India, South and South East Asia Project

Gendering (In)Security: The Exclusionary Effects of the Global Neo-Liberal Turn

Two-day workshop at the University of Hull

1-2 July 2016

 

Organised jointly by:

University of Hull, School of Politics, Philosophy and International Studies

SOAS South Asia Institute

 

The literature of feminist security studies has highlighted that gender is central in the construction of security and insecurity for all actors in the international arena. A lot of work has already been done in determining how gender affects actors’ security and insecurity in relation to war, especially in the Global South (Enloe 2000). However, far less time and effort has been committed to the study of gender-specific insecurities generated in the context of the global project of neo-liberalism which has seen intensifying conditions of exclusion, dispossession and inequality. The (in)securities produced by conflicts and occupations in the Middle East and elsewhere have highlighted the gender effects of national and international neo-liberal governance, not least in the creation of refugees. The moral policing of and sexual violence against women in India highlights ruptures between traditional notions of regulated femininity, on the one hand, and evolving forms of capitalist economic penetration in all aspects of society and culture on the other.

 

Rather than delivering rights, freedoms and liberating effects by emphasizing private property and the individual, neo-liberalism, as David Harvey (2003) points out, has led to the incorporation of those ‘outside’ through processes of ‘accumulation by dispossession’.  A gender analysis of the neo-liberal turn highlights how women left ‘outside’ processes of accumulation are implicit in the contours of emerging economic, social and political formations. Public spaces have become contested zones for women’s presence in contemporary India where ‘freedom’ and so-called ‘rights’ are at odds with the imperatives of capital and ‘development’. In other contexts, the decline of welfare provision as part of the scaling down of the state’s role in the provision of health and other basic needs assumes that the family and its gendered caring and reproductive functions will provide a safety net. This places further pressures upon households to be both producers and consumers. Simultaneously, exploring the tensions produced as a result of the encroachment of neoliberalism reveals the emerging gender-specific insecurities generated in the context of the interplay of markets, capital and security. Indeed, security and insecurity in this context, are symbiotically tied to one another and require an analytical lens attentive to the structural dimensions of gender as part of the broader architecture of societies.

 

At the same time, a narrow focus on purely ‘feminist standpoints’ runs the risk of reaffirming injustices by mobilizing around identities which reflect the structures of domination and ‘states of injury’ (Brown 1995), while ignoring the particular and contextual. Here we opt for a more nuanced understanding of gender which goes beyond crude conflations of (bad) masculinities with war and (good) femininities with peace (Stern and Zalweski 2009). Particularly in the areas of security studies and international relations, the predominance of scholarship concentrating on issues of war and the relations of states (Enloe 2000; Elshtain 1987) has also led to a silencing of approaches addressing structural, systemic violence and exclusions (True 2012; Eisenstein 2004).

 

This two-day workshop aims to posit gender at the centre of cutting-edge international, local, and global developments by bring together scholars exploring a range of topics engaging with the contemporary evolving context of security and insecurity. Without overstating the case of ‘feminist foundationalism’ (Brown 1995), this workshop aims to bring together scholars working on and around the area of gender and (in)security that interrogate the global neo-liberal turn. Papers are invited from scholars working on, though not limited to, the following areas of concern:

 

• Security and insecurity

• Contestations over access to public space

• Markets, consumers, and neo-liberal 'ethics'

• Possession and dispossession

• Sexual violence

• Occupation, conflict and war

• Gender contours of religious supremacy

• 'Rights' and exclusions

• Policy frameworks and states of exclusion

• Migration, refugees, and borders

• Sex, culture and the body politic

• Communication technologies and social media

• Legal state frameworks and summative justice

• Family, community, and the state

• (Dis)Inheritances of culture and capital

 

This workshop is being hosted by the University of Hull in collaboration with the SOAS South Asia Institute.