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Geopolitics
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Feminist Geopolitics: Unpacking

(In)Security, Animating Social Change
a

Jill Williams & Vanessa Massaro

Graduate School of Geography, Clark University , Worcester , MA ,

USA
b

Department of Geography , The Pennsylvania State University ,

University Park , PA , USA
Published online: 20 Nov 2013.

To cite this article: Jill Williams & Vanessa Massaro (2013) Feminist Geopolitics:
Unpacking (In)Security, Animating Social Change, Geopolitics, 18:4, 751-758, DOI:
10.1080/14650045.2013.816842
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2013.816842

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Geopolitics, 18:751758, 2013

Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 online
DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2013.816842

INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL SECTION

Feminist Geopolitics: Unpacking (In)Security,

Animating Social Change

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JILL WILLIAMS
Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, Worcester, MA, USA

VANESSA MASSARO
Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

This piece is the introduction to a special section on Feminist

Geopolitics focusing specifically on securitisation. This introduction provides an overview of the field of feminist geopolitics and
situates the contributions of the articles that follow. We argue that
the contributions to the section push the field in two distinct ways.
First, a number of the pieces draw important connections between
geopolitical and geoeconomic processes. Second, the pieces continue to excavate the complex relationship between geopolitical
processes and everyday life. Taken as a whole, this special section
highlights the utility of feminist geopolitical approaches for gaining
analytic clarity and thinking through and enacting positive social
change.

INTRODUCTION
In the years since Dowler and Sharp1 and Hyndman2 called for the integration of feminist theory, methodologies, and praxis into geopolitical analysis,
a significant body of feminist geopolitical work has developed.3 This broad
and growing body of scholarship challenges the dominant scale of traditional geopolitical inquiry, drawing attention to the everyday and embodied
sites and discourses through which transnational economic and political relations are forged and contested. This special section illustrates the continued
Address correspondence to Jill Williams, Clark University, Graduate School of Geography,
950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610, USA. E-mail: jiwilliams@clarku.edu
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utility of a feminist geopolitical approach through analyses of processes of

securitisation and their uneven effects.
Securitisation refers to diverse processes through which issues, spaces,
and subjectivities become targets of regulation and surveillance in the name
of ensuring security (e.g., economic, physical, cultural) for particular populations, most often the economically and politically privileged.4 Geographers
have been at the forefront of tracing such processes and linking them to
questions of power, politics and economics across the globe.5 Feminist geographers in particular have pointed to the ways in which these processes
shape and are shaped by banal, everyday practices and are experienced in
uneven ways depending on ones social positioning.6
In exploring issues of securitisation and (in)security, the articles that
compose this special section further challenge how security and securitisation are conceptualised in mainstream geopolitical literature. Much
mainstream scholarship on securitisation takes a top-down and state-centric
approach by studying discourses at the global scale, widespread state practices of risk-based surveillance and detention, or new military technologies
(e.g., drones). In contrast, this special section further contributes to understandings of securitisation by attending to everyday, lived experiences of
(in)security, drawing attention to the unexpected sites and subjects of
securitisation.
Utilising situated, embodied methodologies (e.g., in-depth interviews,
ethnography, participant observation) the contributors to this section highlight how efforts to secure and protect simultaneously create a diversity
of insecurities for women and otherwise marginalised populations and reinforce hierarchical power relations based on gender, race, and other axes of
difference. Through analyses of a wide range of topics including tourism,
gender-based development, intimate partner violence, state territorialisation,
and dispossession, the contributions to this section draw attention to the
ways in which (in)security is continually produced, negotiated, and contested
at multiple, interconnected scales.
In addition to highlighting the analytically astute and empirically rich
work being done by feminist political geographers, this section also offers
an important contribution to the field of feminist geopolitics by pressing
the boundaries of what counts as both geopolitics and feminist analysis.
Feminist geopolitical scholarship (and related work in the fields of feminist international relations and feminist political geography more broadly)
has long challenged the boundaries of the (geo)political, illustrating how
even the seemingly apolitical and intimate sites of the home and body
are fundamental loci at which geopolitical power is made and contested.
Contributors to this section continue to disrupt the boundaries and scales
of the geopolitical in linking seemingly local phenomenon and experiences (e.g., intimate partner violence, literacy classes, community organising)
with wider geopolitical processes and discourses of securitisation, disrupting

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overly simplistic global/local binaries. In what follows, we situate the contributions made by the articles and the special section as a whole within the
field of feminist geopolitics and geography more broadly.

