Why we need to study (US) militarism: A critical feminist lens

Abstract

Responding to the special issue call to examine security and militarism alongside one another, this article adopts a critical feminist lens to explore what is at stake when critical scholars study security rather than militarism – and why, for critical feminists in particular, studying one without attention to the other is not helpful. Anchoring the discussion of (US) militarism in ongoing debates about women in combat, the article proposes that studying security without attention to militarism leads scholars to miss the deeply militarist orientation of security studies. It further suggests that feminist scholarship, because it treats militarism and militarization as an integral part of feminist security studies and considers the everyday a crucial site for inquiry, is well suited to studying militarism and security alongside one another. The article then lays out what a critical feminist approach to studying militarism entails and presents some feminist insights on militarization, focusing in particular on what attention to gender can reveal about shared norms of manliness and war. Overall, the article shows why feminist perspectives offer such strikingly different insights into the relationship between militarism and security and what we miss when feminist scholarship is ignored or marginalized in scholarship on these issues.