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Women, Culture, and International Relations, by Vivienne Jabri and Eleanor O’Gorman (eds.)
5. Writing Women’s Wars: Foucauldian Strategies of Engagement
This chapter adopts elements of Foucauldian analysis to dislodge ideas of power, subjectivity, and methodology in feminist international relations (IR), with particular reference to the experiences of women in revolutionary struggles. 1 The works of Michel Foucault have proved rich pickings for the critical/poststructuralist turn in international relations. In particular, the adoption of Foucauldian analyses to the service of critical feminist theory has involved redefining gendered subjectivity and power in the conduct of research and the building of theory. 2 The critical import of such redefinition is in rewriting the ontological and epistemological premises of the discipline of international relations. The appeal of Foucault to feminist theorists has been his challenge to enlightenment understandings of knowledge and the political promise of his genealogical method in excavating previously marginalized voices and forms of knowledge.
In adapting Foucault to the service of critical feminist theory, I take as my terrain the theorizing of women’s participation in revolutionary wars. The discussion is developed in three parts. By way of context, the first part outlines representations of women’s participation in revolutionary struggles. The second part assesses the theoretical implications of Foucauldian reworkings of power/resistance and subjectivity with respect to representations of women’s experiences in such struggles. It is argued that a poststructuralist shift challenges the rigid categories of experience and expression found in representations of women’s revolutionary participation that reinforce gendered stereotypes of roles and political space. The third part of the discussion explores some implications of this theoretical turn for feminist practice. There are two aspects to the idea of feminist practice as understood here. The first refers to practices of research methodology and the implications of interpreting and practicing Foucault’s ideas of genealogy. The second aspect refers to the “experienced” world of international relations and the strategies of engagement that a poststructuralist feminist politics would involve at the level of action and policy. In outlining a distinction between feminist practice and theory, the intention is not to reinforce a sense of autonomy between feminist constructions of theory and feminist forms of political practice. On the contrary, strategies of engagement are identified here to highlight the imbrication of both these aspects of feminism as the sine qua non of feminist IR. 3
Women, Subjectivity, and Revolution
The liberatory promise of revolutionary movements has been one focus of action and research for feminist IR. Nicaragua, Palestine, South Africa, and Zimbabwe are examples of such struggles. Revolutionary struggle has provided a unity of purpose and site of resistance in the context of decolonization in the second half of the twentieth century. The romantic appeal of liberating women through liberating states finds currency and resonance in an iconography that offers particular roles for women in support of a wider struggle. Why do liberation movements invite this possibility of women’s emancipation in the course of revolution?
Cynthia Enloe and Christine Sylvester both see possibilities in the distinctiveness of guerrilla warfare and the decentralized structure of guerrilla armies. The distinction between conventional and revolutionary warfare is seen to enable qualitatively different experiences of women’s participation. In the former, the aim is “to mobilise human and material resources for the sake of optimising military effectiveness,” whereas the latter is aimed “to bring about fundamental alterations in the socio–political order.” 4 One possibility is that combat roles opened up for women by guerrilla armies “can be less other–conceptualized than the labour of combat under the flag of an established state, and the participation of women within it turns everyone’s expectations on their heads.” 5 Sylvester suggests the woman warrior identity can be mobilized to antipatriarchal ends by countering such expectations of the ruling elite, by challenging stereotypes of female labor, and by building the possibility of new understandings of power relations. 6 This is due to the antistate aims and the nonstate nature of a liberation army as a decentralized organization that relies on flexibility rather than weaponry for success.
There is also optimism about the liberatory promise of guerrilla armies as they collapse the boundaries of public/private by eschewing the “gendered distinction between ‘front’ and ‘rear.’” 7 The battlefront and the homefront become the same terrain of struggle. However, Enloe also cautions against the romantic appeal of revolutionary armies as a panacea for the transformation of gender relations. Issues of masculinity, femininity, roles, and the sexual division of labor can be just as contentious here as in state armies.
In terms of revolutionary struggles, the allocation of women’s roles has involved the politicization of women’s “traditional” roles, such as mother, wife, and food producer. The motives for such a strategy include a commitment to agendas for social change as well as the requirements of military effectiveness. Thus, the concerns of revolutionary armies are not simply about transforming the political order but also, like state armies, the military effectiveness of operations. In the pursuit of such effectiveness, strategies of allocating roles according to generation and marital status can perpetuate a gendered and generational division of labor as roles and political space become coterminous when “homefront” support tasks are carried out by married women while unmarried women enter the more militarized spaces of the training camps. In the case of Zimbabwe, some young women assumed the ultimate male military task of combat, but for the most part unmarried women in the camps “performed militarised though still feminine tasks, serving as cooks, nurses, and laundresses for the guerrillas.” 8 This reflects tensions concerning the degree to which such generational allocation of tasks for women actually operates within an unspoken gendered division of revolutionary labor.
Gendered discourses that shape the representation of women’s experiences of war pose another cautionary note for optimism about women’s liberation through revolution. These discourses are embedded in the histories of such revolutions. The currency of such gendered representations includes an exoticized and fetishized notion of women in powerful military positions juxtaposed with the portrayal of women as victims of violence and propaganda in the course and cause of war. The heroic image of women as guerrilla fighters is a familiar trope in revolutionary art and propaganda. Linked to this is an iconography that evokes the presence of women in war and the contradictory tension of expected roles—for example, women as mothers/women as warriors. A classic image is that of a woman holding a rifle and a baby. This image conveys many messages. It is a call to arms for women; it shames men into military action; it reassures society that women are still feminine though involved in masculine activities; it reassures society that women will return to traditional domestic roles following a temporary aberration of the natural order through war.
