1AC Contention 1: Masculine Aid Military aid is the US’s vehicle to export patriarchy, colonialism, and racism globally – violence is replicated against gender minorities in other countries under the guise of benevolence. Even seemingly harmless forms of aid can’t escape hegemonic masculinity, the form of masculinity wielded disproportionately by privileged cis men to infantilize and colonize gender minorities. Connell 16 (R. W. - Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney, PhD, transwoman. “Men, Gender and the State.” Among Men: Moulding Masculinities, Volume 1. Routledge, Dec 5, 2016. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=HBSmDQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT26&dq=feminism+%22military+aid%22&ots=Gi3hG-dt-&sig=3o9S9fJClKzGWGQvPkqn4DmRsGE#v=onepage&q=military%20aid&f=false)-JJN The overwhelming predominance of men in positions of state power has always been a practical problem for feminism. Indeed, the modern movement for women’s emancipation began with a struggle for the right to vote, that is for women’s entry into the institutions of the liberal state. Contemporary feminism has a close practical engagement with the state, as Eisenstein (1991) wittily shows. A theory of the state, however, has been slower in coming. This has been difficult to produce, because it requires a radical shift in the perception of gender. In everyday discussion, gender (or “sex”) is always taken to be the attribute of an individual. In social science too, reference to “masculinity” or “femininity” is usually taken as reference to differences in personal traits, temperament or desire, produced by interpersonal interaction along the lines of “sex roles.” With such a conception of gender, there can only be an incidental connection with the institutional system we call the state. It has gradually come to be recognized that this view of gender is inadequate; gender is also an aspect of institutions and large-scale cultural processes (Connell, 1987). This can be seen clearly in the case of education. Schools have a gendered division of labor, and a curriculum marked by a history of gender division and patriarchal control of knowledge. Schools are settings for the drawing (and erasing) of gender lines in everyday interaction, for the creation of a hierarchy of masculinities, as well as for the contestation of gender subordination. To understand gender in public education it is necessary to “think institutionally,” as Hansot and Tyack (1988) put it. And what is true for public education is true for other sectors of the state. Seeing gender as a social structure, one of the ways collective social processes are shaped, makes it possible to analyze the state as a gendered institution and inherently a site of gender politics. During the 1980s such a view spread among thinkers influenced by socialist and radical feminism, resulting in a series of attempts to define a feminist theory of the state, the best-known being the work of MacKinnon (1989) in the United States. A few years ago 1 suggested (Connell, 1990) that the perspective could be summarized in six theses about the gender—state: (1) The state is the central institutionalization of the power relations of gender (power relations being one of the major sub-structures of gender relations). Conversely the state is, at a fundamental level, constituted by gender relations. The state appears “masculine” because it is a condensation of men’s gender power over women. Traditional state theory cannot see gender where only men are present. But where only men are present, we are dealing with a powerful gender effect (more powerful, indeed, than most effects discussed in social theory). (2) The state is a gendered institution, marked by its internal gender regime. The social relations within the state are ordered in tenns of gender through: (A) a gender division of labor among state personnel, (B) gendered power relations, for instance in the social definition of legitimate authority, (C) a structure of emotional relations, including the social construction of sexuality. It is typical of modern state structures that the centers of state power, such as the centers of military and economic decision-making, are heavily masculinized. Though women are not categorically excluded from the state, their interests tend to be represented in more peripheral state agencies, as Grant and Tancred (1992) point out. (3) Through its position in gender relations, and its internal gender regime, the state has the capacity to “do” gender (as ethnomethodologists put it), and also has reasons to do gender. Put more conventionally, the state develops agencies and policies concerned with gender issues, and acts to regulate gender relations in the society as a whole. Recent research on the welfare state, such as Quadagno and Fobes’s (1995) study of the U.S. “Job Corps,” shows in detail how state agencies reproduce the gender division of labor and promote gender ideologies. This is not a marginal aspect of state operations. It involves a whole range of policy areas, from housing through education to criminal justice and the military (Franzway et al, 1989). (4) State activity not only regulates existing gender relations. It also helps to constitute gender relations and the social categories they define. The best-analyzed example is the role of repressive laws and state- backed medicine in constituting the category of “the homosexual” in the late nineteenth century (Greenberg, 1988). “The prostitute” was a category constituted by similar processes; “the pedophile” is a category, once medical, now being constituted by law and electoral politics. In somewhat less dramatic fomi, the categories of “husband” and “wife” are also constituted by state actions ranging from the legal definition of marriage to the design of tax policy and income security systems (Shaver, 1989). (5) Because of these activities and capacities, the state is the key stake in gender politics. It is the focus of most political mobilization on gender issues. Indeed, the rise of the liberal state, with its characteristic legitimation through citizenship, was the focus of a historic change in the form of gender politics. Gender politics, formerly almost entirely local, became mass politics for the first time through the woman suffrage movement. (6) Since gender relations are historically dynamic, marked by crisis tendencies and structural change, the state as a gendered institution is liable to crisis and transformation. Current crisis tendencies center on problems of legitimation (often to do with violence), and on the tensions arising from the gender division of labor and the accumulation of wealth. The above points are drawn from the first wave of feminist theorizing on the state. Broadly speaking, that research took as its model the Marxist analysis of the state as a condensation of class relations. It identified men as a kind of ruling class, with a common interest somehow embodied in the institutions of the state. This gave the analysis of the gender-state a certain solidity and toughness. But that approach also had limitations, and has come under criticism. Watson (1990) questioned whether feminism needs a theory of the state at all; this is a category of patriarchal social theory, and feminism may be better suited by a more fluid understanding of power. There has been increasing recognition in sociology of the multiple forms of gender (Lorber, 1994), and feminist postmodernism has emphasized the shifting character of gender meanings and the lack of fixed gender identities. The attempts to construct a theory of the state have almost all been conducted in rich metropolitan countries; in developing countries, both ge nder issues and state structures may take very different shapes (Stromquist, 1995) In this essay I will the initial feminist critique of gender—blind social theory was entirely justified. The feminist theorizing of the 1980s provided a good first approximation to the problem, but not a complete analysis. We can now move on to develop a more sophisticated alternative to gender-blind theory. reconsider the gendered character of states in the light of these arguments, focusing on issues about masculinity, power, and globalization. I think Powers and genders Mainstream theories of the state tend to erase other powers. For instance, the famous Weberian definition of the state as the holder of the monopoly of legitimate force in a given territory ignores the force used by husbands toward wives. This is a widespread social pattern, whose legitimacy is only now being widely contested (Dobash and Dobash, 1992) Can we regard husbands as a power? To do so flies in the face of conventional political analysis. But in the context of gender relations, husbands may well be a group with definable interests and the capacity to enforce them. Where family structure is patriarchal, husbands’ interests in their wives’ sexual and domestic services are institutionalized on a society-wide basis. As shown by Hollway’s (1994) study of employment practice in the Tanzanian civil service, state agencies may acco mmodate themselves to this power, to the extent of disrupting explicit equal-opportunity policy. Domestic violence commonly expresses husbands’ claim to power over their wives. But as Segal (1990) observes, interpersonal violence is not usually the basis of power; rather, it is often a sign of its contestation or breakdown. Gender-blind