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Economic competition is based in hegemonic masculinity
Elias and Beasley 09
[Elias, Juanita associate professor in international political economy and Beasley, Christine professor of politics at University of Adelaide.
“Hegemonic Masculinity and Globalization: “Transnational Business Masculinities” and Beyond”. Globalizations, 6(2). 2009.]
For key critical masculinity scholars it
is globalization—specifically a multinational-led neoliberal globalization—
that is recognised as ‘the most obviously important’ issue in the future of the field researching
masculinity. Specifically, this is understood in terms of ‘the relation of masculinities to those emerging
dominant powers in the global capitalist economy, the transnational corporations’ (Connell et al., 2005, p. 9).
Connell’s particular contribution to this field is that globalization, in creating what has been termed a ‘world’ or
‘global gender order’, involves the re-articulation of national hegemonic masculinities into the global
arena. Specifically he refers here to ‘transnational business masculinity’, which he describes as
definitively taking the leading role as the emergent gendered world order, an order associated with the
dominant institutions of the world economy and the globalization of the neo-liberal market agenda.
The leading role of transnational business masculinity re-articulates older and more locally based
bourgeois managerial hegemonic masculinities (Connell, 2005b, pp. 84, 76-7; Connell, 2005a, p. 263; Connell and Wood,
2005). In this account transnational business masculinity is seen to occupy the position of hegemonic
masculinity on a world scale—that is to say, a dominant form of masculinity that embodies, organizes, and legitimates men’s
domination in the world gender order as a whole (Connell, 2000, p. 46). This notion of hegemonic masculinity is, however, understood as
embodying more that just a Gramscian-style mechanism for gaining consent. Rather, the political legitimating meaning of hegemonic
masculinity quickly slides towards its meaning as the ‘dominant’ masculinity and how an actual group of men ‘embodies’ this dominant
positioning, including how this group exhibits particular personality traits. Connell asserts that ‘world
politics is now more and
more organized around the needs of transnational capital’, placing ‘strategic power in the hands of
particular groups of men—managers and entrepreneurs’—who self-consciously manage their bodies
and emotions as well as money, and are increasingly detached from older loyalties to nation, business
organisation, family and marital partners (Connell, 2005a, p. xxiii; Connell and Wood, 2005, p. 359). Drawing upon Connell’s
work the sociologist Joan Acker endorses this view that hegemonic masculinities are embodied in the
specific characteristics of multinational business-men suggesting that we think of ‘Rupert Murdoch,
Phil Knight or Bill Gates’. Adding ‘[t]his masculinity is supported and reinforced by the ethos of the
free-market, competition and a “win or die” environment. This is the masculine image of those who
organize and lead the drive to global control and the opening of markets to international competition’
(Acker 2004, p. 29). These men are, in Connell’s account, dispositionally highly atomistic—competitive and largely
distanced from social or personal commitments. They embody a neo-liberal version of an emphasized
traditional masculinity, without any requirement to direct bodily strength (Connell, 2005a, pp. xxiii, 255-6;
Connell, 2005b, p. 77).
The global economy creates a need for domestic labor of immigrant women, which
causes an increase in “maid trade” and sex trafficking
Mohanty 2003 [Chandra Talpade. professor of Women's and Gender Studies, "'Under Western Eyes'
Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles." Signs: Journal Of Women In Culture &
Society 28.2 (2003): 499.]
Women workers of particular caste/class, race, and economic status are necessary to the operation of
the capitalist global economy. Women are not only the preferred candidates for particular jobs, but
particular kinds of women—poor, Third and Two-Thirds World, working-class, and immigrant/migrant
women—are the preferred workers in these global, “flexible” temporary job markets. The
documented increase in the migration of poor , One-Third/Two-Thirds World women in search of
labor across national borders has led to a rise in the international “maid trade”
(Parren ̃as 2001)
and in
international sex trafficking and tourism.30 Many global cities now require and completely depend on
the service and domestic labor of immigrant and migrant women. The proliferation of structural one
of the smartest, most accessible, and complex analyses of the color, class, and gender of globalization.
29 The literature on gender and globalization is vast, and I do not pretend to review it in any comprehensive way. I draw on three particular
texts to critically summarize what I consider to be the most useful and provocative analyses of this area: Eisenstein 1998; Marchand and
Runyan 2000; and Basu et al. 2001. 30 See essays in Kempadoo and Doezema 1999 and Puar 2001. 526 ! Mohanty adjustment policies around
the world has reprivatized women’s labor by shifting the responsibility for social welfare from the state to the household and to women located
there. The rise of religious fundamentalisms in conjunction with conservative nationalisms, which are also in part reactions to global capital and
its cultural demands, has led to the policing of women’s bodies in the streets and in the workplaces. Global capital also reaffirms the color line
in its newly articulated class structure evident in the prisons in the One-Third World. The
effects of globalization and
deindustrialization on the prison industry in the One- Third World leads to a related policing of the
bodies of poor, One-Third/ Two-Thirds World, immigrant, and migrant women behind the concrete
spaces and bars of privatized prisons. Angela Davis and Gina Dent (2001) argue that the political economy of U.S.
prisons, and the punishment industry in the West/North, brings the intersection of gender, race,
colonialism, and capitalism into sharp focus. Just as the factories and work- places of global corporations seek and discipline
the labor of poor, Third World/South, immigrant/migrant women, the prisons of Europe and the United States incarcerate disproportionately
large numbers of women of color, immigrants, and noncitizens of African, Asian, and Latin American descent.
Economic rationality is a self-maximizing logical system which hyperbolizes the agency
and autonomy of its subjects. This hegemonic construal of agency and autonomy is
the enabling principle of the exploitation of the Other: the atomistic and rationally
self-contained freedoms of the master-subject immediately evoke their opposite in
the oppression and disenfranchisement of the object.
Plumwood 02 [Val: Australian Research Council Fellow at University of Sydney – 2002 Environmental
Culture: The ecological crisis of reason [Routledge nb] p. 28-31].
The rules of capitalist economics have beatified a contractual, privileged and rationally `autonomous'
master subject, recently identified as Business Man, and have also universalised certain related exclusions. Business
Man looks at costs and benefits from a very limited angle, considering only his own firm and what can
be monetised, leaving out the rest of society and leaving out the 'externalities'. The hegemonic economic equipment
that universalises such a rationality is wildly unsuited to the range of conditions it is now generalised to cover. The hegemonic concept of property based on this
formula has built into it the denial and appropriation of certain back¬grounded kinds of prior contribution or labour, and the representation of this contribution as
inessential. This
gives rise to a common pattern or `logic' of oppression or exploitation which includes a
hegemonic conception of agency that denies or backgrounds the contributions of subordinated others
and re-presents the joint product in terms of the agency of the master subject. The category of Others
whose collaborative agency is assumed but denied or backgrounded in this master conception of
property include women, whose labour in the household is assumed but denied by the `autonomous
subject as household head in his appropriation to himself of the social and economic rewards it makes
possible. 2' They also include the non-propertied citizens, both the workers and the wider group once termed `the rabble', whose background contribution to
production, and to the society and the infrastructure which made this production and property possible, is assumed but denied in the appropriation of the product
by the master subject. And these
Others include the colonised, whose prior lands and assets and prior or
continuing labour are assumed but denied and appropriated in the formation and accumulation of the
colonisers' property.
Primary among the Others whose contribution is assumed but denied is nature, the sphere of the nonhuman, including animals, plants and the biospheric cycles and processes of which they are part. The
relation of the colonising master subject to the sphere of nature is one of centre to periphery. The
centre sees the peripheral other or external sector as a place outside itself ('elsewhere') that can be
used for dumping negative externalities (pollution, excess goods) and for collecting positive
externalities. Ships arrive in the colonies laden with convicts and younger sons of the elite, and return to the European centre (the `home'
country) laden with seal or whale oil. To be such an externality is the role of nature in the economic rationalist
imaginary. One of the major conceptual means by which this simultaneous reliance on but disavowal of
nature is accomplished is through the hegemonic construction of autonomy and agency. A centric or
colonising system typically differentiates very strongly between a privileged, hegemonic group awarded full agency status who are placed at the
centre and excluded peripheral groups who are denied agency and whose contribution is discounted, neglected, denied, or rendered invisible.
The contemporary form of globalisation is a centric colonising system which does just this with the contribution of non-humans. In economic
rationalism, the ecological support base of our societies is systematically relied on but systematically denied in the same way as the sphere of
materiality and the body is denied in rationalist philosophy.
One of the consequences of this denial and treatment of the ecosphere as externality is that its continued performance in supporting
`civilisation' is assumed, but restraint is not exercised or resources made available to enable it to reproduce or to continue to function without
decline in that role. This kind of denial of ecological embeddedness appears throughout cultures in (lie grip of hegemonic reason, which develop
dysfunctional blindspots where culture and nature interface, (for example the centric delusion that humans live in culture and non-humans in
nature).
Centric global economic systems of property formation are shaped in terms of the rationality of the
master subject as such an autonomous, separative self. They erase the agency of both social others and
of nature, both as land and as pre-existing, enabling annexation of ecological systems and their products, just as they erase or
downgrade the agency involved in women's work'.' This is a centrist monological structure and it has the
onalities and blindspots of a centrist system. But at the same time it is less powerful than it knows, and partly because its
dynamic of colonisation it rules it certain kinds of knowledge -- especially self-knowledge, knowledge of its own limits, and certain knowledges
of the other. It can easily come to believe its own propaganda; eventually it really comes to think it can do without the others, that it has
succeeded in making them dispensable. these conceptual blindspots are features of frameworks of rationalist ' dualisms which have been used
for millennia to naturalise power, including I ,, ()lie that informs the 'empire of men over things', the human domina¬tion of nature.
When
the colonising party comes to believe that they are radically different and superior to the subordinated
party, who is coded as nature, they can come to believe too that they are beyond ecology and unlike
other animals, especially in urban contexts. They are likely to devalue or deny the Other's agency and their own
dependency on this devaluated Other,, treating it as either inessential and substitutable or as the
unimportant background to their foreground. Thus women's reproductive labour in house labour and
childraising are treated as inessential, as the background services that make `real' work (the work of the male) and achievement
possible, rather than as work or achievement themselves. The conceptual means by which this simultaneous reliance on and disavowal is
accomplished is through the hegemonic construction of agency. In highly androcentric frameworks like that of Aristotle, women's reproductive
agency was backgrounded as an adjunct to or mere condition for real agency,
which was claimed for the male reproductive role, the woman being substitutable, merely `the nurse' for the male seed. Aristotle's age erased
women as social and political agents, enabling Aristotle to disappear women's reproductive agency in his award of the reproductive ownership
of the child to the father. Aristotle saw the father as contributing the rational element of form as compared to the mother's contribution of
mere matter. In this hegemonic construction the father emerged as the only active agent in a reproductive situation which we now conceive as
normally involving joint and mutual agency. In terms of its recognition of nature's agency and contribution to our lives, modern economic
rationalist society remains at the same level as Aristotle's theory of reproduction.
The increasing gulf in global capitalism between winners and losers, between consumption and production, and the growing remoteness and
irresponsibility of chains of production and distribution are one of the products of hegemonic conceptions and relations of agency
institutiona¬lised in global property formation systems. I discuss this remoteness further in Chapter 3. We can see the same mechanism as that
employed by Aristotle at work in current moves to place patented natural organisms under the aegis of intellectual property rights as the
creations of reason, (assumed to be the identifying property of the centre). This is a process in which the contributions of other non-human
systems and agencies are disappeared in the same way as the being and labour of the mother in Aristotle's schema.
When the other's
agency is treated as background or denied, we give the other less credit than is due to them. We easily
come to take for granted what they provide for us, and to starve them of the resources they need to
survive. This is of course the main point of hegemonic construals of agency and labour - they provide the
basis for appropriation of the Other's contribution by the One or centre. The 'profound forgetting' of
nature which ensues from the hegemonic construction of agency, the failure to see externalised nature
as a collaborative partner or to understand relations of dependency on it, is the basis of the now global
economic system of self-maximising economic rationality in which the maximum is extracted and not
enough is left to sustain the life of the external others on which the rational system, unknown to itself, depends.
The more Business Man can disembed himself by hyperbolising his auton-omy and denying the collaborative agencies on which his wealth
relies, the more he can appropriate for himself, and the less likely he is to have to share with others whatever wealth is generated. By his lights,
this is rational; from a more embedded perspective, it is the opposite of rational.
Striving for economic success relies on the creation of gendered identities – the developed world
separates and hierarchizes economic work in a way that devalues the feminine.
Peterson 07[ V. Spike: Professor at the Department of Political Science With courtesy affiliations in
Women’s Studies, International Studies, Institute for LGBT Studies, Comparative Cultural and Literary
Studies, and Center for Latin American Studies Associate Fellow, Gender Institute, London School of
Economics “Rewriting (Global) Political Economy as Reproductive, Productive, and Virtual (Foucauldian)
Economies” International Feminist Journal of Politics,
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713722173]
PRODUCTIVE ECONOMY I begin with the productive economy as that which is most familiar – and perhaps most in need of rewriting. For the
most part, this is the economy of conventional narratives focused on primary (natural resources), secondary (manufactures), and tertiary
(services) production. Its
agentsidentities revolve around production, distribution, and consumption as these
relate to waged labor and commodities. It presupposes specialized (also gendered and racialized)
divisions of labor and the production of goods and services for market exchange. The productive
economy’s primary sites are workplaces, firms, corporations, transportation networks and markets,
though reproductive and virtual economies are not separable from these sites. 9 Rather, it is the stabilization
of a public–private dichotomy that casts (paid) productive labor as economic and denies (unpaid)
reproductive labor relevance to conventional economic theory. In short, the productive economy constructs ‘work’ as
that which is paid. The state shapes the rules, disciplines participants, and provides infrastructure and backup. 10 The productive economy
features contracts and exchange, as well as coercion, bargaining, and coordination. And racialized
gender is pervasive – shaping
identities, desires, tastes, job expectations, labor relations, career ladders, paychecks, consumption
patterns, and benefit packages. The productive economy is most obviously about products (objects, services,
commodities, property), factors of production (symbolic and material resources, labor), the processes of production, and processes by which
goods are consumed. But it
also involves identities and the production of desires and tastes. 11 How these activities
occur and how distribution is patterned vary dramatically, across time and space. Today’s globalization dynamics and
economic restructuring mark new, and many would argue, structural transformations in the
organization of work, identities, resources, and power. In Janine Brodie’s words: ‘[ T]he current round of restructuring
entails a fundamental redrawing of the familiar boundaries between the international and national, the state and the 6 International Feminist
Journal of PoliticsDownloaded By: [London School of Economics & Political Science] At: 14:40 6 June 2007 economy, and the so-called “public”
and “private”’ (1994: 46). The productive economy remains an important site in these new developments. But read alone, it misses, even hides,
too much. Ironically, it is global dynamics that increasingly reveal both the centrality of ‘private’ sphere activities (which is especially clear when
we examine the reproductive economy of informalization), and the impossibility of ‘closure’ in exchange systems (which is especially clear
when we examine the virtual economy of dematerialization). Hence, understanding production is more complicated than descriptions of
objects and the prices they command. In
short, the productive economy is centered on familiar themes of
commodity production and work processes but as rewritten here it also involves less objective or
objectied production – of information, services, desires, tastes, and financial abstractions. The material effects of this production may
be less direct (for example, how insider knowledge shapes the concrete availability of goods or employment) but no less consequential for wellbeing than the effects of more familiar production (for example, how access to material resources determines acquisition of food and shelter).
To illustrate
features of the productive economy, and how this economy interacts with reproductive and
virtual economies, I look briefly at the shift from material-based to information-based production, the
growth in services, and the feminization and racialization of flexibilization. From Material-based to Informationbased Production Globalization has involved a shift away from material-intensive to hightechnology and knowledge-intensive industries and
this shift is registered internationally by a decline in the prices of and demand for (non-oil) primary products and raw materials. This has
implications for all raw material exporting countries, but is especially damaging to many non-industrialized countries. Development strategies in
the latter have historically assumed that the costs of importing foreign capital goods would be paid for in part by raw materials exports to
countries where industrialized production would ensure increasing demand. Instead, declining terms of trade (‘a cumulative 50% over the last
25 years’ (United Nations Development Program 1997: 9)) hurt developing economies by exacerbating unemployment and eroding foreign
investment. It also reproduces and even increases debt dependency insofar as export-oriented development strategies have meant increased
import costs that require increased borrowing. ‘In the case of developing countries (excluding oil exporters and China), income losses arising
from declining terms of trade, already large in the 1980s, have grown larger still in the 1990s and trade deficits too have grown’ (Hoogvelt 2001:
76). This puts further pressure on these countries to view (unregulated) labor as their most competitive resource. It also exacerbates out
migration in search of work. Peterson/Rewriting (global) political economy 7Downloaded By: [London School of Economics & Political Science]
At: 14:40 6 June 2007 Growth in Services As a corollary to the shift from material-based to knowledge-based manufacturing, in industrialized
countries there has been both a downgrading of manufacturing (dramatic growth in low-wage, semi- and unskilled jobs 12 ) and a phenomenal
growth in the service economy. This is most pronounced in industrialized countries – where service employment constitutes 50–70 per cent of
the workforce – but is an emerging pattern in developing countries as well (World Bank 2000: 6, 29). In contrast to middle-income jobs
associated with Fordist material-based manufacturing and unionized workers, service jobs tend to be polarized: either skilled and high-waged
(professional-managerial jobs in health, education, financial, and legal services) or semi-, unskilled and poorly paid (in cleaning, food, retail, and
telemarketing services). Chang and Ling characterize the former as ‘technomuscular capitalism’ and the latter as ‘a regime of labor intimacy’
(Chang and Ling 2000: 27). As one consequence, we observe a pattern of polarization both within countries – as job growth is increasingly low
wage – and between countries – as the gap between developed and developing countries widens. This unevenness is exacerbated by the
concentration of financial transactions and foreign direct investment (FDI, two-thirds of which is now in services (World Bank 2000: 72)) in the
three most developed regions of the world – Japan plus the newly industrialized countries of south-east Asia, Western Europe, and North
America. Hence, more than half of all developing countries are marginalized from the benefits of credit, infrastructural development, and
technology transfer. In effect, this distribution rejects the decision by firms to follow the ‘low road’ to development, that is, ‘opting for the lowcost labor available in low-wage countries, without introducing more sophisticated technology that would represent the “high road,” with
higher productivity and higher wages’ (Benería et al. 2000a: viii). In short, technological developments
and financial flows (features
altered investment strategies and, hence, production processes and labor
markets. As feminist scholarship documents, the shift toward low-skilled services is extremely gendered
and racialized (Clark 1996; Sassen 1998; Marchand and Runyan 2000). 13 These developments have important effects on
culture as well as worker subjectivities worldwide. Flexibilization This refers to shifts in production processes away from
of the virtual economy) have
large, integrated factory worksites, unionized workers, and mass production of standardized consumer goods to spatially dispersed (global)
production networks, increasingly casualized and informalized workers, and small batch production for culturally constructed niche markets. At
the core of flexibilization are efforts to deregulate production processes and labor markets – hence, increasing 8 International Feminist Journal
of PoliticsDownloaded By: [London School of Economics & Political Science] At: 14:40 6 June 2007 freedom for management – ostensibly to
eliminate inefficient ‘rigidities’ imposed by regulation. Here the discourse of neoliberalism invokes flexibility as deregulation, and as Lisa Adler
argues, substituting ‘flexibility’ for ‘structural adjustment’ effectively sanitizes the material and political implications of economic change (Adler
1999: 218). To cut labor costs, flexibilization involves more subcontracting, smaller enterprises (often linked to centralized networks), part-time
and temporary employment, and avoidance of organized labor. It is linked to the reproductive economy especially by reference to
informalization and to the virtual economy especially by reference to dynamic speculative processes (Cerny 1996: 129). In effect,
flexibilization feminizes the workforce insofar as women are preferred for the low-wage positions
associated with export-led industrialization, downgraded manufacturing, and low-skilled service jobs. 14
Moreover, shifting labor processes demand different styles of management: ‘leaner and meaner,’ more innovative, entrepreneurial and risktaking, more flexible across tasks, and less loyal. In important senses,
workforce practices.
these are as much identity issues as they are
International/Political Economy
International economic analysis excludes the gendered nature of domestic labor—the
main analytical tools for understanding the international economy should be
differences which accrue to race, ethnicity, and class, because these are the axes
which seem to most obviously effect the functioning of states.
