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Abstract:
Intersectional analysis attempts to more adequately theorize how social divisions (of ethnicity/race, class, gender, sexuality, age, etc.) interact and affect each other, without reducing one to another. "Triad analytics" is introduced here to emphasize affective investments and the mutual constitution of subject formation (who we are), cultural concepts (how we think), and embodied practices (what we do). I argue that pervasive gender coding privileges not only (some) men but also subjectivities, conceptual frames, and embodied activities that are characterized as masculine. These analytical starting points are used to explore RGC and S in colonial and contemporary contexts of militarization and war. The process reveals how "official war stories" do political work with material consequences: constructing enemy "others," legitimating calls to war, justifying extremes of violence, and normalizing RGC and S forms of subjection.
Keywords: intersectionality; oppression; race; gender; class; sexuality; violence; militarism; militarization; war; imperialism; "war on terror"; socialization; feminization; masculinism
Race, Gender & Class has been at the forefront of analyzing conditions of, reasons for, and struggles against the institutionalized hierarchies of modernity. Contributing authors have deployed a variety of theoretical vantage points to both advance our understanding of race, gender, and class and evaluate the political effects of adopting particular perspectives. Not surprisingly, the complex and contested notion of intersectionality has featured throughout. As sexuality studies has gained wider recognition, the journal responded in 2000 with a special issue exploring "how the interlocking, socially experienced categories of race, gender and class affect the ways in which sexuality is defined and acted upon in various regimes of society" (Foreword). The editors of the present special issue retained this inclusiveness in their call for papers that "focus on the RGCS aspects of contemporary militaries and wars." The topics could hardly be timelier. Yet the enormity and complexity of addressing them is daunting. My contribution is a limited, though I hope productive, engagement from the vantage point of burgeoning scholarship on intersectionality. This essay builds on a range of historical-empirical research, but my focus here is reflective and analytical. More specifically, I attempt to "think through intersectionality" and apply the insights gained to the problematics of militarization and war.1
I begin by introducing a heuristic "tool" I have found especially useful for theorizing intersectionality....