Collier- Feminism and War

The readings this week investigate the relationships between liberalism, neoliberalism, and US imperialism.  With different foci they examine how violent practices like incarceration, counterinsurgency tactics, and settler colonial erasures are constitutive of the liberal nation-state and transnational “special relationships.”  Khalili and Feldman examine how these imperial tactics and knowledges rely on processes of racialization and connect to racial capitalism.  The selections on feminism and war add an analysis of the gendered and sexual components of US imperialism.

In the introduction to Feminism and War, the authors note the mobilization of “women’s rights” and claims of expanding democracy to rationalize imperial expansions.   Much like the discussion of homonationalism and queer liberalism last week, the application of “women’s liberation” for war provides another example of US exceptionalism.  Mohanty and the other authors center on US imperialism as, “it is impossible to understand ‘feminism and war’ on a global scale without understanding the specificities of the racist, heterosexist, and masculine practices and ideologies mobilized by a USA in pursuit of economic and political hegemony”(2).  The focus on anti-imperialist feminist projects allows for important critiques of carceral feminisms as well as the ways that US empire functions domestically and internationally.  These links are demonstrated particularly well in the dialogue between women of color who have served in the US military.  While PaintedCrow and Bhagwati discuss very different motives and histories that shaped their enlistment, they both described the complexities of belonging or not belonging to the "American way of life," and how existing racial and gendered hierarchies are magnified in the military.  They both challenge the notion of liberal violence as an aberration, connecting this to domestic projects of incarceration, sexism and racial othering, and consumption, explaining, “we are born and bred in the same country, inside the same system that preaches the notion of empowerment and respect through the use of violence”(Mohanty et al 98).  Their critique of empowerment as it connects to liberal feminist discourse demonstrates the challenges of multicultural assimilation into existing violent institutions and the importance of anti-imperialist feminist critiques and alternatives. 

These readings are useful for revealing relations and contradictions between domestic and international manifestations of US imperialism.  The turn to history in this methodology is also important for recognizing the US’s sustained relationship with war and violence, but through the different packaging of these technologies of control.  We’ve discussed issues of representation in research over the past several weeks.  This week’s readings, particularly Feldman’s project, provide important tools for analyzing the cultural work around empire and the politics of representation as they relate specifically to US hegemony.  

Feldman and Mohanty et al describe the implementation of racist, gendered, and xenophobic threat-production through permanent war and the rhetoric of “saving the nation”(Mohanty et al 4), which we are seeing with new vigor under the Trump administration.  How could we use these methodologies to describe and challenge the fear tactics, threat production, and capitalist expansions at work under the trump administration?