There is implicit in this image creation an ambivalence of women warriors as role models. Are such images and roles an aberration in gender terms (neither man nor woman) or a liberatory role model for women generally? 9 These contradictions reflect the difficulty of creating categorical identities for women in revolutions. The subjectivity of women in revolutions arises not only from the ideological influence of revolutionary socialism but also from the reclamation work undertaken by feminist historians and social theorists to highlight the actions and roles of women in revolution and war generally. Cutting across such representations is an understanding in the first instance of the public and the private as two distinct spheres of gendered activity—the private being imbued with female values and involving particular roles for women in that sphere. The public sphere is conceptualized very much as a male sphere and war an activity of this sphere. Such partition of space leads to the categorization of women into particular roles with respect to the conduct and experience of war. Thus, the presence of women in war is explained and located in respect of spatial and categorical ontologies. Women are what women do in particular roles in particular spheres. Such a “presence/absence” dynamic assigns different values and visibility to male and female roles but nonetheless involves interdependence for the overall functioning of power. 10
This positioning is partially reinforced by the radical feminist critique of militarism as a structural and institutional type of power that determines the positioning of men and women in relation to war. 11 In such a critique, militarism and patriarchy are seen to be acting in concert to subordinate women; women enter war on male terms, and the roles of women are very much circumscribed by the needs of militarism as a masculinist form of power—to service the primary male role of the soldier/warrior. Women (even in the archetypal male role of fighter) must be constructed in such a way as to perpetuate male power and female subordination in this gendered process of militarization. This defines a public and private space where society sets sanctions and rewards for women’s aberrant actions during war. It also sees women more readily in noncombat, but key, supporting roles as wives, defense workers, nurses, drivers, administrators, and prostitutes. 12
Implicit in the gendered process of militarization is the devaluation and invisibility of militarism’s dependence on female labor. Such devaluation involves redefining women’s roles and the space of noncombatant activity as the “homefront” to ensure the primacy of male, combat, frontline space. This artificiality of space becomes a paradox when women as nurses, soldiers, intelligence workers, and prostitutes may be physically located close to the front line but still viewed as located at the homefront in terms of activities. 13 It is also paradoxical in war situations where military tactics involve increased civilian involvement. This is the case in guerrilla wars, where a daily war of attrition along with counterinsurgent responses involve the development of local supply and intelligence networks that implicate civilians and place them on the front line. In such gendered representations, roles in militarized spaces are constructed to perpetuate a gendered understanding of power where “men fight and women weep.” 14 A feminist critique seeks to reveal such structural power and suggests subversion of these roles as a site of feminist struggle and change.
Jean Bethke Elshtain’s treatise Women and War challenges the binary logic of such representations in the tradition of western modernity that has reinforced and perpetuated this essential dichotomy of women as life givers and men as life takers. The convenience of such typologies is double–edged, as they are deployed by feminists and antifeminists, militarists and pacifists to buttress their divergent positions concerning gender identities and the activities of war. Elshtain dislodges such tropes by asserting a complexity rather than duality of categories for women and men in war. The complexity that underlies the apparent rigidity of dichotomies—military/male/brave warrior versus peace/female/beautiful soul—is witnessed by women in the military and guerrilla armies and male soldiers objecting to technologies of war.
The prospects of women’s emancipation through liberation struggles also come to be seen in a dimmer light when postindependence realities are investigated. There are two conflicting images of the postindependent situations for women. In the optimistic version, women’s traditional roles are irreversibly politicized and gain an increased importance and recognition in the new state. The pessimistic scenario is one that sees the new government adopting the structures of the previous state and reinforcing the public/private split that invites the demobilization of women from their revolutionary roles. The optimism of politicizing women’s work in the course of revolution is often lost, as such roles are most likely to be demobilized and depoliticized in the return to public/private understandings of space in the postindependence context.
The domestic/political strategy is therefore one that does not necessarily ensure advancement for women through revolution. The participation of women has to be seen less romantically in the context of continuity in the gendered division of labor that leaves the way open for the demobilization of women and integration into a new old order. 15 The preoccupation with a return to normality and the institution of public order influences the postliberation phase in the rebuilding of the state. The family is central to this and, as such, the demobilization of women becomes paramount as the political tenor of their actions is stripped away and they are once again consigned to the private realm in the service of the public, state, male realm. Enloe argues that holding on to the perceived empowerment of women in revolution calls for collective strategies that self–consciously promote women in this crucial postindependence period. This can prove particularly difficult for women who have crossed the gender divide and been fighters. One reported problem for such women in the postindependence Zimbabwe was reintegration into their communities because they were often treated with suspicion and fear. Despite the comradeship of combat with their male brethren, women faced difficulties in finding husbands! 16 Such a pessimistic narrative begs the question of how we can assess women’s experiences of empowerment and disempowerment through revolutionary struggles.
One approach is to challenge the motivation for explanation. The question of women’s participation in revolutions has tended to focus on how and why women are mobilized for revolution by revolutionary movements. The “how” question centers on women’s roles and the essential politicization of previously domestic tasks as well as the assumption by women of “male/public” roles as fighters and leaders. With regard to the “why” question, the tendency is to talk of the unifying appeal of anticolonial, nationalist, peasant, or class claims. 17 Within this, more revisionist works seek to disaggregate unified agendas and point to gender agendas or local interests as a key mobilizing factor. 18
Maintaining a focus on mobilization tends to bias research toward the needs and motives of the revolutionary organizations, and local agency becomes important only to the extent that it fulfills or thwarts those efforts. When the why and how of revolutionary struggle for women remain centered on mobilization, the consciousness and actions of women’s agency will remain secondary to institutional requirements. In mapping out a poststructuralist account of power, subjectivity, and research methodology, the intention here is to shift the focus to the daily experiences of women’s participation in revolution through the practices of power and resistance they forge, proactively and reactively. Rethinking power/resistance and subjectivity in revolution allows us to explore and write about the lives of women beyond that of subjects awaiting mobilization and beyond that of roles read off from domestic space and political necessity.
Strategies of Engagement 1: Theories of Power/Resistance and Subjectivity
Using Foucault’s understanding of power and resistance as a starting point, we can construct a poststructuralist approach to gender identities, resistance, and revolution that takes fuller account of women’s differentiated experiences of guerrilla war. Foucault’s conception of power holds the possibility of subjection and resistance simultaneously. He writes not only of disciplinary power but also of power/resistance, which extends through and is imbricated within our entire social fabric. Through power/resistance the practices of power and resistance are intimately inscribed in mutual tension as a dynamic struggle that is “agonistic” in expression. Resistance is inscribed in power. “It would not be possible for power relations to exist without points of insubordination which, by definition, are means of escape.” 19 This suggests an exercise of power that circulates through social relations and is not fixed. Such an understanding of power eschews the notion of power as mere domination, challenges power as a possession, and imagines power as being everywhere. 20
This reimagination of power sees it as circulating within relationships between subjects and originating from inside struggles, from below. It is a relational notion of power (that is, power bound up in social relations) where there is a constant struggle to act and reply to action. This “agonism” has been described as a type of combat “in which opponents develop a strategy of reaction and of mutual taunting.” It constitutes a “relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle; less of a face–to–face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation.” 21 The possibilities and operations of power and resistance coexist in this permanent provocation. “There are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised.” 22
This understanding of power/resistance opens up discursive spaces where power and resistance are creating, defining, and defying each other in a tense dynamic of renegotiation. The simultaneity of resistance separates this from a more classical zero–sum conception of power, which lies at the heart of realist power relations between states and from the binary logic of an exogenous point of resistance as a unifying source of opposition. In such a fluid context of power/resistance relations, difference and differentiation become both conditions and effects of power. This can be said of gendered power that manifests itself in the categorization of women in particular spaces and roles and implicates ideas of femininity to limit behavior.
