Gender, visuality and violence: visual securitization and the 2001 war in Afghanistan

ABSTRACT

Visual securitization (the discursive processes by which images are assigned security implications) is integral to understanding how war and political violence is made possible. However, its insights have yet to be coupled with feminist international relations (IR) scholarship, which is alert to the connections between gender and (in)security. This article synthesizes these two research areas through Lene Hansen’s (2011) framework of visual securitization to investigate the gendered logics that underpinned the 2001 war in Afghanistan. By analyzing 123 photojournalistic images alongside American media texts and foreign policy discourse, I argue western images of Afghan women enacted a specific visuality through which they became constructed as a legitimate matter of security. The article makes two important contributions through this analysis. Firstly, it extends feminist understanding of the war in Afghanistan by demonstrating how the interplay between the visual and textual, and the gendered and racial logics operating within such interplay, visually produced Afghan women as a referent object of security. Secondly, this argument illustrates how gender can be critical in enabling the acceptance of visual securitizations, and how such securitizations can be enacted through gendered representations of insecurity and threat.

KEYWORDS:

• Afghanistan
• visual securitization
• war on terror
• feminist international relations
• gender

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Amanda Chisholm and Rachel Woodward for their thoughtful and supportive comments on an earlier draft of this article and two anonymous reviewers for their extremely constructive feedback. The author would also like to thank Laura Considine for her support and guidance during the completion of the research upon which this article is based.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Matthew Kearns is a doctoral candidate in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University, UK. He holds a BA (Hons) Politics from the University of Sheffield and an MA International Relations from the University of Leeds. His doctoral research investigates the relationship between military masculinities and contemporary recruitment practices in the British Armed Forces. Through this, his research engages with broader feminist debates concerning how gender is performed and negotiated within state militaries and the conditions through which this might shift to disrupt masculine privilege.

Notes

1. See for example Hunt (2002); Hunt and Rygiel (2006); Masters (2009); Nayak (2006); Shepherd (2006); Steans (2008) and Zine (2006).

2. I use the term burka throughout this article, as this is the term used within the textual representations analyzed. I recognize that the practice of “covering” is highly complex and varies across cultural and spatial context.

3. I have elected not to reproduce the images within this article, as it is my contention that the circulation of such images and the strategic depictions they employ is critical to the enablement of political violence, as I demonstrate through my analysis.