Byron & Thorburn 98 (Jessica Byron, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus,
Kingston, Jamaica, PhD from the Graduate Institute of International Studies, University of Geneva, Switzerland, Diana Thorburn, lecturer in
International Relations in the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Ph.D. in International Relations and
International Economics from Johns Hopkins University, “Gender and International Relations: A Global Perspective and Issues for the
Caribbean”, Feminist Review, No. 59, Summer 1998, pp 211-232)
The sub-discipline of International Political Economy (IPE) maintains a consistent critique of
mainstream International Relations for its insufficient attention to the impact of international
processes on people’s lives. Ironically, while IPE identifies class, race and ethnicity as driving forces
behind international relations, gender has not yet been included in a major way. Caribbean IPE scholars have
recognized the unequal and inequitable international division of labours but its gendered dimensions have largely escaped attention save by
Cecilia Green on Caribbean women and global restructuring (1994). So
far it has been feminist theorists who have
identified the capitalist system as based on and maintained by the subordination of women and their
waged and unwaged labour. Maria Mies has given one of the first such analyses in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale
(1986). Mies's thesis posits that the existing international division of labour is built on the exploitation of
women and colonized peoples, towards the maintenance of the capitalist patriarchal system which constitutes the world economy (Mies,
1986). Thus, while there exists an international division of labour that relegates the peripheral groups in peripheral countries (as well as the
peripheral groups in core countries) to subordinate positions,
that division of labour is fundamentally gendered so that
women are, so to speak, doubly oppressed in the historical and contemporary machinations of the global capitalist economy.
Into this framework Cecilia Green puts forward a detailed account and analysis of how these forces were played out in the Caribbean. Green
traces women's relative independence during slavery, where women slaves were seen purely as
labour, and subsequent parallel patterns of autonomy and dependence on male partners after
abolition and emancipation, through to ¶migration and farming patterns which are visible today in the
lives of Caribbean women and the gender system presently at work. Green aptly DD explicates the gendered nature of the contemporary
phase of global , restructuring: As the globalization of high-technology production restructures technology, $ investment, employment, and
labor, it
shifts certain types of low-technology z jobs in electronics and garment assembly activities to the
Caribbean and else- w where in the Third World. Women tend to be concentrated in these jobs because capital has
defined them as women's work. This has been happening at the same time as traditional exports have
contracted, thereby putting many men out of work, combined with the impact of structural
adjustment programs on wages and employment, this process exacerbates problems for women in
the Caribbean especially heads of households who must now support their families and a growing
number of unemployed males
International economy is gendered in a way that perpetuates inequality for women
Sassen-96 (Saskia, Professor in the Department of Urban Planning at Columbia, “Toward a Feminist
Analytics of the Global Economy,” 4 Ind. J. Global Legal Stud. 7 1996-1997)
The master images in the currently dominant account about economic globalization in media and policy circles,
as well as in much
economic analysis, emphasize hypermobility, global communications, and the neutralization of place
and distance. Key concepts in that account--globalization, information economy, and telematics--all suggest that place
no longer matters and that the only type of worker that matters is the highly educated professional .
This account privileges the capability for global transmission over the material infrastructure that
makes transmission possible; information outputs over the workers producing those outputs, from
specialists to secretaries; and the new transnational corporate culture over the multiplicity of work cultures, including immigrant
cultures, within which many of the "other" jobs of the global information economy take place. In brief, the dominant narrative
concerns itself with the upper circuits of capital, not the lower ones; and particularly with the
hypermobility of capital rather than place-bound capital. Massive trends toward the spatial dispersal of economic
activities at the metropolitan, national, and global level represent only half of what is happening. Alongside the well-documented spatial
dispersal of economic activities, new forms of territorial centralization of top-level management and control operations have appeared.
National and global markets, as well as globally integrated operations, require central places where the work of globalization gets done.
Further, information industries require a vast physical infrastructure containing strategic nodes with hyperconcentration of facilities. Finally,
even the most advanced information industries have a production process. Once this production process is brought into the analysis, we see
that secretaries are part of it, and so are the cleaners of the buildings where the professionals do their work. An economic configuration very
different from that suggested by the concept information economy emerges. We recover the material conditions, production sites, and placeboundedness that are also part of globalization and the information economy. There is a tendency in the mainstream account to take the
existence of a global economic system as a given, a function of the power of transnational corporations and global communications. But the
capabilities for global operation, coordination, and control contained in the new information technologies and in the power of transnational
corporations need to be produced. By focusing on the production of these capabilities we add a neglected dimension to the familiar issue of the
power of large corporations and the new technologies. The emphasis shifts to the practices that constitute what we call economic globalization
and global control: the work of producing and reproducing the organization and management of a global production system and a global
marketplace for finance, both under conditions of economic concentration. A focus on practices draws the categories of place and work process
into the analysis of economic globalization. These are two categories easily overlooked in accounts centered on the hypermobility of capital and
the power of transnationals. Developing categories such as place and production process does not negate the importance of hypermobility and
power. Rather, it brings to the fore the fact that many
of the resources necessary for global economic activities are
not hypermobile and are, indeed, deeply embedded in place, notably places such as global cities and export processing
zones. Global processes are structured by local constraints, including the composition of the workforce,
work cultures, and political cultures, and other processes within nation-states. Further, by emphasizing the fact
that global processes are at least partly embedded in national territories, such a focus introduces new variables in current conceptions about
economic globalization and the shrinking regulatory role of the State. That is to say, the space economy for major new transnational economic
processes diverges in significant ways from the duality global/national presupposed in much analysis of the global economy. The duality
"national versus global" suggests two mutually exclusive spaces-- where one begins the other ends. Nation-states play a role in the
implementation of global economic systems, a role that can assume different forms depending on development levels, political culture, and
mode of articulation with global processes.'9 Reintroducing the State in analyses of globalization creates a conceptual opening for an
examination of how this transformed State, specifically the growing power of certain agencies, articulates the gender question. One
instantiation of this reconfigured State is the ascendance of Treasury and the decline of departments dealing with the social fund, from housing
to health and welfare.'0 Recapturing the geography of places involved in globalization allows us to recapture people, workers, communities,
and more specifically, the many different work cultures, apart from the corporate culture, involved in the work of globalization.2 The global city
can be seen as one strategic research site for the study of these processes. This type of city is a structure that contributes to the differentiation
of culture and of the many forms of localization of global processes.22 One of the central concerns in my work has been to look at cities as
production sites for the leading information industries of our time and to recover the infrastructure of activities, firms, and jobs necessary to
run the advanced corporate economy.' These industries are typically conceptualized in terms of the hypermobility of their outputs and the high
levels of expertise of their professionals rather than in terms of the production process involved and the requisite infrastructure of facilities and
non-expert jobs that are also part of these industries. A
detailed analysis of service-based urban economies shows
that there is considerable articulation of firms, sectors, and workers who may appear as though they
have little connection to an urban economy dominated by finance and specialized services, but in fact
fulfill a series of functions that are an integral part of that economy. They do so, however, under
conditions of sharp social, earnings, and, often, sex and racial/ethnic segmentation.' In the day-to-day
work of the leading services complex dominated by finance, a large share of the jobs involved are
low pay and manual, many held by women and immigrants . Although these types of workers and
jobs are never represented as part of the global economy, they are in fact part of the infrastructure of
jobs involved in running and implementing the global economic system, including such an advanced
form of it as international finance.25 The top end of the corporate economy-the corporate towers that project engineering
expertise, precision, "techne"--is far easier to mark as necessary for an advanced economic system than are truckers and other industrial
service workers, even though these are a necessary ingredient.26 We
see here at work a dynamic of valorization that has
sharply increased the distance between the devalorized and the valorized, indeed overvalorized,
sectors of the economy. Some of the developments described above can be read as constituting a new geography of centrality and
marginality. This new geography partly reproduces existing inequalities but also is the outcome of a dynamic specific to current modes of
economic growth. It assumes many forms and operates in many arenas, from the distribution of telecommunications facilities to the structure
of the economy and of employment. Global cities accumulate immense concentrations of economic power while cities that were once major
manufacturing centers suffer inordinate declines; the downtowns of cities and business centers in metropolitan areas receive massive
investments in real estate and telecommunications while low-income urban and metropolitan areas are starved for resources. Highly educated
workers in the corporate sector see their incomes rise to unusually high levels while low- or medium-skilled workers see their incomes sink.
Financial services produce superprofits while industrial services barely survive. This is not a fixed geography; some of its components are quite
volatile and some of its spaces are contested. Yet, there are also strong forces contributing to reproduce these configurations, though not
necessarily all elements within them."'
Trade Liberalization
Trade liberalization increases discrimination against women
Taylor and Thomas 99
[Taylor, Annie visiting fellow in politics at the university of Southampton, previously a research assistant with the open university’s global
environmental cange project and the south-north centre, school of oriental and African studies, university of London and Thomas, Caroline
professor of global politics at the university of Southampton. “Global Trade and Global Social Issues”. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. 1999.]
Most analysts agree that one of the
most obvious results of trade liberalization and the restructuring of
production relations worldwide has been the ‘feminization of the workforce’, that is, increased
participation of women in paid employment in jobs formerly occupied by men (Standing 1989). Indeed,
feminists frequently argue that one of the causes of globalization is that corporations recognize that
they can decrease wages and increase labour force control in an increasingly competitive
international environment by taking advantage of traditional patriarchal controls over women across
the globe. Particularly in the manufacturing sector , many corporations have relocated labourintensive processes to ‘world market factories’ in EPZs mostly located in the South. In these factories,
women workers are preferred because they are viewed as possessing greater manual dexterity, as bearing the tedium of routine
tasks better than men, and as less likely to cause trouble by affiliating with labour unions. Discrimination against women
worldwide means that women are accustomed to working as hard or harder than men for lower pay.
Other factors tend to increase the proportion of women workers in the economically active population. The manufacturing industries that are
eliminated as a result of a greater competition (those producing for the domestic market) often employ a predominantly male labour force,
although women also lose jobs in the service sector because of cutbacks in state services. At the same time that more jobs have become
available for women, the poverty caused by SAPs that have been enacted throughout most countries of the South has increased pressures on
women to enter the paid labour force (Pedrero et al. 1995; Sparr 1994: 21.) However,
the increase in trade and the shift of
manufacturing jobs to the South has apparently not led to a reduction in the relative demand for
women workers in manufacturing in the North (Wood 1991). There, too, more women are entering paid
employment because of economic restructuring, although the jobs they enter are likely to be parttime and insecure (Canadian Labour Congress 1997). There has been considerable debate about the implications of increased
employment of women in the EPZ of the Third World. Proponents of this process argue that women benefit from higher
wages available in these multi-national facotires than in alternative work in the informal sector or in
agriculture (Joekes 1995: 84). It is also claimed that, as well as women’s increased capacity for income generation through outside
employment, there are non-material benefits such as increased status within the household, increased self-esteem, and greater autonomy
(Joekes 1995: 86; Young 1993). Critics
claim, however, that while these new jobs may bring some benefits for
women, they cannot be viewed in isolation from the broader social context in which they occur.
Women enter into these jobs not out of some freely-determined choice, but because of the absence
of other alternatives, given the economic crisis the poor are experiencing in most Third World
Countries. Although wages in the EPZs may be higher than in other jobs available to women, they are
still low, and insufficient to support a family. Working conditions are often abysmal. Diane Elson and Ruth
Pearson (1981) argue that while work in the formal economy may act to reduce some traditional forms
of gender subordination, it may trade one form of exploitation for another in which women are
increasingly subject to the control of men other than their husbands or fathers. On a more positive note, Elson
elsewhere (1992) suggests: the extent to which rising rates of female participation in paid labour decompose existing forms of women’s
subordination depends primarily on the level of remuneration that women receive and the opportunities that the organization of paid work
provides for collective action of various kinds. (Cited in Keller-Herzog 1996: 14)
Global economic integration leads to debasement of women
True 10 (Jacqui. Associate Dean Research, Professor of Politics & IR at Monash University. "THE
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: A FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
PERSPECTIVE." Australian Feminist Law Journal 32 (2010): pg 58-59. Print. JMR)
The destabilisation of economic patterns in society by macro-economic policies that facilitate a states'
global integration is associated with growing inequalities and increasing levels of violence against
women in several regions, including Latin America, Africa and Asia.48 The market transitions in Eastern Europe and
the former Soviet Union led to widespread increases in poverty, unemployment, hardship, income inequality,
stress and violence against women. These factors also indirectly raised women's vulnerability by encouraging more risk-taking
behaviour, more alcohol and drug abuse, the breakdown of social support networks, and the economic dependence of women on their
partners.49 Some
have viewed Eastern Europe and Central Asia as 'test regions' for judging the impact of
neoliberal policies. Rather than revealing positive effects of market reform, almost all the countries in
these regions have exhibited regressions in women's economic and social status.s0 The biggest regression has
been in Eastern Europe according to Social Watch's 2008 Gender Equity Index. As well as increases in rape and domestic
violence, this region has seen hundreds of thousands of young women trafficked for prostitution and
other indentured labour each year due to the loss of economic opportunities emanating from
liberalisation. Women are often the hardest hit by economic transition, financial crises and rising unemployment. 'Economic and political
insecurity provoke private and public backlash against women's rights that may be expressed through violence and articulated in the form of
defending cultures and traditions'.5 Widespread
discrimination against girls and women in education,
employment and business, and the lack of a state social safety net can mean they are not protected
from violence when economies rapidly expand and contract. Export-oriented development in East Asia
has had a detrimental impact on women and girls due to patriarchal family-firm structures and the
lesser value attributed to women's paid and unpaid labour. There is considerable evidence that
economic growth in East Asian countries such as Korea, Taiwan, China and Hong Kong was accelerated
by increasing women's employment, while at the same time widening gender wage gaps in the labour
market.52 When the Asian Financial Crisis hit in 1997-1998, the impact on women and girls in the region was disproportionate as early
indications of the impact of the 2008 financial crisis also suggest. Girls were removed from school to help at home or they were forced to seek
work in the sex sector to support household incomes as a result of cutbacks in public service jobs and salaries. 53 In some East Asian countries
women's paid labour intensified while in others, notably South Korea, their labour participation shrunk. The
resulting increased
financial burdens strained intra-household relationships, boosted suicides, family violence and
abandonment. 5 4
Hegemony
Militarism is the most powerful force of gendered violence and essentialism—not
confronting this link legitimizes the violence of militarism
Scales 13 (Ann Scales, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice 20.1, “Soft on Defense: The Failure to Confront
Militarism”,http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1244&context=bglj, DA: 10 November 2013, mjb)
I hope that I have demonstrated the influence of militarism, at least in my own line of work. I'm sure that readers can come up with other
manifestations of militarism in the law school curriculum. It may be useful to speculate about why we don't make more of it, especially in the
examination of the intersection of women and war. I think there are at least four interrelated reasons.¶ First, I remain convinced that
militarism is gendered to the ground. As I reported in my first article on this topic in 1989, at least one Marine believes
that "[wlhen you get right down to it, you've got to protect the manliness of war." 103 I hope it goes without
saying that, in agreeing with that statement, I am not male- bashing. I do not believe that males are warlike and females
are peaceful. I do believe, however, that the social construction of masculinity and femininity are the
underpinnings of a symbiotic system of socially sanctioned aggression that makes anyone able to
tolerate war as an answer to any problem. I am surely not the only person who believes so, and am glad to see more scholarship
being devoted to the connections between gender and war. If we're not confronting that connection, we're feeding
the beast .¶ I suspect I'm not the only person who was made both anxious and depressed by the contours of the 2004 Presidential contest.
Senator Kerry and President Bush went on a masculinity bender, letting the campaign be a giant arm wrestle about who would be the manliest
commander-in-chief.104 The President's posture was expressly about the masculine virtues of aggression, instinctively certain volition, and
control (as opposed to peacemaking, deliberation, and accommodation). Think of the President's dramatic appearance on May 1, 2003 aboard
the USS Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Bush arrived in the co- pilot's seat of a Navy fighter jet after making two fly-bys of the carrier. The President
emerged wearing a "Top Gun" suit. Later he stood in front of a (mysteriously placed) "Mission Accomplished" banner and proclaimed that
major combat operations in Iraq were over.105 I cannot imagine witnessing this performance and thinking anything other than, "what a man"
or a less¶ opprobrious equivalent.¶ Senator Kerry, other than showcasing his own military service as a primary¶ qualification for office, was less
blatantly masculine. He relied, however, on courage, sacrifice, principled action, and transcendence - what are historically understood in U.S.
political discourse as manly virtues, 1°6 if not always or only understood in opposition to feminine virtues. 10 7¶ Legal
institutions in
the United States have not quite gotten a grip on the problem of gendered violence. In the cases of the
Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel, for example, the problem is less the lack of female entry to
gendered institutions, but the gendered nature of the institutions themselves. Thus, I believe our friend Justice
Ginsburg's opinion in UnitedStates v. Virginia108 quite missed the point. Our girls with shaved heads shouldn't have been
admitted to the institutions; the institutions should have been shut down. Professor Valerie Vojdik, a participant in
the March 2004 conference and counsel for Shannon Faulkner in the Citadel case,t°9 has as much insight as anyone about the self- defeating
nature of winning the military school cases.110¶ It
is still academically unpopular to talk about gender qua gender in
any context. I hope this fashion is passing, because it is extraordinarily difficult to talk about militarism without
taking all the institutions of gender into account. That is, while we academics are busy problematizing and
de-stabilizing gender (at least in our own minds), militarism-above all other institutions in my
estimation-is busy reinforcing gender, in its worst non-fluid forms. Militarism is the most powerful
essentializing force in the world."'¶ Second, on a deeper level, I believe this is a struggle among feminists for a reliable concept of
autonomy. Particularly in the United States, if one wants to have political persuasive power, one has to adhere to the concept of realpolitik.
One has to conform with what is called "realism" at least in external expression; even better if one believes it. One must allow that the rule of
law doesn't really apply when it comes to matters of national security, which really means a wink¶ and nod to global capitalism and the global
arms trade. One must embrace the militaristic mandate to promote the objectification of the enemy, so we feel okay about killing them. It is
the same seduction of realpolitik that underlies most efforts-feminist and otherwise-to oppose prostitution and pornography. A lot of people
seem really to believe that war, the poor, and the systematic consumption of women are simply "always with us." I cannot believe in that view
or let it disempower me. When we fall for that version of self, for that version of authority, we are grasped in the falsely-patriotic talons of a
depressing post-Cartesian axiom: "I objectify, therefore I am."¶
The affirmatives focus on military issues replicates the violence of the status quo.
Masculinity is perpetually fighting a war against women – and their claims to promote
international security should be rejected because they mask the foundational violence
of the international system.
Jones 1996
professor of international studies at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico City 1996 Adam Review of
International Studies Cambridge Journals Online d/a 7/12/10
A forceful treatment of this theme is Peterson's.25 Recapping some statistics of female victimization the world over, Peterson
presents
the now familiar motif of a global, male-initiated 'war against women'. However 'secure' it might be in the
international sphere, the state is complicit in the global phenomenon of violence against women, acting
directly 'through its selective sanctioning of non-state violence' and indirectly 'through its promotion of
masculinist, heterosexist, and classist ideologies'. In the face of women's 'systemic insecurity', Peterson contends that
'"national security" is particularly and profoundly contradictory for women'. She adds: "Radically rethinking
security" is one consequence of taking feminism seriously: this entails asking what security can mean in the context of
interlocking systems of hierarchy and domination and how gendered identities and ideologies
(re)produce these structural insecurities.26 And Tickner notes that 'thinking of security in multidimensional
terms allows us to get away from [Realists'] prioritizing [of] military issues, issues that have been central to
the agenda of traditional international relations but that are the furthest removed from women's
experiences'.27
Expansion of the Military Industrial Complex has a Negative effect on women
Tickner 1992
(J. Ann Tickner - Professor in the School of International Relations at University of Southern California, President of the International Studies
Association, the most respected and widely known scholarly association in this field) “Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives
on Achieving Global Security”
Families maintained by women alone increased from 36 percent to 51.5 percent of all poor families." In
societies where military
spending is high, women are often the first to feel the effects of economic hardship when social
welfare pro- grams are sacrificed for military priorities. As I have men- tioned before, for economic nationalists the
military-industrial complex is an important part of the domestic economy entitled to special protection. For
poor women, however, the trade-off between military and economic spending can pose a security
threat as real as external military threats. l have shown that the economic nationalist explanation of states'
behavior in the international system, which focuses on instrumental rationality, is biased toward a
masculine representation. Moreover, the evolution of the modern state system and the capitalist world
economy changed traditional gender roles in ways that were not always beneficial to women.