political theory has recognized limits to state power mainly in economic institutions — in corporations and markets, especially multinational corporations and international markets. There has been, without doubt, an erosion of state power over the economy in the last two decades, in the face of capital flight, global sourcing (in manufacturing), and currency deregulation. Discussions of these issues almost never register the fact that global capital is gendered. International corporations are overwhelmingly controlled by men. They are institutionally gendered in the same ways as the state, and depend on gender divisions of labor in their workforce, for instance in “offshore” manufacturing plants with female workers and male supervisors (Enloe, 1990). World capitalism involves a gendered accumulation process, whose dimensions have been shown with great clarity by Mies (1986). Most of the documentation of these facts has come from research on “women and development”; we are in dire need of research on “men and development,” that is research on the masculinity of world economic elites. Within the metropolitan countries, another power is emerging which might be called private states. There are said to be more private “security” employees in the United States than there are police. Corporations run surveillance programs to control their own employees, commonly using computer technology. Increasing numbers of the ruling class live in “gated communities,” housing complexes with fences patrolled by security employees and designed to keep out the poor, the black and the card-less. These private states are gendered: controlled by men, mostly employing men, and in the case of the gated communities, en-gating women. (The motivating “threat” has its sexual dimension.) Because their legitimacy depends on property rather than citizenship, private states escape the political pressure of women which the public state encounters as demands for equal opportunity and affirmative action. The gender-state, then, operates in a complex field of powers. This helps explain the phenomenon so forcibly brought to our attention in the 19905, the disintegration of state structures — even apparently well developed ones such as the USSR. Seeing the interplay of states with other Given the importance of patriarchy in state legitimation, it is relatively easy to ground a new state on patriarchal local powers. gendered powers also gives some grip on what has surprised many people, the emergence of ethnicity as a basis of successor states. Ethnicity is constituted in large measure through gender relations. The notion of extended “kinship” is central to the rhetoric of ethnicity -"our kith and kin,” in the old language of British racism. As Vickers (1994) notes, ethnic politics lay heavy emphasis on women's reproductive powers. Gender relations thus provide a vehicle for new claims to authority (all the leaders of the warring successor states in the former Yugoslavia and the former USSR are men), and define boundaries of the group to which loyalty is demanded. If we thus develop a more complicated picture of power, we must also recognize more complexity in the picture of gender. It has become common, in research on men and gender, to speak of “masculinities” rather than “masculinity” (Messerschmidt, 1993). In most situations there is a culturally dominant gender pattern for men; but this is a dominant pattern, not a universal one. Only a minority of men may actually live an exemplary masculinity, as defined, say, by Brahmin codes in India, or by Hollywood action—hero codes in the United States. Therefore we speak of “hegemonic masculinity,” which means precisely that there are also subordinated masculinities (such as found among gay men), marginalized masculinities (for example in marginalized ethnic groups), and complicit masculinities, supporting the hegemonic code but not living rigorously by it (Connell, 1995). In the overall structure of gender relations, men are on top; but many men are not on top in terms of sexuality and gender, let alone class and race. This introduces important complexities into gender relations within and around the state. The men of oppressed ethnic groups may develop aggressive versions of hegemonic masculinity, which are criminalized when state elites perceive a problem of order — note, for instance, the very high rates of violence and imprisonment among African-American men in the United States. They may also be tapped for the purposes of the state: the same group has a high level of recruitment to the U.S. Army. The masculinization of the state identified in feminist theory is principally a relationship between state institutions and hegemonic masculinity . This relationship is a two-way street. While hegemonic masculinity is a resource in the struggle for state power, state power is a resource in the struggle for hegemony in gender (a fact clearly apparent to both Christian and Islamic fundamentalists in current struggles). Where some earlier formulations saw the link between masculinity and state power as a constant throughout history, we must see this as a historical relationship, which has taken different forms in the past and is open to further change now. The pattern of hegemonic masculinity altered, in the North Atlantic world, during the transition from Ancien Regime states controlled by a landowning gentry to liberal imperialist states controlled by alliances of capitalists and technocrats. Metropolitan states in the twentieth century have seen struggles between forms of masculinity whose claim to hegemony rested on expertise, and forms whose claim to hegemony rested on qualities of toughness and fitness to command (liberals versus hard-liners, professionals versus managers, and so on). Specific forms of masculinity, often exceptionally violent, emerged in the process of imperial conquest: the conquistador, the brawling frontiersman or miner, the pastoral worker (cowboys, guachos), posing changing issues for the colonial states concerned (Phillips, 1987). With increasing integration of world markets and mass communications, local gender orders are increasingly under pressure from a global culture centered in the North Atlantic countries. To some extent this makes for a standardization of gender categories. For instance, research on sexuality has shown, in countries as far apart as Brazil and Indonesia, diverse forms of same-gender sexual relationship among men being replaced by a “gay identity” patterned on the urban culture of the United States. Yet globalization is not flat-out homogenization. As Altman (1996) observes, the emerging homosexual identities of Asia are not all of one pattern; indeed the interplay between local and imported patterns creates a very complex array of sexualities and definitions of gender. Clearly, not all gender phenomena follow a masculine versus feminine polarity. There is also a colorful variety of inter-gender and cross-gender identities and practices (Epstein and Straub, 1991). These can pose difficulties for the state. If the police arrest someone of mixed or intermediate gender, where is she/he to be imprisoned: in the men’s jail or the women’s jail? Lawsuits have already been fought over this issue. Wherever the state attempts gender segregation, in fact, difficulties arise about policing the boundaries. States Much of the writing in this area (including my own) uses the singular universal, “the state.” Recognizing the plurality of powers and genders suggests that we should also call this habit of thought into question. What is true of one state is not necessarily true of another, nor of the same state at another point of time. We need to speak of “states,” and think plurally. As with genders, this does not mean that we have to think chaotically. The multiplicity of states in history is very definitely structured. In recent world history there are two over-arching structures of relations between states. The first is the competition and alliance of independent states, originating in the European system of sovereignty. This is the pattern analyzed by the academic discipline of “international relations.” The second is the pattern of imperialism — the colonial empires, the successor system of neo-colonialism, and the world markets dominated by major states and giant corporations. Both structures have a gender dimension. This is documented for the first structure by feminist critiques of international relations theory (Peterson, 1992); for the second, by feminist critiques of development theory and world-systems theory (Mies, 1986; Ward, 1993). Let us consider the gender dynamics that arise from different situations in the history of these structures. Colonial states Colonial conquest often involved a direct assault on the gender orders of indigenous societies. The Portuguese conquerors of Brazil forced indigenous “indians” into slavery on plantations, or into village settlements rigidly controlled by the church, in which their pagan ways (and languages) would be lost (Bums, 1980). The Spanish conquerors of Mexico and neighboring central and north America did similar things, including a violent attack on “sodomy,” nearly obliterating the intermediate gender category (the so-called “berdache”) of indigenous society (Williams, 1986). Economic exploitation under settler colonialism in Africa also involved the “pulverization” of indigenous society, as Good (1976) put it. A major disruption of gender