Filters and Fragments: Making Feminist Sense of Security

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze how feminist work on security is read and understood, where it is located, and the relationship between feminist scholarship and conceptions of security pluralism. I pick up J. Benton Heath's argument that “pluralist security” is a good tool to address widened security agendas and to decolonize international law.1 I also develop Heath's account of “widened security”—which he associates with feminist security studies and with the women, peace, and security agenda—to argue that making feminist sense of widened security requires distinguishing between which feminist knowledge is incorporated into international law and the larger corpus of feminist work.2 I use feminist analysis as a tool for examining, and responding to, the structural inequalities within law, starting with gender, but expanding to intersectional3 and postcolonial feminist insight.4 This approach facilitates the deployment of gender as co-constituted through adjunct vectors of inequality, including, but not limited to, race, sexuality, ableism, or class, as well as the legacies of empire.5