Contemporary economic nationalist prescriptions for maximizing wealth and power can have a
particularly negative impact on women since women are often situated at the edge of the market or
the bottom of the socioeconomic scale.
Masculinity is intrinsic to hegemony, even if you didn’t explicitly prop up masculinity
in your speech
Janie L. Leatherman 2011
(Director of international studies and professor of politics, past employment at U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes, the United Nations
University, Catholic Relief Services, Search for Common Ground, the Brookings Institution, and the Council on Foreign Relations, was Director of
Brethren Colleges Abroad and taught at the University of Barcelona; “Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict”, p. 19-20)
Although the concept of masculinity is linked to the male body, masculinity
does not exist in and of itself. It is relational.
Hegemonic masculinity sets up oppositional masculinities through a system of power relations that
affect both women and men. Hegemonic masculinity is reinforced in part by the opposition it sets up along the
lines of race and class (for example, in terms of toughness or physicality]. Working-class men and Black. Latino, Native American.
Asian and other men of color in the United States have a marginalized position in relation to hegemonic males. They are alienated by the gap
between the expectations of hegemonic masculinity and the obstacles they face in their own lives to achieve it through the accumulation of
wealth or access to power. Consequently, marginalized
masculinity “creates a feeling of emasculation and
powerlessness in the arenas of class and race, even though dominance is maintained in the arena of
gender."“" Marginalized masculinity is especially threatened in natural or man-made crises. For example, disasters and wars destroy social,
political and economic institutions that people depend on for employment, status, and prestige in society, and leave women and men with
devastating personal, professional, and economic losses. Hyper-masculinity
provides men with an alternative role
model to regain their lost status and aspiration to the power of hegemonic males.
Util
Utilitarianism reproduces the logics of domination by demanding the ranking and
qualification of all life. It ignores ethical considerations and makes mutuality and
interconnectedness impossible.
Plumwood 02 [Val: Australian Research Council Fellow at University of Sydney – 2002 Environmental
Culture: The ecological crisis of reason [Routledge nb] p. 150-151]
Singer's Minimalism is also a political position urging minimal departure from prevailing liberal, humanistic and Enlightenment assumptions and
from the present system of economic rationality."" But surely an ecological society will require more than minimal departures from these
systems, none of which have been innocent bystanders in the development of the rational machinery which is bringing the stripping of the
planet for the benefit of a small elite of humans to a high point of rational refinement. Singer's Utilitarianism
reproduces many
elements of rationalism, including the adoption of universal, abstract mathematically-expressible
formulae for decision, in the best universalist/Impersonalist tradition. Also in the rationalist tradition is
the content of the Utilitarian formula, with its maximisations (always damaging), illusory precision, its
intellectualist reduction of ethics to a matter of rational calculation and quantification, and its
corresponding reduction of the important dimensions of decision to aspects of life supposedly
susceptible to these rational manipulations. And as we have seen, awareness, the chief ground of ethical consideration, is one,
but only one, possible variation on reason or mind, although one that modernism can tie to preferences and hence to agency and property
ownership. The most serious objection to my mind however is that any
ecological or animal ethics based on Singer's
Utilitarianism is committed to a massive program of ranking, quantification and comparison between
beings and species - a program which, as I argue in the next chapter, is unworkable, ethically repugnant, and
built on a problematic reading of equality. Theoretically, ranking comparisons and tradeoffs between
beings are insisted upon by Utilitarianism at virtually every level. This emphasis on ranking does not
encourage the kind of thinking that aims for mutual, negotiated outcomes, but rather ones that sanction
a sacrificial order determined on the basis of greater approximations to the human.
Hegemony / Orientalism
Hegemony operates via the feminization and domination of the orient, in order to
justify paternalist and exploitative policies – this orientalism relies on the
victimization of Muslim women in order to establish oriental backwardness and thus
justify paternalism – women are used as tools in a geopolitical game even though they
do not benefit from US hegemony
Teresa Heffernan, Professor Saint Mary’s University, Canada. “Feminism Against the East/West Divide: Lady
Mary's Turkish Embassy Letters” Eighteenth-Century Studies Volume 33, Number 2, Winter 2000
In an episode of Cervantes's Don Quixote (1604) entitled "The Captive's Tale," a Moorish woman and a Spaniard arrive at an inn where Don
Quixote and various guests are lodged. After reassuring the guests, who are disturbed by the presence of the veiled woman, that although his
companion is "Moorish...in body and dress," she is "in her soul...a very good Christian," the Spaniard begins to tell of his adventures and she is
persuaded to remove her veil. 10 While fighting for "his God and king" against the Turks at the battle of Lepanto (1571), the Spaniard recounts,
he was captured and imprisoned in Algeria. Coming to his rescue, a wealthy Moorish woman promised to free and marry him in return for
taking her to Christian lands. This woman, his traveling companion, "the most beautiful princess in the whole kingdom," according to the
Spaniard, betrayed her father, denounced her people, and changed her name from Zoraida to Maria, warning her Spanish savior "'Do not trust
[End Page 203] any Moor; they are all deceitful.'" 11 The Christian victory at the battle of Lepanto, was, according to the Spaniard, the moment
"when the insolent pride of the Ottoman's was broken for ever," proving to "all the nations" that the Ottoman empire was penetrable; his story
of this veiled woman's unveiling seems to support this claim.¶ As
the balance of power shifts and Islam begins to lose
ground, the West asserts its dominance by speaking for and producing a silenced Orient, much as the Spaniard
speaks for his silent Moorish companion. Moreover, this tale of conquest and domination, which involves the
emasculation of the Eastern father and the "rescue" of the daughter, underscores a seminal change in
the relations of East and West. No longer is this story just about the Christians against the infidels, as in the Crusades. Rather,
Zoraida's father, on discovering his daughter's complicity in the betrayal, accuses her of joining the captive not for reasons of faith, but in order
to indulge in the "immorality" of the West and to satiate "her wicked desires": "Do not imagine that she has been moved to change her faith
out of a belief that your religion is better than ours. No, it is because she knows that immorality is more freely practised in your country than in
ours." 12 Caught between the captive's reading of her in terms of a sexual conquest and her father's reading of her in terms of sexual
perversion, Zoraida as the (un)veiled woman is doubly silenced. This tale, ostensibly about religious difference (the daughter wants to convert
to Christianity), undergoes an important shift in this scene as the religious tension between West and East is recast into its modern form. In
this East/West divide, depending on which side articulates the dispute, the West's moral decay is pitted against the East's spirituality or,
alternately, Western freedom and reason are pitted against Eastern fundamentalism.¶ Despite the
commercial and diplomatic alliance between Britain and Turkey (which encouraged Queen Elizabeth to solicit the help of the
Sultan against the idol-worshipping Spanish), like the captive's tale, many of the earliest travel narratives about the Orient written by the
merchants of the Levant Company, established in 1581, stressed the
cultural divide between East and West, keeping
"intact the separateness of the Orient, its eccentricity, its backwardness." 13 Looking back over the life
of the Company in 1893 and paying homage to its "heroic" colonial past, Theodore Bent writes in his introduction to
an edition of the diaries of two early merchants (Dallam and Covel), The Levant Company, "besides the amount of wealth it accumulated for
this country, did infinite service in the development of art and research, geography and travel, the suppression of slavery, and the spread of
civilization in countries which would still have been unapproachable, had not the continued efforts of the 244 years [the life of the Company]
been towards civilization and humanity." 14 As
a burgeoning publishing industry begins to develop around these
tales of the "exotic" east in the late seventeenth century, in these narratives, like in the "Captive's Tale," the construction of
the (un)veiled woman is central to the depiction of the East as barbaric. These colonial narratives thus
justified the economic domination and exploitation of foreign markets with scandalous stories that
testified to the essentially uncivilized behavior of distant neighbors. In his diary that details his travels in the Levant
(1599), Thomas Dallam mentions catching a glimpse of the Signor's concubines through a grate in a "very thick wall" surrounded by "very strong
iron"; he
lingers, on pain of death, over the spectacle of these bejeweled captive women, perversely
commenting that the sight "did please me wondrous well." 15 In an entry of his diary dated 23 May 1676, John Covel tells
a sordid tale about a slave of great beauty, [End Page 204] who is ravished by an admirer. The Sultan, overcome "with madnesse that he lost
one so sweet," beheads the man and takes the girl for his harem. 16 Bon Ottaviano writes of the eleven or twelve hundred virgins that make up
the Sultan's harem in his 1625 account of the Ottoman Court. He
further gives details of the brutality these women faced
at the hands of the Grand Seignior, claiming that in some cases the punishment involved them being
bound hand and foot, put into a sack, and thrown into the sea in the dark of night. Furthermore, he tells
us that these "young, lusty, lascivious wenches" are allowed radishes, cucumbers, and gourds only in slices to
prevent them from engaging in any unnatural or unclean acts. 17 Robert Withers, who claimed Ottaviano's 1625 account
as his own, embellished this already exaggerated and inaccurate narrative with more lurid details about life in the harem, rashly claiming to
have penetrated it. Finally, Jean Dumont comments in A New Voyage to the Levant (1696) on the Sultan's wives who, he reports, are guarded
by white and black eunuchs "who never permit'em to enjoy the least Shadow of liberty." 18¶ These largely fictitious (given the fact that male
travelers had no access to women's quarters) and, at the very least, grossly
distorted accounts of the abusive treatment of
the veiled woman are standard tropes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel narratives to the Levant. At once
voyeuristic and indignant, these travel narratives distracted attention from the gender inequities at
home, presented the Orient as a place in need of rescue, and secured the idea of Europe as free, fair,
and civilized. These narratives also allowed the male reader to experience vicariously the role of hero or
savior, in the colonial vein of "white men saving brown women from brown men," while satisfying
fantasies of penetration and domination of the East. 19 Furthermore, despite the similarities in the
subordinate positions of women in the East and West, the veiled woman, as portrayed in these
narratives, becomes one of the most powerful symbols of the "irrationality" and "backwardness" of
Islam. Jean Dumont, claiming there is "no slavery equal to that of the Turkish Woman," suggests that these customs are the result of a mind
that "is at the bottom nothing else but a pure Insensibility and a Weakness that is altogether inexcusable in any reasonable creature." 20¶ This
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century orientalist literature that foregrounds the trials of the (un)veiled woman is already part of the story of the
West's shift to modernity. While
the West was preoccupied with the struggle of liberating itself from the
tyranny of the father and articulating itself as secular, a story in which paternal rule is replaced by a
fraternal order and reason displaces faith, Islam was perceived as arrested, irrational, and backward, still
enslaved by despots. The modern understanding of the opposition between a traditional, religious, and
conservative Islam that values community, faith, and spirituality and a modern, secular, and progressive society, which is
founded on liberty, reason, and materialism, in short, the contemporary East/West divide, is already evident in these
tales. Like Zoraida, the (un)veiled woman, captive in this narrative, can only be "saved" from her culture
or "submit" to it.
Environment
The environment is feminized in order to justify its domination
Karen J. Warren, author, scholar, and former Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Macalester College.
“TOWARD AN ECOFEMINIST PEACE POLITICS “ 1996.
http://www.dhushara.com/book/renewal/voices2/warren.htm#anchor2902793
First, feminists have provided powerful critiques of dominant Western conceptions of reason, rationality,
and rational behavior (Cohn 1989: 129, n. 5; Warren 1989). These critiques need to be extended to show how socalled 'rational behavior' towards women, nature, and nuclear issues, as well as the dominant discourse
language associated with each, is patriarchalist. Consider, for instance, the way in which Vance Cope-Kasten unpacks
the domination metaphors, sexist language, and sexual rhetoric of standard philosophical descriptions of
arguments, good reasoning, and rational decision-making (Cope-Kasten 1989). Good reasoners knock down arguments;
they tear, rip, chew, cut them up; attack them, try to beat, destroy, or annihilate them, preferably by nailing them to the wall. Good arguers are
sharp, incisive, cutting, relentless, intimidating, brutal; those not good at giving arguments are wimpy, touchy, quarrelsome, irritable, nagging.
Good arguments have a thrust to them: they are compelling, binding, air-tight, steel-trap, knock-down, dynamite, smashing, and devastating
bits of reasoning which lay things out and pin them down, overcoming any resistance. 'Bad' arguments are described in metaphors of the
dominated and powerless: they 'fall flat on their face,' are limp, lame, soft, fuzzy, silly, and 'full of holes." Similar critiques have been provided,
especially be ecofeminists, of the language used to describe women, nature, and nuclear weaponry (see, for example, Adams 1990; Cohn 1989;
Strange 1989). Women
are often described in animal terms (e.g. as cows, foxes, chicks, serpents, bitches, beavers, old
terms (e.g. as lays, fucks, screws, cunts) and plaything terms (e.g. as babes,
dolls, girls, pets) terms which contribute to viewing women as inferior, not fully rational, and child-like. just
as women are naturalized in the dominant discourse, so, too, is nature feminized. 'Mother Nature' is
raped, mastered, conquered, mined; her secrets are 'penetrated" and her 'womb" is to be put into
service of the 'man of science." Virgin timber is felled, cut down; fertile soil is tilled and land that lies
fallow is 'barren,' useless. Language fuses women's and animal's or nature's inferior status in a
patriarchal culture. We exploit nature and animals by associating them with women's lesser status, and,
conversely, dominate women by associating women with nature's and animals' inferior status. As Carol
Adams argues so persuasively in The Sexual Politics of Meat, language which feminizes nature and naturalizes women
describes, reflects, and perpetuates oppression by failing to see the extent to which the twin
dominations of women and nature, especially of animals, are, in fact, culturally analogous and not
simply metaphorically analogous (Adams 1990: 61). Stereotyping through "power dualisms of domination'14
occurs with both women and nature in language that is both sexist and naturist. Nuclear parlance employs 'nature
bats, pussycats, cats, birdbrains, hare-brains), sexual
language.' Nuclear missiles are stored on 'farms,' 'in silos." That part of the submarine where twenty-four multiple warhead nuclear missiles are
lined up, ready for launching, is called 'the Christmas tree farm'; BAMBI is the acronym developed for an early version of an antiballistic missile
system (for BAllistic Missile Boost Intercept). Nuclear parlance also uses female imagery, often in conjunction with naturalizing metaphors, to
describe and refer to nuclear weaponry and strategies. In her wonderfully illuminating article, 'Sex and death in the rational world of defense
intellectuals,' Carol Cohn describes her one year immersion in a university's center on defense technology and arms control. She relates a
professor's explanation of why the MX missile is to be placed in the silos of the new Minuteman missiles, instead of replacing the older, less
accurate ones: "because they're in the nicest hole you're not going to take the nicest missile you have and put it in a crummy hole' (Cohn 1989:
133). Cohn
describes a linguistic world of vertical erector launchers; thrust-to-weight ratios, soft lay
downs, deep penetration, penetration aids (devices that help bombers of missiles get past the "enemy's' defensive system, also
known as apenaids"), the comparative advantages of protracted versus spasm attacks or what one military advisor to the National Security
Council has called 'releasing 70 to 80 percent of our megatonnage in one orgasmic whump" where India's explosion of a nuclear bomb is
spoken of as 'losing her virginity' and New Zealand's refusal to allow nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered warships into its ports is described as
'nuclear virginity' (Cohn 1989: 133-7). Such
language and imagery creates, reinforces, and justifies nuclear
weapons as a kind of sexual dominance. The incredible distortions of nuclear parlance are reinforced by such misnomer's as
Ronald Reagan's dubbing the MX missile 'the Peacekeeper,' terminology whereby 'clean bombs' are those which announce that 'radioactivity is
the only 'dirty' part of @g people' (Cohn 1989: 132) and the Pentagon position that human deaths are only "Collateral damage' (since bombs
are targeted at buildings, not people). Such
distortions leave little room for acknowledging, in nuclear parlance, a
total disregard for the effects of nuclear technology on the natural environment or the objectionable
female sexual domination metaphors used to describe and justify the deployment of nuclear weapons.
An ecofeminist feminist peace politics can build on this important work already being done with regard
to sexism, naturism, and nuclearism by showing how this language and imagery grows out of and
perpetuates patriarchalism. Under patriarchalism, naturist-sexist language provides a historical
justificatory strategy for domination (Adams 1990: 82).
Environmental policies perpetuate environmental destruction by feminizing nature
Fahimeh Sanati, June 6, 2011School of Humanities, University of Science Malaysia. “An Analysis of the
Ecofeminist Viewpoint on Industrialization and Environmental Degradation in Starhawk’s The Fifth
Sacred Thing” www.ccsenet.org/jsd Journal of Sustainable Development Vol. 4, No. 4; August 2011
¶ The impact of industrialization and
advancement of technology will be¶ analyzed in relation to social well-being. This discussion addresses the
fact that the advancement of technology¶ may bring benefits to some but at the same time may cause natural disasters to others.
Ecofeminist theory¶ negotiates these emerging interfaces and revives socialist concerns for equity.¶
Keywords: Industrialization, Ecofeminism, Sustainable development, Environmental Degradation, Social¶ Injustice¶ 1. Introduction¶
Ecofeminism is defined as a movement whose main intention is to interrogate how the capitalist
patriarchal¶ position prioritizes men and marginalizes women and nature. In fact, ecofeminists believe
that the destruction¶ and exploitation of nature by men has its roots in the domination of women by
men. In this respect their analysis¶ is deeper and broader than that which concerns environmentalists.
Whereas many environmentalists identify¶ industrialization and new technologies as appropriate tools
for economic growth, ecofeminists believe that the¶ proliferation of technology should be balanced and
more attention must be paid to pollution and natural resource¶ preservation.¶ Nature has always been the most
important resource for human beings, being available everywhere and free of¶ charge. In the capitalist patriarchal world the use
of natural resources has been manipulated excessively, as an¶ economic tool to meet human economic
requirements. Hence, it cannot be denied that nature has been sacrificed¶ for the sake of
industrialization. To illustrate this point, one can refer to many different cases of environmental¶ negligence; Billions of trees have been
chopped down and farms have been cleared to allow more space for¶ housing and factories. Many people tend to believe that the clearing of
land is a necessary effort to improve¶ economic conditions, but an important aspect of the problem of technological development is that it
disregards¶ attempts to preserve and protect natural resources. Ecologists
are concerned by the environmental
devastation¶ which poses a threat to the equilibrium between humans and nature. Ecofeminists are deeply
worried about this¶ crisis, and propose the need for greater awareness for nature conservation.¶ This research
examines Starhawk’s science fiction The Fifth Sacred Thing, to highlight how technology is a¶ problem for people of the ‘North’. In the North, at
first sight, the reader might notice the rural area, depicted by¶ gardens and flowing rivers. But the advancement in medical sciences and
computer technologies are¶ simultaneously portrayed in the North even though the ecofeminist society of the ‘North’ is so conservative¶ about
environment and natural resources. Therefore, examining
ecofeminists’ stance regarding technology and
industrialization this analysis discusses how the development of technology brings benefits to some but
at the¶ same time causes natural disasters to others. In view of these facts, Ecofeminist theory
negotiates these emerging¶ interfaces and revives socialist concern towards kinds of industrialization
that are "appropriate" and more¶ sympathetic to nature perseverance.
Energy
The way energy is distributed and incentivized ignores the particular needs of women
in the energy sector – hierarchizing male needs over female needs.
Gaynor and Jennings 03 [Cathy and Mary “Annex on Gender and Infrastructure”
http://www4.worldbank.org/afr/ssatp/Resources/HTML/GenderRG/Source%20%20documents/Issue%20and%20Strategy%20Papers/G&T%20Rationale/ISGT11%20%20
Gender%20and%20Infrastructure%20WEDC.pdf]
Gender Related Issues in Energy: For more than 90% of the 650 million people in Africa, energy is about wood, waste, dung, candles and
kerosene. 14 Energy is one of the most basic requirements for all people, women and men, rich and poor. It
is used to cook food, boil water and to provide heat, light and power for appliances. Typically a poor urban family spends 20 percent of its
income on fuels. The World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg 2002 acknowledged that access to energy is needed to help
achieve the Millennium Development Goals and included a reference to this in the Plan for Implementation. 15 National energy policies need to
target poor households in order to enable them to pursue sustainable livelihoods. However there is still much uncertainty about how 15 See for
example the special issue of ENERGIA News Vol.5, no.4 (www.energia.org), an international network on gender and sustainable energy. The
materials posted in this site, which is sponsored by the World Bank Institute of the World Bank, including any findings, interpretations, and
conclusions, are entirely those of the authors and should not be attributed in any manner to the World Bank, to its affiliated organizations, or to
members of its Board of Executive Directors or the countries they represent. 18 to operationalise gender and poverty in energy. There
is a
wide gap between women and men and between the rich and the poor in terms of access to different
types of energy and in their use of different forms of energy. These gender differences need to be known
and understood in order to increase access and affordability, to help both women and men to derive
benefits from provision of energy and to ensure that the energy sector is contributing to poverty
reduction. The availability of affordable and accessible energy will enable women to devote more of their energy to productive activities by
reducing their domestic burden. Affordability of energy will be crucial but different for both women and men and
levels of energy demand, uses, consumption patterns and their ability and willingness to pay will differ.