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ATTENDING TO DIFFERENCE, ANIMATING SOCIAL CHANGE

Feminist geopolitics first emerged as a critique of the cultural turn in political
geography and the deconstructive tendencies of critical geopolitical scholarship. Feminist scholars argued that poststructural analyses of geopolitical
relations failed to link the discursive realm of representation to the lived
realities of individuals and communities, offering only a disembodied critical practice.7 Instead, feminist scholars suggested that a re-scaling of
geopolitical analysis was necessary. They argued that attending to the
everyday and embodied sites at which geopolitical relations are made
and contested would enable more politically powerful and relevant analyses. As Dowler and Sharp discussed, feminist geopolitics aims to ground
geopolitical discourse in practice and place to link international representation to the geographies of everyday life; to understand the ways in which
the nation and the international are reproduced in the mundane practices
we take for granted.8 In re-scaling geopolitical inquiry feminist scholars
attended to the uneven ways in which geopolitical processes shape the lives
of differently situated populations, drawing attention to how even the most
intimate and everyday aspects of life are key sites where geopolitical power
is (re)produced and negotiated.9
In drawing on a wide range of feminist theoretical and methodological insights, feminist work in the field of geopolitics aims to move beyond
critique, providing the vitality to animate social change.10 Through reflexive and collaborative methodological approaches including ethnography,
participant observation, in-depth interviews, and collaboration with nongovernmental organisations and social movements, feminist geopolitical
scholars highlight the complex topographies and cartographies of global
power as it reverberates dialectically through everyday life. For example,
the 2011 special section Feminist Engagements with Geopolitics in Gender,
Place, and Culture highlights the role of research praxis in producing feminist geopolitics as they emphasise the ethics of care central to feminist
methodological approaches. In illustrating the varied sites, processes and
subjectivities through which global power is forged, feminist examinations
of the geopolitical draw what Cindi Katz refers to as counter-topographical
lines of connection, struggle, and resistance lines that are necessary for
imagining and enacting creative social change.11
A central way in which feminist geopolitical scholarship aims to animate
social change is by attending to the entangled relationship between discourse
and materiality. While Dalby and others have illustrated how gendered

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tropes, ideologies, and discourses are key to the articulation of global

politics,12 feminist theory is particularly well suited to take the poststructural attention to discourse a step further. Feminist geopolitical scholarship
thus illustrates how discourse shapes the everyday, material lives of differently situated populations in ways that both enable and constrain political
action.13 It is this linking of the discursive and material, the symbolic and
the experiential, that enables feminist geopolitical analyses to be more than
critical practice or armchair theorising. Attending to the paradoxes and complications that arise when geopolitical discourse meets everyday life creates
challenges for imagining political solutions that do not unintentionally reproduce the very power relations we aim to challenge. We believe that it is
precisely this attention to complexity that makes feminist geopolitical analysis
both intellectually provocative and politically transformative.
In recent years, feminist scholars have drawn on critical race, postcolonial, and queer theory to move past women and gender as the sole
or primary focus of analysis, instead turning attention to the reproduction of global power and how such forces constitute and reinforce socially
produced and embodied differences (e.g., gender, race, class, sexuality).
Feminist approaches to geopolitical analysis increasingly apply an intersectional framework, explicitly tracing how various forms of socially produced
and embodied difference, and related discourses, shape and are shaped by
geopolitical processes.14 Thus, an intersectional feminist analysis examines
how intersecting forms of difference (e.g., gender, race, class, sexuality)
shape geopolitical relations and the daily lives of differently situated individuals and communities. In turn, many of the articles in this special section
explore the centrality of identity-based discourses in shaping the rhetorical
frameworks through which securitisation is justified.
By drawing attention to the less visible and marginalised sites of
geopolitical contestation and mobilising an intersectional approach, feminist
geopolitics has been a useful analytic for understanding transnational economic and political processes and the (re)production of hegemonic power
relations. The articles in this special section advance feminist geopolitical
scholarship by rigorously interrogating the concept of security in relation
to ongoing processes of securitisation. Each article ultimately questions the
type of security being created in a given context and for whom this security
applies. Collectively, the articles trace the way security manifests and coproduces insecurity in order to make visible what is oft rendered invisible in
securitisation and hegemonic geopolitical discourse.
The articles in this special section extend feminist geopolitical scholarship in two distinct ways. First, the contributions by Dowler, Ojeda,
Doshi and Casolo, and Clark draw important, though often unexamined,
connections between geopolitical and geoeconomic processes.
In their respective analyses of tourism as an economic development
strategy embedded within processes of both peace and militarised violences

