“Women helping women”: deploying gender in US counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Head, N. (2024) “Women helping women”: deploying gender in US counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Security Dialogue, 55(2), pp. 160-178. (doi: 10.1177/09670106231203839)

Abstract

Central to the goal of ‘hearts and minds’ counterinsurgency is the need for knowledge, understanding and influence in relation to local populations. Building on feminist scholarship on counterinsurgency, the article focuses on the ‘female engagement’ work undertaken by four programmes developed by the US military between 2003 and 2014. The article offers three key arguments. First, it maintains that the gendered subjectivities of Iraqi and Afghan women and US female counterinsurgents are constructed as strategic assets and as vulnerable subjects. Second, these programmes reveal the extent to which gendered counterinsurgency is constituted and regulated by emotional and embodied norms and rules for both female soldiers and civilians. Third, it suggests that the discursive construction of ‘winning hearts and minds’ works to render less visible the violence of gendered counterinsurgency practices. Although gendered counterinsurgency mobilizes a relational ontology predicated on the emotional labour required for developing knowledge of the Iraqi and Afghan ‘other’, female engagement activities cannot escape the logic of instrumental reasoning within which they are located. Ultimately, recognizing the policy of female engagement as central to forms of knowledge production reveals the extent to which the violences of war rely on a complex set of gendered and affective relations.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research benefited from a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, grant number RF-2018-384\7.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Head, Professor Naomi
• Authors: Head, N.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences > Politics
• Journal Name: Security Dialogue
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• ISSN: 0967-0106
• ISSN (Online): 1460-3640
• Published Online: 23 November 2023
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © The Author(s) 2023
• First Published: First published in Security Dialogue 55(2):160-178
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

Project Code	Award No	Project Name	Principal Investigator	Funder's Name	Funder Ref	Lead Dept
302193		Empathy under Fire: 'Hearts and Minds' and the Politics of Empathy	Naomi Head	Leverhulme Trust (LEVERHUL)	RF-2018-384\7	S&PS - Politics