One clear example is reflected in the fact that women’s domestic responsibility for cooking will make
energy for this purpose a priority for them. Men may instead be primarily concerned to use energy for running appliances.
Instead of purchasing labour saving appliances used by women, men, who largely control household income may opt to buy recreational
appliances such as radio or television. Understanding
the decision-making process within households in relation to
energy services is therefore important for designing effective solutions. Introduction of electricity is often assumed
to create a time saving for women but this is not automatic. For example, the availability of electric light could lead to women spending longer
time outside the home on productive activities and still doing their domestic chores in the evening/night using electric light. Some studies
suggest that, even with an electricity connection, many poor households will use a different and cheaper source of fuel for cooking. For women
to really avail of benefits from electricity, there is need for associated applied technology and access to microcredit. With access to these,
women are more likely to be able to make use of electricity in small enterprise development. Many
of the traditional income
generating activities for women are energy demanding such as food preparation and processing and
beer brewing. Availability and affordability of this energy and energy efficient technologies could have a
significant impact on the viability of these activities. Men and women cannot be treated as a uniform
group of customers for energy, any more than one can ignore differences based on income, location and
other factors affecting consumer energy needs. When people as both users and producers of energy
services are factored into discussions on energy, there is greater potential to address gender and poverty
dimensions. There has been some shift in the sector to focusing on the concept of energy services (uses) rather than on fuels (e.g. electricity)
and their supply or technologies (e.g. solar equipment). This approach is more promising for poor women and men as it implies shifting
emphasis to what people use energy for and identification of the constraints and The materials posted in this site, which is sponsored by the
World Bank Institute of the World Bank, including any findings, interpretations, and conclusions, are entirely those of the authors and should
not be attributed in any manner to the World Bank, to its affiliated organizations, or to members of its Board of Executive Directors or the
countries they represent. 19 conditions around these end uses. Energy
planning must focus on this demand rather than
supply side if services are to meet the needs of women and the poor. Large-scale energy projects, such as
gas and electricity generation, are generally dominated by better-off men, and the needs of women and
of the poor may not be high on their agenda. In such projects, issues such as land tenure, property rights and possible
relocation will be significant and the interests of women and of the poor must be protected . Consideration needs to be given to
social impact especially how women and men will be differently affected by relocation, and to
employment possibilities and whether women will benefit from increased economic opportunities. The
following box provides evidence from a World Bank study in Asia, which looked at the links between gender, poverty and energy and clearly
show that these links must be better understood if the energy sector is to contribute positively to poverty reduction. In guidance provided by
the World Bank on Energy and Gender Equality 16 , three particular issues are identified: • The need for national energy policies to take
account of domestic energy needs and requirements, and the priorities of women and men 16 Energy and Gender Equality (July 2002) The
World Bank Gender & Development Group Briefing Notes, Washington • The need to know and understand current patterns of energy
collection, processing and use • The need to focus on reduction of women’s and girl’s heavy work burden due to the existing energy patterns.
Oil
The concept of oil drilling perpetuates the penetration and exploitation of the
feminized Ocean.
Tinsley assistant professor in the departments of English and African American studies at the University
of Minnesota 2008 Omise'eke Natasha “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic Queer Imaginings of the Middle
Passage” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies project muse
If Gilroy’s Atlantic is frigid, Benítez-Rojo’s Caribbean
overflows with hyperfeeling female sexuality. Recentering
the resistantly nonphallic Peoples of the Sea, Benítez-Rojo foregrounds a vaginalized Caribbean as he
proclaims: The Atlantic is today the Atlantic (the navel of capitalism) because Europe, in its mercantilist laboratory,
conceived of the project of inseminating the Caribbean womb with the blood of Africa; the Atlantic is
today the Atlantic . . . because it is the painfully delivered child of the Caribbean, whose vagina was stretched
between continental clamps. . . . After the blood and salt water spurts, quickly sew up torn flesh and apply the antiseptic tinctures,
the gauze and surgical plaster; then the febrile wait through the forming of a scar: suppurating, always suppurating.13 Here sexual
violence and painful reproduction are simultaneously abstracted and reinscribed in regional
imaginations; projected onto the water by which Caribbean women arrived in the archipelago, they conceive a
disturbing image that spreads women’s metaphoric legs in unsettling ways. Yet the suppurating
wound can heal, almost magically. A few pages later, the vaginal sea opens into a metaphor for
liberatory pleasure and pleasurable liberation as Benítez-Rojo imagines the region’s femininity as “its flux, its diffuse
sensuality, its generative force, its capacity to nourish and conserve (juices, spring, pollen, rain, seed, shoot, ritual
sacrifice).”14 Bleeding, orgasming, or both, Benítez-Rojo’s cunnic Caribbean overexposes the¶ sexualized bodies that Gilroy denies.
Like the sea, the space between women’s legs is at once insistently present and insistently ethereal;
like the sea, the space between women’s legs becomes a metaphor to mine. These tropes of the black
Atlantic, of Peoples of the Sea, do call to me as powerful enunciations of crosscurrents of African
diaspora identity, and I evoke them in respect and solidarity. And yet as Gilroy, Benítez-Rojo, Edouard Glissant,¶ and
others call on maritime metaphors without maritime histories and evoke¶ sexualized bodies as figures
rather than experiences, their writing out of materiality¶ stops short of the most radical potential of
such oceanic imaginations.15 There¶ are other Atlantic and Caribbean histories that these scholars could have evoked¶ to make
sense of the present, other material details of maritime crossings they¶ could have drawn on to make their metaphors richer conceptual tools.
As Africans¶ became diasporic, Atlantic and Caribbean, sex and sexuality did not only impact¶
imaginations; they impacted bodies. Not at all an opening to infinite possibilities,¶ the sea was initially
a site of painful fluidities for many Africans. The first sight¶ of the ocean was often a vision of fear, as Equiano remembers
when slave traders¶ marched him to the coast:¶ I was beyond measure astonished at this, as I had never before seen any¶ water larger than a
pond or a rivulet, and my surprise was mingled with no¶ small fear. . . . The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the¶ coast was
the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and¶ waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon¶
converted to terror.16¶ Once
loaded onto the slave ships, Africans became fluid bodies under the force¶ of
brutality. Tightly or loosely packed in sex-segregated holds — men chained¶ together at the ankles while women were sometimes left
unchained — surrounded¶ by churning, unseen waters, these brutalized bodies themselves became liquid,¶ oozing. Ship’s surgeon Alexander
Falconbridge records days when “wet and blowing weather having occasioned the portholes to be shut and the grating to be covered,¶ fluxes
and fevers among the negroes ensued. . . . The deck was so covered¶ with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in
consequence of¶ the flux, that it resembled a slaughterhouse.”17 Lara adds to this imagination in¶ a character’s vision of a slave ship:
“Women’s
menstrual blood stained the floor¶ around her, pus crusting at the edges of the chattel
wounds. . . . She could feel¶ her body rise in a wave of urine and blood, the stench so wretched as to make her¶ choke on her own
breath.”18 On this Atlantic, then, black body waters, corporeal¶ effluvia, and the stains of gendered and
reproductive bodies were among the first¶ sites of colonization.¶ But this bloody Atlantic was also the site of
collaboration and resistance.¶ In the early eighteenth century, ship captains like John Newton and James Barbot¶ repeatedly record with horror
how despite such conditions slaves conspired to¶ rebel against captors. At the same time, unnamed rebellions took place not in ¶ violent but in
erotic resistance, in interpersonal relationships enslaved Africans¶ formed with those imprisoned and oozing beside them.
Oil production  stronger patriarchal institutions
Ross, 8 (Michael L. Ross, PhD., Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles
and Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies; Oil, Islam, and Women. American Political
Science Review, Vol. 102, No. 1, February 2008,
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/ross/Oil%20Islam%20and%20Women%20%20apsr%20final.pdf)
I suggest that oil, not Islam, is at fault; and that oil production also explains why women lag behind in many¶ other countries. Oil
production reduces the number of women in the labor force, which in turn reduces¶ their political
influence. As a result, oil-producing states are left with atypically strong patriarchal norms, laws, and
political institutions.I n the Middle East, fewer women work outside the¶ home, and fewer hold positions in government,¶ than in any
other region of the world. According¶ to most observers, this troubling anomaly is due to the¶ region’s Islamic traditions (e.g., Sharabi 1988;
World¶ Bank 2004). Some even argue that the “clash of civilizations” between the Islamic world and the West has¶ been caused, in part, by the
poor treatment of Muslim¶ women (Inglehart and Norris 2003a; Landes and¶ Landes 2001).¶ This paper suggests that women in the Middle
East¶ are underrepresented in the workforce and in government because of oil—–not Islam. Oil and mineral¶ production can also explain the
unusually low status¶ of women in many countries outside the Middle East,¶ including Azerbaijan, Botswana, Chile, Nigeria, and¶ Russia.¶ Oil
production affects gender relations by reducing¶ the presence of women in the labor force. The failure
of women to join the nonagricultural labor force¶ has profound social consequences: it leads to higher¶
fertility rates, less education for girls, and less female¶ influence within the family. It also has farreaching political consequences: when fewer women work outside¶ the home, they are less likely to
exchange information¶ and overcome collective action problems; less likely to¶ mobilize politically, and
to lobby for expanded rights;¶ and less likely to gain representation in government.¶ This leaves oilproducing states with atypically strong¶ patriarchal cultures and political institutions. This argument challenges
a common belief about¶ economic development: that growth promotes gender equality (e.g., Inglehart and Norris 2003b; Lerner1958).
Development institutions like the World Bank¶ often echo this theme, and it is widely accepted among¶ development experts (World Bank
2001). I
instead suggests that different types of economic¶ growth have different consequences for gender
relations: when growth encourages women to join the formal labor market, it ultimately brings about
greater¶ gender equality; when growth is based on oil and mineral extraction, it discourages women
from entering the¶ labor force and tends to exaggerate gender inequalities.¶ It also casts new light on
the “resource curse.” Oil¶ and mineral production has previously been tied to¶ slow economic growth
(Sachs and Warner 1995), authoritarian rule (Ross 2001a), and civil war (Collier¶ and Hoeffler 2004). This paper suggests that
oil extraction has even broader consequences than previously¶ recognized: it not only affects a country’s
government¶ and economy but also its core social structures.¶ Finally, it has important policy
implications. The¶ United States and Europe consume most of the world’s¶ oil exports, and hence have
strong effects on the¶ economies of oil-exporting states. One of these effects is to reduce economic
opportunities for women;¶ another is to reduce their political influence. A third¶ effect may be to foster Islamic
fundamentalism: a recent study of 18 countries found that when Muslim¶ women had fewer economic opportunities, they were¶ more likely to
support fundamentalist Islam (Blaydes¶ and Linzer 2006). Changes in Western energy policies¶ could strongly affect these outcomes.
Oil economies structurally perpetuate patriarchy
Ross, 8 (Michael Ross, Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles and
Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies; Oil, Islam, and Women. American Political Science
Review, Vol. 102, No. 1, February 2008,
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/ross/Oil%20Islam%20and%20Women%20%20apsr%20final.pdf)
CONCLUSION¶ The extraction of oil and gas tends to reduce the role of women in the work force, and the
likelihood they will accumulate political influence. Without large numbers of women participating in the
economic and political life of a country, traditional patriarchal institutions will¶ go unchallenged. In
short, petroleum perpetuates patriarchy. This dynamic can help explain the surprisingly low influence of
women in mineral-rich states¶ in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman,¶ Algeria, Libya), as well as in Latin America
(Chile),¶ 8¶ Women comprised 6.6% of the nonagricultural work force in¶ Algeria in 1980 and 9.0% in 1990. The estimate of 12% in 2000 is a¶
projection based on changes between 1990 and 2000 in the fraction¶ of women in the total work force.¶ Sub-Saharan Africa (Botswana, Gabon,
Mauritania,¶ Nigeria), and the former Soviet Union (Azerbaijan,¶ Russia).¶ This dynamic has implications for our understanding¶ of both the
Middle East and Islam. Many observers¶ claim the unusually low status of women in the Middle¶ East is due to the patriarchal culture of Islam,
the Arab¶ states, or perhaps the Middle East region. Some suggest that the treatment of women is the central issue¶ that divides the Islamic
and Western worlds, and hence¶ drives the “clash of civilizations.” Writing in Foreign¶ Policy, Inglehart and Norris (2003b) argue,¶ the real fault
line between the West and Islam . . . concerns¶ gender equality and sexual liberalization. In other words,¶ the values separating the two
cultures have much more¶ to do with eros than demos. As younger generations in¶ the West have gradually become more liberal on these¶
issues, Muslim nations have remained the most traditional¶ societies in the world.¶ Some observers also argue that gender inequalities in¶ the
Middle East are at the core of the region’s failure¶ to democratize, and are linked to a more general lack¶ of tolerance (Fish 2002; Inglehart and
Norris 2003a).¶ These criticisms are at least partly misplaced. The
persistence of patriarchy in the Middle East has relatively little to
to do with the region’s oil-based economy. Economic growth that is based on
export-oriented manufacturing and agriculture tends to benefit women; economic growth based on oil
exports diminishes their role in the work force and the political sphere, and hence allows patriarchal
norms, laws, and institutions to endure. The link between oil and patriarchy also has ramifications for
the way we think about economic development. Many scholars argue that in low- and middle income
countries, economic growth leads to social modernization, including greater gender equality (e.g.,¶ Inkeles
do with Islam, but much
and Smith 1974; Inglehart and Norris 2003a).¶ In his classic book The Passing of Traditional Society,¶ Lerner (1958, 45) wrote that¶ Whether
from East or West, modernization poses the same¶ basic challenge—–the infusion of a ‘rationalist and positivist¶ spirit’ against which, scholars
seem agreed, “Islam is absolutely defenseless.”¶ This study suggests that different types of economic growth can have different effects on
gender relations. When economic growth is the result¶ of industrialization—–particularly the type of exportoriented manufacturing that draws
women into the¶ labor force—–it should also bring about the changes in¶ gender relations that we associate with modernization.¶ But
income that comes from oil extraction often fails¶ to produce industrialization—–and can even
discourage¶ industrialization by causing the Dutch Disease.¶ Ironically, this suggests that scholars have
underappreciated the socially transformative effects of industrialization, by conflating the “positive”
impact of¶ growth driven by industrialization with the “negative”¶ impact of growth driven by resource
extraction. This is¶ apparent in the regressions: when Oil Rents is added¶ to each of the models, the substantive and statistical significance
of Income on female status grows substantially. In other words, once the confounding effects of oil-fueled growth are
controlled for, industry-fueled growth has an even larger impact on the status of women.¶ This study also has
implications for our understanding of the “resource curse,” a term that refers to the¶ political and economic ailments of mineral-producing¶
states. Earlier studies found that oil-producing
states tend to have more frequent civil wars (Collier and¶ Hoeffler 2004;
less democracy (Ross 2001a; Jensen and Wantchekon 2004); and possibly, slower economic
growth (Sachs and Warner¶ 1995). This study suggests that the production of oil and gas—–and potentially,
other minerals—–also influences a country’s social structure, a topic that has received little attention.
Oil not only hinders democracy; it also hinders more equitable gender relations.
Fearon and Laitin 2003);
State
State relies on a gendering of political agency – perpetuates masculine domination
Youngs 2004
Feminist International Relations: A Contradiction in Terms? Or: Why Women and Gender Are Essential
to Understanding the World 'We' Live in Author(s): Gillian Youngs Source: International Affairs (Royal
Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 80, No. 1 (Jan., 2004)
The public over private (male over female) social hierarchy leads to the gendering of political agency
and influence in profound ways. This is a problem when we think of internal state politics but it is amplified in
international relations, the so-called realm of high politics, where women have had least presence and direct
impact. Radical thinkers such as John Hoffman argue for the reconstruction of the political concept of sovereignty as emancipatory, for 'a
sovereignty beyond the state'.22 States are an expression of patriarchal power. 'Empirically, states are (mostly)
run by men, defended by men and advance the interests of men ... Logically, state sovereignty is
gendered by its assertion that leadership is monolithic, hierarchical and violent. These principles are
all "masculinist" in character since the idea of concentrating power so that the few rule by force over
the many is associated with the domination of men.'23 Hoffinan explores the problematics and complexities of the
characteristic of the state as the sole legitimate user of force in the interests of maintaining internal and external order, a legitimacy deriving in
the liberal tradition from the social contract.24 This
characteristic of the state and issues of violence associated with
it is central to the concept of security in International Relations. Feminists have examined extensively the degree to
which mainstream concepts of security in the field have been traditionally constrained by masculinist
blinkers, failing to take account of security issues women confront daily that are associated with their
unequal or oppressed conditions of existence in relation to men, for example domestic violence. They
also largely fail to take account of the specific ways in which women and children are affected by war,
military occupation, militarization, (forced) migration, human trafficking, sexual and other forms of
slavery and (forced) prostitution.2
State is paternalistic and perpetuates the image of the feminine as weak and in need
of male protection
Blanchard 03
Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory Author(s): Eric M.
Blanchard Source: Signs, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer 2003), pp. 1289-1312
Like Tickner, many IR
feminists problematize the state and raise questions as to its status as protector of
women. Peterson argues that, in addition to its relegation of sexual violence and its threat to the private
domestic realm, the state is implicated in the ways that women become “the objects of masculinist
social control not only through direct violence (murder, rape, battering, incest), but also through ideological
constructs, such as ‘women’s work’ and the cult of motherhood, that justify structural violence— inadequate health care, sexual
harassment, and sex-segregated wages, rights and resources” (1992c, 46). However, while not denying the possibility of limited protection
offered by the state (Harrington 1992), FST contests the notion of protection—“the exchange of obedience/ subordination for (promises of)
security”—as a justification for state power (Peterson 1992c, 50). Peterson
likens the state’s provision of security for
women to a protection racket, “implicated in the reproduction of hierarchies and in the structural
violence against which they claim to offer protection” (1992c, 51). In addition, Stiehm argues that the state
typically denies women the opportunity to be societal “protectors,” assigning to them the role of
“protected” despite the predatory threat often posed by their ostensible guardians (1983a).
Governmental attempts to achieve total security versus an external threat can result in predictable
oppression: “The problem is that the potential victim is both more accessible and compliant than the
marauder. Because the protector is embarrassed and frustrated by his failure to protect, he restricts
his protectee instead” (373). By circumscribing the possibilities of the female deployment of legitimate
force, the masculine state effectively denies the development of what Stiehm calls a “defender” society,
one “composed of citizens equally liable to experience violence and equally responsible for exercising
society’s violence” (367).
Masculine violence depends on the construction of a gendered identity inherent
within security discourse—this creates sexual hierarchies. (Zac)
Tickner 1992
(J. Ann Tickner - Professor in the School of International Relations at University of Southern California, President of the International Studies
Association, the most respected and widely known scholarly association in this field) “Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives
on Achieving Global Security”
While contemporary
international relations does not employ this explicitly misogynist discourse, the contemporary
remains bound up with the Greeks' and Machiavelli's depictions of the citizen-warrior.
The most noble sacrifice a citizen can make is to give his life for his country. When the National Organization for
understanding of citizenship still
Women decided to support the drafting of women into the United States military, it argued its case on the grounds that, if women were barred
from participation in the armed forces on an equal footing with men, they would remain second-class citizens denied the unique political
responsibility of risking one's life for the state. HYPERLINK "http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/tickner13.html" \l "note26" 26 But in
spite of women's
increasing numbers in noncombat roles in the armed forces of certain states, the relationship between
soldiering, masculinity, and citizenship remains very strong in most societies today. To be a soldier is to
be a man, not a woman; more than any other social institution, the military separates men from women.