This shift in understanding power relations as relations of power/resistance has implications for understanding the modalities of power and gender identities in a setting of revolution. It triggers a movement away from fixed categories or roles toward a recognition of the many contradictory “roles” or “positions” that women are called upon to take up or resist within revolutionary struggles. For the “subject,” this is a map of compliance and resistance, losses and gains, in the constant struggle that defines the field of possible actions. Through the circulation of power/resistance, the subject and subjectivity itself are in a state of renegotiation. This dynamic is described by Jana Sawicki as “resistant subjectivity.” 23 It works through Foucauldian power/resistance as a struggle “against that which ties the individual to himself [sic] and submits him to others in this way,” such that “maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are.” 24 We move toward a more discursive notion of power/resistance where the subject of power is both exercising power and creating resistance as well as being subject to power and resistance. Subjectivity becomes a shifting terrain of struggle such that modes of identity are claimed, reclaimed, and refused. Such continuous struggle is linked to the roles/identities we may be attempting to fulfill at any one time—for example, lecturer, daughter, student, Irishwoman, mother, friend. The strategies of power/resistance hinge upon the nature of a resisting subject producing a field of possible actions within the mobile field of social power relations. These practices of power/resistance find materiality in the practical engagement of experience that forges subjectivity. Such resistant subjectivity arises not simply in relation to other subjects and social representation but in the tense dynamic of self–representation implicit in the actions and consciousness of agents. With respect to the strategies involved in the perpetual struggle of power/resistance, Foucault suggests the following hypothesis:
I would say it’s all against all. There aren’t immediately given subjects of a struggle, one the proletariat, the other the bourgeoisie. Who fights against whom? We all fight against each other. And there is always within each of us something that fights something else. 25
The power/resistance dynamic functions not only as resistant subjectivity but also as “differentiated subjectivity” in relation to the self and others. In terms of gender power/resistance, resistant subjectivity invokes a recognition of difference among women and within “woman” as political agents. Sandra Harding reflects this in her assertion that “not only do our gender experiences vary across the cultural categories; they also are often in conflict in any one individual’s experience.” 26 The practices of power/resistance therefore reflect the possibility of multiple sites of resistance. This challenges the idea of a unitary site of resistance tied to a particular subject position (e.g., class, race, gender) that is at the heart of revolutionary resistance:
The points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistance’s [sic], each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations. 27
Thus, in one fell swoop we lose the notion of the revolutionary subject so beloved of peasant revolutionary writers and also the possibility of a shared worldview. But we do gain the imagination of possibilities of multiple sites of resistance enacted through resistant and differentiated subjectivity. Resistance is grounded in particular histories and relations and expands the possibilities of politics: The personal, in its many forms and positionalities, becomes political. In the context of revolution, such a shift reveals the localized practices of resistance such that the possibilities for action do not have to involve a sense of false consciousness that robs women of their power to act.
To challenge any imperative to categorize gender identities in revolution, we need to explore this terrain of difference, resistance, and subjectivity in a context of relations of power and resistance. Our understanding of discursive practices of gender power/resistance is furthered by Henrietta Moore’s discussion of “processes of identification and differentiation.” 28 Rather than embodied and fixed identities of categories, roles, or spheres, it is these processes that inform the fluid interpretation and reinterpretation of gender identities through the experience of social power relations. Through these processes, differentiation is seen to mirror the complex interactions of multiple subjectivities that cut across race, class, sexuality, and age in inscribing gender identities. This leads to a highlighting of the “performative aspects of gender identity and the possibilities that exist for the subversion of categorical identities.” 29 These processes mirror the idea of power/resistance practices outlined above. Through such practices, difference, social identities, and resistance are bound up in this contested terrain of gender subjectivities and are underpinned by a practical consciousness of gender identities “forged through practical engagement in lives lived.” 30 The resistant and differentiated subjectivity of gender identities has therefore to be seen in the context of experienced difference.
This practical consciousness of identification and difference is informed by understandings of “intersubjectivity” and “subject positionality” that posit a constant renegotiation of identity “in relation” to others and the self. Intersubjectivity refers to the way in which our identities are constructed in relation to others around us and in relation to our own self–representations. In the process of identification, the agency of the individual is reclaimed through an intersubjectivity that is concerned with “desire and the projection and introjection of images of the self and others.” 31 Positionality with respect to multiple subjectivities refers to the different “speaking positions” or “subject positions” taken up by an individual at any given time. It goes beyond gendered dichotomies in problematizing identities formed through social relations. In this way, the discursive practices of gendered power/resistance lead to women taking up different subject positions in the performance of multiple subjectivities—for example, mother, food provider, collaborator, good citizen, community worker, and so on. Such multiple positioning allied to intersubjectivity leads to gender identities that are discursive, that is, provisional and subject to reinforcement and/or resistance. Women in revolutions can be seen to take up a number of “speaking positions,” which are established through relation with self and others.
The interplay of intersubjectivity and positionality suggests that gender identities can emerge to resist as well as subject—not in a universalist, detemporalized sense but in a located sense of experience and possibility in different situations—and still unmask the workings of power. Gender identities are therefore not simply the passive outcome of a determinist process of socialization but rather are constructed through processes of practical and discursive knowledge involving agency in the form of resistance and compliance that reproduce and/or resist dominant discourses and categories. The fluidity of such dynamics finds expression as “conflicting loyalties” and “incoherent identities,” in the descriptions coined by Sawicki and Sylvester. 32 This reflects the many subject positions women may be enacting at any one time and the actions arising from different subject positions, be they ones of compliance (with the state, with the guerrillas, with neighbors) or of resistance (against the state, against the guerrillas, against each other). The positions are further differentiated in terms of location and experience.
Such identities are often in conflict through “investment” in particular subject positions and through the “thwarting” of such positions. The tension of taking up and maintaining multiple and contradictory subject positions results in thwarting that reflects the “inability to sustain or properly take up a gendered subject position, resulting in a crisis—real or imagined—of self–representation and/or social evaluation.” 33 This can also arise from “others” failing to fulfill their subject positions in relation to one’s own (e.g., husband/wife, government/good citizen, revolutionary organization/revolutionary cadre). Thwarting can also reflect the failure to accrue benefits from adopting or investing in a particular subject position—for example, compensation from the independent government for cattle seized and food given to the guerrillas during the war by local people. In an everyday context of living through and participating (or not) in revolution, such positionality is reflected in the following scenario:
Competing demands can force women to make painful decisions: the family may need her support and attention, while she feels impelled by events to be active outside the home—demonstrating for peace, participating in the struggle, organising welfare services and so on. Many women find enormous reserves of emotional and physical energy to fulfil both roles; sometimes they have instead to sacrifice one or the other, and cope with some form of guilt. 34
In building a poststructuralist perspective on revolution, we come to an understanding of social relations in war that challenges any attempt at metanarratives of power (patriarchal militarism) or categories of being (fighter, mother, prostitute). These multiple positionalities, along with a terrain of conflict marked by discursive practices of power/resistance (which do not demarcate political and nonpolitical spaces), allow us to map out the ways in which women, through resistant subjectivity (refusal to be categorized), negotiate and renegotiate their relationship to war at an everyday and local level. The practices of resistant and differentiated subjectivity in war are thus argued to be manifest in the struggle over gender identities that lies at the heart of the contradictory practice of power/resistance. Such a perspective allows us to understand the “field of possible actions” as viewed by women from their various subject positions in relation to war. These actions of power, resistance, and survival inform and are informed by a practical consciousness of everyday experience.
