Abstract
This chapter begins with establishing feminist theory’s dominant narrative on Women and War before problematizing it via Queer theory. As feminist theory in International Relations emerged in the 1980s, it began to articulate and problematize the binary of the Just Warrior and the Beautiful Soul. These two figurations, of a chivalrous man fighting war on behalf of state and the nurturing woman, who is in turn located as either safely behind the lines or as a victim of war, helped feminist thought to identify where women were in war and how this led to expectations of women as (lesser) citizens. Yet, feminist theory has come a long way in the past 30 years and this binary should be problematized, particularly as not all men are soldiers and some are indeed victims of war and not all women are passive in war but are actively engaged in the fighting. Thus, we aim to ‘queer’ how men and women are located in war and how this leads to queering the politics of sovereignty and citizenship.
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Gentry, C.E., Wilson, R. (2023). Women and War. In: Williams, H., Boucher, D., Sutch, P., Reidy, D., Koutsoukis, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of International Political Theory. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36111-1_26
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