Soldiering is a role into which boys are socialized in school and on the playing fields. A soldier must be a protector; he must show courage,
strength, and responsibility and repress feelings of fear, vulnerability, and compassion. Such feelings are womanly traits, which are liabilities in
time of war. HYPERLINK "http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/tickner13.html" \l "note27" 27 War
demands manliness; it is an event in which boys
become men, for combat is the ultimate test of masculinity. When women become soldiers, this gender
identity is called into question; for Americans, this questioning became real during the Persian Gulf war of 1991, the first time that
women soldiers were sent into a war zone in large numbers. HYPERLINK "http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/tickner13.html" \l "note28" 28 To understand the citizenwarrior as a social construction allows us to question the essentialist connection between war and men's natural aggressiveness. Considerable
evidence suggests that most men would prefer not to fight; many refuse to do so even when they are put in positions that make it difficult not
to. One study shows that in World War II, on the average, only 15 percent of soldiers actually fired their weapons in battle, even when
threatened by enemy soldiers. HYPERLINK "http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/tickner13.html" \l "note29" 29 Because military recruiters cannot rely on violent qualities in
men, they appeal to manliness and patriotic duty. Judith Stiehm avers that military trainers resort to manipulation of men's anxiety about their
sexual identity in order to increase soldiers' willingness to fight. In basic training the term of utmost derision is to be called a girl or a lady.
The association between men and violence therefore depends not
on men's innate aggressiveness, but on the construction of a gendered identity that places heavy
pressure on soldiers to prove themselves as men. Just as the Greeks gave special respect to citizens who had proved
HYPERLINK "http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/tickner13.html" \l "note30" 30
themselves in war, it is still a special mark of respect in many societies to be a war veteran, an honor that is denied to all women as well as to
certain men. In the United States, nowhere
is this more evident than in the political arena where "political man's"
identity is importantly tied to his service in the military. Sheila Tobias suggests that there are risks involved for politicians
seeking office who have chosen not to serve in combat or for women who cannot serve. War service is of special value for gaining votes even in
political offices not exclusively concerned with foreign policy. In the United States, former generals are looked upon favorably as presidential
candidates, and many American presidents have run for office on their war record. In the 1984 vice presidential debates between George Bush
and Geraldine Ferraro, Bush talked about his experience as a navy pilot shot down in World War II; while this might seem like a dubious
qualification for the office of vice president, it was one that Ferraro-- to her detriment-- could not counter. HYPERLINK
To be a first-class citizen therefore, one must be a warrior. It is an
important qualification for the politics of national security for it is to such men that the state entrusts its
most vital interests. Characteristics associated with femininity are considered a liability when dealing
with the realities of international politics. When realists write about national security, they often do so
in abstract and depersonalized terms, yet they are constructing a discourse shaped out of these
"http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/tickner13.html" \l "note31" 31
gendered identities. This notion of manhood, crucial for upholding the interests of the state, is an image
that is frequently extended to the way in which we personify the behavior of the state itself.
Middle Passage
The Atlantic was one of the original sights of gendered violence, metaphors with
figures minus experiences perpetuates the dominant discourse.
Tinsley assistant professor in the departments of English and African American studies at the University
of Minnesota 2008 Omise'eke Natasha “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic Queer Imaginings of the Middle
Passage” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies project muse
If Gilroy’s Atlantic is frigid, Benítez-Rojo’s Caribbean
overflows with hyperfeeling female sexuality. Recentering
the resistantly nonphallic Peoples of the Sea, Benítez-Rojo foregrounds a vaginalized Caribbean as he
proclaims: The Atlantic is today the Atlantic (the navel of capitalism) because Europe, in its mercantilist laboratory,
conceived of the project of inseminating the Caribbean womb with the blood of Africa; the Atlantic is
today the Atlantic . . . because it is the painfully delivered child of the Caribbean, whose vagina was stretched
between continental clamps. . . . After the blood and salt water spurts, quickly sew up torn flesh and apply the antiseptic tinctures,
the gauze and surgical plaster; then the febrile wait through the forming of a scar: suppurating, always suppurating.13 Here sexual
violence and painful reproduction are simultaneously abstracted and reinscribed in regional
imaginations; projected onto the water by which Caribbean women arrived in the archipelago, they conceive a
disturbing image that spreads women’s metaphoric legs in unsettling ways. Yet the suppurating
wound can heal, almost magically. A few pages later, the vaginal sea opens into a metaphor for
liberatory pleasure and pleasurable liberation as Benítez-Rojo imagines the region’s femininity as “its flux, its diffuse
sensuality, its generative force, its capacity to nourish and conserve (juices, spring, pollen, rain, seed, shoot, ritual
sacrifice).”14 Bleeding, orgasming, or both, Benítez-Rojo’s cunnic Caribbean overexposes the¶ sexualized bodies that Gilroy denies.
Like the sea, the space between women’s legs is at once insistently present and insistently ethereal;
like the sea, the space between women’s legs becomes a metaphor to mine. These tropes of the black
Atlantic, of Peoples of the Sea, do call to me as powerful enunciations of crosscurrents of African
diaspora identity, and I evoke them in respect and solidarity. And yet as Gilroy, Benítez-Rojo, Edouard Glissant,¶ and
others call on maritime metaphors without maritime histories and evoke¶ sexualized bodies as figures
rather than experiences, their writing out of materiality¶ stops short of the most radical potential of
such oceanic imaginations.15 There¶ are other Atlantic and Caribbean histories that these scholars could have evoked¶ to make
sense of the present, other material details of maritime crossings they¶ could have drawn on to make their metaphors richer conceptual tools.
As Africans¶ became diasporic, Atlantic and Caribbean, sex and sexuality did not only impact¶
imaginations; they impacted bodies. Not at all an opening to infinite possibilities,¶ the sea was initially
a site of painful fluidities for many Africans. The first sight¶ of the ocean was often a vision of fear, as Equiano remembers
when slave traders¶ marched him to the coast:¶ I was beyond measure astonished at this, as I had never before seen any¶ water larger than a
pond or a rivulet, and my surprise was mingled with no¶ small fear. . . . The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the¶ coast was
the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and¶ waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon¶
converted to terror.16¶ Once
loaded onto the slave ships, Africans became fluid bodies under the force¶ of
brutality. Tightly or loosely packed in sex-segregated holds — men chained¶ together at the ankles while women were sometimes left
unchained — surrounded¶ by churning, unseen waters, these brutalized bodies themselves became liquid,¶ oozing. Ship’s surgeon Alexander
Falconbridge records days when “wet and blowing weather having occasioned the portholes to be shut and the grating to be covered,¶ fluxes
and fevers among the negroes ensued. . . . The deck was so covered¶ with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in
consequence of¶ the flux, that it resembled a slaughterhouse.”17 Lara adds to this imagination in¶ a character’s vision of a slave ship:
“Women’s
menstrual blood stained the floor¶ around her, pus crusting at the edges of the chattel
wounds. . . . She could feel¶ her body rise in a wave of urine and blood, the stench so wretched as to make her¶ choke on her own
breath.”18 On this Atlantic, then, black body waters, corporeal¶ effluvia, and the stains of gendered and
reproductive bodies were among the first¶ sites of colonization.¶ But this bloody Atlantic was also the site of
collaboration and resistance.¶ In the early eighteenth century, ship captains like John Newton and James Barbot¶ repeatedly record with horror
how despite such conditions slaves conspired to¶ rebel against captors. At the same time, unnamed rebellions took place not in¶ violent but in
erotic resistance, in interpersonal relationships enslaved Africans¶ formed with those imprisoned and oozing beside them.
Epistemology
Aff ignores how gender is coded with knowledge production.
Peterson 05 [V. Spike, Professor at the Department of Political Science With courtesy affiliations in
Women’s Studies, International Studies, Institute for LGBT Studies, Comparative Cultural and Literary
Studies, and Center for Latin American Studies Associate Fellow, Gender Institute, London School of
Economics “How (the Meaning of) Gender Matters in Political Economy” New Political Economy, Vol. 10,
No. 4, December 2005,
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~spikep/Publications/VSP%20GenderMatters%20NPE%202005.pdf]/]
Understood analytically, gender is a governing code that pervades language and hence systemically shapes
how we think, what we presume to ‘know’, and how such knowledge claims are legitimated.
Epistemological and ontological issues are more visible at this ‘side’ of the continuum because
conventional categories and dichotomies are not taken for granted but problematised. Here we find more
attention to discourse, subjectivities and culture, and more interrogation of foundational constructs (rationality, work, production, capital,
there is typically more evidence of theoretical discussion and debate, and
more self-consciousness about analytical assumptions and how they frame the questions we ask, the
methods we adopt and the politics they entail. At the same time, as a governing code gender systemically shapes what we
value, development). Consistent with this,
value. In particular, gender privileges (valorises) that which is characterised as masculine – not all men or only men – at the expense of that
which is stigmatised (devalorised) as feminine: lacking agency, control, reason, ‘skills’, culture, and so on. To illustrate how a focus on analytical
gender shifts the terms of debate I briefly consider two developments in gendered political economy.
Impacts
War Impact
This subordination of women amounts to a war against those who are subjected to gendered
violence – their refusal to acknowledge this as a war is a link
Ray, US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, 2-1997 [Amy, American University Law Review]
Because, as currently constructed, human rights laws can reach only individual perpetrators during times
of war, one alternative is to reconsider our understanding of what constitutes "war" and what constitutes
"peace." <=265> n264 When it is universally true that no matter where in the world a woman lives or with
what culture she identifies, she is at grave risk of being beaten, imprisoned, enslaved, raped, prostituted,
physically tortured, and murdered simply because she is a woman, the term "peace" does not describe
her existence. <=266> n265 In addition to being persecuted for being a woman, many women also are
persecuted on ethnic, racial, religious, sexual orientation, or other grounds. Therefore, it is crucial that our
re-conceptualization of [*837] human rights is not limited to violations based on gender. <=267> n266
Rather, our definitions of "war" and "peace" in the context of all of the world's persecuted groups should
be questioned. Nevertheless, in every culture a common risk factor is being a woman, and to describe the
conditions of our lives as "peace" is to deny the effect of sexual terrorism on all women. <=268> n267
Because we are socialized to think of times of "war" as limited to groups of men fighting over physical
territory or land, we do not immediately consider the possibility of "war" outside this narrow definition
except in a metaphorical sense, such as in the expression "the war against poverty." However, the
physical violence and sex discrimination perpetrated against women because we are women is hardly
metaphorical. Despite the fact that its prevalence makes the violence seem natural or inevitable, it is
profoundly political in both its purpose and its effect. Further, its exclusion from international human rights
law is no accident, but rather part of a system politically constructed to exclude and silence women.
<=269> n268 The appropriation of women's sexuality and women's bodies as representative of men's
ownership over women has been central to this "politically constructed reality." <=270> n269 Women's
bodies have become the objects through which dominance and even ownership are communicated, as
well as the objects through which men's honor is attained or taken away in many cultures. <=271>
n270 Thus, when a man wants to communicate that he is more powerful than a woman, he may beat her.
When a man wants to communicate that a woman is [*838] his to use as he pleases, he may rape her or
prostitute her. The objectification of women is so universal that when one country ruled by men (Serbia)
wants to communicate to another country ruled by men (Bosnia-Herzegovina or Croatia) that it is superior
and more powerful, it rapes, tortures, and prostitutes the "inferior" country's women. <=272> n271 The
use of the possessive is intentional, for communication among men through the abuse of women is
effective only to the extent that the group of men to whom the message is sent believes they have some
right of possession over the bodies of the women used. Unless they have some claim of right to what is
taken, no injury is experienced. Of course, regardless of whether a group of men sexually terrorizing a
group of women is trying to communicate a message to another group of men, the universal sexual
victimization of women clearly communicates to all women a message of dominance and ownership over
women. As Charlotte Bunch explains, "The physical territory of [the] political struggle [over female
subordination] is women's bodies." <=273> n272 Given the emphasis on invasion of physical territory as
the impetus of war between nations or groups of people within one nation, we may be able to reconceive
the notion of "war" in order to make human rights laws applicable to women "in the by-ways of daily life."
<=274> n273 We could eradicate the traditional public/private dichotomy and define oppression of
women in terms traditionally recognized by human rights laws by arguing that women's bodies are the
physical territory at issue in a war perpetrated by men against women. Under this broader definition of
"war," any time one group of people systematically uses physical coercion and violence to subordinate
another group, that group would be perpetrating a war and could be prosecuted for human rights
violations under war crimes statutes.
Patriarchy is the root cause of war
Cynthia Cockburn 2010
(Cockburn is a professor at the Department of Sociology, UK Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of Warwick; “Gender
Relations as Causal in Militarization and War”;
http://dq4wu5nl3d.scholar.serialssolutions.com/?sid=google&auinit=C&aulast=Cockburn&atitle=Gender+Relations+as+Causal+in+Militarizatio
n+and+War:+A+FEMINIST+STANDPOINT+1&id=doi:10.1080/14616741003665169&title=International+feminist+journal+of+politics&volume=12
&issue=2&date=2010&spage=139&issn=1461-6742)
By contrast, patriarchal
gender relations as a cause of war, I would suggest, most often fall in the 'root cause' or
'favourable conditions' category, and here we have to pay attention to culture. With the exception of the abduction of the
mythical Helen of Troy (and the spurious attempt of George W. and Laura Bush to portray the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 as a war to save
Afghan women from repression by the Taliban) wars
are not fought for' gender issues in the way they are sometimes fought 'for'
oil resources, or 'for' national autonomy. Instead, they foster militarism and militarization. They make war
thinkable. They make peace difficult to sustain. As noted above, women close to militarization and war are
observant of cultures, cultures as they manifest themselves in societies before, in and after armed
conflicts. If we think of the war system as having a cyclical or spiralling life, as a continuum over time,
proceeding from the discourse of militarist ideology, through material investment in militarization,
aggressive policy-making, outbreaks of war, short fuefights, prolonged stalemates, ceasefires,
demobilization, periods of provisional peace, anxieties about security, rearmament and so on, and if we
look closely at the social relations in which individuals and groups enact these various steps, that is
where it is possible to see gender relations at work, pushing the wheel around. The above account of a feminist
standpoint, generating an understanding of war that contradicts the hegemonic view, is derived first and foremost from my empirical research
among women's antiwar organizations and networks. But, closely involved with that movement, there is a world of feminist scholars (men as
well as women) who have striven over the past three decades to articulate in a growing library of written work the understandings arising
among women war survivors and activists. Many collected editions bring together research and reporting from a range of different countries
and periods (for instance, Cooke and Woollacott 1993; Lorentzen and Turpin 1998; Moser and Clark 2001; Giles and Hyndman 2004). Researchbased monographs show the influence of gender relations at points along the continuum of militarization and war. Robert Dean (2001), for
instance, in his study of the Kennedy administration taking the USA to war in Vietnam, shows masculinism at work in preparation for war. Susan
Jeffords (1989) in The Remasculinization of America, shows, through an analysis of films and novels, national efforts to salvage masculine pride
in military training, patriarchal masculinity lends
itself to exploitation for war-fighting, and how violence is eroticized in masculine fantasy (Theweleit 1987).
Together such studies articulate the feminist perception that patriarchal gender relations are among the 'root causes' of
militarism and war.
after such a defeat. Many firsthand accounts show in painful detail how,
Extinction
This patriarchal violence encourages militarism, and in the age of nuclear weapons “macho
posturing” by belligerent leaders, could lead to a new nuclear disaster.
Betty A. Reardon, Director of the Peace Education Program at Teacher’s College Columbia
University, 1993, Women and Peace: Feminist Visions of Global Security, p. 30-2
In an article entitled “Naming the Cultural Forces That Push Us toward War” (1983), Charlene Spretnak
focused on some of the fundamental cultural factors that deeply influence ways of thinking about
security. She argues that patriarchy encourages militarist tendencies. Since a major war now could easily
bring on massive annihilation of almost unthinkable proportions, why are discussions in our national
forums addressing the madness of the nuclear arms race limited to matters of hardware and statistics?
A more comprehensive analysis is badly needed . . . A clearly visible element in the escalating tensions
among militarized nations is the macho posturing and the patriarchal ideal of dominance, not parity,
which motivates defense ministers and government leaders to “strut their stuff” as we watch with
increasing horror. Most men in our patriarchal culture are still acting out old patterns that are radically
inappropriate for the nuclear age. To prove dominance and control, to distance one’s character from
that of women, to survive the toughest violent initiation, to shed the sacred blood of the hero, to
collaborate with death in order to hold it at bay—all of these patriarchal pressures on men have
traditionally reached resolution in ritual fashion on the battlefield. But there is no longer any battlefield.
Does anyone seriously believe that if a nuclear power were losing a crucial, large-scale conventional war
it would refrain from using its multiple-warhead nuclear missiles because of some diplomatic
agreement? The military theater of a nuclear exchange today would extend, instantly or eventually, to
all living things, all the air, all the soil, all the water. If we believe that war is a “necessary evil,” that
patriarchal assumptions are simply “human nature,” then we are locked into a lie, paralyzed. The
ultimate result of unchecked terminal patriarchy will be nuclear holocaust. The causes of recurrent
warfare are not biological. Neither are they solely economic. They are also a result of patriarchal ways of
thinking, which historically have generated considerable pressure for standing armies to be used.
(Spretnak 1983) These cultural tendencies have produced our current crisis of a highly militarized,
violent world that in spite of the decline of the cold war and the slowing of the military race between
the superpowers is still staring into the abyss of nuclear disaster, as described by a leading feminist in an
address to the Community Aid Abroad State Convention, Melbourne, Australia: These then are the
outward signs of militarism across the world today: weapons-building and trading in them; spheres of
influence derived from their supply; intervention—both overt and covert; torture; training of military
personnel, and supply of hardware to, and training of police; the positioning of military bases on foreign
soil; the despoilation of the planet; ‘intelligence’ networks; the rise in the number of national security
states; more and more countries coming under direct military rule; 13 the militarization of diplomacy,
and the interlocking and the international nature of the military order which even defines the major rifts
in world politics. (Shelly 1983)
The cult of reason elevates a masculine form of reason that devalues nature and other
ways of knowing. This view of the world distorts the many spheres of human life, and
these misunderstandings risk extinction.
Plumwood 02 [Val: Australian Research Council Fellow at University of Sydney – 2002 Environmental
Culture: The ecological crisis of reason [Routledge nb] p. 4-5]
The ecological crisis requires from us a new kind of culture because a m in its development has been the rationalist
culture and the associated human/nature dualism characteristic of the west. Human/nature As I argued in Feminism and the Mastery of
Nature, is a system of ideas that takes a radically separated reason to be the essential characteristic of humans and situates human life
outside and above an inferiorised and manipulable nature. Rationalism
and human/nature dualism are linked
through the narrative which maps the supremacy of reason onto human supremacy via the
identification of humanity with active mind and reason and of non-humans with passive, tradeable
bodies. We should not mistake rationalism for reason - rather it is a cult of reason that elevates to
extreme supremacy a particular narrow form of reason and correspondingly devalues the
contrasted and reduced sphere of nature and embodiment. Feminist thinker Elizabeth Gross puts her finger on the
basic denial mechanism involved in the irrationality of rationalist forms of reason when she writes that the crisis of reason `is a
consequence of the historical privileging of the purely conceptual or mental over the corporeal; that
is, it is a consequence of the inability of western knowledges to conceive their own processes of
(material) production, processes that simultaneously rely on and disavow the role of the body'.' The
ecological crisis can be thought of as involving a centric and self-enclosed form of reason that simultaneously relies on and disavows its
material base, as 'externality', and a similar failure of the rationalised world it has made to acknowledge and to adapt itself adequately to
its larger `body', the material and ecological support base it draws on in the long-denied counter-sphere of `nature'.
Rationalism and human/nature dualism have helped create ideals of culture and human identity that promote human distance from,
control of and ruthlessness towards the sphere of nature as the Other, while minimising non-human claims to the earth and to elements
of mind, reason and ethical consideration.
Its monological logic leads to denials of dependency on the Other in
the name of an hyperbolised autonomy, and to relationships that cannot be sustained in real world
contexts of radical dependency on the Other. That the Other is an independent being on whom one is dependent is the
child's first and hardest lesson, even before the lesson that the nurturing Other must in turn be nurtured. It is a lesson that some children
never properly learn, and neither do some cultures of denial.
