Book talk - Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Training Peacekeepers

The practice of "gender training" has gained widespread popularity among numerous professions in the last few decades, even becoming a requirement for soldiers and police officers deploying overseas as peacekeepers. But what happens when the concept of gender, the analytical purchase of which we owe to feminist activism and scholarship, is taken up by martial institutions shaped by hegemonic masculinity? This ethnographic study examines how gender is conceptualised, taught, and learned in these settings, and with what political effects. The book argues that this training constitutes a deeply ambivalent practice. On the one hand, it reinscribes the logic that martial force is an appropriate solution to gendered insecurities, and affirms attachments to normative heterosexuality. On the other hand, this training exposes contradictions that inhere to the logics of martiality, coloniality, and heteronormativity that structure the peacekeeping enterprise. Drawing on queer and postcolonial feminist thought, Fixing Gender examines the contradictory politics of gender training, arguing that we need to develop the analytical tools to grapple with paradoxical practices that are simultaneously good and bad feminist politics.

Find out more and purchase the book via this link

Speakers 

Dr Aiko Holvikivi is Assistant Professor of Gender, Peace and Security at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. She is author of Fixing Gender (OUP) and  co-editor of Transnational Anti-Gender Politics (Palgrave). She was the recipient of the 2020 Michael Nicholson thesis prize from BISA.

Chair 

Dr Nancy Annan

Registration will close two hours before the event begins.