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The science of economics conceptualizes itself as a value-free and universal methodical approach used to describe self-interested actions by the agents in a market, which is defined as a place for the exchange of goods. The description of this process does not need to include values or evaluative standpoints, however it does not deny that economic agency is restricted and shaped by normative topics. A Jewish society differs from the action parameters of a Moslem society, this from a Buddhist, a Confucian and a Christian one, and so on. Science itself is not bothered by these preconditions. For the different societies it is true that women are not equally present, neither as producers of economic output nor as economic agents. Women are excluded as agents in the market and thus excluded from the relevant positioning of their interests (Strassmann 1997: viii). The sheer fact that women are not visible within the different economic realms is not problematized within the systems themselves. The fact of their absence and the inferior valuation of their contribution to the Gross National Products worldwide is taken to be a result of their lack of participation and a consequence of women’s role in society, stereotyping them into activities which are not regarded as being a part of economic productivity. Nonetheless, the rational economic agent is perceived to be gender-neutral (Ferber and Nelson 2003; Strassmann 1993; Justman 1996). The homo oeconomicus is a preference-selecting person, an autonomous individual acting in abstract circumstances, “in society without being influenced by society,” and acting in an “ideal market” without realizing the ostracisms and segregations that shape this market (Nelson 1995). Although economic science claims that the homo oeconomicus is a universal model of economic action, it regards the predicates of autonomy and context-free action capacity as particularly masculine and is convinced that these concepts are justifiably dominant over culturally feminine predicates, like interde- pendency, interconnectivity and concreteness. Albeit the economic man is predi- cated as a universal one, it is a particular identity, built upon exploitation and discrimination (Barker and Kuiper 2003: 9). Cultural organization has placed one at the market place, the other in the house. Often these two kinds of activities are presented as being opposite. When they are designed to be complementary, this is not relevant for the market. The assumption of perfect competition in the market turns out to be irrelevant for the comple- mentary activities of the gendered production endeavors. On the contrary, the market is a male segregation locus, supported by women and caregivers, who provide important labor to support the productivity in the market (Waring 1988: 14). Mainstream economics presents itself as a result of abstract, free and independent individual actions and ignores the fact that its categories depend on the cultural contexts and social norms which comprise a nation, with religion shaping the determining conditions and traits on the paths which economics has developed and has not overcome but confirmed. It ignores the fact that its knowledge belongs to epistemic communities (Strassmann 1993; Longino 1993; Nelson 1993). Preference economics has disregarded important elements that influence the eco- nomic process, shape preferences and thus lead to a tautology of self-confirming effectiveness (Hagengruber 2000). Elementary economic principles that should guarantee the transparency of action, equal access to the market, preference for the best, are ignored and even contradicted by this practice. These kinds of social patterns are realized in preference and utility-functions and deepen the traps of cultural backgrounds. Choice theory is built upon tautology and a consequentialist attitude (Dunleavy 1991; Seiz 1999). This way, economic actions perpetuate seg- regation habits, allowing the maximum benefit from this kind of oppression and segregation (McCloskey 1998). Stating that these kinds of values enter into eco- nomic analysis, as every choice is the expression of personal value, the value judgments in all aspects of economics must be considered (van Staveren 2007). There are elementary parts in economic theory which are inherently qualitative. Economics, like any science, is referring to social constructions that shape its theory (Nelson 1995). The aim of feminist research on economic concepts is thus to identify these social and cultural constructions that privilege male interpretations of economic issues, identifying where these forms of dominance and subjection tend to devaluate women in the economic realm (Power 2004). The market is dependent on provisioning activities which are not part of itself. These are gendered social activities, performed mostly in favor of the male of the house and performed by the females. The sex-segregating labor implies the per- formance of domestic work, care work, subsistence work such as that of the male dependent worker, with unpaid or lower paid labor and even “voluntary” work, often connected to personal and emotional interaction. This social provisional work —although necessary and also acknowledged as such—has presented a challenge to mainstream economics as the traditional image of the economic man is shaped as the autonomous and self-interested individual. Consequently, the thus constituted homo economics negated this provisional work as a market relevant action, as neoclassic economics did in demarcation to classic and ancient economics. Although provisional labor is a substantial and necessary part of every market participation and participant, it is excluded as fact-relevant labor and not counted as a relevant input for the homo oeconomicus to present himself in the market.