Rationalist culture has distorted many spheres of human life; its remaking is a major but essential
cultural enterprise. The old reason-centred culture of the west which has allowed the ecological crisis to deepen to the current
dangerous point may at one time have facilitated the dominant culture's comparative advantage over and conquest of other more
modest and ecologically-adapted cultures on this planet. This is speculation, but what is not speculation is that
in an era when we
are reaching the biophysical limits of the planet, this reason-centred culture has become a liability to
survival. Its 'success- making' characteristics, including its ruthlessness in dealing with the sphere it
counts as `nature', have allowed it to dominate both non-human nature and other peoples and cultures. But these
characteristics, and the resulting successes in commodifying the world (or producing `cargo'), are only too clearly
related to our longer-term ecological and ethical failures. We must change this culture or face
extinction.
Environment Impact
Logic of masculine domination is the cause of environmental destruction
Chris J. Cuomo 2002
(Chris J. Cuomo is Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, and an affiliate faculty member of the Environmental Ethics Certificate
Program, the Institute for African-American Studies, and the Institute for Native American Studies; “Ethics and the Environment”, p.3;
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=info:72d4AK2Z5_sJ:scholar.google.com/&output=instlink&hl=en&as_sdt=0,44&scillfp=562233327239502
1783&oi=lle)
I take that phrase "power and promise," an unusually optimistic measure for anything in the contemporary discipline of philosophy, from the
title of Karen Warren's widely-read and often reprinted 1991 essay, "The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism." That essay includes an
argument that is basic to Warren's Ecofeminist Philosophy, and that is commonly characterized as the fundamental insight of ecofeminism. The
view argued for is that a
"logic of domination" that divides the world into bifurcated hierarchies is basic to
all forms of oppression and domination. This logic (which Warren also calls a "conceptual framework") is a way of
thinking that encourages separating from and mistreating nature and members of subordinated
groups, for no good reason. In addition, the conceptual frameworks that are used to justify racism, sexism, and
the mistreatment of nature (efe.), are interwoven and mutually reinforcing. Some ecofeminists find that the
very aspects of identity and otherness (gender, race, class, species, efe.) are created through conceptual frameworks that encourage
domination rather than connection, but Warren remains agnostic about such ontological issues. Her emphasis instead is on a more basic point -
that the morally loaded concepts through which we understand ourselves and reality (and through
which "we" humans have historically constructed knowledge) are at the core of the terrible ecological
and social messes we currently face.
Seeing ourselves as separate from nature is the root cause of our ecological problems.
Smith 08 [Mick, Professor at Queens University, “Suspended Animation: Radical Ecology, Sovereign
Powers, and Saving the (Natural) World,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Vol. 2, No. 1, Pg 4, 2008,
Project Muse]
This feeling oneself part of (which is not the same as feeling at one with) a living world is not just the
ground of radical ecology, but is originally present and made manifest in the phenomenal ground and flow
of every human existence. It is certainly a sign of the successful dominance of the technological Gestalt
that many “sophisticated” adults claim to no longer feel this (or that they have managed to repress
such feelings) and that an entire polity is ordered on the basis that such feelings are unimportant. (The
fact that this enframing has resulted in the successful eradication of nonhuman natural matter from an
increasing proportion of so many human lives doubtless fosters this.) But this Gestalt should be seen for
what it is—a bizarre historical aberration, and one that, radical ecologists would argue, is closely
connected to our current ecological problems.
The current lens in which we view nature causes environmental degradation
Kohak 2k [Erazim, Professor Emeritus Philosophy Boston University, The Green Halo: A Bird’s Eye View of Environmental Ethics, p.3-4]
When today we speak of an ecological crisis we are basically articulating a realization that this primitive,
seemingly self-evident ethics will no longer do. We made do with it for three centuries and in a sense even longer. Ancient
Romans treated nature with the same total unconcern as we. The deserts around Carthage, once Rome's granary, and
deforested rocky slopes of southern Italy testify to that. The monks who brought the beaver to extinction in
the Czech lands in the eighteenth century—beaver was considered fish and so allowable on fast days—were no more
considerate. We have simply assumed that, whatever we do, nature is always more powerful and can make
good the damage. Still during the Second World War we used to hear on the radio how many gross register tons of crude oil,
destined for England, the German navy sank. We were anxious for England but never dreamed of considering the fate of the oceans
and the fish. We simply assumed nature would set it right and, in general, it worked out that way. It works out no longer. All
available indicators show that humankind is drastically crippling the ability of the biosphere to make up for
human interventions and to preserve an environment suitable for our kind of life.3 Nature has not
changed—it still is what it has been throughout the countless millennia of its evolution. Nor did our
approach to nature change—we are still acting wholly in the spirit of "cowboy ethics," interested only in our
own wishes and sublimely unconcerned about the consequences of our doing , just as drivers care little about the
effect of their exhaust fumes on the city, people, or nature.4 After all, we have a right and we have always done so . . . Seemingly,
nothing has changed, so why worry? Because something has changed. Figuratively speaking, we have run out of yellow
paint for covering up the damage we are causing (see p. i). The effects of the heedless disregard which for
centuries we could paint over with cosmetic measures will no longer be hid . Our mode of living upon this Earth is
endangering its ability to support our kind of life. That is what the global ecological crisis for the twenty-first century is all about: we
are using more than the Earth can replace. In the Czech Republic, the government for years refused to admit what scientists and
citizens see ever more clearly, that our conceptions of being human on this Earth are in direct conflict with the conditions of
sustainability of life. As the mythical King Canute commanded in his royal authority that the tide should stop
rising, so until very recently first our Communist, then our neo-liberal leaders proclaimed that there is no
ecological threat and acted accordingly, perhaps in the hope that what they will not acknowledge will not
exist.
Policy Failure
Viewing humanity as disembedded from nature makes policy failure inevitable: the
traditional notion of humanity’s split from nature is replicated in policymaking, as the
policymaker is split from the object of policymaking proper.
Plumwood 02 [Val: Australian Research Council Fellow at University of Sydney – 2002 Environmental
Culture: The ecological crisis of reason [Routledge nb] p. 110-111]
Economic centrism: nature as class and resource
Nature as resource, as labour, and as externality is also the subordinated Other in systems of oligarchical economic centrism, where there is
radical economic inequality and hyper-separation between classes, those of `persons' who are owners (increasingly corporations and their
personnel) and those who are counted as property or as externality. This hyper-separation is reinforced in the division between high and low
culture as well as in cultural practices such as excess or conspicuous consumption. Radical class differentiation is reinforced through a division
of labour which is often framed in terms of reason/body dualism in which rational managers control hired `hands', while inequality is justified
as a matter of desert through a culture of rational meritocracy rewarding `rationality' and `indi¬vidualism', that is, hyperbolised autonomy.
Many tasks of decision-making and management which can beneficially be amalgamated with the practical or manual aspect of work are
reserved for managers, with the purpose of setting them apart as a distanced and controlling elite. 23
Splitting or hyper-separation and backgrounding or denial work together to produce typical hegemonic
constructions of agency. This is well illustrated in the Marglins' study of dominating forms of knowledge.'`' Knowledge which in
some cultures remains integrated and fully embodied is in western cultures often split into a superior
abstract `rational' form versus an inferiorised `practical', experiential and embodied form, usually
reflecting the different status of the different groups possessing it. The split opens the way for the
dominance of abstract `rational management' over those reduced to serviceable bodies that carry out
the tasks management plans and dictates, and also allows appropriation of agency and rewards on
behalf of those counted as rational managers. The dominant party can afford to `forget' the other,
provided they continue to function in serviceable ways or are replaceable (substitutable). If their level of distancing and denial goes deep
enough, managers may be inclined to do so even where the other is not replaceable.
Both backgrounding and splitting are hazardous for those in this category of `nature'. `Forgetting' may mean
that connections and feedback crucial to continuing the service can be blocked, and `splitting' and remoteness means that
abstract decision-makers may never be brought to face the failure of their rational edicts on the ground,
because that has become externality, `someone else's department'. In private enterprise and private property culture,
the `forgetting' of nature's agency and contribution is often paralleled by the forgetting of the importance of social infrastructure, which under
economic rationalism and centrism is similarly either privatised (often with disastrous consequences) or starved of resources to the point of
breakdown. Dramatic
system failures usually have to occur before the situation is rectified. In the case of
nature, rectification might not be possible.
In the system of property formation, the Other that is not to be made part of the self through incorporation is conceived as externality, that
place remote from the self or home for which no responsibility is accepted and from which resources can be taken or waste deposited. The
inferiorised groups are classified as either waste or as resource, but centrist society need not be without mobility: it is possible for those in the
`waste' category (for example as the unemployed) to make the transition to the `resource cate¬gory, for example as workers paid belowsubsistence wages, (or in a previous colonial age, as foot soldiers). As Lovins et al. (2000) point out, things can move from being in the waste
product category to being resources for more production. This transition from the category of waste to that of resource can be speeded up and
enlarged in scope, but this will not necessarily remedy or address the basic mindset, or the basic problem. Whichever category you are in, it is
bad news to find yourself on the wrong side of the nature/culture and person/property boundaries, for you will either be discarded or
instrumentalised, thrown away or eaten.
VTL
Independently, their securitized discourse devaluates life into useable energy
Burke 7 (Anthony, lecturer of IR at U New South Wales, “Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason,” December 7,
http://www.hopkins-debate.com/pdf/Burke.pdf)
Bacon thought of the new scientific method not merely as way of achieving a purer access to truth and epistemological certainty, but as liberating a new power that would enable the creation of a new kind of. He opened the
Novum Organum with the statement that 'knowledge and human power are synonymous', and later wrote of his 'determination...to lay a firmer foundation, and extend to a greater distance the boundaries of human power and
dignity'.67 In a revealing and highly negative comparison between 'men's lives in the most polished countries of Europe and in any wild and barbarous region of the new Indies' -- one that echoes in advance Kissinger's distinction
between post-and pre-Newtonian cultures -- Bacon set out what was at stake in the advancement of empirical science: anyone making this comparison, he remarked, 'will think it so great, that man may be said to be a god unto
We may be forgiven for blinking, but in Bacon's thought 'man' was indeed in the process of stealing a new fire
from the heavens and seizing God's power over the world for itself. Not only would the new empirical science lead
to 'an improvement of mankind's estate, and an increase in their power over nature', but would reverse the primordial
humiliation of the Fall of Adam: For man, by the fall, lost at once his state of innocence, and his empire over creation, both of which can be partially recovered even in this life, the first by religion and faith, the second by
man'.68 #
the arts and sciences. For creation did not become entirely and utterly rebellious by the curse, but in consequence of the Divine decree, 'in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread'; she is now compelled by our labours (not
There is a breathtaking, world-creating hubris in this
statement -- one that, in many ways, came to characterise western modernity itself, and which is easily
recognisable in a generation of modern technocrats like Kissinger. The Fall of Adam was the Judeo-Christian West's primal creation myth, one that
assuredly by our disputes or magical ceremonies) at length to afford mankind in some degree his bread...69 #
marked humankind as flawed and humbled before God, condemned to hardship and ambivalence. Bacon forecast here a return to Eden, but one of man's own making. This truly was the death of God, of putting man into God's
no pious appeals to the continuity or guidance of faith could disguise the awesome epistemological
violence which now subordinated creation to man. Bacon indeed argued that inventions are 'new creations and imitations of divine works'. As such, there is nothing but
place, and
good in science: 'the introduction of great inventions is the most distinguished of human actions...inventions are a blessing and a benefit without injuring or afflicting any'.70 # And what would be mankind's 'bread', the rewards of
If the new method and invention brought modern medicine, social welfare, sanitation,
communications, education and comfort, it also enabled the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and two
world wars; napalm, the B52, the hydrogen bomb, the Kalashnikov rifle and military strategy. Indeed
some of the 20th Century's most far-reaching inventions -- radar, television, rocketry, computing, communications, jet aircraft, the Internet -- would be
the product of drives for national security and militarisation. Even the inventions Bacon thought so
marvellous and transformative -- printing, gunpowder and the compass -- brought in their wake
upheaval and tragedy: printing, dogma and bureaucracy; gunpowder, the rifle and the artillery battery;
navigation, slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples. In short, the legacy of the new empirical
science would be ambivalence as much as certainty; degradation as much as enlightenment; the
destruction of nature as much as its utilisation. Doubts and Fears: Technology as Ontology # If Bacon could not reasonably be expected to foresee many of these
its new 'empire over creation'?
developments, the idea that scientific and technological progress could be destructive did occur to him. However it was an anxiety he summarily dismissed: ...let none be alarmed at the objection of the arts and sciences becoming
depraved to malevolent or luxurious purposes and the like, for the same can be said of every worldly good; talent, courage, strength, beauty, riches, light itself...Only let mankind regain their rights over nature, assigned to them by
the gift of God, and obtain that power, whose exercise will be governed by right reason and true religion.71 # By the mid-Twentieth Century, after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such fears could no longer be so easily
wished away, as the physicist and scientific director of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer recognised. He said in a 1947 lecture: We felt a particularly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting and in the end
in large measure achieving the realization of atomic weapons...In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no over-statement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge they cannot
his discovery of the
innermost secrets of matter and energy, of the fires that fuelled the stars -- had not 'enhanced human
power and dignity' as Bacon claimed, but instead brought destruction and horror. Scientific powers that
had been consciously applied in the defence of life and in the hope of its betterment now threatened its
total and absolute destruction. This would not prevent a legion of scientists, soldiers and national security policymakers later attempting to apply Bacon's faith in invention and Descartes' faith in
mathematics to make of the Bomb a rational weapon. # Oppenheimer -- who resolutely opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb -- understood what the strategists could not: that the weapons
resisted control, resisted utility, that 'with the release of atomic energy quite revolutionary changes had
occurred in the techniques of warfare'.73 Yet Bacon's legacy, one deeply imprinted on the strategists, was his view that truth and utility are 'perfectly identical'.74 In 1947 Oppenheimer
lose.72 # Adam had fallen once more, but into a world which refused to acknowledge its renewed intimacy with contingency and evil. Man's empire over creation --
had clung to the hope that 'knowledge is good...it seems hard to live any other way than thinking it was better to know something than not to know it; and the more you know, the better'; by 1960 he felt that 'terror attaches to
new knowledge. It has an unmooring quality; it finds men unprepared to deal with it.'75 # Martin Heidegger questioned this mapping of natural science onto the social world in his essays on technology -- which, as 'machine', has
been so crucial to modern strategic and geopolitical thought as an image of perfect function and order and a powerful tool of intervention. He commented that, given that modern technology 'employs exact physical science...the
technology and its relation to science,
society and war cannot be reduced to a noiseless series of translations of science for politics, knowledge
for force, or force for good. # Instead, Oppenheimer saw a process frustrated by roadblocks and ruptured by irony; in his view there was no smooth, unproblematic translation of scientific truth into
social truth, and technology was not its vehicle. Rather his comments raise profound and painful ethical questions that resonate
with terror and uncertainty. Yet this has not prevented technology becoming a potent object of desire, not merely as an instrument of power but as a promise and conduit of certainty itself. In the
minds of too many rational soldiers, strategists and policymakers, technology brings with it the truth of its enabling science and spreads it
over the world. It turns epistemological certainty into political certainty; it turns control over 'facts' into
control over the earth. # Heidegger's insights into this phenomena I find especially telling and disturbing -- because they underline the ontological force of the instrumental view of politics. In The Question
Concerning Technology, Heidegger's striking argument was that in the modernising West technology is not merely a tool, a 'means to an end'. Rather technology has become a governing image of the modern universe, one
deceptive illusion arises that modern technology is applied physical science'.76 Yet as the essays and speeches of Oppenheimer attest,
that has come to order, limit and define human existence as a 'calculable coherence of forces' and a
'standing reserve' of energy. Heidegger wrote: 'the threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already
affected man in his essence.'77 # This process Heidegger calls 'Enframing' and through it the scientific mind demands that 'nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and remains orderable as
Man is not a being who makes and uses machines as means, choosing and limiting their
impact on the world for his ends; rather people have imagined the world as a machine and people
everywhere becomes trapped within its logic. Man, he writes, 'comes to the very brink of a precipitous
fall...where it himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile Man, precisely as the one so
threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth.'78 Technological man not only becomes
the name for a project of lordship and mastery over the earth, but incorporates humanity within this
project as a calculable resource. In strategy, warfare and geopolitics human bodies, actions and
aspirations are caught, transformed and perverted by such calculating, enframing reason: human lives
are reduced to tools, obstacles, useful or obstinate matter.
***edited for gendered language***
a system of information'.
Alts
1NC Alternative
Our alternative is to start with an analysis of the constancy of war and military
presence. Presence-based analysis should be preferred over an analysis which
attempts to prevent flashpoints of war, in order to best approach patriarchal violence
that lingers even in perceived times of peace
Chris J. Cuomo Autumn 1996
(Chris J. Cuomo is Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, and an affiliate faculty member of the Environmental Ethics Certificate
Program, the Institute for African-American Studies, and the Institute for Native American Studies; War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the
Significance of Everyday Violence; page(s) 42-44; http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810390)
Emphasizing the ways in which war is a presence, a constant undertone, white noise in the background
of social existence, moving sometimes closer to the foreground of collective consciousness in the form
of direct combat yet remaining mostly as an unconsidered given, allows for several promising analyses.
To conclude, I will summarize four distinct benefits of feminist philosophical attention to the constancy of
military presence in most everyday contemporary life.
1) By considering the presence of war and militarism, philosophers and activists are able to engage in a
more effective, local, textured, multiplicitous discussion of specific examples and issues of militarism,
especially during "peacetime" (when most military activities occur). These include environmental effects, such as the recent French
decision to engage in nuclear testing; and effects on conceptions of gender and on the lives of women, such as the twelve-year-old Japanese
girl who was recently raped by American soldiers stationed in Okinawa.
2) Expanding the field of vision when considering the ethical issues of war allows us to better perceive
and reflect upon the connections among various effects and causes of militarism, and between aspects
of everyday militarism and military activities that generally occur between declarations of war and the
signing of peace treaties.
3) As Robin Schott emphasizes, focusing on the presence of war is particularly necessary given current realities
of war, in an age in which military technology makes war less temporally, conceptually, and physically
bounded, and in which civil conflict, guerilla wars, ethnic wars, and urban violence in response to worsening social
conditions are the most common forms of large- scale violence.
4) Finally, to return to a point which I raised earlier, it is my hope that a more presence-based analysis of war can be a
tool for noticing and understanding other political and ethical issues as presences, and not just events. In
a recent article in The New Yorker, Henry Louis Gates relays the following:
"You've got to start with the families," [Colin Powell] says of the crisis in the inner cities, "and then you've got to fix education so these little
bright-eyed five-year-olds, who are innocent as the day is long and who know right from wrong, have all the education they need. And you have
to do both these things simultaneously. It's like being able to support two military conflicts simultaneously." Military metaphors, the worn
currency of political discourse in this country, take on a certain vitality when he deploys them. (Indeed, there are those who argue that much of
the General's allure stems from a sort of transposition of realms. "I think people are hungry for a military solution to inner-city problems," the
black law professor and activist Patricia Williams says.) (Gates 1995, 77)
How (where? when? why?) are institutions of law enforcement like military institutions? How is the presumed constant need for personal
protection experienced by some constructed similarly to the necessity of national security? How does the constancy of militarism induce
complacency toward or collaboration with authoritative violence? Looking
at these questions might help interested parties
figure out how to create and sustain movements that are attentive to local realities and particularities
about war, about violence, and about the enmeshment of various systems of oppression.
It is of course crucial that the analysis I recommend here notice similarities, patterns, and connections without collapsing all forms and
instances of militarism or of state-sponsored violence into one neat picture. It is also important to emphasize that an
expanded
conception of war is meant to disrupt crisis- based politics that distract attention from mundane,
everyday violence that is rooted in injustice. Seeing the constant presence of militarism does not require that middle-class and
other privileged Americans suddenly see themselves as constantly under siege. It does require the development of abilities to
notice the extent to which people and ecosystems can be severely under siege by military institutions
and values, even when peace seems present.
