(Note: This post is cross-posted at the Columbia University Press Authors’ Blog)Â
Over the last couple of years, the US military has begun to employ FETs (Female Engagement Teams) in Afghanistan, characterizing their purpose as “to engage the female populace” of the country. The mission of these groups of female soldiers seems to be divided between victim services, trust building, influence seeking, and intelligence gathering. Many feminist scholars (e.g., Keally McBride and Annick T. R. Wibben) have expressed their deep concerns about both the effectiveness of FETs and the ideas about sex, gender, and warfare that their deployments suggest the US military holds.
My recent book, Gendering Global Conflict, is not about FETs specifically, but it does provide insight into this (and hopefully a number of other) problems of sex, gender, and war. It argues that, in order to understand fully how something like an FET became possible, we have to be able to see gender subordination and war-fighing as mutually constituted. Understanding that, it argues, provides insight into a number of other policy choices and theoretical assumptions in the security sector that might initially appear paradoxical when approached from a feminist perspective. The rest of this post discusses that with regard to FETs.
Like many of the other examples in the book, I approach FETs with what Cynthia Enloe calls a “feminist curiosity” – looking for what assumptions about sex and gender a policy, idea, or interaction has to have in order to become what it is. Using a feminist curiosity to look at FETs, I think, is initially confusing. On the one hand, it is not only including women but utilizing skills they may be better at than men to a military advantage. That is a radical turn from a US military with a long reputation for sidelining women and femininity, and was perhaps a precursor to the lifting of the combat ban. This seems to suggest that the US military is becoming more open to women’s participation. The stated policy goal of FETs also seems woman-friendly: to interact with Afghan women without violating the sex and gender norms of “Afghan culture,” it is necessary to have women interact with women. This expresses a concern for both American and Afghan women.
At the same time, a feminist curiosity has to ask – what is it about being a woman in this discourse that makes the people who serve in FETs different? What assumptions about sex and gender do they make? Characterizations of FETs that talk about women soldiers doing victim services work assume that women soldiers are more sensitive than, and less dangerous than, male soldiers. Discussions that women’s ability to penetrate discussions in Afghan women’s homes make both culturally essentialist suggestions about Afghani women and gender essentialist assumptions about American women’s ability to have and communicate care and empathy. Policy statements which relate FETs to a “softer side” of the US military imply that the presence of women makes the US military somehow less violent or threatening. All of these assumptions share the idea that women are different than, and more peaceful than, men. They also share an understanding that men (as masculine) and women (as feminine) serve differentiated roles in war.
It is not only the American men and women that the deployment of FETs makes assumptions about, however. Their deployment is framed as much as an intelligence mission as it is a diplomatic mission – many of the official military statements suggest that Afghan women know things, and that they will only open up to other women. Helping Afghan women, then, becomes instrumental to gain their trust. Feminist scholars have for decades been suggesting that it is important to see and understand people whose lives are traditionally left out of war stories – women, children, and minorities at the margins of global politics. But this suggestion has always been about the value of those people for their own sake, rather than about co-opting their knowledges for the purposes of traditional warfare. The deployment of FETs seems to make Afghan women visible in war – but, cruelly, only as subjects and objects of influence-spreading and intelligence-gathering.
For these and many other reasons, the deployment of FETs seems on-face ridiculous to me as a feminist scholar – women are not to be essentialized or instrumentalized; the idea that men are masculine and women are feminine is oversimple; this is a move to reify the gendered nature of war rather than to relieve it. To me, though, these are the simple questions and the easy answers. The hard question – and the one engaged in Gendering Global Conflict – is how this policy came to look like a good idea to the United States military, and how the military can claim its “success.”
Gendering Global Conflict suggests that it is impossible to accurately think about the existence, constitution, causes, and consequences of war and conflict without thinking about gender. By “gender,” I mean the assumptions about men and women, masculinities and femininities, and sexuality that overlay military discussions from who makes war against who to how peacekeepers treat civilians. I argue that logics of gender domination (looking to achieve idealized masculinity) and gendered protection (looking to find that masculinity by protecting feminized others) are a condition of possibility of war and conflict, and reverberate through war decision-making across the levels of analysis (the system, dyadic relationships, state decisions, and individual action) as well as across the parts of war (policy decision-making, strategy, tactics, and logistics). Chapters on each of these levels and parts explore in-depth the entrenched nature of gender norms about people and about states without which war as it currently exists would be unimaginable.
So what does that have to do with FETs? It means that FETs are not just a poorly calculated decision by people who do not understand gender politics. In fact, given the gender norms under which the US military operates, they might even be a well-calculated decision by people who understand how gender politics play out “on the ground.” Looking for the problems with FETs in the decision to make and deploy them, I argue, is short-sighted. All of the inaccurate assumptions about sex, gender, and war that go into that decision were always and already present in the militarist structure of the American state – and its not just the US.
That is why, whether it is the deployment of FETs or the phenomena of wartime rape, it is important to see the operation of gender norms and gender subordination in the logics of war, as well as in its practices. As Gendering Global Conflict concludes, it is only then that it will be possible both to make sense of and to fight against gender injustice, both in war and outside of it.
Another set of questions that seems to follow from this post, but part of a slightly different feminist curiosity: What are the conditions that make a transcendental category of woman possible? How does this transcendental concept of woman lead to particular valorizations of agency? Answering both questions might tell us about the instrumentalization of particular version of feminism by the US military and tell us why FETS have become possible now (rather than during the Cold War).
It might, but it seems unlikely to do so. I suspect the use of FETS is driven by operational needs/wants, not transcendental categories or concepts.
