‘Gender’ is not enough

III
‘Gender’ is not enough: the need for a feminist consciousness
Cynthia Enloe
Reading Gillian Youngs’ pertinent essay reminded me of a recent conversation
with Carol Cohn, author of the now-classic article on the masculinized diver-
sionary discourse used by American national security strategists.1 Carol is
currently investigating the political dynamics that are shaping the relationships
between feminist NGOs and agencies of the UN responsible for peacekeeping
and postwar reconstruction. Carol and I were talking about the obstacles that
are put in the way of women’s meaningful inclusion in those war-ending pro-
cesses that United Nations personnel call ‘DDR’: disarmament, demobilization
and reintegration. I described what I had learned from participating in a recent
New York gathering on ‘gender and small arms trade’—one of those meetings-
after-the-meeting that can be so fruitful because the frustrations, successes and
puzzles of the larger formal meeting are still fresh in the mind. I had been struck
by the tales told by the two dozen participants—from the Congo, Mali, South
Africa, Norway, Britain and the US—of their attempts, to little avail, to put
masculinity on the formal agenda of the larger UN gathering. After all, how
could the current international relationships that facilitate the trade in rifles and
grenade launchers be understood without taking account of how men in the
trade weigh the masculinities of other men? Similarly, how could boys’ and
men’s reluctance to hand in their guns be adequately explained (and thus
addressed) by international peacekeepers if those gun-wielders were imagined as
caring nothing about their manly status in conditions of insecurity and instabi-
lity? Reasonable as these gendered questions seemed to most of us around the
table at the meeting-after-the-meeting, they had been shunted aside by most of
the delegates in the larger UN small arms trade forum. Masculinity, it seemed
clear, was just not taken seriously by many of those government and NGO
delegates, who were engaged in otherwise valuable work in transforming the
international political economy of war and peace. The general attitude seemed
to be, ‘When we’re talking here about life, death and hard trade data, how can
you bring up such fluffy stuff as identity?’
Of course, there was an alternative explanation for the delegates’ resistance to
allowing the politics of masculinity to be placed on the official table: perhaps it
was too hot to handle. That is, if the constructions of arms traders’ and arms
wielders’ masculinity were accorded public seriousness, then maybe the gendered
investments that many of the delegates themselves had in their own reputations
as manly, rational, international experts would become germane.
So it seemed crucial to me that we should promote an intellectual curiosity
about the myriad international political dynamics of masculinity. Carol agreed;

1 Carol Cohn, ‘Sex and death in the rational world of defence intellectuals’, Signs: Journal of Women and
Culture in Society 12: 4, 1987, pp. 687–718.

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but she reminded me that, as our colleague and friend Dyan Mazurana is wont
to warn us, we should not ‘lose sight of girls’ in these UN disarmament and
demobilization efforts. Dyan has become one of the most knowledgeable
researchers investigating the experiences of girls and young women in war
zones, especially as members of both government and insurgent armies. Carol
reminded me that, while it is true that masculinities often get swept under the
political and analytical carpet, when they are dragged out it is still men and boys
who tend to remain the centre of attention. It has proved consistently difficult
to get serious attention devoted to women and—especially—girls, and to how
their femininities are manipulated, by whom and for what ends.
Carol described how girls are rendered invisible sometimes even by people
who are self-conscious about the myriad genderings of international affairs. Not
long ago she attended another small international gathering, this time in
Ottawa. The purpose was to draft guidelines to be followed in negotiating
ceasefires, peace agreements and new constitutions. In deciding on the final
wording of the guidelines, participants had to choose a single word to describe
those people whose needs had to be explicitly taken into account in these delicate,
usually tense negotiations. The word they chose was ‘combatants’. Carol had to
remind everyone of what Dyan Mazurana and field workers from UNICEF had
been teaching us all: ‘combatants’ implies in the minds of too many people only
one sort of militarized person, someone who has been issued a gun. But girls
who have joined or have been abducted into militaries often aren’t used by the
men designing the force’s division of labour as weapon-carrying soldiers;
instead, girls and young women are usually deployed as cooks, porters, and
forced ‘wives’ of male combatants. These girls and young women are likely to
be made invisible—and thus their ideas and needs politically ignored—at every
step of the ‘DDR’ process if the discourse is simply about ‘combatants’.
Carol’s timely caveat made me think again about Gillian Youngs’ question:
what is making it so difficult for many academic IR practitioners to take
feminist analysis on board seriously? Perhaps it is a double fear: first, the fear of
having, if they themselves are male, to consider thoughtfully when and how
their own relationships to masculinity are affecting what they choose to deem a
‘serious’ topic of investigation; and, second, the complementary fear of appear-
ing somehow feminized in the eyes of those colleagues who will judge their
work, and accord it or deny it the mantle of ‘serious’.
Carol Cohn’s and Dyan Mazurana’s warning reminds us that those IR
specialists who manage to overcome the first of these fears might do so in a way
that simply builds a new, fashionable platform on which to privilege mascu-
linized International Relations: ‘masculinity’ will be endowed with academic
seriousness, but the subjects directed to the centre stage of research and teaching
will remain men. The second anxiety can infect both women and men making
their careers in IR—or making their careers in those professional arenas of
NGO or governmental or international agency work influenced by academic
IR culture. I still remember how nervous I was the first time I wrote a whole

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chapter devoted to military wives, when I was writing Does khaki become you? in
the early 1980s. I felt acutely vulnerable at openly declaring that I was taking
wives seriously as political actors. I honestly imagined that I was risking my very
tentative status as a ‘serious’ political scientist. Perhaps this is the sort of worry
that today many women and men in academic IR feel when deciding whether
to put ‘girls’ in the titles of their grant proposals, books, chapters and refereed
articles. It is always useful to bring professional defensiveness out into the open
and discuss it. If that anxiety-ridden defensiveness prompts us to hold on to an
unrealistically shrunken definition of what is political, then we need to dissect it
and defuse it now.
It is not that masculinity shouldn’t be investigated. As Gillian Youngs argues,
despite some of the eye-opening new work being done by academics such as
Charlotte Hooper, the varied causal roles of masculinities in the workings of
international politics and political economy remain woefully under-analysed.
Rather, the point is that ‘gender’ by itself is insufficient for creating a
transformed—more useful, more reliable—IR discipline. There needs to be a
feminist consciousness informing our work on gender. A feminist consciousness
is what keeps one taking seriously—staying intellectually curious about—the
experiences, actions and ideas of women and girls. Take away an explicit
interest in femininities, and it will be impossible to develop a reliable analysis of
masculinity.

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