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in Northern Ireland and Colombia, Dowler and Ojeda each draw attention to
the complicated processes through which spaces for tourism are produced.
Ojeda argues that tourism is an everyday geopolitical project through which
imaginative and material geographies of (in)security have been forged by
the Colombian state. In examining the state securitisation project Democratic
Security, Ojeda illustrates how efforts to secure tourists (and the capital they
bring) is made possible through practices of forced displacement and surveillance that create insecurities for non-tourist bodies (e.g., journalists, political
activists, union workers, human rights activists). As she shows, processes of
securitisation and touristification combine to create a new cartography of
security and leisure that underpins the myth of a post-conflict Colombia.
Dowlers piece similarly examines the role of tourism and hospitality in
a post-conflict context. Drawing on twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork
in West Belfast, she argues that the development of particular tourism efforts
illustrates a mode of hospitality that functions as a means of overcoming past
conflicts. Rather than reproducing geopolitical discourses of Irish nationalism and British loyalism, Dowlers analysis reveals a fluid understanding of
hospitality that promotes individuals confidence and security while minimizing fear in interactions not only between host and visitor, but also between
once rival communities. Most notably, her paper builds on her many and
varied contributions to both feminist geopolitics and understandings of the
specific, everyday geopolitics of West Belfast. In so doing, Dowler disrupts
the gendering of the local and the global, unhinges hospitality from binary
linkings of scale and gender and ultimately shows the utility of a prolonged
feminist geopolitical lens and research methodology.
Jennifer Casolo and Sapana Doshi combine their extensive research
working in rural Guatemala and Mumbai, India, to connect the geo-economic
with the geopolitical, sketching out what they term a transnational feminist
geopolitics. They argue that a feminist analytic is crucial for understanding processes of dispossession and the production of insecurity because
neoliberal development operates through the production of differences and
harnesses subjectivities that may domesticate dissent and/or foment confrontation. Thus a transnational feminist geopolitics attends to the way in
which difference is both mobilised and produced via transnational economic
transformations and resistances to them. Casolo and Doshi not only put feminist theory to work in understanding their empirical cases, but also offer up
an example of collaborative feminist praxis drawing counter-topographical
lines of connection across their disparate sites and enacting feminist collaborative practice by knitting their research together. In doing so, they open
new sites for resistance and possibility in the struggle against accumulation
by dispossession.
Clark contributes to feminist analyses of gender-based development programmes and their relationship to processes of state securitisation efforts.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork in urban southeast Turkey, she unpacks the

