Victims, soldiers, peacemakers and caretakers: the neoliberal constitution of women in the EU’s security policy

ABSTRACT

Feminist scholars praise and criticize the UNSC Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security for its considerations of women and gender in conflicts. Poststructuralist feminists show how gender is constructed in the UN’s security policies and how these constructions reproduce gendered dichotomies between women and men and representations of women as victims, part of civil society and neoliberal subjects. Although the UNSC Resolutions 1325 and 1820 are implemented by the EU, there is no literature on how the EU is taking up the UN’s discourse. Scholars studying gender policies in and of the EU mainly analyze the (in)effectiveness of EU gender mainstreaming but rarely interrogate its discursive foundations. Using a governmentality perspective, I argue that on the one hand the EU produces a binary and stereotypical understanding of gender, and on the other hand constitutes women as neoliberal subjects responsible for their own well-being, ignoring broader structures of (gender) inequality and war and making gender equality solely an instrument to achieve more security and development.

KEYWORDS:

• governmentality
• EU
• gender
• security
• neoliberal

Acknowledgments

I presented the first draft of this article at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in New Orleans in February 2015 and the European Conference on Politics and Gender at Uppsala University in June 2015. I want to thank the participants of both panels for providing very constructive criticism and encouraging me to continue working on this article. Further, I am thankful to Stefan Borg for his very good comments. Also, I am indebted to the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal for very fruitful feedback which has greatly shaped this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Hanna L. Muehlenhoff is a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam Centre for Contemporary European Studies (ACCESS EUROPE), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Prior, she was a lecturer and research associate at the Institute of Political Science, University of Tuebingen. Her research interests include the international relations of the EU – with a focus on Turkey–EU relations and EU civil society funding – and poststructuralist and feminist approaches to international politics. Among her latest publications are an article on the depoliticizing effects of EU civil society funding in Turkey in the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies (2014) and an article on the ambiguities of power in Turkey–EU relations in Cooperation and Conflict (2016).