Analyzing gendered occupation power
RIS ID
51311
Abstract
Military occupations are implicitly masculine affairs. It is men who compose the majority of the military forces that undertake the tasks of occupation, and primarily men who command an occupation force. These men operate within the structures and culture of the hyper-masculinized military institution. Yet not only is the attempt to make masculinities more explicit in war, occupation and peacekeeping research quite recent, the more complex gendered impacts of military occupation have only begun to be interrogated. Women can be part of an occupation force. Both men and women are affected as the occupied. There are gender complexities and hierarchies within each side of the occupation power binary, that is within the occupiers and within the occupied. These webs of hierarchical and interactive gendered relationships are enacted in complex, diverse, and often contradictory ways. The aim of this edited collection of chapters by scholars, activists and those affected by occupation is to reveal the diversity of the gendered impacts of military occupation on both the occupier and the occupied. Attention is paid to the ways that occupation power is performed, negotiated and subverted on a daily basis through the questioning and interrogation of both normative and changing gender roles in occupation power hierarchies and in occupied societies and spaces.
Publication Details
De Matos, C. M. & Ward, R. G. 2012, 'Analyzing gendered occupation power', in C. M. De Matos & R. Ward (eds), Gender, Power, and Military Occuapations: Asia Pacific and the Middle East since 1945, Routledge, New York. pp. 1-19.