Making Gender, Making War is a unique interdisciplinary edited collection which explores the social construction of gender, war-making and peacekeeping. It highlights the institutions and processes involved in the making of gender in terms of both men and women, masculinity and femininity. The "war question for feminism" marks a thematic red thread throughout; it is a call to students and scholars of feminism to take seriously and engage with the task of analyzing war. Contributors analyze how war-making is intertwined with the making of gender in a diversity of empirical case studies, organized around four themes: gender, violence and militarism; how the making of gender is connected to a (re)making of the nation through military practices; UN SCR 1325 and gender mainstreaming in institutional practices; and gender subjectivities in the organization of violence, exploring the notion of violent women and non-violent men.

Gender roles are nowhere more prominent than in war. Yet contentious debates, and the scattering of scholarship across academic disciplines, have obscured understanding of how gender affects war and vice versa. In this authoritative and lively review of our state of knowledge, Joshua Goldstein assesses the possible explanations for the near-total exclusion of women from combat forces, through history and across cultures. Topics covered include the history of women who did fight and fought well, the complex role of testosterone in men's social behaviours, and the construction of masculinity and femininity in the shadow of war. Goldstein concludes that killing in war does not come naturally for either gender, and that gender norms often shape men, women, and children to the needs of the war system. lllustrated with photographs, drawings, and graphics, and drawing from scholarship spanning six academic disciplines, this book provides a unique study of a fascinating issue.

From Pakistan to Chechnya, Sri Lanka to Canada, pioneering women are taking their places in formal and informal military structures previously reserved for, and assumed appropriate only for men. Women have fought in wars, either as women or covertly dressed as men, throughout the history of warfare, but only recently have they been allowed to join state militaries, insurgent groups, and terrorist organizations in unprecedented numbers. This begs the question - how useful are traditional gendered categories in understanding the dynamics of war and conflict? And why are our stories of gender roles in war typically so narrow? Who benefits from them? In this illuminating book, Laura Sjoberg explores how gender matters in war-making and war-fighting today. Drawing on a rich range of examples from conflicts around the world, she shows that both women and men play many more diverse roles in wars than either media or scholarly accounts convey. Gender, she argues, can be found at every turn in the practice of war; it is crucial to understanding not only ‘what war is’, but equally how it is caused, fought and experienced. With end of chapter questions for discussion and guides to further reading, this book provides the perfect introduction for students keen to understand the multi-faceted role of gender in warfare. Gender, War and Conflict will challenge and change the way we think about war and conflict in the modern world.

Will war ever end? Women across the world are proving that they can oppose patriarchal capitalist violence

This vibrant collection of essays reveals the intimate politics of how people with a wide range of relationships to war identify with, and against, the military and its gendered and racialised norms. It synthesises three recent turns in the study of international politics: aesthetics, embodiment and the everyday, into a new conceptual framework. This helps us to understand how militarism permeates society and how far its practices can be re-appropriated or even turned against it.

This compelling, interdisciplinary compilation of essays documents the extensive, intersubjective relationships between gender, war, and militarism in 21st-century global politics. Feminist scholars have long contended that war and militarism are fundamentally gendered. Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives provides empirical evidence, theoretical innovation, and interdisciplinary conversation on the topic, while explicitly—and uniquely—considering the links between gender, war, and militarism. Essentially an interdisciplinary conversation between scholars studying gender in political science, anthropology, and sociology, the essays here all turn their attention to the same questions. How are war and militarism gendered? Seventeen innovative explanations of different intersections of the gendering of global politics and global conflict examine the theoretical relationship between gender, militarization, and security; the deployment of gender and sexuality in times of conflict; sexual violence in war and conflict; post-conflict reconstruction; and gender and militarism in media and literary accounts of war. Together, these essays make a coherent argument that reveals that, although it takes different forms, gendering is a constant feature of 21st-century militarism.