Introduction

Feminist scholars have long argued that gender “matters” to understanding world politics and issues of global security. In 1989, Cynthia Enloe famously asked the question: “Where are the women?” in studies of global security, highlighting the profound neglect of gender as a framework for analysis in traditional international relations (IR) approaches. Enloe, in her landmark text Bananas, Beaches and Bases, showed that, far from being absent from the machinations of international affairs—as the silences in conventional IR would suggest— women are in fact present at all levels of world politics and, moreover, critical to their functioning. Charting the multiple and varied roles performed by women in contexts ranging from backroom diplomacy to military brothels and banana plantations, her analysis pointed to the significance of gender, or the “workings of both femininity and masculinity,” in the structures, behaviors, and norms of international relations.

In the years since Enloe first posed her question, feminist inquiry into the subject of global security has grown exponentially. The quantity of feminist work on security produced over the last three decades is such that it is now recognized as its own academic subfield, known as feminist security studies (FSS). It is important to note that the scholarship generated under the banner of FSS is diverse. As Annick Wibben observes, there is “no singular feminist position on security” amid the “veritable explosion” in feminist theorizing on war, violence, and peace that has taken place. Rather, the FSS literature draws on an array of theoretical approaches, with scholars contributing from numerous disciplinary backgrounds (including, but also from outside, mainstream IR), where the aims, subject matter, implications, and methods of study vary, too. The diversity of approaches apparent in FSS means, as Laura Sjoberg cautions, that “there is no one Feminist Security Studies … and

no one on-balance normatively correct way to handle feminist security theorizing around global politics.” Yet, even with the differences (and, indeed, tensions) that exist across the field, it is clear that there is a shared commitment to the concept of gender in the work that is constitutive of FSS, which sets it apart from both traditional and more critical security studies research. In FSS, “gender” operates as a central category for analyzing “security” (however this may be defined) and as a normative standpoint from which unequal and unjust relations of power can be remade.