Expanding the Combat Zone. Sex-Gender-Culture Talk and Cognitive Militarization

Although International Relations is still largely androcentric, masculinist and heteronormative, certain issues of gender and sexuality have gained currency over the last decade. At the same time, much of IR follows a Eurocentrist and occidentalist script that is systematically built into disciplinary ways of knowing. Adapting step-by-step Spivak’s famous quote of “white men saving brown women from brown men” across a range of feminist and queer concepts like patriarchal genderism, embedded feminism, transnational sexism, homonationalism and queer imperialism, this article traces the flexible phenomenon of gendered and sexualized epistemic violence from British colonialism in India to imperial western politics today. It shows how the logic of who is to liberate whom for sex/gender reasons gradually shifts from heteronormativity and whiteness to more diverse patterns that contribute to a cognitive militarization of large parts of society. Introducing the notion of the occidentalist dividend that can be earned in this procedure, we can understand that some forms of sex–gender– culture talk are quite ambivalent achievements that constitute genuine challenges for antimilitarist feminist positions.