International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   It has been well over two decades since feminist scholars began critiquing conventional approaches to the study of war as being both gender blind and absent of women's involvement and experience of conflict ( Enloe 1983; 1993 ; Sylvester 1990; 1996 ; Tickner 1992 ; Cohn 1993 ). This critique was perhaps voiced most clearly by Cynthia Enloe's famous question: “where are the women?” in reference to the study of conflicts. Numerous scholars have taken up the challenge of this question and produced invaluable contributions that not only add women to existing accounts of war but offer dramatically alternative approaches to the study of war. Although scholars have made significant impacts to the way conflict is conceptualized and researched, mainstream approaches to the study of war in the past decade remain resistant to systematic and comprehensive considerations of gender. Today, feminists’ inroads into the study of conflict continue to be blocked by dominant perceptions about war as a hyper-masculine arena ( Whitworth 2004 ). All too often, gender has been sidelined as “women's issues,” or generalized into an account of women's experience as victims in conflict. In addition, despite a growing body of literature in the area, female actors in conflict and violent women remain under-researched and under-theorized. Finally, issues that primarily impact females ... log in or subscribe to read full text