At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War
Dr. Jennifer Greenburg
Assistant Professor, International Relations
University of Sheffield
In Person Only (no Zoom):
GUGG 205
Sep 29, 2023, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Abstract
This talk will focus on the argument and findings of Jennifer Greenburg’s new book, At War with Women, which examines how the post-9/11 politics of gender and development have transformed US military power. Based on ethnographic fieldwork observing US military trainings during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, At War with Women investigates how the military translated development into a counterinsurgency weapon. After tracing the post-9/11 militarization of development through its colonial history, this talk will specifically focus on how military strategy depended on new forms of women’s labor. Despite women technically being banned from combat during these years, in practice they were deployed on all-female counterinsurgency teams to access Afghan women and their households. The military framed these women as “emotional experts of war” who could calm and soothe the victims of night raids or counsel male soldiers. This talk will interrogate how such gender meanings are part of a new imperial feminism that is central to understanding US hegemony today.
Bio
Jennifer Greenburg is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Sheffield. She is currently directing the collaborative research project, “Understanding and Reimagining US Beliefs about Militarism” in partnership with Brown University’s Costs of War project and Purdue University’s Public Policy Research Initiative. She publishes about US militarism as well as the political geography linking Haiti to the United States in journals such as Antipode, Political Geography, Gender, Place, and Culture, and more popular outlets such as The Conversation, Responsible Statecraft and Inkstick Media. She holds a PhD in Geography from UC Berkeley.
