AMINA MAMA - Challenging militarized masculinities
It is not that ‘masculinity’ generates war, as the question has been put, but rather that the process of militarization both draws on and exaggerates the bipolarization of gender identities in extremis. Amina Mama writes from the Nobel Women's Initiative conference in Belfast.
Militarism and hetero-normative gender identities are co-constitutive. It is not that ‘masculinity’ generates war, as the question has been put, but rather that the process of militarization both draws on and exaggerates the bipolarization of gender identities in extremis. Mustering troops is all about the mobilization of men into aggressive expressions of hyper-masculinity – they are ‘pumped up’ and as it were to facilitate their most murderous and pornographic capabilities. This is not just a masculinizing process of a particular quality, but an inter-sectional dynamic that also ‘works’ ethnicity, religion and other social distinctions, and very often appeals to racial supremacist constructions of ‘the enemy’. This is not just a matter of ‘prejudice’ or ‘traditional gender stereotypes’ – because this gendering of subjectivity is a process that lies at the dehumanizing heart of a systemic shift towards “war preparedness”.
Even before war looms, the proclivity is there because the dynamic of gender is at the centre of modern Western statecraft itself – the very definition of the state includes the existence of a standing army. Societies that do and did not maintain the standing armies that characterize the modern state were not only vulnerable to conquest. They were also regarded as “primitive”. “Acephalous” was one term used by colonial anthropologists to describe the decentralized Igbo socio-political formations that Chinua Achebe & Ifi Amadiume recuperate in their writings.Patronizing depictions of alternative political systems provided justifications for imposing patriarchal and militarized systems of governance on some these more interesting precursors to patriarchal capitalism.
Colonial officers are on record as having responded to their encounters with non-militarized societies that did not subordinate women in the way that Europeans considered civilized by advocating ‘making men of the natives’ by creating armies (Mies 1986). What were initially frontier forces used to guard occupied territories from rival occupiers (Brits vs. French vs. German etc) were also used to suppress dissent. Recall that the Women’s Wars in Nigeria were suppressed using colonial forces schooled in misogynistic and ethno-religious contempt– Hausa troops were brought in to gun down Igbo women – a sad theme that was to be repeated in the anti-Igbo pogroms that erupted in the town were I grew up, as Nigeria descended into the civil war.
And of course the mass conscription/recruitment of colonized men into the first and second World Wars shows us how this served empire. The social costs of that massive removal and militarization of millions of African men in colonial armies have never been even estimated (e.g. over 100,000 men were conscripted from French Sudan in the first World War, many thousands more in the second)... read more:
