Armored peacocks and proxy bodies: gender geopolitics in aid/development spaces of Afghanistan (original) (raw)
Related papers
Foreign Passports Only”: Geographies of (Post)Conflict Work in Kabul, Afghanistan
Annals of The Association of American Geographers, 2009
Geopolitical “peace-building” relies increasingly on intersections of neoliberal economies of war, violent conflict, and corruption. This article addresses U.S.-led international (post)war aid and development through a spatial examination of Kabul, Afghanistan, examining international worker epistemologies of Afghanistan and “post” conflict aid and development to investigate the spaces of privilege and power associated with political influence, (in)security, and economic and spatial inequities (2006–2008). I draw on recent scholarship in critical feminism, geography, and development studies and the work of Giorgio Agamben regarding the sovereign body and state of exception to demonstrate the spatial disparities and resource inequalities between the “international community” defined as the (un)commonwealth and “local” Afghans. I examine the sovereign status of the (un)commonwealth who manage, assist, or financially profit from international aid and development economies through four interrelated themes: economic and spatial exclusion, (in)security, mobility, and cosmopolitan auxiliary economies. La “construcción de paz” geopolítica depende cada vez más de las intersecciones entre economías neoliberales de guerra, el conflicto violento y la corrupción. Este artículo se ocupa de los programas internacionales liderados por EE.UU. para proporcionar ayuda de (post)guerra y desarrollo, mediante un estudio espacial de Kabul, Afganistán, examinando las epistemologías internacionales del trabajador de ese país y los programas de ayuda y desarrollo “post” conflicto, para investigar los espacios de privilegio y poder asociados con influencia política, (in)seguridad y desigualdades económicas y espaciales (2006–2008). Mi trabajo toma en cuenta los recientes desarrollos del feminismo crítico, estudios de geografía y desarrollo, y el trabajo de Giorgio Agamben relacionado con el cuerpo soberano y el estado de excepción, para demostrar las disparidades espaciales y desigualdad de recursos entre la “comunidad internacional,” definida como la “(in)comonalidad” [(un)commonwealth], y los afganos “locales.” Examino el estatus de soberanía de la (un)commonwealth que maneja, ayuda o se lucra financieramente de la ayuda internacional y las economías del desarrollo, a través de cuatro temas interrelacionados: exclusión económica y espacial, (in)seguridad, movilidad, y economías auxiliares cosmopolitas.
Geopolitics of gender and violence ‘from below
Political Geography, 2009
This article examines geopolitical violence, gender and political constructions of scale from the site of the body to international discourse and politics. The political constructions of scale and body-politics analyzed in this study draw on feminist and political geographic analysis and an empirical study of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). This study includes an examination of state, military and paramilitary violence from below as articulated through the lens of RAWA's documentation and political framing. RAWA clandestinely used photographic and video technologies to document the corporeal results of state/military violence and politically constructed scale by way of linking this violence to international discourses and political action. A number of opportunities, challenges, and pitfalls are identified as part of RAWA's geopolitics of violence from below. The post 9-11-01 U.S.-led military invasion of Afghanistan demonstrates a significant shift in the management and manipulation of RAWA's documentation. Both the U.S. and RAWA politically constructed scale and drew upon western-led ''universal'' moralities and human/women's rights discourses for alternative purposes. This paper also discusses the use of gender politics and its various manipulations to resist, criminalize, or legitimize the use of violence in the name of human/women's rights.
Dynamis, 2024
This article is concerned with the ways in which humanitarian imaginaries in post-9/11 Afghanistan have shaped representations of women's needs as well as programs designed to answer them. Its aim is to examine the 'dark side' of care and the politics of worthiness on which humanitarianism relies. In conversation with scholars who have highlighted the disciplinary aspects of care, I show how apparently well-intentioned humanitarian discourses and practices have drawn boundaries within the Afghan population and reinforced nationalist sentiments. I argue that Orientalist imaginaries of Muslim women in need of rescue did not only serve to justify the military intervention but also the presence of international humanitarian organizations. Furthermore, such colonial fantasies have actualized specific regimes of care based on liberal notions of self-empowerment. The technologies of the 'self' on which these programs have relied have overlooked the various forms of structural inequalities responsible for triggering crises in the first place and the broader dynamics of violence and abandonment that have marked the history of the West's engagement with Afghanistan since the 1990s. The return of the Taliban in 2021 should therefore not solely be understood as the mere result of military strategies and political negotiations but also as the outcome of a broader movement of resistance against this humanitarian ideology, locally perceived as a form of cultural imperialism.