relations was required to produce labor forces for plantations and mines. The resulting pattern of poverty, labor migration, male labor forces living in barracks, family separation, urban sex work and long-distance travel, has provided ideal conditions for the HIV/AIDS epidemic, now a major disaster in central, western and southern Africa (Barnett and Blaikie, 1992). In constructing a social order after conquest, the colonizers produced racialized gender orders. Though initial conquest often meant widespread interracial sex (rape, concubinage, and sometimes marriage), by the high tide of colonialism in the late nineteenth century all the major empires were operating color bats connected to a gender division of labor. The colonial states were controlled by men, for whom wives were imported from the metropolis. The interpersonal relations of colonial society revolved around “white women” who directed labor forces of domestic servants but were forbidden political expression. (The resulting experience in Papua New Guinea is documented in a remarkable oral history by Bulbeck, 1988.) Post-colonial states The process of decolonization necessarily challenged the imperial gender order. Some anti—colonial movements mobilized women’s support and contested traditional forms of patriarchy, the Chinese communist movement being the best known case (Stacey, 1983). It is common, however, for the establishment of a post-colonial or post—revolutionary regime to involve the reinstallation of patriarchy. Mies’s (1986) sardonic observations on the cults of Marxist Founding Fathers are all too apt. The intimidation of women by Islamic revival movements in Iran and some Arab countries is a current example, where feminist attitudes among women are seen as evidence of the Western corruption of religion and culture (Tohidi, 1991). Yet the current is not all one way. Women have achieved a considerable level of influence within the Islamic republic of Iran. The post-colonial state in India has provided a political environment in which a feminist movement could develop, known internationally through the journal Manushi (Kishwar and Vanita, 1984). Of the five successor states to the British Indian Empire, three have had women Prime Ministers and a fourth nearly did. Metropolitan states Imperialism impacts society in the metropolis as well as in the colonies. The tremendous scale of the social surplus concentrated in the imperial centers, and now in the financial centers of the global economy, changes the conditions of gender politics. It supports, for instance, the rising expectation of life and the drastic drop in birth rate that has transformed the experience of married women. But global empire also raised the size of the patriarchal dividend, the volume of social assets controlled by men. This raised the stake of gender politics for men, and helped expand the public realm in which public masculinities were constructed (Heam, 1992). Women’s political citizenship developed first on the frontier of European settler colonialism (in North America and Australasia), next in the metropolis. Citizenship, however, has been progressively emptied of political content and replaced by the status of consumer, as the commercialization of everyday life and culture intensifies. This has involved an extensive commodification of sexuality, constituting heterosexual men as collective consumers of women’s sexual services (for example through advertising and pornography). Thus women’s increased presence in the public realm has been counterbalanced by a decline of the public realm itself, and a relocation of power into market mechanisms dominated by men. The old form of state patriarchy, with masculine authority embedded in bureaucratic hierarchies, was vulnerable to challenge through equal rights campaigns. New forms of management which commodity state services (privatization, corporatization, program budgeting), and neo-liberal administrative reform agendas (Yeatman, 1990), have reconstituted state power in forms less open to feminist challenge. It is no accident that these organizational reforms coincided with a “taxpayers’ revolt” and tax concessions to business, budgetary attacks on social services (which tend to benefit women), and higher military expenditure in major powers (benefiting mostly men). The international state A striking feature of twentieth-century political history is the attempt to overcome the anarchy of the system of sovereign states through permanent international institutions. Some of these agencies link territorial states without themselves having a territorial base. The International Labour Organization is one of the oldest, followed by the League of Nations, the United Nations and its various agencies, the World Bank and Intermational Monetary Fund, and the more selective club of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Other agencies follow the more traditional pattern of regional customs unions or trading blocs, gradually developing into federal states. The most important of these at present is the European Union. These agencies too are gendered, and have gender effects. For the most part their gender regimes replicate those of the territorial states that gave rise to them. The international agencies have, however, a specific importance in gender politics as means for the globalization of gender relations. As Stromquist (1995) notes, gender policies at the international level may be more progressive than their local realizations. In other respects international agencies have reinforced rather than challenged local patriarchy. The ‘‘male bias” in most development aid is familiar — so scandalous, eventually, that aid agencies such as the World Bank were persuaded to set up special programs for women. But the general economic policies pursued by international financial agencies since the debt crisis of the 1980s has disadvantaged women, since the austerity programs forced on debtor governments have squeezed the welfare sector, on which women are generally more dependent than men, and has favored market mechanisms, which are mostly controlled by men. Realism demands that we should also acknowledge the size and importance of intergovernmental links in the realm of violence and espionage. Military aid is the largest single component of international aid. The resources transferred go overwhelmingly into the hands of men. In many cases the armed forces supported by these links became the main political power; these cases include Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world; Brazil and Argentina, the largest countries in South America; Afghanistan, where rival military forces are currently fighting for control. Military dictatorships are, without exception, patriarchal dictatorships . A case in point: the arms trade The gender meaning of weapons is familiar, and has deep historical roots. Fembach (1981) speaks of the “masculine specialization in violence” that can be traced from the first armies, in the first urban societies. Armed forces are overwhelmingly composed of men today. Recent research on civilians in the United States, which has probably the most heavily armed population in the world, shows gun ownership about four times as high among men as among women (Smith and Smith, 1994) The masculinization of weapons is not a natural fact, but a cultural pattern . (So far as natural difference goes, guns are aptly called, in Damon Runyon stories, “equalizers.”) It must be constantly regenerated and reproduced. A recent study by Gibson (1994) provides a striking illustration. Gibson traces the hypermasculine cult of weaponry in “paramilitary culture” in the United States, the cult of the “new war” developed in the period since the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. This was dramatically brought to public attention by the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. What is worked out culturally in gun cults and violent “action movies” is also an economic reality in the forms of the arms trade. This ranges from government-to-government sales of high-technology weapons systems, to the private circulation of small arms in countries whose governments officially permit arms sales, or cannot prevent them. The largest part of the arms trade is the legal equipping of military and paramilitary forces. This is no small industry. United States arms exports in 1993 totalled $32 billion. The metal does not come naked: it comes clothed in social forms. The army is a patriarchal institution. It is no accident that civil wars, from Bangladesh (at its separation from Pakistan) to the current conflict in Bosnia, include rape in the spectrum of military operations; this is a familiar form in which armies assert dominance over conquered peoples. Recent social research inside armed forces in the United States (Barrett, 1996) reveals an oppressive but efficient regime designed to produce a narrowly defined hegemonic masculinity . It is hardly surprising that institutions with such gender regimes have difficulty incorporating women under equal opportunity rules, and difficulty with the concept (though not the reality) of gay soldiers. Because of the social forms in which armaments are embedded, the arms trade is a vector of the globalization of gender , much as the international state is. Indeed, the two overlap, since the arms trade is connected to the globally linked military and intelligence apparatuses of the major powers. The social forms of military masculinity are exported to post-colonial states by military aid and advice programs (the mechanism by which the United States became involved in the Vietnamese war in the 1960s, with U.S. advisers constantly urging greater aggressiveness on officers of the Saigon regime), and by the training of officers in the military schools of the metropolis. In a world perspective, the modest gains of women’s representation in parliaments and bureaucracies at a national level may well be outweighed by the growth of the apparatuses of patriarchal violence at an international level. Only unwavering commitment to feminist foreign policy can resolve current violence, otherwise neoliberal and patriarchal interests coopt the demand – violence is a continuum such that military aid is not distinct from intervention but the US plays language games to hide its violence. True 15 (Jacqui is Professor of Politics and International Relations, and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at Monash University, Australia. “Why we need a feminist foreign policy to stop war.” Open Democracy. 