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everyday effects of state development programmes for Kurdish women, ultimately questioning the efficacy of state efforts to create security through
gender-based development programmes. In doing so, she develops a relational geography of human security through the concept of care. By tracing
the ways in which women differentially experience the classroom, the home,
and the courtroom, Clark illustrates how development programmes, and the
liberal discourses in which they are founded, fail to speak to the everyday realities of Kurdish women. An individualistic security framework that
assumes a detached, free-floating individual fails to account for the various
ways in which individuals are situated within families, communities, and
relationships of all kinds. In turn, the very programmes aimed at creating
economic and national security for the nation-state via the development of
the individual, produce a whole set of insecurities for the women who are
both the objects and subjects of development interventions.
The second set of articles extends feminist geopolitical scholarship by
further excavating the dialectical relationship between geopolitical processes
and everyday life. In doing so, the papers by Cuomo, Lalibert, and Williams
and Boyce further push us to reconsider the boundaries of the geopolitical.
In her paper, Cuomo draws on the logic of masculinist protection,
outlined by Iris Marion Young, to link intimate partner violence in Centre
County, Pennsylvania with global security interventions. In her analysis of
intimate partner violence, Cuomo demonstrates the hyper-focus of physical
security enacted through a logic of masculinist protection. This approach not
only stifles the agency of violence survivors, it effectively erases a range of
other possible securities, including emotional, mental, and financial security.
Cuomo notes the inability to attend to victims multiple and varying security
needs ultimately means masculinist protection can paradoxically result in
decreased security and increased fear for those whom the arrest is purported
to protect. Her application of a feminist geopolitical analytic to security sited
at the intimate first helps unpack a problematic approach to intimate partner
violence in the United States. Second, and perhaps more importantly, her
work connects this logic to global discourses of protection and subsequent
military domination across the globe. Her paper draws important lines of
solidarity across scales and experiences by rethinking both security and the
logic of protection that pervades all of our lives.
Lalibert links geopolitical discourses that are used to explain violence
and unrest in Northern Uganda to the situated people and places that are
made insecure by these discourses. Namely, she traces the monster narrative
surrounding Joseph Kony, leader of the Lords Resistance Army (LRA), and
how it functions to not only justify the Ugandan governments approach to
ending conflict (e.g., militarised intervention) but also serves to other the
people and places associated with Kony. By linking this representation of
Kony to the ways in which it shapes the everyday lives of individuals from
his hometown and ethnic group, Lalibert illustrates how security practices

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aimed at defeating a monster create insecurity for those often most affected
by the monster in question.
Williams and Boyce contribute to the emerging field of emotional
geopolitics through an examination of the dialectical relationship between
geopolitical transformation, namely militarised border enforcement, and the
emotional and affective experiences of those in the US-Mexico borderlands.
Their case is situated at the complex intersection between affect and emotion
and demonstrates the way fear and insecurity are reproduced through policy
and enforcement, which is then ironically used to justify further securitisation efforts. The outcome of emotionally motivated policy transformations is
border and immigration enforcement efforts that aim to quell the discomfort
of some while creating a whole range of new insecurities. In their attention
to the everyday lived experiences of people on the border, their paper helps
us understand the relationship between emotion, affect and political action
in such a way as to chart a path toward new geopolitical configurations on
the US/Mexico border.
Taken together, the contributions to this special section highlight the
utility of feminist geopolitical approaches for gaining analytic clarity and
thinking through positive social change. However, as Koopman has argued,15
feminist geopolitics does not just happen on the pages of academic journals
or in the ivory towers of the global north. Rather, as many of the case studies
discussed here illustrate, feminist geopolitical transformation is happening in
streets, homes, and communities throughout the world as individuals and
communities come together to create new forms of security that challenge
hegemonic geopolitical powers and make the everyday more livable for even
the most marginalised.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank Simon Dalby, Deb Cowen, Lorraine Dowler,
and Melissa Wright for guidance and feedback while putting together this
special section.

