Turning the Gendered Politics of the Security State Inside Out?

摘要

This article analyzes sexual harassment politics in the global south as a crucial laboratory for testing and reformulating the mix of emancipatory and repressive governance practices that constitute contemporary gender-sensitive ‘human security’ regimes. In Egypt, between 2003 and 2010, internationalist feminist campaigns advocated anti-harassment projects that demonized working-class youth masculinities as well as ‘disreputable’ public femininities in an attempt to intensify the policing of the city and discipline public sociability. Through a politics of respectability and ‘strange bedfellow’ processes of NGO-ization, this state-allied, pro-enforcement project demobilized class-based movements for democratic change. By contrast, inventive Egyptian organizations adapted UN gender doctrines and legal mechanisms to their own purposes, mobilizing mass campaigns that critiqued frameworks of police protection and social respectability. They cultivated forms of assertive female agency that came to occupy center-stage during the recent Egyptian Revolution of January and February of 2011. By contrasting these forms of global/local feminist organizing, this article reveals the queering power of new metaphors of masculinity, class struggle and global female insecurity. The conclusion generates a critical theory of security-state practice and illuminates alternative global-south feminisms that contest rather than facilitate securitized and militarized appropriations of internationalist gender and security interventions.View full textDownload full textKeywordsgender, security, masculinity, Egypt, feminism, harassment, human rights, international law, police brutality, international relations, Middle EastRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2011.587364