4/20/15. https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/jacqui-true/why-we-need-feminist-foreign-policy-to-stop-war)-JJN So far, so good – but is a feminist approach compatible with the use of military force and with increasing military budgets? With respect to Sweden’s credibility in international affairs Wallström asserts that it is “not down to our military capacity but rather our stand on human rights, democracy, development assistance.” She adds that Sweden will advocate for stronger international positions on disarmament and development if elected to a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council in 2016 (2017-2019). Yet Wallstrom's embrace of feminist foreign policy has been forged against the reassertion of Russian aggression in Ukraine; with Vladimir Putin flexing his muscle abroad with threats of force in the Baltics and even sending submarines to Australia’s northern coastline during the G20 meetings in a show of Russian machismo. With realpolitik at the border, Sweden’s feminist foreign policy deploys both feminine ‘soft’ and masculine ‘hard’ power. A human rights-based foreign and security policy is advocated for alongside a 150-year tradition of Swedish neutrality and lies a fundamental contradiction from a feminist perspective. How is it possible to sell arms (when, regardless of whom you first sell them to, they often end up perpetrating crimes) and at the same time promote a humanitarian, human rights approach to foreign policy? This conundrum applies to the self-defence which is resourced by increasing military spending and a domestic arms industry that must export weapons to be viable . Herein United Kingdom and the United States as well: how can you be a force for good in the world supporting human rights and conflict-resolution but with a large trade including in arms with countries like Saudi Arabia? Sweden’s answer to this conundrum has been unfolding in recent weeks in some “splendidly undiplomatic”- we might say, ‘feminist’ diplomacy towards Saudi Arabia. In March, Wallstrom declined to sign a cooperation agreement on arms exports with Saudi Arabia also following the blocking by Saudia Arabia of her speech to Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo in March that criticized the Kingdom’s treatment of dissidents and women. In so doing, Wallström is the first foreign minister to seek to implement Article 7 of the UN Arms Trade Treaty ratified in 2013, which requires state parties to prohibit the export of arms if they will be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian or human rights law or to commit serious acts of gender-based violence or violence against women and children. Saudi Arabia is known to have an atrocious human rights record with respect to its own citizens. It is currently engaged in a military bombing campaign on Yemen which is having devastating effects on civilians. The country is also believed to be supplying weapons to the Syrian regime, where over 200,000 have been killed, many of them civilians. What more evidence could you need to legally rescind an arms deal? The ease of doing business to make war In revoking the arms export deal, Wallström is negotiating the tension between Sweden’s human rights-based foreign policy with its self-defence military capacity. She is also righting past abuses of state power in the case of the Swedish Defence Research Agency’s secret “Project Simoon” to help Saudi Arabia build an anti-tank missile arms factory, exposed in 2012 by Swedish radio. Soon after announcing Sweden’s decision to revoke the export deal, Saudi Arabia retaliated by denying business visas to Swedes and recalling their ambassador. Meanwhile Wallström was the subject of public approbation in the Swedish media by the eons of Swedish multinationals concerned about th e impact on their exports, the likes of Volvo, Ikea, H&M, so popular with especially female consumers globally. Wallström was also Even with a “feminine” social democratic government in power, the fable shows just how hard it is to address the unregulated global arms trade - one of the root causes of conflict - when it is so lucrative and inseparable from most transnational business and global trading relationships. Moreover, the fable reveals the spontaneous solidarity of a diverse group of captains of industry and of state power, nearly all men, who support the accumulation of profits over people’s lives and basic freedoms. This is patriarchy at work – and a feminist foreign policy worth its salt needs to confront regimes of masculine hegemonies and the unequal entitlements that hold such hierarchical political economic orders together at every level . As WILPF Secretary-General Madeleine Rees has argued on 50.50, Margot Wallström shows us what can be visited by King Olaf who tried to persuade her to renege on her decision, while the EU states have stood by, silent by all accounts. This is a feminist fable for our neoliberal times. done when we put principles and human decency above “business as usual”. She may have derailed an arms deal in undiplomatic circumstances, but feminist foreign policy must be undiplomatic if it is to be transformative. To stop wars, we need to hold to account transnational business power, because it increasingly shapes state policies more than it is shaped by them, and because it has the power to uphold human rights, to be ethical, responsible, and responsive to consumers. And we need to refocus our advocacy for international peace and security on state power. More than ever, states value masculine qualities of competitiveness, aggression and strategic rationality, with many governments turning their back on the security and wellbeing of citizens and non-citizens as the analysis on the growth in arms expenditures and tax breaks for multinational business relative to austerity in state budgets for public health and education shows. Gendered economic structures determine the limits and the possibilities of security and foreign policy, but the politics of democracy including in countries like Sweden, the United States and European states, are the principal means through which these structures are established and transformed. Exposing the connections between state military complexes and transnational business will enable us to better understand how power works to fuel and fund conflicts around the world. A feminist foreign policy must have as its central goal the long-term prevention of conflict and violence. It must identify the gendered globalized structures that contribute to violence and conflict such as economic inequality and insecurity. And it must link demilitarisation and disarmament to investment in peoplecentred development and justice. In this way, Margot Wallström’s approach is similar to Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s (WILPF) century-long approach: that is, foreign policy needs to start at home with, to take one example, saving on weapons to spend on alleviating child poverty as the leader of the SNP in the UK, Nicola Sturgeon is doing in the run up to the UK general election. With Hillary Clinton getting ready to run for the US Presidency, promising to be the country with the highest military spending’s first female commander-in-chief, it will be important to keep a close check on the connection she makes between feminism and foreign policy. Above all, foreign policy worthy of the adjective “feminist” must support and resource non-militarised solutions to conflict and challenge the selfinterested masculine hegemonies in the state and private sector that perpetuate the business of killing. Towards this end, establishing a US Department of Peace – an idea muted by many in the past – would clearly demonstrate the prioritizing of peace-building through international aid and development initatives. In approaching old problems using peaceful means, an initiative of this kind would be a vital step in institutionalising a feminist foreign policy. The only solution is a total break from the military industrial complex – any complicity reaffirms subjugation of gender minorities. Be skeptical of any PIC that claims military aid can be used for benevolent means. Spade and Lazare 19 (Dean is a professor at Seattle University School of Law. His book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law, was published in 2015 by Duke University Press. Sarah is web editor at In These Times. She comes from a background in independent journalism for publications including the Intercept, the Nation, and Tom Dispatch. “There’s Nothing Feminist About Imperialism.” 