The forms of actions are similar to those unearthed by James Scott in his writings on everyday forms of peasant resistance, which he terms “weapons of the weak.” Such actions include “foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth.” 35 The stories of resistant and differentiated subjectivity yield a war by women fought on the level of the everyday, where risk and change are constantly being renegotiated. The outcome of such practical consciousness incorporates the contradictory practices of compliance and resistance in which women engage to present themselves to the world and to understand the war around them in relation to their daily lives. These practices and consciousness I have termed “Gendered Localized Resistance.” 36 The practices of Gendered Localized Resistance reveal continuous gender struggles that take the form of everyday resistance. The fluid way in which this dynamic permeates the lives of women challenges a gender analysis of war conducted through women’s roles or actions confined to private or public spheres. Through the various relationships in which women are involved throughout a war, there emerges a repertoire of contradictory views and practices that reflect elements of power, powerlessness, and resistance within the experiences of war.
The dynamics of resistant and differentiated subjectivity have implications for feminist research in that the focus of interest is shifted away from the revelation of oppression toward the anatomy of struggle, which reveals not only the intricacies of power as exercised but also the possibilities of resistance as bound up in power. Such a rendering of women’s relationship to war has implications for a transformative agenda of gender relations. The first of these involves the opening up of roles and categories for women in war to give space and voice to the agency of women even in the most circumscribed of situations. It allows women to bear witness to their own experiences, which may otherwise be ignored, defined as nonpolitical, or individualized to an extent that the lack of a collective manifestation of agency is read as passivity. In a practical sense, what this reveals is that far from certain actions and identities in a context of war, we find a struggle of identities wrapped up in the experiences of war itself. This is first evident in the various subject positions adopted by women in war that refute any attempt to demarcate space as public/private or to term any experiences as purely embodied in one subject position—for example, woman as soldier, woman as mother, woman as food provider, woman as victim. The public and private must be disestablished, because the center of spatially configured political subjectivity cannot hold once power/resistance struggles are seen to embrace subjectivity in pervasive, noncategorical forms.
The transformative potential of gender power also lies in the analysis of difference between women’s experiences of the same war through acts of compliance or resistance within relationships. Some women may be widowed, have a husband who works away from home, or leave home as a young adult to join a revolutionary movement. Their perspectives on war may be very different in reflecting how women relate to the community and the state and in how they perceive themselves and wish others to perceive them. A telling example is the ambivalence I found, in the course of my research on the Zimbabwe war, toward women who were in relationships with government soldiers. Such women were sometimes vilified by others in their communities and were targeted as sellouts and thus subject to punishment beatings or accusations of witchcraft. Yet other women claimed to understand that the motivation for women in such relationships was often economic in a context of chronic shortages of food, medicines, and cash. As such, some of the women interviewed were forgiving of behavior that in the main was socially unacceptable. Still other women saw sexual harassment by guards as bringing about such relations and saw the women involved as victims. In this scenario of private relations between women and the state military, we find a mix of social approbation, moral outrage, political treason, witchcraft, and economic rationalization. These are all explanations of one phenomenon that defy categorization as private/public or woman as prostitute/camp follower. In fact, such women may be at the same time a mother, a wife, a guerrilla supporter, a state collaborator, an economic agent, a victim, and a survivor.
Rethinking gender, power, and resistance as dynamic practices of positioning oneself in relation to war through the local conduct of everyday social relations has implications of not only moving beyond stereotypes of femininity and war but also reconfiguring stereotypes of masculinity and war. Differentiating the experiences of men and the constructions of masculine identities in war raises the question of the extent to which men embrace or resist categorical identities as women do. If women, in patriarchal accounts and feminist critiques, have been categorized or silenced, then men’s identities also have been constructed from metanarratives of masculinity and power. If women are trapped by the subjectivities and roles of preexisting modes of explanation concerning war and revolution, then it follows that perhaps men too have been stereotyped, albeit in relatively more powerful subject positions. In taking women’s and men’s voices and actions at the local level as a starting point for analyzing war and gender relations, we can imagine more flexible ideas of gender identities and identify opportunities for transformation.
The promises of resistance and subversion come through “agonistic” understandings of power and subjectivity. This continual interplay of subjection and resistance is very different from the apocalyptic promise of open revolt inherent in revolutionary adaptations of Marxism. The latter, which involve dialectical schemes of liberation through the categorical inevitability of class conflict, influenced anticolonial liberation struggles in the second half of this century. The former, which allows no such clarity of struggle, invokes instead a complex interaction of the power, resistance, and subjectivity that require more historicized and located revelation of how people become subjects in revolution and how power is exercised through the creation of subjectivity (the oppressor and the oppressed). Such explorations involve an excavation and exhumation of revolutions that seek out the assumed and the unexplained and give voice to the simultaneous operations and possibilities of power and resistance within and without revolution.
Strategies of Engagement 2: Feminist Practices
Genealogy and Research Methodology
The reconceptualization of power, subjectivity, and resistance I have outlined requires appropriate methodologies and coalitions of practice on the ground if an agenda of transformation is to be effected. Practices of resistant and differentiated subjectivity challenge not only claims to knowledge but also how we establish such claims. A Foucauldian strategy in this regard is the development of critical knowledge and practice through genealogy. Genealogy recovers power/resistance through the particularization of located struggles, and it grounds any attempt at building theory and action. This requires the imbrication of theory and method to create critical knowledge. The argument here is that such a genealogical method underpins the work of the feminist as critic. The practice of criticism, according to Foucault, involves “pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.” 37 Implicit in his genealogical method is the practice of criticism that displays a “local character of criticism... whose validity is not dependent on the approval of the established regimes of thought.” Such criticism is nothing less than the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” 38 and is a self–conscious strategy whereby “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.” 39 Genealogy as methodology is implicated in power/resistance because the recovery of “subjugated knowledges” is central to understanding the workings of power and subjectivity.
