos of masculinized resistance that is often present within such spaces, along with the very language of "occupying" used by the movement, are troubling from a transnational antiracist feminist perspective. However, we feel that it is vital to carefully peer into these spaces with a feminist curiosity that searches for openings, listens for the difficult dialogues, and glimpses the feminist and decolonial perfor mances of resistance occurring from within. FeministStudies38, no. 2 (Summer 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 485 486 Molly Talcottand Dana Collins Through our photographic analysis of the Occupy Los Angeles (OLA) movement, we ask: How are women, in particular, challeng ing the masculine, racialized, and imperial/nationalistic logics that continue to operate within some Occupy spaces? Are they contributing to the building of this complex and emancipatory unity from within the movement of the 99 percent?2 If so, how? And which women? Photographs do not capture an external or stagnant real ity; rather, as Wendy Cheng has argued in her photographic explo ration of urban political history of Los Angeles, photography is a part of a method of social storytelling, requiring the photogra pher to be a social actor among the urban spaces she seeks to repre sent.3 The photos and analytical reflections shared here arise out of our own participation in OLA—we frequently attended the OLA encampments, taught and participated in workshops at the on-site People's Collective University, and were in the encampment the night of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) raid on Novem ber 30, 2011. Dana has used photography to document OLA as well as regional labor and racial justice protests that have adopted the language and ethos of the 99 percent following the formation of OLA.4 These photographs emerge out of the performative social rela tions of political protest; they reflect interactions between a white woman photographer and the women who agree to be photo graphed.5 I (Dana) photographed widely; however, I am most inter ested as a feminist visual sociologist in how women shaped Occupy protest space, particularly given the critiques of the masculiniza tion of the movement. Social positioning shapes the very production of these photographs, as women express openness to being repre sented by a politicized woman photographer (Dana) whose visual sociological method encourages women to choosehow they will pose with their signs for the photograph. While the smiles of the women in the following photos might at first seem to relay a romanticized resistance, we interpret their posing as a forceful expression of their politicized display of bodies, signs, and presence. Our analysis below therefore combines our photographic work at OLA, our participant observation, our assessment of Occupy images and discourses as they have circulated on the Internet, and our commitment to deco lonial/antiracist feminist social transformation. Molly Talcottand Dana Collins 487 We feature imagery that represents, from our specific OLA refer ence point, reoccurring patterns that we recognize. Other settings may have different outcomes and dynamics, but we begin from the OLA context as a way to pose questions relevant to the...

What Can Applying a Gender Lens Contribute to Conflict Studies? A Review of Selected MICROCON Working Papers

It is rare to find gender a specific focus of scholarship on conflict studies. In MICROCON we have tried to place gender in a central position within all projects and to convince all researchers to use a gender lens for their analysis. This paper uses a set of MICROCON working papers to illustrate how gender can be used at different conceptual levels in conflict analysis, and aims to show what can be gained by the use of a gender lens. The papers bear out Enloe’s insistence that those seeking an in-depth understanding of the social and political world require a feminist curiosity – that is, a curiosity about the roles gender categories play in political debate and action, as well as in scholarship.

Globalization and militarism: feminists make the link

Chapter 1: Crafting a Global Feminist Curiosity to Make Sense of Globalized Militarism: Tallying Impacts, Exposing Causes Chapter 2: Tracking the Militarized Global Sneaker Chapter 3: How Does National Security Become Militarized? Chapter 4: Paying Close Attention to Women inside Militaries Chapter 5: Wielding Masculinity inside Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo: The Globalized Dynamics Chapter 6: Demilitarizing a Society in a Globalized World or, Do You Wear Camo? Chapter 7: The Diverse Lives of Militarized and Demilitarized Women: Globalizing Insights from Local Japanese Places Chapter 8: Conclusion: The Global, the Local, and the Personal

To Make the Connections, You Must See the Pieces

The Curious Feminist. By Cynthia Enloe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 367 pp., $50.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-520-24235-1), $19.95 paper (ISBN: 0-520-24381-1). Readers familiar with Cynthia Enloe's work know to expect both clarity and new insights from it. Enloe, Research Professor at Clark University, helped create the field of feminist studies in international politics while also contributing to feminist theory and to comparative politics more generally. The Curious Feminist , a collection of essays on “searching for women in a new age of empire,” will not disappoint either new readers or long-term followers of Enloe. A number of these essays have been published previously. Fans of Enloe's work will recognize, for example, such classics as “The Globetrotting Sneaker” and “Sneak Attack: The Militarization of US Culture.” But placed in the context of this volume, which argues for the importance of developing a “feminist curiosity,” even these familiar essays offer new perspectives. Moreover, many of the essays included in The Curious Feminist have either not been published before in the United States or have appeared in journals or collections that may be hard to locate. Altogether, then, this volume is a most welcome addition to the Enloe oeuvre (see especially Enloe 1989, 1993, 2000). Enloe has been arguing for some time that those who wish to understand politics need to develop habits of “curiosity” (see especially Enloe 1993)—that is, a willingness to ask questions about things that might seem to be either natural or obvious. In The Curious Feminist , she takes up this call, exploring the multiple dimensions of what it might mean to develop a “feminist curiosity” as we think about politics in general and international relations in particular. As she demonstrates through the essays in this volume, to develop such a curiosity means (1) taking …