1/19/19. Jacobin. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/01/feminismmilitary-industrial-complex-pentagon)-JJN Yet, feminists should not view this “rise” of women as a win. Feminism, as the most recent wave of imperial-feminist articles shows, is increasingly being co-opted to promote and sell the US military-industrial complex: a profoundly violent institution that will never bring liberation to women — whether they are within its own ranks or in the countries bearing the greatest brunt of its brutality. As Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney and assistant professor at George Mason University, put it in an interview with In These Times, women’s inclusion in US military institutions “makes the system subjugating us stronger and more difficult to fight. Our historical exclusion makes it [appear] desirable to achieve [inclusion] but that’s a lack of imagination. Our historical exclusion should push us to imagine a better system and another world that’s possible .” This pro-military media spin is no accident: Weapons contractors are working hard to sell a progressive, pro-women brand to the public. Raytheon and other firms spend millions on public relations painting themselves as noble empowerers of women and girls in the sciences. Raytheon champions its partnership with Girl Scouts of the USA. “Through a multiyear commitment from Raytheon, Girl Scouts will launch its first national computer science program and Cyber Challenge for middle and high school girls,” states a promotional page. A high-dollar promotional video quotes Rebecca Rhoads, president of Raytheon’s global business services, as stating, “Raytheon’s vision about making the world a safer place and the girl scouts’ vision of making the world a better place couldn’t be more well-suited as partners.” Such a claim is particularly brazen, coming from a company that supplies a steady stream of bombs for the US-Saudi war in Yemen, which has unleashed a famine that has killed an estimated 85,000 Yemeni children under the age of five. Lockheed Martin, by far the biggest arms producer in the world with $44.9 billion in arms sales in 2017, manufactured the 500-pound laser-guided MK 82 bomb that struck a Yemeni school bus last August, killing fifty-four people (fortyfour of them children). But that doesn’t stop the company from presenting itself as a progressive organization that recruits — and supports — women scientists. A page on its website quotes the Langston Hughes poem, “A Dream Deferred,” to make the case that the company helps girls achieve their dreams. “This poem was one of my favorites from my high school English class, but, now, as I consider my Community Service and Engagement with the Lockheed Martin community, I personally know what can happen to a dream deferred, when many say no, but I say, ‘Yes you can,’” the page states. In her speech at the 2015 World Assembly for Women in Tokyo, the company’s chairperson, president and CEO Marillyn A. Hewson said that “it is just as important to support women as they Faux-feminist PR is not just for private corporations — it is also being used to sell woman-led CIA torture. Gina Haspel, who once oversaw torture at a black site in Thailand, now runs the CIA, and the Trump administration work to lift themselves up and raise up each other. Because taking responsibility for our own careers is empowering in and of itself.” defended her from critics of torture by pointing out the fact that she is a woman. “Any Democrat who claims to support women’s empowerment and our national security but opposes her nomination is a total hypocrite,” said Press Sec. Sarah Sanders on Twitter. Yet, Erakat asks, “How are you going to celebrate women in high military ranks as an achievement when all they do is fulfill an agenda that was never created through a feminist framework? Haspel was an architect of our torture regime. Why would I celebrate her?” Meanwhile, the war criminals of yesteryear are being rehabilitated by this “girl-power” coverage. Last April, the Washington Post ran a story with the eyebrow-raising headline, “‘The kids, they love Madeleine Albright’: How a veteran diplomat got turned into a girl-power icon.” In 1996, Albright, the then-US ambassador to the United Nations, told 60 Minutes that the half-million Iraqi children killed by the US sanctions regime were “worth” it. “It’s a very white, imperialist, liberal understanding of feminism to think that the promotion of women at the top of militarization and militarism is advancing women,” says Kara Ellerby, author of No Shortcut to Change, who derides what she calls the “add-women-and-stir” approach. “Sure, it’s great that you have a woman at the head of Raytheon, but what about the women who those bombs are being dropped on ?” Ellerby emphasizes to In These Times. “From a global perspective, putting women in charge of US military dominance is not remotely feminist: It’s imperialist.” Feminist scholar and author Cynthia Enloe echoes this concern, suggesting that women’s leadership in these organizations does not change what the organizations do to the rest of the world. “There is no evidence that I’ve seen — of the CIA, defense department, or other institutions where only a few women are rising to the top — that they challenge the mission of the company or the organization ,” she tells In These Times. The Military-Industrial Complex Is Not Good for Women US military intervention is particularly bad for women: It remains deeply interconnected to sexual and gender violence, for people in the military, for military spouses, and for people living in or near the estimated 1,000 US military bases around the world or where US military actions occur. From Japan to the Philippines, local populations have long protested the presence of the US military — and the environmental destruction and sexual violence it brings. The impacts of war — such as reduction in basic services, electricity, and access to food and water, loss of family members, and increased rates of illness and disability — all increase women’s vulnerability to assault and worsen the conditions of women’s labor. Women are predominantly responsible for caring for sick and disabled people, children, and elders — and the conditions for doing that work worsen severely in war conditions. The US military is also the largest polluter in the world. It is difficult to argue that its activities are “good for women” when it contributes to climate change and the poisoning of air, water, and land that endangers all people. The US military is also profoundly violent towards women within its own ranks. According to Veterans Affairs records, 1,307,781outpatient visits took place at the VA for Military Sexual Trauma (MST)-related care in 2015. Approximately 38 percent of female and 4 percent of male military personnel and veterans have experienced Military Sexual Trauma — a euphemism for rape or sexual assault. Research reveals that 40 percent of women homeless veterans have experienced sexual assault in the military. (Far less is known or publicly reported about the US military’s sexual violence against occupied peoples .) Service members are punished for speaking out. A report from the Department of Defense finds 58 percent of women and 60 percent of men who report sexual assault face retaliation. And 77 percent of retaliation reports alleged t hat retaliators were in the reporter’s chain of command. A third of victims are discharged after reporting, typically within seven months of making a report. A report from Harvard Law School’s Veterans’ clinic finds sexual assault victims receive harsher discharges from the military, with 24 percent separated under less than fully honorable conditions, compared to 15 percent of all service members. Women who drop out of the military because they have been sexually assaulted cannot rise through the ranks. The media portrayal of the women who have climbed to the top of the military and intelligence apparatuses, however, relies on bootstrap tough-it-up narratives that implicitly victim-shame women, often framing failure to achieve what they did in terms of women’s lack of confidence that creates obstacles to their success. Lynn Dugle, CEO of Englity and former CEO of Raytheon, tells Politico, “One of my biggest challenges has been resisting the temptation to tell myself I couldn’t do something. I didn’t think I was ready to be president of a multibillion-dollar business at Raytheon when I was offered the role. I continually remind myself to have courage and confidence.” These narratives about “progress” through inclusion of underrepresented groups in dominant institutions (in this case women), actually follow a well-worn pattern in US politics. Whether it is police departments championing progressivism or inclusivity is one of the most common PR strategies at work for the world’s most harmful institutions. Wars to Save Women? The idea that the US military-industrial complex can be pro-women is not just an internal rebranding exercise: It is used to justify disastrous US military interventions around the world. In his book Ideal Illusions, historian James Peck shows how this is part of a larger trend that developed during the Cold War when, as