The excavation of subjugated knowledges and the anatomization of particular struggles mean we “lose” any sense of a transhistorical subject, man or woman. The genealogies of dissipated subjectivity challenge the idea of history as the march of God or man on earth. Rationality is that engine of history that seeks an authoritative account of historical events in order to render them fixed in terms of an unfolding story of inevitability in which characters enter the stage of history on cue with roles readily performed and interpreted in the playing out of these events. Genealogy recovers an alternative myriad of possibilities, the “numberless beginnings” of history that refuse a unified self. It is nothing less than a liberation of “lost events.” 40 History is therefore seen to involve many interpretations and many points of emergence where we, the agents of history, are embroiled in the constant forging of meaning through the subversion, inversion, replacement, and creation of power relations. In the refusal of absolutes, genealogy
corresponds to the acuity of a glance that distinguishes, separates, and disperses; that is capable of liberating divergence and marginal elements—the kind of dissociating view that is capable of decomposing itself, capable of shattering the unity of man’s being through which it was thought he could extend his sovereignty to the events of his past. 41
There is self–reflexivity involved in such an approach that calls for a consciousness of discontinuity. This consciousness is one that takes the present moment as the moment of question. Thus, in seeking to reevaluate past events, we, as researchers, are posing questions rooted in concerns arising from our present circumstances. The impetus for change and the search for new possibilities of ways of being as our “selves” drives the search into the past to deconstruct metanarratives and constitute alternative narratives. The impetus for such criticism is the expression of “a historical ontology of ourselves.” 42 This ontology transforms the way we create and understand history and knowledge in relation to our present way of being. It refers to the creativity of criticism that, through a genealogical search, leads to an exploration of the past from the perspectives and problems of the present. Such a focus lends itself to a knowledge concerned with the limits of our existence so that we may transgress those limits, not that we may contain ourselves within them.
To seek out “subjugated knowledges,” to pose a “critical ontology of ourselves” in the present as we look to the past, to deny a transcendental historical subject the comfort of a millennial solution—these are all the marks of a subversive methodology intricately bound up in that of which it speaks: power, resistance, and the possibilities of freedom. 43 It is this promise of resistance that remains both elusive and seductive in the work of Foucault and poses the challenge for feminist writers wishing to take up Foucault in challenging the limits of IR as an academic discipline and feminist IR as a critical discourse within that discipline.
The deployment of Foucault’s genealogy to the purposes of writing about women’s experiences of revolution involves close attention to issues of voice and difference in the representations of women’s experiences. The tradition of western humanism is itself a partial knowledge constructed on particular positioning of women and ideas about women. It is based on a binary logic that frames the construction of “others.” This, as we saw earlier, involves a gendered valuation of subjectivity and experience such that a norm of western male agency is juxtaposed with a devalued feminized “other.” This is raised by Chandra Mohanty with respect to the representation of the experiences of women in the Third World. She raises the specter of “discursive colonialism” in the work of western feminists who forge a new orthodoxy of “otherness” by reductionist representations of women from the “Third World.” 44 The critical ontology of feminist IR must be one that seeks to manifest the polyvocality of experience and so reflect differences of location, identity, constructions of past experience, and ongoing resistance that occur among “women” as a sexed and gendered group and within “woman” as a particular subject in relation to her “self” and “others.”
One implication of genealogy as a critical methodology is the need to explore appropriate research methods that do not create a new orthodoxy but do embrace difference and seek out subjugated knowledges. The methods of such excavation may be archaeological and documentary but in the case of feminist research are reflected in the increased emphasis given to voice and oral testimony in writing about women and war. This raises issues concerning the nature of experience and the methods used to represent experience. 45 This reconceptualization opens up spaces and opportunities to explore the actions, responses, and understandings that women themselves bring to war through various research methods, including oral testimony, autobiographical and literary analysis, and revisions of documentary evidence used to “authenticate” events and actions. This allows us to envisage practices of gender power/resistance that are accompanied by an empowering methodology of recovering subjugated knowledges.
The practice of criticism by feminist scholars in international relations is not now about taking the canonical texts of man, the state, and war and seeking to insert a “womanly” presence; nor is it to covet and define “feminine” agendas of health, education, and the treatment of victims of war. Rather we must excavate the many practices of gender power relations within the academic discipline that construct the knowledge of political practice, and also reimagine that state of political practice in itself. In the case of war, the why and how of revolution for women becomes transplanted by the wider knowledge of lives lived, strategies developed, hopes, fears, and feelings through which the questions become: What do women want from revolution and what is their relationship to it? This is the why and how of revolution from the perspective of those subjects on whose behalf a revolution is claimed. In terms of research methodologies, rethinking the practice of gender power/resistance and gender identities in war situations opens the way for an array of cross–disciplinary research and insights in challenging the preconceptions of gender and conflict that have influenced thinking in politics and development. The significance of difference and representation of women’s experiences are two themes requiring further research and debate in the wider field of feminist IR. Equally important may be the humility of a discipline coming to terms with, and listening to, the voices of the “subjects” it claims as constituents.
Politics of Engagement
Rethinking power and subjectivity allied to genealogical method poses subversive possibilities and fears for feminist theory. It generates much enlivening debate at a time when feminist theory and practice is infused with critical self–questioning concerning its political direction, its constituencies, and its foundations. Viewing gendered identities as tied to discursive power/resistance destabilizes the idea of a fixed standpoint position to inform political actions, which has long been a tenet of feminist research and politics. It has been asked if in dismantling categories we are heralding the end of feminist politics as a politics of resistance. 46 The answer here is no. In fact, the relinquishing of a privileged standpoint feminist epistemology has positive political implications for feminist practices in opening up the “field of possible actions.”
Far from killing the subject, it can be argued that Foucault reinvigorates the dynamism of subjectivity by refusing the determinism of an Enlightenment humanism. The political act of social criticism creates this proliferation and explosion that defies the knowledge we claim to hold and blinds the Cartesian cyclops we call history. As subjects in constant struggle we do not necessarily face the inevitability of struggle but may also always face the prospect of resistance, reversal, and change. Feminist politics is urged beyond fixed subjectivities of victimhood or liberation. For feminist epistemology this means the letting go of a singular standpoint, a privileged perspective from which to locate the experiences of women. The claim to a female truth can be argued to have universalized “otherness,” restricted strategies of resistance, and elided important differences that shape resistance. There is no authentic truth to counter another truth. Gendered positioning is much more mediated than that.
From a feminist standpoint position, Nancy Hartsock accuses the postmodernist turn of at best suspicious timing, at worst forging a conspiracy aimed at robbing feminism of its oppositional power in challenging unitary subjectivity at a time when critical social movements are gathering force. Foucault is thus condemned as a “colonizer who refuses,” who exists in “painful ambiguity” with the Enlightenment tenets of his own subjectivity. 47 Pace Hartsock, it can be argued that Foucault’s understanding of power does offer epistemological value to feminist reworkings of power. In particular, she laments the possible loss of a material analysis based on categories of the dominant and the dominated (the oppositional “other”). However, while materialism in the strict Marxist sense may be eschewed, a sense of poststructural materiality can be read from Foucault’s rendering of power/resistance and his method of genealogy. It is not that in the mapping of power/resistance and resistant subjectivity we lose the importance of material contexts in the construction of identities and the practice of power and resistance. Rather, experiences of multiple subjectivity and intersubjectivity, through power/resistance, give a discursive rather than determining influence to that materialism in shaping power relations.
