Going Greenham/going Gaga on peace and security

Abstract

The remarkable correspondences between the 19-year occupation of what was a US Air Forces in Europe Base by the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp and Jack Halberstam’s depictions of new millennium Gaga feminism are revealed through a queer reading of Greenham women and their movement ephemera collected upon the 30th anniversary of the encampment’s beginnings. Although this destabilizes Halberstam’s claim that Gaga feminism is a new feminism, more importantly it raises questions about how the Gagaesque politics of Greenham have given way to a more ‘respectable’ and ‘straight’ feminist peace and security agenda and what the costs are of clinging to conventional feminist peace and security teleologies that render such ‘peace’ politics as passé, marginal, and (erroneously) gender normative with the rise of the UNSCR 1325 era and the shift to feminist security (or war) studies that have come to represent a feminist coming-of-age story. What if ‘we’ queered feminist ‘peace’ stories, defying the dead and deadening categories to which they have been consigned, including by ‘us’? How might going Greenham/going Gaga on peace and security teleologies change the way we imagine what non-normative bodies, relationships, and practices are open to us?

Keywords:

• Greenham
• Gagaesque
• queer
• peace
• normativities

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne Sisson Runyan

Anne Sisson Runyan is a professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati (USA). Her most recent books include Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium (2014), Feminist (Im)Mobilities in Fortress(ing) North America (2013), and Gender and Global Restructuring (2011). She is an associate editor of the International Feminist Journal of Politics.