NOTES
1. Lorraine Dowler and Joanne Sharp, A Feminist Geopolitics?, Space & Polity 5/3 (2001)
pp. 165176.
2. Jennifer Hyndman, Mind the Gap: Bridging Feminist and Political Geography through
Geopolitics, Political Geography 23 (2004) pp. 307322.
3. Deborah Dixon and Sallie Marston, Introduction: Feminist Engagements with Geopolitics,
Gender, Place, and Culture 18/4 (2011) pp. 445453; Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner, Introduction:
The Global & the Intimate, Womens Studies Quarterly 34/1-2 (2006) pp. 1324; Rachel Pain and Susan J.
Smith, Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life, in Rachel Pain and Susan Smith (Eds.), Fear: Critical
Geopolitics and Everyday Life, vols. (Burlington: Ashgate 2008) pp. 124.

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4. Barry Buzan, Ole Wver, and Jaap De Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder:
Lynne Rienner Publishers 1998); Holger Stritzel, Towards a Theory of Securitization: Copenhagen and
Beyond, European Journal of International Relations 13/3 (2007) pp. 357383.
5. Stephen Graham, Laboratories of War: United States-Israeli Collaboration in Urban War and
Securitization, Brown Journal of World Affairs 17/1 (2010) p. 35; Deborah Cowen and Neil Smith, After
Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics, Antipode 41/1 (2009) pp. 2248.
6. For example, Sara Smith, Intimate Geopolitics: Religion, Marriage, and Reproductive Bodies in
Ladakh Leh, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102/6 (2012); Jennifer Fluri, Armored
Peacocks and Proxy Bodies: Gender Geopolitics in Aid/Development Spaces of Afghanistan, Gender,
Place & Culture 18/4 (2011) pp. 519536; Jennifer Fluri, Geopolitics of Gender and Violence from
Below, Political Geography 28 (2009) pp. 259265; Alison Mountz, and Jennifer Hyndman, Feminist
Approaches to the Global Intimate, Womens Studies Quarterly 34/1-2 (2006) pp. 446463; Lauren Martin,
Bombs, Bodies, and Biopolitics: Securitizing the Subject at the Airport Security Checkpoint, Social and
Cultural Geography 11/1 (2010) pp. 1734; Geoffrey Boyce and Jill Williams, Intervention: Homeland
Security and the Precarity of Life in the Borderlands, Antipodefoundation.org (2012); Juanita Sundberg,
Trash-Talk and the Production of Quotidian Geopolitical Boundaries in the US-Mexico Borderlands,
Social and Cultural Geography 9/8 (2008) pp. 871890; Cindi Katz, Banal Terrorism: Spatial Fetishism
and Everyday Insecurity, in Derek Gregory and Allan Pred (Eds.), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror,
and Political Violence, vols. (New York: Routledge 2007) pp. 349361; Louise Amoore, Algorithmic War:
Everyday Geographies of the War on Terror, Antipode 41/1 (2009) pp. 4969.
7. Hyndman (note 2) pp. 310311.
8. Dowler and Sharp (note 1) p. 171.
9. Dixon and Marston (note 3); Pratt and Rosner (note 3); Mountz and Hyndman (note
6) pp. 446463; Smith (note 6).
10. Quoted in Melissa Wright, Gender and Geography: Knowledge and Activism across the
Intimately Global, Progress in Human Geography 33/3 (2008) p. 379.
11. Cindi Katz, On the Grounds of Globalization: A Topography for Feminist Political Engagement,
Signs 26/4 (2001) pp. 12131234.
12. Simon Dalby, Gender and Critical Geopolitics: Reading Security Discourse in the New World
Disorder, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12/5 (1994) pp. 595612.
13. Melissa Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (New York:
Routledge 2006); Geraldine Pratt, Abandoned Women and Spaces of Exception, Antipode 37/5
(2005) pp. 10521078.
14. Kimberle Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence
against Women of Color, Stanford Law Review 43/6 (1991) pp. 12411299; Combahee River Collective,
The Combahee River Collective Statement, in Barbara Smith (Ed.), Home Girls: A Black Feminist
Anthology (New Brunswick: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press 1977) pp. 272282; Patricia Hill Collins,
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York:
Routledge 2000).
15. Sara Koopman, Alter-Geopolitics: Other Securities Are Happening, Geoforum 42/3
(2011) pp. 274284.