As if those are even possibly unrelated?
Actually I meant that I doubt that anyone has a transcendental category or concept of woman.
You’re missing the point. I am not sure where I need to jump into the minds of decision makers and talk about motives at any point in my claims above; rather, suggesting that a particular outcome derives from sets of conditions seems to be one of many types of explanations in the social sciences (and one that I am trying to use above). As Laura kindly implies below, we may be profess our resolve to escape problems of representation and abstraction, but that does not mean that we have actually done so.
Sure, but it strikes me that this is very unlikely to be a useful explanation of FETS. That something occasionally occurs in the social sciences doesn’t mean it’s any good, all the sciences, both social and natural, have gone down dead ends from time to time.
I think I’m lost – I don’t think the initial post or Matt’s reaction were about “explaining” – rather, they were about “how-possible” questions.
I’m not following your parsing. Let me try to explain my own thinking and then you can point out what I’m missing, if you like. Constitutive thinking about discourses or social systems might say that particular outcomes are possible or retroactively explain things from the elements of the larger whole; this seems like an explanation to me. Perhaps it’s a different type of explanation than what some other folks might want, but it still tries to offer deeper meaning about an event (through sometimes causal-like language). For example, within the field of IR, Wendt suggested a decade ago why a one world state was inevitable (because of boundary conditions of the world system itself). We may entirely reject this claim by Wendt, but it’s an explanation. Constitutive thinking need not confine itself to system theory or systematic constructivism, but a range of other theories with radically different ontologies, epistemologies, and metaphysics.
Matt said originally that answering his two questions “might … tell us why FETS have become possible now” and in his reaction used the word “explanations”. I only used the word explanation after Matt introduced it.
I don’t know what distinction you are making between a “how-possible question” and an explanation.
“Characterizations of FETs that talk about women soldiers doing victim services work assume that women soldiers are more sensitive than, and less dangerous than, male soldiers. Discussions that women’s ability to penetrate discussions in Afghan women’s homes make both culturally essentialist suggestions about Afghani women and gender essentialist assumptions about American women’s ability to have and communicate care and empathy.”
The use of the words “assumption” and “suggestion” here imply that that there is not a reality behind these statements. In fact, I have spoken with U.S. troops who served in Afghanistan. One (a medic) told me that in nine months in Afghanistan he never had the opportunity to speak to an Afghan woman. That did not reflect an “assumption,” rather it was a restriction that was imposed upon him by the society in which he operated. I appreciate the concern that these teams have co-opted Afghan women, but to make statements like that quoted above–which make it sound like “cultural essentialism” did not reflect realities in the political environment–strike me as inaccurate.
If essentialism “reflects reality” than it is okay? Rather than just creating a vicious cycle of essentialism and social construction? That’s like the realists who suggest that they are ok to omit women from their analysis because they are interested in the power structure of the world, in which women are irrelevant?
Isn’t that irrelevant to Kelly’s point? That the Afghan cultural separattion of men and women is socially constructed and could very easily have been different in the past and be different in the future doesn’t change that right now in our world men generally will not get to talk and work with Afghan women who are not related to them.
To give an example, there’s no essential reason why I only speak and read English, but if you want to communicate with me then speaking Japanese at me is dooming yourself to failure.
That Afghan women would be much more likely to talk to other women matches with what I’ve read of Afghan culture even before the Soviet invasion (I read an account by a Dutch woman anthropologist who made friends with a number of local women. ) I don’t see any inaccurate assumptions here.
And what’s the complaint about instrumentalising on about? The US military isn’t in Afghanistan (or anywhere else, including the USA) for academic reasons, it’s entirely sensible from its perspective to instrumentalise Afghan women, or any other group that it interacts with, including its own soldiers and its own generals, nothing ridiculous at all. Indeed the question of whether the US military could better accomplish its aims if it didn’t instrumentalise people rather mistakes the whole definition of instrumentalistion.
That Afghan women would be much more likely to talk to other women matches with what I’ve read of Afghan culture even before the Soviet invasion (I read an account by a Dutch woman anthropologist who made friends with a number of local women. ) I don’t see any inaccurate assumptions here.
And what’s the complaint about instrumentalising on about? The US military isn’t in Afghanistan (or anywhere else, including the USA) for academic reasons, it’s entirely sensible from its perspective to instrumentalise Afghan women, or any other group that it interacts with, including its own soldiers and its own generals, nothing ridiculous at all. Indeed the question of whether the US military could better accomplish its aims if it didn’t instrumentalise people rather mistakes the whole definition of instrumentalistion.
I tried to write the post without registering objections (on feminist and many other grounds) to the US presence in Afghanistan, and suggest that, from a position that approves of that, this is still problematic.
Yes, that’s what I’m puzzled by. Given that you’re writing from that perspective, why do you think the FETs are ridiculous or problematic given the US military’s objectives?
The easiest one is that it relies on an oversimplified understanding of the ‘unfriendliness’ of the ‘Afghan people’ being based on personal distrust and healable by personal trust? (scare quotes because both concepts are silly, but nonetheless part of policy discourse)
I don’t see such an assumption being made in the materials you’ve linked to. And you yourself in the post above state something different:
If your original statement is true then the US military is not relying on an oversimplified understanding. (And even if your statement is false, that still doesn’t explain why you brought in comments about instrumentalising Afghan women given that you were deliberately writing from a (artificial i presume) position that approves of the US’s presence in Afghanistan).
As for “unfriendliness” and “Afghan people”, I think that both concepts are generally sensible. They may be misapplied in any particular situation, but that’s true of *any * concept, such as instrumentalisation.