War and matters of gender

DR GABRIELLE JAMELA HOSEIN

DOES gender matter to war? As we watch Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this is a question that hardly makes it to news coverage, though its answers can offer valuable analytical insight.

So, what does the question really explore? First, whether masculinities and femininities shape how people experience war and how those with power wield violence in international politics. We’ve seen how militaries are dominated by men and how men in particular become conscripted into a nation’s defence.

This happened a few days ago in Ukraine, when men 18-60 were banned from leaving the country and encouraged to join the army. On the other side of this are women who are left with responsibility for care for families, the aged and the ill, and for provision of food and water, which have long been responsibilities assigned to women. In this way, war relies on and reinforces stereotypical gender divisions, like most crises.

Second, the question directs us to look to leaders themselves and how they represent their power. Vladimir Putin’s highly crafted “badman” hyper-masculinity is part of his domestic gender politics and global gendered politics. This is not unusual.

Whether in relation to the Cold War confrontation between John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev over the Cuban Missile Crisis or now between Putin and Biden, it’s necessary to not appear “weak” and to talk tough. Pro-American propaganda machines are referring to the sanctions as “potent” economic warfare exposing Putin’s “shocking weakness.”

For both countries, nuclear weapons have long generated an imagery of competitive male sexuality, literally bombs are compared to the phallus (or erect penis), referred to as “big boy” and associated with penetration, just as the penis (though not in its usual soft and vulnerable state) is associated with a gun and semen described as bullets or blanks.

Nationally, Putin has backed a mix of positions with relation to gender and sexuality, for example, defending women’s right to work but also championing motherhood as an essential part of Soviet womanhood. Feminists have faced increased repression since Pussy Riot members were imprisoned, anti-domestic violence organisations were placed on “foreign agent” lists, and some forms of domestic violence were decriminalised in 2017.

More importantly, feminist scholars have pointed to the ways that gender is used for nation-building, through establishing state-friendly masculinised youth groups, and branding the West as gay, feminised, weak and immoral. Opposition leaders were photoshopped as transgender prostitutes, for example, and the Ukraine is represented as a “picky girl,” a “flighty mistress” and a western-dominated and dependent state.

Homosexuality is portrayed as European, making Russia’s emphasis on heteronormative militarised manhood appear morally superior, and legitimising domination of Ukraine. Russian propaganda also compares Ukraine to a prostitute, sleeping with the EU and US for money (and weapons). In such ways, gender and sexuality are always part of establishing the boundaries between “us” vs “them” and establishing justifications for violence and war.

Before he was killed on assignment in Libya, photojournalist Tim Hetherington compassionately represented military men, describing war as “one of the very few places where men can express love for each other without inhibition.” On the basis of his time in Liberia, he also observed how young rebel fighters re-enacted scenes from Hollywood films of war and combat like a “feedback loop.” Fighting became a stage to perform masculinity as portrayed by mass media just like gangs both provide the images for and then imagine themselves in relation to movies portraying gangsters as dominant men.

These gendered considerations appear peripheral to economic and imperial rationales for war, but only because there’s mainstream silence about their significance. They shape who leads nations, what kinds of security decisions they make, how they militarise societies to normalise armed violence against others, how they dehumanise death, and how much war (like gangs, like sports) is a site for competing patriarchies. Women have become more involved in militaries, but they haven’t changed this matrix of power, sexuality and gender.

Russian feminists are courageously condemning Putin’s war. One manifesto declares, “War means violence, poverty, forced displacement, broken lives, insecurity, and the lack of a future. It is irreconcilable with the essential values and goals of the feminist movement. War exacerbates gender inequality and sets back gains for human rights by many years. War brings with it not only the violence of bombs and bullets but also sexual violence…We are the opposition to war, patriarchy, authoritarianism, and militarism. We are the future that will prevail.”

May solidarity with a more feminist future bring us greater peace.