Alternative Extensions
Accounts of war that only focus on war as an event OBSCURE the omnipresence of war
that is perpetuated by militarism – the only ethical way to approach violence is
through the bottom-up lens of the alternative
Chris J. Cuomo Autumn 1996
(Chris J. Cuomo is Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, and an affiliate faculty member of the Environmental Ethics Certificate
Program, the Institute for African-American Studies, and the Institute for Native American Studies; War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the
Significance of Everyday Violence; page(s) 42-44; http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810390)
In "Gender and 'Postmoder' War," Robin Schott introduces some of the ways in which
war is currently best seen not as an
event but as a presence (Schott 1995). Schott argues that postmodem understandings of persons, states, and
politics, as well as the high-tech nature of much contemporary warfare and the preponderance of civil and
nationalist wars, render an event- based conception of war inadequate, especially insofar as gender is
taken into account. In this essay, I will expand upon her argument by showing that accounts of war that only focus on
events are impoverished in a number of ways, and therefore feminist consideration of the political,
ethical, and ontological dimensions of war and the possibilities for resistance demand a much more
complicated approach. I take Schott's characterization of war as presence as a point of departure, though I am not committed to the
idea that the constancy of militarism, the fact of its omnipresence in human experience, and the paucity of an event-based account of war are
exclusive to contemporary postmodern or postcolonial circumstances.1
Theory that does not investigate or even notice the omnipresence of militarism cannot represent or
address the depth and specificity of the everyday effects of militarism on women, on people living in
occupied territories, on members of military institutions, and on the environment. These effects are relevant to
feminists in a number of ways because military practices and institutions help construct gendered and national
identity, and because they justify the destruction of natural nonhuman entities and communities during
peacetime. Lack of attention to these aspects of the business of making or preventing military violence
in an extremely technologized world results in theory that cannot accommodate the connections among
the constant presence of militarism, declared wars, and other closely related social phenomena, such as
nationalistic glorifications of motherhood, media violence, and current ideological gravitations to
military solutions for social problems.
Ethical approaches that do not attend to the ways in which warfare and military practices are woven
into the very fabric of life in twenty-first century technological states lead to crisis-based politics and analyses.
For any feminism that aims to resist oppression and create alternative social and political options, crisis-based ethics and politics
are problematic because they distract attention from the need for sustained resistance to the
enmeshed, omnipresent systems of domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most people's lives.
Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the absence of declared armed
conflicts is peace, the polar opposite of war. It is particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege,
and who do not regularly encounter the realities of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political
concern only regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to militarism that are merely exercises in crisis control. Antiwar resistance is
then mobilized when the "real" violence finally occurs, or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not
to respond in ways that make resisters drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war might actually keep
resisters complacent about and complicitous in the general presence of global militarism. Seeing
war as necessarily embedded in
constant military presence draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is
happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military institutions and other
militaristic agents of the state.
Reject the affirmative’s patriarchal state action in favor of examining the political
through a gendered lens
Tickner 1997
(J. Ann Tickner - Professor in the School of International Relations at University of Southern California, President of the
International Studies Association, the most respected and widely known scholarly association in this field - Dec., 1997 “You Just
Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and IR Theorists” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4.)
Many of these issues seem far removed from the concerns of international relations. But, employing
bottom-up
rather than top-down explanations, feminists claim that the operation of the global economy and
states' attempts to secure benefits from it are built on these unequal social relations between
women and men which work to the detriment of women's (and certain men's) security. For example,
states that successfully compete in attracting multinational corporations often do so by promising
them a pool of docile cheap labor consisting of young unmarried women who are not seen as
"breadwinners" and who are unlikely to organize to protest working conditions and low wages (Enloe, 1990: 151-76). When
states are forced to cut back on government spending in order to comply with structural adjustment programs, it is often the
expectation that women, by virtue of their traditional role as care-givers, will perform the welfare tasks previously assumed by
the state without remuneration. According to Caroline Moser (1 99 1 : 105), structural adjustment programs dedicated
to economic "efficiency" are built on the assumption of the elasticity of women's unpaid labor. In
presenting some feminist perspectives on security and some explanations for insecurity, I have demonstrated how
feminists are challenging levels of analysis and boundaries between inside and outside which they
see, not as discrete constructs delineating boundaries between anarchy and order, but as
contested and mutually constitutive of one another. Through a reexamination of the state, feminists
demonstrate how the unequal social relations on which most states are founded both influence
their external security-seeking behavior and are influenced by it. Investigating states as
gendered constructs is not irrelevant to understanding their security- seeking behaviors as well as
whose interests are most served by these behaviors. Bringing to light social structures that support war and
"naturalize" the gender inequalities manifested in markets and households is not irrelevant for
understanding their causes. Feminists claim that the gendered foundations of states and markets
must be exposed and challenged before adequate understandings of, and prescriptions for ,
women's (and certain men's) security broadly defined can be formulated .
Alt solves war
Bottom up approach is the only way to solve for systematic violence, rather than
focusing on flashpoints of violence
Youngs 2004
Feminist International Relations: A Contradiction in Terms? Or: Why Women and Gender Are Essential
to Understanding the World 'We' Live in Author(s): Gillian Youngs Source: International Affairs (Royal
Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 80, No. 1 (Jan., 2004)
The implication of feminist analysis of such areas is that the mainstream tendency to ignore them is a form of political not-knowing. One
of
the most powerful, and perhaps controversial, aims of different kinds of feminist analysis in these areas is the
opening up of consideration that different kinds of oppres- sion, including in extreme forms as violence, may be
interconnected. As Ann Tickner has explained: Whereas conventional security studies has tended to
look at causes and consequences of wars from a top-down, or structural, perspective, feminists have
generally taken a bottom-up approach, analyzing the impact of war at the microlevel. By so doing, as
well as adopting gender as a category of analysis, feminists believe they can tell us some- thing new about the causes of
war that is missing from both conventional and critical perspectives. By crossing what many feminists believe to be
mutually constitutive levels of analysis, we get a better understanding of the interrelationship between all forms of violence and the extent to
which unjust social relations, including gender hierarchies, contribute to insecurity, broadly defined.27 Feminist International
Relations has broadened the definition of security, and gone deep inside state boundaries as well as across them,
to get behind the masculinist warrior/protector mythology that tends to depict war and conflict in
archetypal (gendered) and frequently nationalistic terms, and to reveal the increasing suffering that
women and children have endured through death and injury, rape, displacement and deprivation, as
well as the many roles women have forged in peace- and community-building.28 Few have travelled in their
analysis as far as Cynthia Enloe, who has assessed such diverse areas as sex tourism, women in the military,
military wives, militarized prostitution, domestic service and export processing zones, and always
with the multi-level, bottom-up approach that distinguishes feminist work in international politics.29
Enloe has explained how, through her research, she came to learn how deeply women are connected to
military systems, even though this may not be readily recognized. The following reflections seem all the more pertinent in the wake of
the recent Gulf war and its aftermath.
Alt solves political economy
Alt solves structural violence and is a better way to approach the political economy
Tickner 1992
(J. Ann Tickner - Professor in the School of International Relations at University of Southern California, President of the International Studies
Association, the most respected and widely known scholarly association in this field) “Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives
on Achieving Global Security”
At the same time, peace
researchers began to question whether the economic security of the state, so
important to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mercantilists, was synonymous with the economic security of its
citizens. In many parts of the Third World, the failure of development strategies to solve problems of poverty
called for an examination of hierarchical political relations between North and South as well as the uneven
distributive effects of the world capital- ist economy. The legitimacy of states that failed to meet the basic material needs
of their citizens began to be questioned. In many states, military budgets and arms purchases were taking priority
over the economic welfare of individuals. The term structural violence was used to denote the economic insecurity of
individuals whose life expectancy was reduced, not by the direct violence of war but by domestic and inter- national structures of political and
economic oppression. Peace researchers began to define security in terms of "positive peace," a peace that included economic security as well
as physical safety.
Depending on their normative orientation and area of concern, contemporary scholars
of international political economy have used different approaches to investigate these various
concerns. These approaches fit broadly into what Robert Gilpin has described as the three constituting
ideologies of international political economy: liberalism, economic nationalism, and Marxism .' Gilpin
defines an ideology as a belief system that includes both scientific explanations and nonna- tive prescriptions. Since none of these
approaches discusses gender, we must assume that their authors be understood without reference to
gender distinctions. Feminists would disagree with this claim; as I argued in chapter 1, ignoring gender
distinctions hides a set of social and economic relations characterized by inequality between men and
women. In order to understand how these unequal relationships affect the workings of the world
economy--and their consequences for both women and men- models of international political
economy that make gender relations explicit must be constructed.
Alt solves - environment
ALT Solves conflict, environmental degradation, and international cooperation
Blanchard 03
Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory Author(s): Eric M.
Blanchard Source: Signs, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer 2003), pp. 1289-1312
Applying gender as a category of analysis to show the possibility of a more comprehensive notion of
security, Tickner traces the linkage between the system of international relations (and its theorization)
and multileveled, gendered insecurities. Against realism’s assumption of autonomous states and its prescription of self-help in a
hostile anarchical environment, Tickner argues that the threats of the nuclear age, cross-border environmental
degradation, and evidence of increasing international cooperation demand that interdependence be
taken seriously (1992). For Tickner, the assumption that there is order within and anarchy beyond the
bounds of the community effects a divide between international and domestic politics that mirrors
the public-private split that feminist theorists argue perpetuates domestic violence. Tickner rejects the analytic
separation of explanations for war into distinct levels and the identification of security with state borders, arguing that violence at the
international, national, and family levels is interrelated, ironically taking place in domestic and
international spaces beyond the reaches of law (1992, 58, 193). Feminists in IR find the levels-of-analysis approach
particularly inappropriate to their concerns because the problem of the system of patriarchy cannot be addressed
solely by reference to particular actors, whether they are men or states (Brown 1988, 473).
Blocks
AT: Perm
The aff and the alt are mutually exclusive –
a. If we win any links to hegemony or the economy, we win mutual exclusivity. You cannot
simultaneously save hegemony and the economy while attempting to combat it – perm would
have to sever their advantages even though we turned them
b. Our alternative approaches violence from a perspective of positive peace, while the aff
approaches violence from the perspective of negative peace. Their proposal that hegemony
prevents war and economic growth prevents war props up the viewpoint that the absence of
large flashpoints of war or the absence of nuclear war is equitable with peace. These claims
mean they cannot claim to be compatible with the world of the alternative because they have
already excluded the potential for war to exist in a normal state of hegemonic and economic
security – allowing the perm would sever the aff’s representations of war from the 1ac.
c. Severance is a voting issue- makes the aff a moving target which kills stable negative ground.
A2 Perm
Jean B. Elshtain 1982
(Elshtain is an award-winning professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago. She holds administrative positions at U Chicago
and Georgetown University. She is a fellow at Princeton and multiple other universities; “Feminist Discourse and Its Discontents: Language,
Power, and Meaning”; http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3173857.pdf?acceptTC=true)
On the other hand, one also finds prominent liberal feminists embracing a
contemporary political language, that of
academic social science, in which people become abstract role players, and the social spaces inhabited by
real human beings are turned into hollow structures that mysteriously perform decreed functions. Accepting the presumptions of
classical liberal market theory, this language reduces human motivation to a utilitarian calculus of self-interest.
Neither the discourse of modern social science, then, nor the discursive tradition of Western political
thought can, together or singly, serve as the rich, fertile soil in which to sow the seeds of emancipatory
speech. No single thinker, no school of thought, no "scientific" model of social life, offers an adequate image of
human subjects, nor a compelling account of that speech which is a central human capability, which
makes us the creatures we are and holds forth the tantalizing possibility of creative change when language bursts
the bonds of social control and, unexpectedly, offers intimations of a life still-in-becoming.
A2 Perm
Michael Warner 1999
(Warner is an award winning professor of American studies and English literature at Harvard. He is a literary critic, social theorist, editor, and
prolific author on social issues. He has a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and has taught at Rutgers and Northwestern; “The Trouble with
Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life”;
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=nvPEDrScjmAC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=The+Trouble+with+Normal:+Sex,+Politics,+and+the+Ethics
+of+Queer+Life&ots=vpTHrpCv9P&sig=CEgzeQrKrIPFe5zPHU30TFYhvTM#v=onepage&q=The%20Trouble%20with%20Normal%3A%20Sex%2C%
20Politics%2C%20and%20the%20Ethics%20of%20Queer%20Life&f=false)
What would it take to
make sexual autonomy possible? The answer is not simply to roll back repression,
loosen all constraints, purge ourselves from all civilized shame, return to an earlier state of development, run wild
through the streets. (Anyone who wants to run wild down my street has my blessing.) Sexual autonomy has grown, not just by
regressing to infantile pleasure (however important that might be), but by making room for new freedoms, new experiences, new
pleasures, new identities, new bodies-even if many of us turn out to live in the old ones without complaining. Variation in this way is a
precondition of autonomy-as much as it is also the outcome of autonomy. Pleasures once imaginable only with disgust, if at all,
become the material out of which individuals and groups elaborate themselves. Inequalities of shame act as a drag on this process.
They inhibit variation and restrict knowledge about the variations that do exist. Moralities that insist on the
permanence of sexual norms have an especially stunting effect on people who lack resources of
knowledge or of experiment. As Whartons story illustrates, there is a fine line between coercion through shame
and constraint through ignorance. The more people are isolated or privatized, the more vulnerable they are
to the unequal effects of shame. Conditions that prevent variation, or prevent the knowledge of such possibilities
from circulating, undermine sexual autonomy And the moralists work very hard to make sure that this
happens. The United States Supreme Court went so far in this effort as to exempt sexual materials from First
Amendment protections. In Roth v the United States (1957), it allowed states and the federal government to restrict anything defined
as "obscene"-a word designed to shame dissenters into silence. The Court later defined obscenity as anything having "prurient" interest in sex
and "offensive" by community standards, since
community standards set the definition of obscene, the law in this areathe majority to impose its will without Constitutional check. Defenders
of the law say that it imposes discretion and restraint on everyone. In fact it enlists the government in the politics of shame,
making sure that nothing challenging to the tastes of the majority will be allowed to circulate. The legal and political systems
routinely produce shame simply in the pompous and corny way they force people to talk. Like many other states, for
unlike the rest of First Amendment law allows
example, the state of Virginia has a law, enacted in 1950, that makes it a crime for any persons "to lewdly and lasciviously associate and cohabit
together,"• This just means that sex outside of marriage, or merely living together, is illegal. The law is seldom enforced, and most people
regard it as harmless anachronism. But it has real effects: people are denied child custody because it makes them criminal; gay men and
lesbians have been fired from their jobs in some states on the same grounds; and defendants on other charges are often given tougher
sentences by means of such statutes. (Sodomy laws are especially popular with prosecutors for this purpose.) Archaic
legal language
also has an effect simply by staying on the books and helping to create the air of unreality in which
medieval moral judgments are given authority Massachusetts law still refers to the "abominable and detestable crime against
nature."• Florida criminalizes "any unnatural and lascivious act." In the Wonderland of Americas legal codes, the sex laws are like a version of
Lewis Carroll’s "Jabberwocky" with a vengeance: "Tis brillig, and the slilhy loves did lewdly and lasciviously gyre and gimble in the wabe, All
prurient were the borogoves, and the mome raths did fornicate." When the law talks this way, ordinary sexual knowledge goes on vacation,
and the moralist’s battle is more than half won.
AT: Framework/Policy focus good
Alternative is a better way to approach policymaking and policy debates
Joni Lovendusi 2005
(Lovenduski is the Professor of Politics at Birkbeck college, University of London, author of Women and European Politics and Feminizing
politics; “State Feminism and Political Representation”, p. 7; http://www.langtoninfo.co.uk/web_content/9780521617642_frontmatter.pdf)
Gender is therefore an important component of the way in which issues are framed in policy debates.
Policy-making can be construed as a set of arguments among policy actors about what problems deserve attention, how those problems
are defined and what the solutions are (John 1998; Mazur 2002). In this conflict of ideas only a few issues are taken up for action. The
problem for women's advocates therefore is twofold: first, they must gain attention for their issues and
the ideas they promote, and second, they must ensure that the problem is defined in terms that are
compatible with movement goals. The public definition of a problem is amongst other things a frame
that affects how an issue is considered and treated. Paradoxically gender issues are often framed in
gender-blind terms. Historically the gendering of debates about political representation has 'seen
'invisible', built on the unspoken assumption that the political actor (the voter, the citizen) is male.
Feminist theorists have unmasked this convention (Pateman 1988; Lister 1997) pointing out not only that
women are citizens, voters and activists, but also that women in traditional gender roles have made
possible the functioning and dominance of the male political actor. Historically, when issues of political
representation were discussed, traditional gendering went unnoticed until the suffrage movements
claimed votes for women.
AT: Realism Good
Realism is a patriarchal discourse that renders women invisible
Blanchard 03
Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory Author(s): Eric M.
Blanchard Source: Signs, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer 2003), pp. 1289-1312
Feminists in IR argue that realism, dominated by elite, white, male practitioners, is a patriarchal discourse
that renders women invisible from the high politics of IR even as it depends on women’s subjugation as a “‘domesticated’
figure whose ‘feminine’ sensibilities are both at odds with and inconsequential to the harsh ‘realities’ of the public world of men and states”
(Runyan and Peterson 1991, 68–69). Feminists in IR explain the
exclusion of women from foreign policy decision
making by pointing to the “extent to which international politics is such a thoroughly masculinized
sphere of activity that women’s voices are considered inauthentic” (Tickner 1992, 4). Women’s traditional
exclusion from the military and continuing lack of access to political power at times presents women
with a “catch-22” situation. For example, the importance of a candidate’s military service as a
qualification for government office in U.S. political campaigns puts women, who cannot appeal to this
experience, at a disadvantage in obtaining the elite status of national office and thus the ability to
affect defense and security policies (Tobias 1990; cf. Elshtain 2000, 445).
AFFIRMATIVE ANSWERS
Perm
Analysis of gender can be integrated into policymaking—proven effective
Murphy, Research Professor; Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance at the University of
Massachusetts, 96 (Craig N., “Seeing Women, Recognizing Gender, Recasting International Relations”, International Organization 50:3,
Summer 1996, JSTOR)//AS
Skocpol's work also exemplifies one way that the value of "looking
concerns of a field. While Skocpol is
for the women" can be integrated with the central
critical of fellow political sociologists who attempt to explain major changes in modern industrial
societies by looking only at the roles of women, her
immersion in "the rich, recently created, literature" in
American women's history led her to look for the role of women in creating the modern welfare
state. In the process of doing so she found thather "state-centric approach had evolved into a 'politycentered approach'" as she "grappled with a central issue in the study of any nation's identity: the
transformations over time in the issues, social identities, and styles of politics that succeed (or fail) at
influencing agendas of political debate and public policy making."32 Similarly, consider- ation of the roles
of women in the formation and disintegration of modern international orders would probably lead
international relations away from a state-centric approach toward one that allows scholars to see the
interplay of national (and other) identities in the formation of international policy. In large part this is because, as
Skocpol argues, consideration of the role of women leads us immediately to recognize the constitutive power of a ubiquitous form of identity:
gender.
Perm solves – we need both political action and reflection.
Soper 95 [Kate: Professor in Humanities, Arts and Languages at London Metropolitan University,
Feminism and Ecology: Realism and Rhetoric in the Discourses of Nature, Science, Technology, & Human
Values, Vol. 20, No. 3, Special Issue: Feminist and Constructivist Perspectives on New Technology,
Summer, pp. 3 1 1 -33 1].
I here consider a spectrum of feminist and ecological arguments with a view to revealing-and resolvingthe tensions between the "nature-endorsing" argument of ecology and the conventionalist and the
"nature skeptical" impulse of the constructivist critique. At the center of my analysis is a confrontation
between ecological naturalism and feminist constructivism, whose very divergent rhetorics I treat as
symptomatic of a need for both to clarify their conceptualizations of nature. I defend a realist position as
offering the only responsible basis from which to argue for any kind of political change whether in our
relations to the natural environment or to each other. But I also recognize that representations of
nature and the concepts and symbolisms we bring to it can have very defInite political effects, many of
them bearing directly on the cause of ecological conservation itself, and that a realist position requires
us to acknowledge this and to review the rhetoric of green politics in the light of it. Both the natureendorsing and nature-skeptical perspectives need, therefore, to be more conscious of what their
respective discourses on nature may be ignoring and politically repressing. Just as a simplistic
endorsement of nature can seem insensitive to the emancipatory concerns motivating its rejection, so
too can an exclusive emphasis on discourse and signification very readily appear evasive of ecological
realities and irrelevant to the task of addressing them.
Plans good
Single-issue piecemeal reforms are key to challenge the root causes of environmental
destruction
Stewart 03 [Keith: wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on environmental politics in Ontario and currently works
for the Toronto Environmental Alliance, Canadian Dimension, 9-1].
