My research on gender studies militarised masculinities to understand how gendered political identity reproduces state power and shapes citizens’ propensity to engage in violent conflict.
In this project, I’ve published on the role of masculinity in projecting authoritarian power, as well as naked protest as a form of political mobilisation that is especially important in politically repressive contexts. I’ve also looked at how different masculine ideal types intersect and produce state authority in the everyday. I am extending these insights to examine how citizens’ gendered and embodied interactions with coercive state institutions produce state authority in daily life.
The Paradox of Restraint: Militarized masculinities and arbitrary power in the everyday (book project)
How do states exercise discretionary violence? In many senses, this question has been well-treated, not least by scholars of feminist international relations. This literature poignantly illustrates that the state’s organizational structure is embedded within and co-produced by gendered discourses, performances, and encounters between people and (inter)national institutions that both restrain and organize the use of violence, and give social and political meaning to its discretionary use. A central strand of this scholarship focuses on militarized masculinities as a nexus of gender, violence, and state authority, which can provide insight into how state authority manifests everyday life. Working in this tradition, this project studies citizens’ gendered encounters with coercive state institutions. The analysis identifies a logic of state violence that is unpredictably patterned and discretionary, and that is a powerful source of state authority in the everyday. In doing so, the book reconceptualizes the constitution of state power—rather than a well-defined relationship between discretionary and patterned violence (whether an equilibrium, dialectic, balance or other), arbitrary violence and its constraints can instead be sustained in an unpredictable tension. The findings contribute to multiple scholarships on violence and the state, demonstrating how this type of gendered analysis can nuance and enrichen understandings of their core problematic.