A strict standpoint position holds on to key modernist premises such as the binary opposition, the division of political space, and the need for a transcendental revolutionary subject. As long as those remain nonnegotiable elements of a feminist politics of resistance, poststructuralist strategies of engagement and resistance cannot be heard or evaluated. These latter strategies of engagement are not explicit in the work of Foucault and certainly are not directed specifically to struggles of gender power/resistance. Foucault’s evasive positions on the precise forms of resistance and political action are well established. However, feminist adoptions of Foucault should not shy away from highlighting the dynamics of resistance through genealogies of the diverse struggles that can readily be identified as concerns of feminist international relations.
The arguments of standpoint feminism have been well rehearsed in feminist theories of war and peace and hark back to the politics underlying the representations of women in war outlined earlier. Embracing the maternal/peaceful stereotype implies essentially shared values among women qua women and reinforces the beautiful–soul image that has inspired feminist action in the promotion of peace. To counter such standpoint claims of “feminine authenticity,” Sylvester argues for the consideration of difference between women involved in different struggles. The efficacy of viewing the oppression of women in war as a collective standpoint is questionable in contexts where experiences among women and the subjectivities of women in war may differ greatly. There is not a linear progression of political consciousness for women and indeed not even one privileged type of consciousness. She argues that “for postmodernists... multiple standpoints which derive from ways of understanding developed collectively, through self–conscious political struggle, are harbingers of political victories.” 48 (I would add “individually” to “collectively,” as most struggles involve these two aspects.) This multiple and contested creation of subjectivities reflects the “crowded and fractured” nature of women’s identities that defy simplistic categorizations of maternity and peace. 49
In fact, such essentialism becomes a threat to any feminist project. The understanding of difference among women in interpreting experiences of war and consciousness of struggle thus becomes central to developing feminist analyses of war. Multiple subjectivities crossed by race, sex, class, and roles give rise to multiple standpoints of experience that must shape any feminist understanding of politics and change. Precisely because such difference rests on “a certain foundational incoherence,” it is difficult to embrace, particularly in the attempts to forge political action and mobilize for change. However, such mobilization for change may be more effective precisely because there is a keener understanding of the practical engagement of women’s struggles of power/resistance. Sylvester poses an “aware cacophony” where “dissonance and disagreement... shows that feminism as consciousness and movement, is subject to interpretation based on differences in lived realities of the interpreters.” 50 Women therefore who do not “fit” categories of authenticity, because feminist change will not be consigned to the false consciousness of the victim who needs to be saved from herself.
There are positive elements of tension between Foucault and feminism in moving forward. One such link is the creativity of subjectivity, which leads to the emergence of subjects, illuminating the possibility for creative resistance. The fragmented nature of women’s social identities is at the root of understanding the contradictory nature of the impact of revolution upon women and women’s responses to revolution. What is envisioned therefore is not the abandonment of feminist politics but rather a feminist politics grounded in the struggles of resistance and identities by women. Such a feminist politics grows from a localized understanding of gendered resistance. It is the understanding of difference that gives voice to a more meaningful and empowered feminist politics in advocating and shaping agendas for change. One of the implications of this is that the strategies of struggle and resistance are predicated on difference and not on Enlightenment generalizations of unity tied to fixed subjectivity. This shift gives way to a feminist politics that does not destabilize or depoliticize action by women but, on the contrary, acknowledges the agency of women in very different contexts.
Sawicki’s Foucauldian analysis suggests the possibility of feminist action through such a “politics of difference.” She advocates a radical pluralism that politicizes social and personal relationships and does not place boundaries on what is the concern of the political. Resistant subjectivity is a theory and a practice aimed at unveiling domination and also enacting resistance.
It is based on a form of incrementalism in which the distinction between reform and revolution is collapsed.... It is an incrementalism that recognizes domination, but also represents the social field as a dynamic, multidimensional set of relationships containing possibilities for liberation as well as domination. 51
It allows us to evaluate the effectiveness or otherwise of particular power/resistance practices in particular struggles. The political practice of difference is effected through “coalition building.” In such coalitions, “our basis for common struggle is a democratic and provisional one, subject to recreation and renegotiation.” 52 This involves an acknowledgment of the shifting identities we are and also of the many social and political coalitions arising from experiences of multiple identities. Coming to terms with such differences may be the creative source of change. The fragmentation of subjectivity also offers feminist politics an alternative model of consciousness–raising to that of the shared experience of patriarchal oppression. It acts instead to challenge who we are, in all our differences, and opens up spaces for other imaginings of who we might want to be. In this way, Sawicki argues, consciousness–raising “can be salvaged from the remnants of humanist emancipatory politics.” 53 The fragmentation of subjectivity through the microapplication of genealogy does not therefore mean the fragmentation of politics. It simply means that shared experiences and similarities will not be assumed, or taken for granted, and that understandings of struggle and strategies of resistance can be developed with a more sensitive ear to different possibilities and necessities.
In the world of daily survival for many women around the globe, issues of difference must respond to the impetus for action. This is an argument made by Anne Marie Goetz when she criticizes claims to cultural relativity and epistemological problems of subjectivity as “paralysing and inadequate in the face of the imperative to act posed by the survival problems of women in the third world.” 54 Yet she carries forward the importance of difference and multiple sites of struggle in her proposition of coalition building as a feasible form of feminist politics. In this project there is no privileging of perspectives, and all claims to knowledge are accepted as partial. Also implicit in this coalition strategy is the coexistence of competing claims of class, race, and sexuality, as well as gender. Rather than an equation of oppressions, there is a shifting coalition of oppressions that will be tied to context and provide provisional knowledge claims. She argues that
coalition politics of this sort struggles to eliminate the elements of centre, unity, and totality that organize structures into hierarchical oppositions. It also allows for the fact that women experience simultaneously many oppressions and must engage in a multitude of struggles that conflict and supplement each other. 55
Mohanty’s criticism of the homogenizing effects of discursive colonialism within western feminism draws attention to the limitations of sisterhood based on the “erasure of difference and inequality.” 56 Her impetus for such criticism springs from “the urgent political necessity of forming strategic coalitions across race, class, and gender.” 57 The self–conscious awareness of difference is thus a necessary strategy of engagement for feminist theorists who would be feminist activists. The activity of writing about women, gender, and change is a political act requiring writers to reflect on the effects of their representations of women.
