Description
Book SynopsisHistorically, there has been reluctance, from mainstream IR scholars as well as feminists, to seriously engage with womenâs agency in warfare. Instead, scholarship has tended to focus on womenâs activism for peace or to ignore womenâs agency altogether.
This book rectifies this omission by exploring the cultural understanding of actors, agents and structures of war and how can we make sense of attitudes towards women, agency and war today. By using a poststructuralist feminist perspective and by analysing empirical cases from a Western âwar on terrorâ cultural context, Ahall argues that all types of stories are informed by ideas about motherhood and maternal reproduction as the foundation of sexual difference. This does not only mean that women are judged/read/valued based on the shape of their, maternalised, bodies, rather than what they actually do, but, it means that ideas about motherhood, not motherhood itself, function to police contemporary gender norms and contemporary
Trade Review
Overall, the book presents interesting case studies and an eclectic methodology. The book is well structured, the conceptual connections are made easy to follow and are well linked to the case studies. Thus making the book highly recommended for students and scholars interested in gender and political communication, visual culture and the politics of emotions, Barthesian methodological approaches to the discipline of international relations, and the relation between world politics and popular culture. - Foucault, M
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Securitising Feminism or Feminist Security Studies?, Chapter 1: Stories of Motherhood, Agency and War, Chapter 2: Gender, Security and Popular Culture: A methodological approach, CAST: Empirical cases and list of characters, Chapter 4: Heroic Subjects, Chapter 5: Monstrous Abjects, Conclusion: Making Feminist Sense of Maternalist War Stories