an anticommunist strategy, the United States revamped its image as the human rights protector of the world to justify its military empire. The US claim that it uniquely protects women’s rights was part of this larger picture. The George W. Bush administration famously justified the war in Afghanistan by arguing that it would rescue women from the Taliban. On Nov. 17, 2001, Laura Bush gave the president’s weekly “diversity” while perpetuating targeted harm against marginalized populations, or oil companies portraying themselves as “green,” the drive to be associated with a (watered-down) radio address, proclaiming, “Afghan women know, through hard experience, what the rest of the world is discovering: the brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists.” Media outlets dutifully followed suit: In 2010, Time ran a cover showing “Bibi Aisha” with her nose cut off, with the headline, “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.” Of course, the protracted US occupation has only further entrenched the Taliban, which now controls more territory than at any point in the past seventeen years. Meanwhile, civilian deaths are climbing. Yet none of the politicians or pundits who popularized the rhetoric of “saving women” are forced to answer to how this war has actually harmed — and killed — women in Afghanistan. The 2011 bombing of Libya was cheered as the first US war led by women, as noted by the Daily Beast, which reported that “[t]he Libyan airstrikes mark the first time in U.S. history that a female-dominated diplomatic team has urged military action.” The fact that command of the Libya air strategy was given to a woman officer was also celebrated in the Guardian as “a boost to women in the US military who complain daily about discrimination.” Are these celebrated woman architects of war required to answer to today’s nightmarish conditions in Libya where black people are now bought and sold in open-air slave markets? Do cheerleaders of the intervention actually examine whether US military intervention in Libya, or anywhere, leads to improved conditions for women? Narratives about saving women are also prevalent in the US war on ISIS. While there is no doubt that women face horrific treatment at the hands of ISIS, rape, enslavement, and abuse has been used to justify a brutal US bombing campaign that has caused 2,780 civilian casualty incidents in Syria and Iraq and relaxed standards for killing civilians in both countries — opening the door to more civilian deaths. Meanwhile, atrocities against women perpetrated by US ally Saudi Arabia go unpunished, revealing that the need to protect women is contingent on US geopolitical interests. These tropes are not new. They come from the playbook of US and Western European colonization, in which colonizers argue that their presence helps women, and their exit would do them grave harm. In just one example, Lord Cromer, who was the British consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, cited the veil — and women’s well-being — to argue Egyptians should be forcibly civilized. “The position of women in Egypt, and Mohammedan countries generally, is, therefore a fatal obstacle to the attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilisation,” he once declared. Yet, as feminist scholar Leila Ahmed has pointed out, at the same time Cromer was railing against the veil, he was agitating in favor of the subordination of women in England, as a leader of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. Plan Plan: The United States ought not provide military aid to authoritarian regimes Contention 2: Framing Large-scale threats of future suffering collapses ethics and creates a form of temporal blackmail- the only ethical response is to refuse that bribery and align yourself with feminist urgency Olson 15 (Elizabeth, professor of geography and global studies at UNC Chapel Hill, ‘Geography and Ethics I: Waiting and Urgency,’ Progress in Human Geography, vol. 39 no. 4, pp. 517-526) Though toileting might be thought of as a special case of bodily urgency, geographic research suggests that the body is increasingly set at odds with larger scale ethical concerns, especially large-scale future events of forecasted suffering. Emergency planning is a particularly good example in which the large-scale threats of future suffering can distort moral reasoning. Žižek (2006) lightly develops this point in the context of the war on terror, where in the presence of fictitious and real ticking clocks and warning systems, the urgent body must be bypassed because there are bigger scales to worry about:¶ What does this all-pervasive sense of urgency mean ethically? The pressure of events is so overbearing, the stakes are so high, that they necessitate a suspension of ordinary ethical concerns. After all, displaying moral qualms when the lives of millions are at stake plays into the hands of the enemy. (Žižek, 2006)¶ In the presence of large-scale future emergency, the urgency to secure the state, the citizenry, the economy, or the climate creates new scales and new temporal orders of response (see Anderson, 2010; Baldwin, 2012; Dalby, 2013; Morrissey, 2012), many of which treat the urgent body as impulsive and thus requiring management. McDonald’s (2013) analysis of three interconnected discourses of ‘climate security’ illustrates how bodily urgency in climate change is also recast as a menacing impulse that might require exclusion from moral reckoning. The logics of climate security, especially those related to national security, ‘can encourage perverse political responses that not only fail to respond effectively to climate change but may present victims of it as a threat’ (McDonald, 2013: 49). Bodies that are currently suffering cannot be urgent, because they are excluded from the potential collectivity that could be suffering everywhere in some future time . Similar bypassing of existing bodily urgency is echoed in writing about violent securitization, such as drone warfare (Shaw and Akhter, 2012), and also in intimate scales like the street and the school, especially in relation to race (Mitchell, 2009; Young et al., 2014).¶ As large-scale urgent concerns are institutionalized, the urgent body is increasingly obscured through technical planning and coordination (Anderson and Adey, 2012). The predominant characteristic of this institutionalization of large-scale emergency is a ‘built-in bias for action’ (Wuthnow, 2010: 212) that circumvents contingencies. The urgent body is at best an assumed eventuality, one that will likely require another state of waiting, such as triage (e.g. Greatbach et al., 2005). Amin (2013) cautions that in much of the West, governmental need to provide evidence of laissez-faire governing on the one hand, and assurance of strength in facing a threatening future on the other, produces ‘just-in-case preparedness’ (Amin, 2013: 151) of neoliberal risk management policies. In the US, ‘personal ingenuity’ is built into emergency response at the expense of the poor and vulnerable for whom ‘[t]he difference between abjection and bearable survival’ (Amin, 2013: 153) will not be determined by emergency planning, but in the material infrastructure of the city.¶ In short, the urgencies of the body provide justifications for social exclusion of the most marginalized based on impulse and perceived threat, while large-scale future emergencies effectively absorb the deliberative power of urgency into the institutions of preparedness and risk avoidance. Žižek references Arendt’s (2006) analysis of the banality of evil to explain the current state of ethical reasoning under the war on terror, noting that people who perform morally reprehensible actions under the conditions of urgency assume a ‘tragic-ethic grandeur’ (Žižek, 2006) by sacrificing their own morality for the good of the state. But his analysis fails to note that bodies are today so rarely legitimate sites for claiming urgency. In the context of the assumed priority of the large-scale future emergency, the urgent body becomes literally nonsense, a non sequitur within societies, states and worlds that will always be more urgent.¶ If the important ethical work of urgency has been to identify that which must not wait, then the capture of the power and persuasiveness of urgency by large-scale future emergencies has consequences for the kinds of normative arguments we can raise on behalf of urgent bodies. How, then, might waiting compare as a normative description and critique in our own urgent time? Waiting can be categorized according to its purpose or outcome (see Corbridge, 2004; Gray, 2011), but it also modifies the place of the individual in society and her importance. As Ramdas (2012: 834) writes, ‘waiting … produces hierarchies which segregate people and places into those which matter and those which do not’. The segregation of waiting might produce effects that counteract suffering, however, and Jeffery (2008: 957) explains that though the ‘politics of waiting’ can be repressive, it can also engender creative political engagement. In his research with educated unemployed Jat youth who spend days and years waiting for desired employment, Jeffery finds that ‘the temporal suffering and sense of ambivalence experienced by young men can generate cultural and political experiments that, in turn, have marked social and spatial effects’ (Jeffery, 2010: 186). Though this is not the same as claiming normative neutrality for waiting, it does suggest that waiting is more ethically ambivalent and open than urgency.