In terms of political action, collectivity and the “fiction of unity” are still necessary to mobilize for change. Collective engagements can also provide vehicles for personal transformations that allow wider expression of the types of practices discussed here. 58 However, such political engagements are not separate from the academic work of theory. How we imagine the world and act to transform it reflects the imbricated politics of being. This will to know and will to act must continue to be a necessary tension for the development of feminist IR as theory and practice. There is therefore a need for dialogue across disciplines in forging international knowledge and practice. There is also a need to set in partnership the validity of field research and the abstractions of theory if the political impetus of international feminism tied to difference is to be supported and nurtured. The strategic challenge is to create and grasp opportunities of collective resistance in a context of difference as outlined by writers such as Bina Agarwal in the context of women’s land rights in South Asia. 59
There are other implications of a poststructuralist analysis for feminist politics and policies, not least of which is the design of more appropriate development interventions in war–torn societies struggling toward peace. The inability to understand the intricate dynamics of the societies on whose behalf “we” have so often presumed to act has marked many such interventions. The recognition of women’s many identities and actions in war pushes policymakers to move beyond discourses of vulnerability and responsibility through to self–styled agendas where whole communities, rather than women as mothers/carers, take charge of survival and recovery. Political and development interventions need to acknowledge the lives and actions of women at a localized level in ways that do not reinforce and appropriate women’s roles (as mothers, carers, community developers, etc.) in the form of low–cost invisible local resources. The current humanitarian concerns arising from the changing nature and conduct of war (in the shift to more internal and intimate conflicts implicating civilian populations to a pervasive extent) also demonstrate the need for local understandings of the dynamics of gender in conflict situations. This local focus is the bubbling source that distills international debates on gender, violence, the breakdown of community, and the constant struggle to secure human rights. The knowledge and understanding of local relational dynamics can inform the prospect of an end to war and the rebuilding of society in a context of ordinary lives being lived in extraordinary circumstances.
Conclusion
Gendered Localized Resistance is proposed as an emancipatory vehicle for dislodging a universalizing discourse on women and resistance in revolutionary wars. It challenges the conceptual and practical value of viewing women in war as victims colluding in their own oppression or as heroic role models of self–empowerment. In reality, wars have rarely been fought for the advancement of women. Gender analysis based on resistant and differentiated subjectivity moves beyond the reductionist conventions of women’s roles (mother, fighter, camp follower) and spheres of activity (public, private, personal) in placing the dynamic of social relationships and identities at the center of analysis. In place of a standpoint position that views women as a group speaking from a shared position of oppression, the emphasis is to explore the multiple standpoints of experience and identity between and within individual women. In refusing who we are, we also redefine and renegotiate continually who we are in relation to others and ourselves. The forging of identities, self–understandings, and “other”–understandings thus takes place through the practices and accounts of power/resistance. The potential for transforming gender power relations lies in unmasking such relational practices. The reconceptualization of such relations as ones of power/resistance allied to a struggle of identities reveals a central role for difference and resistance as part of a silent, mundane revolution taking place from below in the constant negotiation of such gender power relations and identities. The strategies of engagement for women in revolutions arise from these everyday heroics that we blandly call survival. If liberation is about emancipation, it is not to be found in the metanarrative but in the everyday, localized narratives of women’s locations, actions, and identities in a context of war.
In the adoption of Foucault, feminists have embraced the understandings of power and the efficacy of genealogical method. What could be more appealing to a liberatory and emancipatory project than the idea of recovering lost voices and excavating marginalized knowledge? However, the fractured subjectivity that lies at the heart of these alternative renderings of power and method has proved a source of unease to a project dedicated not only to the building of theory to understand subordination but also to a politics of opposition in overcoming such subordination. The inscriptions of difference and the dissipation of identity through a myriad of social practices that are power relations mark the dislodging of the central unitary subject of “woman” and “women.” The implications of this shift are twofold. In simple terms, it is whether we view our glass as half full or half empty! In the latter scenario, the fragmentation of identity and the renouncing of universals may mean the end of the millennial liberatory project as we have known it in the West through the liberal and Marxist traditions. The coherent revolutionary subject bound together with others in an apocalyptic struggle of dialectical change is the narrative we have to sacrifice. The clarity and certainty of such a narrative has served as a potent appeal in the mobilization of various groups in many struggles—workers, peasants, women, colonized peoples. Some feminists predict that the emancipatory project of feminism will lose its teeth if we adopt a totally rejectionist position with respect to the Enlightenment tradition and to the notion of essential subjectivity.
However, in the scenario of the half–full glass we may, if we are brave enough to imagine, embrace an alternative vision of resistance and subjectivity that allows women the multiplicity of their experiences in different times and cultures as subjects of race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, and age. It is this politics of difference that forges practices of coalition that some feminist advocates of Foucauldian analysis see as the liberatory promise of our age. Instead of one voice, one politics, we reclaim the shifting contexts of the many power relations in which women are differentially implicated. In this way, we can imagine a more inclusive and more grounded form of social criticism and political action. The many coalitions formed by women across a range of issues—birth control, environmental degradation, education, emergency relief, peacebuilding—are testimony to practices that involve contradictory positions for “women” and defy any natural cohesive coalition for all women at all times. The challenge of resistance opened up by Foucault is to forge resistance at the limits, to constantly build and renegotiate interstitial resistance. This a resistance that creates crevices and fills them, forges power relations and reverses them. These strategies of resistance demand the commitment and vigilance of the long–distance hiker aware of vistas and falling rocks, dangers and opportunities.
The ego–myth of the intellectual enlightening the oppressed and leading them to revolution is thus unmasked. The challenge for feminist international relations is not to ape the revolutionary intellectual but to self–consciously explore the limits of the academic discipline and forge new narratives of understanding the workings of international relations. This is a work of partnership that reaches across disciplines and creates coalitions of knowledge and political action. In a world of diversity we can celebrate the many revolutions of daily emancipation and coping strategies and also decry the daily oppression and risks that make the rhetoric of revolutionary transformation less spontaneous or inevitable. Such strategies of academic engagement require a self–consciousness that questions the view we create of the world through the disciplinary lens of IR and the interventions we advance for genuine transformations and understandings of gender power relations. The challenge remains for us to push the boundaries of the discipline more creatively and to place our ears to the ground, for there are many untold stories and long silences erupting under our feet.
Endnotes
Note 1: An early version of this essay was presented to the International Studies Association Conference in San Diego, April 1996. I would like to thank the panel participants for their comments. I am also grateful to Sarah White, Liz Trinder, Deirdre Collings, Polly Mohs, Ann Cotton, and Vivienne Jabri for their helpful discussions on earlier drafts of this chapter. Back.
Note 2: The term critical feminist theory is used consciously and is not to be confused with feminist Critical Theory, which implies an association with the ideas and theories of the Frankfurt School. Back.
Note 3: I had considered using the term feminist praxis here, as that seemed to connote a sense of imbricated theory and practice. However, the word praxis seems loaded with other theoretical connotations based on derivations of Marxist theory, so I have opted to use the term theory and practice. Back.
Note 4: Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? pp. 161, 164. Back.
Note 5: Sylvester, “Some Dangers,” p. 505. Back.
Note 6: Ibid., pp. 502, 505–506. Back.
Note 7: Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? p. 160. Back.