Most Environmentalists Are against the System
Precisely because capitalism keeps inventing new ways to muck up the planet, the
environmental movement--or at least large
chunks of it--is constantly engaged in challenging the right of corporations to make money by whatever
eco-destructive means are most profitable. These fights take place on multiple fronts at various spatial
scales, use a bewildering variety of strategies and tactics by constantly changing coalitions of groups and
individuals motivated by an equally diverse set of ideas about protecting nature.
But if you spend some time with environmentalists, rather than simply absorbing whatever makes it
through the filter of the mainstream media, you'll find that issue-specific solutions (save this park, better public transit,
phase out that toxin) are usually couched within a broader context. At the risk of over-generalizing (and how can I not if I'm to speak of the environmental
movement as if it was a coherent entity) I would argue that there is a widespread recognition within the environmental movement,
particularly among those who've been around for a while, that there is a system that is lighting all these fires (climate change,
deforestation, toxic contamination, radioactive waste, species extinction, etc.) that we spend all of our time running around
trying to put out.
Most days I label this system capitalism, but others might call it patriarchy, spiritually empty
consumerism, racism, or simply big, mean corporations. And none of us would be wrong. That the planet-sized
pyromaniac in question isn't always labeled capitalism is perhaps because capitalism isn't the cause of all of the world's evil, the weakness of
the socialist movement in Canada and the ecologically regrettable record of "actually existing socialism."
You also have to remember that few activists come to movements fresh from graduate degrees where they studied Marx--the "big picture" stuff comes out of lived
experience combined with a lot of reading. Environmental
activists are typically born out of a sense that something
precious is in peril. Our victories seem always temporary, while defeats risk becoming permanent. It is
this sense of urgency and an attachment to very particular bits of "nature"--a forest, a river, your child's smogscarred lungs, the planet's atmosphere--or outrage at some particular assault--the toxic dump next door, the contaminated workplace, the carcinogen
being sprayed on your neighbourhood park to kill those vicious dandelions--which move individuals and communities to action.
Typically this action initially takes the form of seeking out practical, achievable solutions like the Kyoto Protocol, a
ban in your community on the use of pesticides for cosmetic purposes, or saving the local wetland. These "reformist" solutions are not to be
despised, for you can't build a movement without victories. Indeed, to dream of a movement that suddenly
overthrows the existing order and replaces it with a socially and environmentally superior alternative
without having won any victories along the way to inspire the collective imagination and from which to
learn practical lessons is ludicrous.
Impact Inevitable
Patriarchy is inevitable—biology proves
Fukuyama 1998 [Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist/economist and author. He’s a senior fellow at
the Center on Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law at Stanford. He has a Ph.D. in political science
from Harvard.] “Women and the Evolution of World Politics.” Foreign Affairs 77.5 (1998). Web.
http://www.evoyage.com/Evolutionary%20Feminism/ForAffairWomen&Evolution.htm)
A number of authors have extended the noble savage idea to argue that violence and patriarchy were late inventions,
rooted in either the Western Judeo-Christian tradition or the capitalism to which the former gave birth. Friedrich Engels anticipated the work of
later feminists by positing the existence of a primordial matriarchy, which was replaced by a violent and repressive patriarchy only with the
transition to agricultural societies. The problem with this theory is, as Lawrence Keeley points out in his book War Before Civilization,
that the most comprehensive recent studies of violence in hunter-gatherer societies suggest that for them was
actually more frequent, and rates of murder higher, than for modern ones. Surveys of ethnographic data show that only 10-13 percent
of primitive societies never or rarely engaged in war or raiding; the others engaged in conflict either continuously or at less than yearly
intervals. Closer examination of the peaceful cases shows that they were frequently refugee populations driven into remote locations by prior
warfare or groups protected by a more advanced society. Of the Yanomamö tribesmen studied by Napoleon Chagnon in Venezuela, some 30
percent of the men died by violence; the !Kung San of the Kalahari desert, once characterized as the "harmless people," have a higher murder
rate than New York or Detroit. The Sad archaeological evidence from sites like Jebel Sahaba in Egypt, Talheim in Germany, or Roaix in France
indicates that systematic mass killings of men, women, and children occurred in Neolithic times. The Holocaust, Cambodia, and
Bosnia have each been described as a unique, and often as a uniquely modern, form of horror. Exceptional and tragic they are indeed, but with
precedents stretching back tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. It is clear that this violence was largely perpetrated by
men. While small minorities of human societies have been matrilineal, evidence of a primordial matriarchy in which women
dominated men, or were even relatively equal to men, has been hard to find. There was no age of innocence . The line from
chimp to modern man is continuous. It would seem, then, that there is something to the contention of many feminists
that phenomena like aggression, violence, war, and intense competition for dominance in a status hierarchy are more closely
associated with men than women. Theories of international relations like realism that see international politics as a remorseless
struggle for power are in fact what feminist call a gendered perspective, describing the behavior of states controlled by men rather than states
per se. A world run by women would follow different rules, it would appear, and it is toward that sort of world that all postindustrial or Western
societies are moving. As women gain power in these countries, the latter should become less aggressive, adventurous, competitive and violent.
The problem with the feminist view is that it sees these attitudes toward violence, power, status as wholly the
products of a patriarchal culture, whereas in fact it appears they are rooted in biology. This makes these
attitudes harder to change in men and consequently in societies. Despite the rise of women, men will continue to
play a major, if not dominant, part in the governance of postindustrial countries, not to mention less-developed ones. The realms
of war and international politics in particular will remain controlled by men for longer than many feminists would like.
Most important, the task of resocializing men to be more like women - that is, less violent - will run into limits. What is
bred in the bone cannot be altered easily by changes in culture and ideology.
Alt
No solvency – the alternative lacks a pragmatic approach.
Spegele 02
- obtained his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago, and has published several articles in international theory. (Roger D.,
“Emancipatory International Relations: Good News, Bad News or No News at All?”, International Relations, 12/1/02,
http://ire.sagepub.com/content/16/3/381)//js
Another feature of an emancipatory conception of international relations is that any theory under this rubric
has to have a certain relation to practice (i.e. a relationship in which the theory has to give some
indication of how the radical change required by the critique is to be achieved). If emancipatory
international theory is to go beyond merely endorsing progress and recommending reforms – which it must
do if it is to make good on its claim to embody a distinctively radical understanding of international relations – it will have to showhow
the theory it proposes provides a basis for thinking that radical change is not just notionally possible but actually
possible; that there is not simply an adventitious relationship between accepting the theory and something’s happening which would help
make the theory come out true. If it fails to provide such a basis, the theory would be in grave danger of slipping
into the very positivism it roundly rejects(i.e. into the idea that we study international relations to gain
scientific understanding, and doing so is logically unrelated to change). Retreating to a voluntaristic view of change, to
some vague, speculative hope for the future, would so weaken its internal coherence that emancipatory international relations would be hard
pressed to sustain its liberationist modality or provide a basis for radically opposing the status quo. An
emancipatory theory in this
sense must show how the theory becomes accessible to the subjects so that they will be motivated, or
perhaps self-compelled, to change the structures and conditions which serve as obstacles to political
transformation. On this view, atheory must not only describe the world but indicate how it can (or will) be
changed for the better. It is along this dimension, in particular, that there are to be found large differences in emancipatory theories in
international relations. Certain theoretical structures will relate theory to practice only in an oblique or marginal way (e.g. postmodernist
theories and postmodernist feminist theories), whereas others will relate theory to practice in a robust way (e.g. Kantian Cosmopolitan Theory
and Critical International Theory). Nonetheless, all
emancipatory theories will have understandings, however
attenuated, of how theory and practice are bound up with from one another in such a way that if the
theory is true, correct or warrantedlyassertible, the current practices in international relations will (or will
probably) radically change for the better. Thus, if the theory is Kantian, the connection between theory and practice will be such
that if the theory is true, then it will yield access to the motivations of the agents and agencies which the theory addresses in such a way that
the agents and agencies will be inclined to change their present policies. For example, Onora O’Neill’s theory of obligation claims to be
accessible to agents and agencies in this sense.27 On the other hand, if
the theorist is a postmodernist feminist, theory’s
task might be construed, for example, as moving men and women from their present power struggles
via ‘empathetic concern’ to a world in which relations between men and women will be thoroughly new.
Non-dominant world is too difficult to realize in practice. It is not grounded in actual
experience.
Nhanenge 07 – Master of Arts in development studies at the University of South Africa
(Jytte “Ecofeminism: Towards Integrating the concerns of women,, poor people and nature into development”
http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/570/dissertation.pdf?sequence=1)
I believe there is no research without weaknesses. Hence, the study's limitations should also be stated. (Creswell 1994: ll0): In my opinion, the
study has mainly two weaknesses. The first is major, the second minor: A bit simplified one may say that I try to explore two worlds. One
world is real, but not universal since each of us creates our unique meaning of it. It is the world we live
in. According to ecofeminists, that world dominates women, poor people and nature. The other world is
a possible world, which each of us only can imagine. It is the world we would like to live in, our utopia.
According to ecofeminism, that world must be non-dominant if it should provide all with a good life. It is
from the perspective of a possible, non-dominant world that ecofeminism critique the dominant world.
That has one weakness. Since the dominant world is real and we each have our experience of it, we can judge
and criticize it in various ways. The possible non-dominant world is not real. Hence, we have no experience
of it, and we therefore do
not know if we can create it. So we cannot know how a non-dominant world would
be or if it is possible. We also do not know, if we would be able to develop systems of knowledge, economics,
technology, and governance so diverse and context-bound that they would be non-dominant to any
groups in society. We do not know if we could change our meaning-structure into a way of thinking,
which is non-dualised and hence non-dominant. That may very well only be possible after a new generation grows up without
having learned the dualised perception of reality - but who should teach them? Conclusively, the critique ecofeminism direct to the dominant
world is based on a real world of which we have experience. It is therefore well founded.
However, it remains to be seen if
humanity, in reality, can create non-dominant alternatives. I assume that this is the kind of hurdle we come across, when
we critique a world-view.
Feminist control triggers violent male retaliation.
Tiger 99 – Professor of Anthropology @ Rutgers University, Ph.D @ U of London (Lionel,“Fukuyama’s
Follies” [“Prehistory Returns”], 1999, Foreign Affairs Volume 78, No. 1, January/February,
http://www.metu.edu.tr/~utuba/Ehrenreich%20etal.pdf, Spector)
It is possible, even if unlikely, that one response to greater female influence will be greater male belligerence
and even violence against them. At the same time that the Taliban restricts women from kindergarten,
radical activists restrict women from abortion in the United States. In the contemporary world, there is
nowhere for women and children to go. We receive daily bulletins about the bewilderingly lethal
intransigence of male leaders committed to some program of desperate importance to them. The
struggle for social control may be one that women choose not to take up.
Turns to Alt
Ecofeminism marginalizes women by embracing patriarchal essentialisms.
Biehl 91 [Janet: Social ecology activist and the author of Rethinking Eco-feminist Politics. “Rethinking
Ecofeminist Politics,” p. 3-4]
Although most political movements might feel the need to sort out these differences and their theorists might argue for and against them,
producing a healthy debate, ecofeminists rarely confront each other en the differences in these writings. Ecofeminists who even acknowledge
the existence of serious contradictions tend, in fact, to pride themselves on the contradictions in their works as a healthy sign of "diversity"presumably in contrast to "dogmatic," fairly consistent, and presumably "male" or "masculine" theories. But dogmatism is clearly not the same
thing as coherence, clarity, and at least a minimum level of consistency. Ecofeminism, far from being healthily diverse, is so blatantly selfcontradictory as to be incoherent. As one might expect, at least one ecofeminist even rejects the very-notion of coherence itself, arguing that
coherence is "totalizing" and by inference oppressive. Moreover, because ecofeminists rarely debate each other, it is nearly impossible to glean
from their writings the extent to which they agree or disagree with each other. The reader of this book should be wary of attributing the views
of anyone ecofeminist, as they are presented here, to all other ecofeminists. But ecofeminists'
apparent aversion to sorting
out the differences among themselves leaves the critical observer no choice but to generalize. The selfcontradictory nature of ecofeminism raises further problems as well. Some ecofeminists literally
celebrate the identification of women with nature as an ontological reality. They thereby speciously
biologize the personality traits that patricentric society assigns to women. The implication of this
position is to confine women to the same regressive social definitions from which feminists have fought
long and hard to emancipate women. Other ecofeminists reject such biologizations and rightly consider what are virtually
sociobiological definitions of women as regressive for women. But some of the same ecofeminists who reject these definitions nonetheless
favor using them to build a movement.
The alt turns itself – it advocates the view of all women that it does not represent –
this replicates patriarchy
Harding 86 – Professor Social Sciences, Comparative Education, and Gender Studies @ UCLA, Ph.D
Philosophy @ NYU, (Sandra, “The Instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory”, JSTOR,
Published by The University of Chicago Press, Vol. 11, No. 4, Summer, 1986, pages 645-646, RSpec)
Furthermore, once we understand the destructively mythical character of the essential and universal “man”
which was the subject and paradigmatic object of non-feminist theories, so too do we begin to doubt
the usefulness of analysis that has essential, universal woman as its subject or object—as its thinker or
the object of its thought. We have come to understand that whatever we have found useful form the perspective
of the social experience of the Western, bourgeois, heterosexual, white women is especially suspect
when we begin our analyses with the social experiences of any other women. The patriarchal theories
we try to extend and reinterpret were created to explain not men’s experience but only the experience of those men
who are Western, bourgeois, white and heterosexual. Feminist theorists also come primarily from
these categories —not through conspiracy but through the historically common pattern that it is people in these
categories who have had the time and resources to theorize, and who—among women—can be heard at all. In trying
to develop theories that provide the one true (feminist) story of humane experience, feminism risks replicating in theory
and public policy the tendency in the patriarchal theories to police thought by assuming that only the
problems of some women are human problems and that solutions for them are the only reasonable
ones. Feminism has played an important role in showing that there are not now and never have been
any generic “men” at all—only gendered men and women. Once essential and universal man dissolves, so does his hidden
companion, women. We have, instead, myriads of women living in elaborate historical complexes of class,
race, and culture.
A2 Tickner
Tickner’s methodology is flawed – reliance on dichotomies
Keohane ’98
Duke University (Robert O., “Beyond Dichotomy: Conversations between International Relations and
Feminist Theory,” International Studies Quarterly, March 1998,
http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/courses/PoliticalScience/661B1/documents/KeohaneBeyondDichotomyI
RFeministTheory.pdf)//SS
Taking scholarly work seriously, however, involves not only trying to read it sympathetically, but also offering criticism of arguments that do
My starting point is to accept an insight of much feminist writing: conceptual
dichotomies create misleading stereotypes. Professor Tickner mentions four: rational/irrational,
fact/value, universal/particular, and public/private. As feminists point out, genderhe social
construction of sexual differencesoperates largely through the use of such stereotypes. What I will
argue here is that Professor Tickner herself relies too much on three key dichotomies, which seem to
me to have misleading implications, and to hinder constructive debate. The first of these dichotomies
contrasts “critical theory” with “problem-solving” theory. “Problem-solving [theory] takes the world as it finds it and
implicitly accepts the prevailing order as its framework” (1997:619). The second dichotomy pits “hermeneutic,
historically-based, humanistic and philosophical traditions” against positivist epistemologies modeled
on the natural sciences. Finally, Tickner contrasts a view that emphasizes the social construction of
reality with an atomistic, asocial conception of behavior governed by the laws of nature (1997:616,
618-9). International relations theory is portrayed as problem-solving, positivist, an asocial; feminist theory as critical, post-positivist, and
not seem convincing.
sociological.
A2 Solves War
Feminism will not create global peace – women commit numerous violent atrocities
Pollitt 99 – B.A. Philosophy @ Radcliffe College, M.F.A Writing @ Columbia University, former columnist
@ The New Yorker, NYT, The New Republic, former lecturer @ Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Katha,
“Fukuyama’s Follies” [“Father Knows Best”], 1999, Foreign Affairs Volume 78, No. 1, January/February,
http://www.metu.edu.tr/~utuba/Ehrenreich%20etal.pdf, Spector)
He argues that men are more violent than women. Someday he may provide actual evidence that this is a biological rather social tendency.
But even if women are innately less violent, they are plenty violent enough to call into question
Fukuyama’s claim that more female political power would mean more peace. Women commit infanticide,
abuse and kill children, mutilate the genitals of little girls, and cruelly tyrannize daughters, daughter-inlaw, servants, and slaves. They have also been known to encourage and defend male violence—egging
on personal, family, or gang vendettas, blaming victims of rape and wife-beating, and so on.
Historically, cultures organized around war and displays of cruelty have had women’s full cooperation:
Spartan and Roman women were famed for their “manly” valor. Did Viking women stand on
Scandinavian beaches begging their husbands not to pillage France? Did premodern European women
shun public executions and witch burnings? As these examples suggest, even defining violence raises
questions: The same act can be regarded as wrong, psychopathic, glorious, or routine, depending on its social context.
Women are empirically responsible for mass violence
Ehrenreich 99 – Ph.D Cellular Immunology @ Rockefeller University, author of 21 books, political activist
(Barbara, “Fukuyama’s Follies” [“Men Hate War Too”], 1999, Foreign Affairs, Volume 78, No.1,
January/February, http://www.metu.edu.tr/~utuba/Ehrenreich%20etal.pdf, Spector)
Whatever our genetic and prehistoric cultural legacies, women in the past two centuries have more than adequately
demonstrated a capacity for collective violence. They have played a leading role in nonmilitary
violence such as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bread riots and revolutionary uprisings, in which
they were often reputed to be "foremost in violence and ferocity." In World War II, the Soviet military
deployed them as fighter pilots and in ground combat. Since then, women have served as terrorists and
guerrilla fighters in wars of national liberation. More to the point, women have proved themselves no
less susceptible than men to the passions of militaristic nationalism: witness feminist leader Sylvia Pankhurst, who set
aside the struggle for suffrage to mobilize English support for World War I by, for example, publicly shaming men into enlisting. Fukuyama
concedes that, among heads of government, Margaret Thatcher is an exception to his gender dichotomy but ignores the many exceptions on
the male side of the ledger—such as the antimihtaristic, social-democratic Olaf Palme and Willy Brandt. Nor does he mention the gender of the
greatest pacifist leaders of the twentieth century, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mohandas K. Gandhi.
AT: Root cause of war
Gender is not the root cause of war – Efforts to end gender injustice must start by
dealing with war – Only the aff can provide the space necessary for change.
Joshua S. Goldstein, Professor of International Relations at American University, War and Gender:
How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, 2001, pp.411-412
I began this book hoping to contribute in some way to a deeper understanding of war – an understanding that would improve the chances of
someday achieving real peace, by deleting war from our human repertoire. In following the thread of gender running through war, I found the
deeper understanding I had hoped for – a multidisciplinary and multilevel engagement with the subject. Yet I became somewhat more
pessimistic about how quickly or easily war may end. The war system emerges, from the evidence in this book, as relatively ubiquitous and
robust. Efforts to change this system must overcome several dilemmas mentioned in this book. First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking
about causes of war and working for peace. Many peace scholars and activists support the approach, “if you want peace, work for justice.”
Then, if one believes that sexism contributes to war, one can work for gender justice specifically (perhaps among others)
in order to pursue peace.
This approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but rests on the
assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this book suggests that causality runs at least as strongly the
other way. War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these
influence wars’ outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war has in part fueled and sustained these and other injustices. So, “if you
want peace, work for peace.” Indeed, if you want justice (gender and others), work for peace. Causality does not run just upward
through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It runs downward
too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the military may be the most important way to “reverse women’s oppression.”
The dilemma is that peace work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet, in light of this book’s
evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war seems to be empirically inadequate .
War turns patriarchy
War causes the re-masculinization of society – turns their alternative.
J Ann Tickner, Professor of International Relations at USC, International Studies Perspectives
November 2002 p.336
So, if the story is not a simple one where gender and other ideological lines are firmly drawn, what can a feminist analysis add to our
understanding of 9/11 and its aftermath? The statements with which I begin this article offer support for the claim that war both reinforces
gender stereotypes and shakes up gender expectations (Goldstein, 2002). The conduct of war is a largely male activity on both sides but
Meena, the founder of RAWA, exhorts women to fight too. Nevertheless, gender is a powerful legitimator of war and national
security; our acceptance of a “remasculinized” society during times of war and uncertainty rises considerably . And
the power of gendered expectations and identifications have real consequences for women and for men,
consequences that are frequently ignored by conventional accounts of war and civilizational clashes .
[NOTE: RAWA = Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan]