January 08, 2012

What kind of feminism does war provoke?

Feminist peace researcher Cynthia Cockburn's valuable analysis.

"In the last fifteen years I have been engaged fulltime in researching women’s antiwar movements of various kinds in a heap of countries and regions. It is due to these travels, and the many conversations I have had with women in the scores of groups, organizations and networks I have met and studied along the road, that I conclude we may confidently use the words ‘feminist peace activism’, ‘feminist antimilitarism’ or ‘a feminist analysis of war’. But what kind of feminism are we talking about here?

Those who keep a sceptical distance from feminism and the women’s movement often make a particular double supposition about women’s relationship to peace movements. They suppose that women are, in disproportionate numbers, drawn to peace movements; and that this must derive from some primordial instinct. Women are ‘by nature intended’ to be mothers, nurturers and carers. They are ‘natural peace makers’. Some celebrate the idea: ‘Women are better than men. They can save the world.’ But more often the trope ‘women oppose war on grounds of women’s life-giving role’ is part of a critical anti-essentialist discourse: biology determines nothing.

Experience has shown me that this to-ing and fro-ing about ‘women’s peaceful natures’ is no more than an excitable bubble of argument out of touch with facts on the ground. It is often, on both sides, inspired by anti-feminism. In the first place, it provocatively overstates women’s presence in peace movements. Women are many, it is true, but they seldom outweigh men. In the second place, I have found very few women who, while camping outside military bases, lobbying politicians or demonstrating for peace, are invoking women’s life-giving natures. Some, it is true, are enriched by a personal history that has socialized them in nurturing and caring skills. But most of them have (unfortunately) seen too many women soldiers, abusive mothers and belligerent women political leaders to think either nature or nurture can guarantee an antiwar impulse in women. Besides, to believe the best of women is to believe the worst of men: that they are irremediably violence-prone. If women believed human beings dichotomous and fixed in their natures, they would see no sense in campaigning for change. Antiwar activists are necessarily social-constructionists."...

Read full article here, posted on January 7, 2012 on "Secularism is a Women's Issue" http://www.siawi.org/