¶ In other contexts, however, our descriptions of waiting indicate a strong condemnation of its effects upon the subjects of study. Waiting can demobilize radical reform, depoliticizing ‘the insurrectionary possibilities of the present by delaying the revolutionary imperative to a future moment that is forever drifting towards infinity’ (Springer, 2014: 407). Yonucu’s (2011) analysis of the self-destructive activities of disrespected working-class youth in Istanbul suggests that this sense of infinite waiting can lead not only to depoliticization, but also to a disbelief in the possibility of a future self of any value. Waiting, like urgency, can undermine the possibility of self-care two-fold, first by making people wait for essential needs, and again by reinforcing that waiting is ‘[s]omething to be ashamed of because it may be noted or taken as evidence of indolence or low status, seen as a symptom of rejection or a signal to exclude’ (Bauman, 2004: 109). This is why Auyero (2012) suggests that waiting creates an ideal state subject, providing ‘temporal processes in and through which political subordination is produced’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 90; see also Secor, 2007). Furthermore, Auyero notes, it is not only political subordination, but the subjective effect of waiting that secures domination, as citizens and non-citizens find themselves ‘waiting hopefully and then frustratedly for others to make decisions, and in effect surrendering to the authority of others’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 123).¶ Waiting can therefore function as a potentially important spatial technology of the elite and powerful, mobilized not only for the purpose of governing individuals, but also to retain claims over moral urgency. But there is growing resistance to the capture of claims of urgency by the elite, and it is important to note that even in cases where the material conditions of containment are currently impenetrable, arguments based on human value are at the forefront of reclaiming urgency for the body. In detention centers, clandestine prisons, state borders and refugee camps, geographers point to ongoing struggles against the ethical impossibility of bodily urgency and a rejection of states of waiting (see Conlon, 2011; Darling, 2009, 2011; Garmany, 2012; Mountz et al., 2013; Schuster, 2011). Ramakrishnan’s (2014) analysis of a Delhi resettlement colony and Shewly’s (2013) discussion of the enclave between India and Bangladesh describe people who refuse to give up their own status as legitimately urgent, even in the context of larger scale politics. Similarly, Tyler’s (2013) account of desperate female detainees stripping off their clothes to expose their humanness and suffering in the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in the UK suggests that demands for recognition are not just about politics, but also about the acknowledgement of humanness and the irrevocable possibility of being that which cannot wait. The continued existence of places like Yarl’s Wood and similar institutions in the USA nonetheless points to the challenge of exposing the urgent body as a moral priority when it is so easily hidden from view, and also reminds us that our research can help to explain the relationships between normative dimensions and the political and social conditions of struggle.¶ In closing, geographic depictions of waiting do seem to evocatively describe otherwise obscured suffering (e.g. Bennett, 2011), but it is striking how rarely these descriptions also use the language of urgency. Given the discussion above, what might be accomplished – and risked – by incorporating urgency more overtly and deliberately into our discussions of waiting, surplus and abandoned bodies? Urgency can clarify the implicit but understated ethical consequences and normativity associated with waiting, and encourage explicit discussion about harmful suffering. Waiting can be productive or unproductive for radical praxis, but urgency compels and requires response. Geographers could be instrumental in reclaiming the ethical work of urgency in ways that leave it open for critique, clarifying common spatial misunderstandings and representations. There is good reason to be thoughtful in this process, since moral outrage towards inhumanity can itself obscure differentiated experiences of being human, dividing up ‘those for whom we feel urgent unreasoned concern and those whose lives and deaths simply do not touch us, or do not appear as lives at all’ (Butler, 2009: 50). But when the urgent body is rendered as only waiting, both materially and discursively, it is just as easily cast as impulsive, disgusting, animalistic (see also McKittrick, 2006). Feminist theory insists that the urgent body, whose encounters of violence are ‘usually framed as private, apolitical and mundane’ (Pain, 2014: 8), are as deeply political, public, and exceptional as other forms of violence (Phillips, 2008; Pratt, 2005). Insisting that a suffering body, now, is that which cannot wait, has the ethical effect of drawing it into consideration alongside the political, public and exceptional scope of large-scale futures. It may help us insist on the body, both as a single unit and a plurality, as a legitimate scale of normative priority and social care.¶ In this report, I have explored old and new reflections on the ethical work of urgency and waiting. Geographic research suggests a contemporary popular bias towards the urgency of large-scale futures, institutionalized in ways that further obscure and discredit the urgencies of the body. This bias also justifies the production of new waiting places in our material landscape, places like the detention center and the waiting room. In some cases, waiting is normatively neutral, even providing opportunities for alternative politics. In others, the technologies of waiting serve to manage potentially problematic bodies, leading to suspended suffering and even to extermination (e.g. Wright, 2013). One of my aims has been to suggest that moral reasoning is important both because it exposes normative biases against subjugated people, and because it potentially provides routes toward struggle where claims to urgency seem to foreclose the possibilities of alleviation of suffering. Saving the world still should require a debate about whose world is being saved, when, and at what cost – and this requires a debate about what really cannot wait . My next report will extend some of these concerns by reviewing how feelings of urgency, as well as hope, fear, and other emotions, have played a role in geography and ethical reasoning.¶ I conclude, however, by pulling together past and present. In 1972, Gilbert White asked why geographers were not engaging ‘the truly urgent questions’ (1972: 101) such as racial repression, decaying cities, economic inequality, and global environmental destruction. His question highlights just how much the discipline has changed, but it is also unnerving in its echoes of our contemporary problems. Since White’s writing, our moral reasoning has been stretched to consider the future body and the more-than-human, alongside the presently urgent body – topics and concerns that I have not taken up in this review but which will provide their own new possibilities for urgent concerns. My own hope presently is drawn from an acknowledgement that the temporal characteristics of contemporary capitalism can be interrupted in creative ways (Sharma, 2014), with the possibility of squaring the urgent body with our large-scale future concerns. Temporal alternatives already exist in ongoing and emerging revolutions and the disruption of claims of cycles and circular political processes (e.g. Lombard, 2013; Reyes, 2012). Though calls for urgency will certainly be used to obscure evasion of responsibility (e.g. Gilmore, 2008: 56, fn 6), they may also serve as fertile ground for radical critique, a truly fierce urgency for now. Metrics and justifications for policies matter just as much as the ends - moves to resolve the aff by using hegemonically masculine risk calculus are antithetical to ethical demands of the plan. Verloo 05 (Mieke, Senior Lecturer in Political Sciences and Gender Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen and Research Director of an EU-funded comparative research facility, “Displacement and Empowerment: Reflections on the Concept and Practice of the Council of Europe Approach to Gender Mainstreaming and Gender Equality”, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 12.3 (2005) 344-365) Some studies that focus on assessing the success of gender mainstreaming practices at the level of the European Union point to a similar phenomenon of "adding other goals," as happened in the Message to the Committee of Ministers to Steering Committees of the Council of Europe on Gender Mainstreaming. In Hafner-Burton and Pollack's analysis (2000) of five areas (structural funds, employment and social affairs, development, competition and science, research and development), the accent is on explaining cross-sectional variety within the European Commission in the start and the implementation of gender mainstreaming. They show how important it has been that political opportunities in Europe have widened and increased over the course of the last decade, for instance as a result