The Case of U.S. Servicewomen: A Feminist Analysis of Militarism

While feminist scholars have only recently begun to explicitly frame their concerns in terms of security (leading to the development of the field of Feminist Security Studies), they have long engaged militarism and explored it in great detail. In my own work (e.g. Wibben 2011), I have explored possibilities of fruitful exchange between feminists and critical approaches to security, arguing that feminist insights are crucial to furthering the critical project in security studies (Wibben 2016). This papers makes the case that militarism is a concept that (critical) scholars of security should take seriously (again). A feminist understanding of militarism, which pays attention to the gendered nature thereof, is particularly useful because feminist analyses of militarism also tend to attend to the political economy dimension – one often lacking in straight-up security studies. To explore the work that (a feminist conception of) militarism can do and what it limits are, the proposed article considers the changing roles of U.S. servicewomen since the beginning of the war on terror and the more recent lifting of the combat exclusion policy. Wibben, ATR (2011) Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach. London: Routledge. -- (2016) “Opening Security: Recovering Critical Scholarship as Political” Critical Studies on Security. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2016.1146528