Introduction: Feminist Engagements with the Geopolitical
Here, we introduce a themed set of articles that, using diverse feminist knowledges and practices, aims to expose the force relations that operate through and upon bodies, such that particular 'geopolitical' subjectivities are enhanced, constrained and put to work, and particular corporealities are violated, exploited and often abandoned. The substantive scope of these articles highlights the relevance of such feminist analysis, not as a universalising framework, but as a project of universal reach. The empirical depth of this work, founded upon (variously) a committed period of fieldwork, the careful gathering of lengthy, in situ interviews, participant observation, focus groups, visual methodology and months spent in the archives highlights a complex, feminist ethics of care. Taken as a collection, what we hope these articles make clear are the manifold struggles within feminist analysis in regard to 'researching with' embodiment, agency, passivity, vulnerability, emotion, praxis and care.
Feminist Geopolitics: Redefining the Geopolitical, Complicating (In)Security
Geography Compass, 2013
This paper traces the development of feminist geopolitics as a distinct analytical, epistemological, and methodological approach in geography. Feminist geopolitics is explained as an analytic approach that connects seemingly disparate people, places, events, and issues to show the connections across various operations of power and productions of inequality and exploitation. In so doing, we demonstrate the ways in which feminist geopolitics challenges the scales of geopolitics and refocuses on the mundane, everyday reproductions of geopolitical power. We further discuss recent work in the field that examines issues of security and insecurity to illustrate what insights can be gained by employing a feminist geopolitical framework.
Gender, Place & Culture, 2009
This paper examines corporeal modernity as part of the larger 'savior and liberation' trope produced for Afghan women by US-led military, political and economic intervention post-9/11. This savior trope has been identified as a co-optation of women's rights discourses and activism (Hunt 2002), a misguided approach to security through gendered scripts of masculine aggressive protection and female submission (Young 2003; Dowler 2002), and as yet another example in a long history of gendered tropes devised by colonial and imperial powers to save Muslim women (Abu Lughod 2002). This study adds to existing feminist critiques of US intervention in Afghanistan by examining the Beauty Academy of Kabul and the participation of Miss Afghanistan in the 2003 Miss Earth Pageant as particular lenses through which the economic and corporeal 'liberation' of Afghan women was presented in the US. This economic approach occurs at the site and scale of the body in order to (re)define corporeal modernity through corporate driven, heteronormative, and hegemonic beauty standards.
Unsettling feminist geopolitics: forging feminist political geographies of violence and displacement
Gender, Place & Culture, 2019
Feminist geopolitics has analyzed violence across scales and critiqued the dominant epistemology of political geography for almost two decades. What theoretical and political purchase does it have today, given the potpourri of perspectives and reimaginings of the idea? Current research on violence, human displacement and the security of people out of place is used to explore answers to this question, finding that feminist political geographya bigger tent than just feminist geopoliticsis indispensable to geographical thinking. Recent non-human feminist geopolitics of 'earthliness' offer an original theoretical departure from what has come before, though truncate political possibilities by refusing to engage the individuated subjects of 'conventional' feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics and its consonant concepts remain relevant to addressing the fast violence of war, displacement, detention and the attendant waiting, or slow violence, that these power relations imply. Feminist geopolitics can and has been enriched by critical work on subaltern geopolitics and post-secular geographies and is shown to be vital to understanding human displacement for those living in the postcolonies of the global South. A case study of private refugee sponsorship to Canada is critically analyzed as one pathway out of protracted displacement. While resettlement is valorized by states and their civil societies as a laudable 'solution' offering permanent protection, a feminist geopolitical analysis exposes the Canadian Government's racialized preferences and prejudice against Sub-Saharan African asylum seekers, masked as geography. The research presented exposes some of the Orientalist assumptions that frame and figure private refugee sponsorship. Taking this Orientalist critique and these additional literatures into the fold of feminist geopolitics, 'feminist political geography' offers a larger umbrella under which to collaborate, innovate, and intervene in political struggles that interrupt salient geopolitics and state discourse across world regions and inhibit violence wherever possible.
International Journal of English Language, Literature, and Humanities , 2019
The life of almost every Afghan woman over the years has not been without turbulence due to traditional, societal norms which form the intrinsic part of Afghan culture. The recent official discovery of the practice of bacha posh (young girls are dressed up and raised as boys) in Afghanistan by an American journalist, Jenny Nordberg has resulted in a more serious academic engagement. She has given a detailed account of her interview with few bacha posh women in her non-fiction work, The Underground Girls of Kabul-The Hidden Lives of Afghan Girls Disguised as Boys. This paper is an attempt to delve deeper into the psyche of these women and examine the various forms of gendered violence which has struck the core of Afghan society. It mainly explores the factors surrounding the age-old practice of bacha posh