of the entrance of the Nordic countries. They also show how important lobbying and modernization have been, for instance the lobbying of WISE (the European organization for women's studies) in the case of gender mainstreaming in science, research, and development. In assessing the success of gender mainstreaming, they refer to classical power mechanisms that are at the heart of social movement theory: political opportunities and mobilizing. In the context of this article, the most interesting part of their analysis is their use of the concept of strategical framing, another power mechanism conceptualized in social movement theory. Strategical framing is a dynamic concept that enables us to see how different actors adapt existing policy frames to pursue their prospective goals. Strategical framing is defined as attempting to construct a fit between existing frames, or networks of meaning, and the frames of a change agent. Hafner-Burton and Pollack show that gender mainstreaming is "sold" as an effective means to the ends pursued by the European Commission, rather than as an overt challenge to those ends. They argue that the gender mainstreaming efforts, because of this strategical framing, might turn into an integrationist approach, integrating women and gender issues into specific regular policies rather than rethinking the fundamental aims of the European Union from a gender perspective. Especially since the European Union is one of the most successful implementers of gender mainstreaming so far, this threatens the transformative potential of gender mainstreaming, they say. [End Page 358] Mary Braithwaite's work on gender mainstreaming in the structural funds (1999) corroborates these findings. She finds that because of the absence of precise objectives on reducing gender inequalities, gender is easily located within and has been subjected to other goals, such as employment creation, economic growth, or poverty reduction. This is not to say that these are abject goals, just to stress that they are not synonymous with gender equality. Braithwaite concludes that gender equity suffers from the dominance of efficiency and effectiveness in gender mainstreaming practices in the structural funds. Strategical Framing and Power The studies presented point out that "success," in the sense of starting a process of gender mainstreaming, seems to be connected to the "stretching" of the goal of gender equality, to strategical framing, and they also show that the actual goal of gender mainstreaming is not articulated clearly. In the last section of this article, I will therefore take a closer look at framing processes, at the politics of framing. What happens in processes of strategical framing? Why would it be that integration rather than transformation is the inevitable result of strategical framing processes? Strategical framing refers to a process of linking a feminist goal, such as gender equality, to some major goal of an organization that should engage or is engaging in gender mainstreaming, thereby securing the allegiance of these organizations to gender mainstreaming. In technical terms, this means that until now strategical framing in gender mainstreaming practices has usually involved framing bridging or frame extension6 (Benford and Snow 2000). The strategies chosen do not challenge the other, mainstream goals of policy makers, but provide for a link by "stretching" the gender equality goal. This means that the dual agenda that is mostly present in gender mainstreaming (of the feminist goal and some other goal) is presented as the possibility of a win-win situation. In such conceptualizations, power seems to evaporate; it is put between brackets. Gender mainstreaming is presented as a harmonious process, certainly in the Council of Europe report. The state is also mostly conceptualized as "friendly," probably connected to the fact that Sweden and the Netherlands have been among its pioneers, countries that to some extent have been "friendly" states in the past. Yet, if gender inequality is about power and privileges, then gender mainstreaming should be about abolishing privileges, and if gender mainstreaming is about eliminating gender bias in policy making, then the state should be problematized. Why then is a process of abolishing privileges and gender bias conceptualized as harmony? The answer provided in the studies discussed earlier is that it helps in organizing acceptance of gender mainstreaming, by making it less [End Page 359] threatening. The consequence of this avoidance of struggle is the exclusion of opposing voices, including radical feminist voices. The "Beyond Armchair Feminism" volume of Organization (2000) is one of the few studies analyzing the bad results of such a dual agenda: the disappearance of a gender focus altogether. Coleman and Rippin (2000) conclude, after having tried such a process of harmonious change, that there needs to be more challenge and less agreement in such change processes, even if trust is a crucial component. The presentation of harmony, used to help smooth the process of change, is counterproductive in the end. In Hearn's (2000) reflection on the project, not only organizations are gendered (in the Acker 1990 definition), but also models of organizational or societal change are gendered, as well as embodying other forms of social division and domination. Following this analysis, change processes and hence gender mainstreaming processes and activities should be conceptualized as necessarily riddled with power, subject to mechanisms of power, and best understood in terms of power. Looking at processes of strategical framing as connected to power relations through a Foucauldian lens shows the logic of the dual agenda as a mix of enabling and constraining processes. The main enabling part is the opening generated by the bridging of frames. Yet, in this logic that juxtaposes two sets of goals, some options are repressed. Exposing the "organization" goal as not neutral, but already gendered, or positioning the "feminist" goal as an organization goal in its own right, will be difficult. As organizations tend to have a self-image of gender neutrality, the gender bias in their existing goals will not easily be recognized. And as both goals will hardly ever be backed by equal power resources, the feminist goal will be watered down much more, or much more easily than the organization goal. Moreover, in the process of convincing organizations or people to start a process of gender mainstreaming, there will already be a tendency to select more "acceptable" feminist goals. Also, the feminists or femocrats involved in these efforts will necessarily have some kind of acceptance by the (gender-biased) organization, leading to further selection and exclusion of radical or marginalized voices. The logic of the dual agenda therefore leads first to an opening for a feminist agenda, and then to a narrowing down of the feminist focus and feminist voices, to eventually losing the focus on gender and gender equality altogether. This logic functions through mechanisms of power. Both goals are not equally powerful, as they have unequal support and resources within the regular organizations that are the relevant context of gender mainstreaming. Especially when gender mainstreaming is conceptualized in a technocratic way, less external pressure or mobilization of feminist groups is to be expected. [End Page 360] Moreover, this inequality of support and resources hinders a clear articulation of a feminist goal, or the expression of particular feminist goals that are seen as more radical, while such radical goals would be needed in view of the watering-down mechanisms. Mainstream liberal feminism hence has an advantage, while a goal that is articulated as a need to displace gender will meet resistance. Finally, within feminism there are hegemonic processes as well that are not recognized and that lead to the exclusion of certain feminist voices. The judge should make an ethical decision about Gender violence – this requires setting aside issues of political expediency. Concerns with political will or scarce resources makes possible violence against women Enloe 4 [Cynthia, prof of IR, The Curious Feminist, p. 74] Thus we need to become more curious about the process of trivialization. How exactly do regimes, opposition parties, judges, popular movements, and the press go about making any incident of violence against women appear trivial? The gendered violence can be explained as inevitablethat is, not worth the expenditure of political capital. Or it can be treated by the trivializers as numerically inconsequential, so rare that it would seem wasteful of scarce political will or state resources to try to prevent it. Third, trivialization can be accomplished by engaging in comparisons: how can one spend limited political attention on, say, domestic violence or forced prostitution when there are market forces like global competition, structural adjustment, or nuclear testing to deal with- as if, that is, none of those had any relationship to the incidence of violence against women? Finally, trivialization may take the form of undermining the credibility of the messenger. As early as the 1800's trivializers already were labeling women who spoke out publicly against violence against women as "loose," "prudish," or disappointed (it would be the trivializers twentieth century successors who would thing to add "lesbian").