Note 8: Ibid., p. 164. Also see Scott, “Women and the Armed Struggle,” for an analysis of roles taken up by women of different generations in the Zimbabwe liberation war. Back.
Note 9: For more on this point, see Stiehm “The Effect of Myths,” and Macdonald, “Drawing the Lines.” Back.
Note 10:
Peterson and Runyan, Global Gender Issues, pp. 7–8. The presence/
absence dynamic is described as a situation in which “the presence of men depends on the absence of women. Because of this interdependence, a gender analysis of women’s lives and experiences does not simply ‘add something’ about women but transforms what we know about men and the activities they undertake” (emphasis in original). Back.
Note 11: This is far from being a consensus approach as Burguieres suggests in her analysis of three schools within the feminist peace/war approach. See Burguieres, “Feminist Approaches to Peace.” The starting point for her analysis is the existence of stereotypes in relation to men and war and women and peace. The first school embraces the maternal female stereotype and valorizes it as a vision of peaceful society. The second school rejects the female stereotype and seeks instead to prove women to be as capable as men in the defense of the state. The equality of women in the military would be a strategy supported within this view. The third school challenges both male and female stereotypes in seeking to address issues of structural power in the establishment of a feminist critique of militarism. Examples of the women and war literature include Brownmiller, Against Our Will; Elshtain, Women and War; Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?; Isaksson, Women and the Military System; Macdonald, Holden, and Ardener, Images of Women in Peace and War; Ridd and Callaway, Caught Up in Conflict. Back.
Note 12: Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? p. 212. Back.
Note 14: Pierson, “Did Your Mother Wear Army Boots?” p. 214. Back.
Note 15: Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? pp. 161–169. Back.
Note 16: See Seidman, “Women in Zimbabwe,” and Sylvester, Zimbabwe, on the mixed fortunes of women in postindependent Zimbabwe. Back.
Note 17: For examples of this in the case of the liberation war in Zimbabwe, see Ranger, Peasant Consciousness; and Lan, Guns and Rain. Back.
Note 18: In the case of Zimbabwe, see Kriger, Zimbabwe’s Liberation War. Back.
Note 19: Foucault, “Afterword,” p. 225. See also Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 95, where he says, “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.” Back.
Note 20: Foucault, The History of Sexuality, pp. 93–94. Back.
Note 21: Foucault, “Afterword,” p. 222; footnote 3, p. 222. The “combat” description is suggested by the translator to clarify the meaning of the term. Back.
Note 22: Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 142. Back.
Note 23: Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault, p. 26. Back.
Note 24: Foucault, “Afterword,” pp. 21, 212. Back.
Note 25: Foucault, “Introduction,” p. 126 (quoted in Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault, pp. 25–26). Back.
Note 26: Harding, Feminism and Methodology, p. 7. Back.
Note 27: Foucault, The History of Sexuality, pp. 95–96. Back.
Note 28: Moore, A Passion for Difference. Back.
Note 30: Ibid., pp. 53–54. Back.
Note 31: Ibid., pp. 3, 41. Back.
Note 32: Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault, p. 41; Sylvester, “Some Dangers,” p. 507. Back.
Note 33: Moore, A Passion for Difference, p. 66. Back.
Note 34: Bennett, Bexley, and Warnock, Arms to Fight, Arms to Protect, p. 12. Back.
Note 35: Scott, Weapons of the Weak, p. 29. These actions are seen to reflect the “prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labour, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them.” Scott has mapped out a terrain of resistance he sees as lying outside of the great struggles and movements and in a sense as being a precursor to them in the shape of everyday forms of peasant resistance. However, the consciousness for such actions is based on a neo–Marxist understanding of local class experiences. Scott’s concerns with such resistance remain locked within a move toward the grand narrative of peasant resistance through open revolt of the agrarian classes against the rent–seeking landlords. However, what he does reveal is a cornucopia of strategies and actions that bubble beneath the surface of open revolt and in fact mark more widely the practice of resistance on a day–to–day level. The consciousness of resistance understood here borrows Scott’s notion of practical engagement in the everyday as the impetus to intention and form of action but sees that context of action as informed by manipulations of power/resistance played out through negotiating identities in the form of various subject positions. Such practical engagement corresponds to Moore’s understanding of gender identifications outlined above. Back.
Note 36: Eleanor O’Gorman, “Chimurenga and Change: A Study of Women and War in Zimbabwe,” Ph.D. thesis, University Of Cambridge (1999). The gendered dimension refers to gender power/resistance as practices of gender identities and relations. In this context, these relations and identities are drawn from understandings of women’s identities and relations within revolutionary struggle. The focus is not simply one of women in relation to men but also of women in relation to other women and in relation to themselves. The “localized” focus refers in the first instance to geospecific localities where microstudies of conflict may be conducted in building an analysis of gender power/resistance from below. In the second instance, “localized” refers to a discursive space wherein the agonistic understanding of power/resistance allows us to break the dichotomy of public/private that lies at the heart of positioning women in war and peace. In a wider, more discursive sense, the “local” is infused with a Foucauldian understanding of the acting subject caught up in many power relationships. As such, actions within a locality feed into understandings and experiences beyond their physical boundaries and, in turn, power relations within the locality draw on ideas, subjectivities, and realities beyond those geographical limits. The linchpin of “Gendered Localized Resistance” is the notion of “resistant and differentiated subjectivity” that brings together these operations of gender and locality to map out the actions and consciousness of women’s experiences of war. Back.
Note 37: Foucault, “Practicing Criticism,” p. 154. Back.
Note 38: Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 81. Back.
Note 40: Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 81; for an interesting discussion on Foucault and history, see Thacker, “Foucault.” Back.
Note 41: Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 87. Back.
Note 42: Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” Back.
Note 44: Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” and “Feminist Encounters.” Back.
Note 45: Joan Wallach Scott, “Evidence of Experience,” takes up this theme of the foundational claims of experience. In a critical historical turn similar to Foucault’s genealogy, she sees the task of the historian to be the investigation of constructions of experience rather than the mere acceptance of experience as explanation: “Experience is at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted.... The study of experience... must call into question its originary status in historical explanation. This will happen when historians take as their project not the reproduction and transmission of knowledge said to be arrived at through experience but the analysis of the production of that knowledge” (pp. 400–401). Back.
Note 46: Martin, “Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault,” p. 17. Back.
Note 47: Hartsock, “Foucault on Power,” p. 164. Back.
Note 48: Sylvester, “Some Dangers,” p. 501. Back.
Note 51: Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault, p. 9. Back.
Note 54: Goetz, “Feminism and the Claim to Know,” p. 134. Back.
Note 55: Ibid., pp. 151–152. Back.
Note 56: Mohanty, “Feminist Encounters,” p. 77. Back.
Note 57: Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” p. 61. Back.
Note 58: Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault, pp. 307–308. Back.
Note 59: Agarwal, “Gender, Resistance, and Land.” Back.
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