Tickner argues that IR is gendered to “marginalize women’s voices,” and stresses “that women have knowledge, perspectives and experiences that should be brought to bear on the study of international relations.” For example, Tickner would argue that security, a main topic in IR, should not only be understood as “defending the state from attack,” but should also consider that security for women “might be different because women are more likely to be attacked by men they know, rather than strangers from other states.” 10 In other words, in contrast to traditional IR views that view security as protecting the state from other states, feminists argue the topic of security should address acts of rape and violence, not only from foreign perpetrators, but from their own fellow citizens as well. Feminists would also add that occurrences of rape increase during times of war, and is even used as a method of ethnic cleansing among the rivalries within their state, 11 yet would never enter into typical IR discussions that focus solely on stateto-state interaction, simply because IR discussions traditionally remain focused on states as the key actors. Thus, the topic of security shows how gender consideration, excluded from the very beginning of the discussion, results in policymaking that would be subsequently exclusive of, and likely detrimental to, women. Prior to discussing any IR topic, standpoint feminist IR theory would first challenge those participating in the discussion, and those defining the key terms and issues, by critically asking them if the normative perspectives and working vocabulary are broad enough to effectively accommodate issues affecting women. In addition to standpoint feminism, Griffiths also presents an explanation of radical feminist theory. “The radical feminist focus[es] on the lives and experiences of women...showing how women’s activities are made invisible on the international scene.” 12 She describes the writings of feminist Cynthia Enloe, who is famous for the question “where are the women?” One of Enloe’s main arguments is that feminists should not only seek to include themselves in the higher realms of policymaking and leadership, but should search for where women have already fulfilled roles to “ensure the international system works smoothly and efficiently”, such as “the work done by diplomatic wives and military prostitutes.” 13 Following this method of inquiry leads to consideration of more marginalized issues -- or “low politics” -- in IR, e.g., issues concerning sex, trafficking, and migration of labor. Enloe would argue that though such issues may be considered less important than the forefront issues of military and war, they serve to uphold the critical processes of smooth diplomacy and local relations between foreign states, in such areas as military bases in times of war, or at state dinners for foreign diplomats. Radical feminism stresses that women have never really been excluded from the core of international relations, but have simply not been publicly or professionally acknowledged for their past and present contributions to central issues in IR. This leads to the next question: what are the main topics in IR, and what do feminists have to say about these issues? Theories of realism and liberalism will be considered in presenting feminist critiques of how IR issues are traditionally framed and addressed. Realism centers its theoretical structure on how the state seeks power and defends its national interests against other competing states within a global anarchy, or where there is the lack of authority higher than the state. States seek security through a balance of power in the international arena, primarily through military means, and resorting to war, if necessary. Realists generally view the state as the key actor in international politics, and de-emphasize – or, as feminist theory argues, ignore -- the role of the individual. Much feminist IR theory stems from a critique of realism, whose “socially constructed worldview continues to guide much thought about world politics.” 14 First, feminists argue that realists overvalue the role of the state in defining international relations, without questioning how the state itself is internally structured, politically and socially. Feminist theory would consider how the state includes, or excludes, the views of its individual citizens, and how, in turn, the state’s domestic views translate into foreign policies. In challenging the concepts of a state defending its national interests, feminists would ask: who is defining the national interests? If women were included in such discussions, would the national interest be interpreted differently, and if so, how? How would such an outlook change foreign policy? 14 Charles W. Kegley and Eugene R. Wittkopf. World Politics: Trend & Transformation. (USA: Wadsworth, 2004), 36. How would the definition of ‘security’ change? Would military and defense capabilities still be atop the agenda? Would women necessarily be less militaristic in their approach to IR issues? An example of how gender studies might reflect a state’s sociopolitical construction is reflected in a recent empirical study completed by Mark Tessler and Ina Warriner. To discover links between gender, feminism, and international relations within and among societies, Tessler and Warriner based their analysis on survey data from four areas in the Middle East, each quite different from one another socially, politically, and ideologically: Israel, Egypt, Palestine, and Kuwait. Seeing as how the Middle East offers an ideal example of states acting as realist actors, their findings are quite relevant to feminist IR theory. Three points deserve emphasis: • “women are not more pacific than men in their attitudes toward international conflict” • “regardless of the sex...[of the survey participant], persons who express greater concern for the status and role of women, and particularly for equality between women and men, are more likely than other[s]...to believe that the international disputes in which their country is involved should be resolved through diplomacy and compromise” • “the promotion of progressive values...is likely to increase support in the Middle East for peace through diplomacy and compromise.” 15 Though the authors note these relationships can be better understood by including other countries in such studies, 16 their analysis shows that first, women are not necessarily pacifists by nature, and second, having key actors in the state system who believe in 15 Mark Tessler and Ina Warriner, “Gender, Feminism, and Attitudes Toward International Conflict: Exploring Relationships with Survey Data from the Middle East.” World Politics 49.2 (1997): 250-281. Project Muse (15 November 2003). 16 Mark Tessler and Ina Warriner, “Gender, Feminism, and Attitudes Toward International Conflict: Exploring Relationships with Survey Data from the Middle East.” World Politics 49.2 (1997): 250-281. Project Muse (15 November 2003). gender equality can be linked to increased use of diplomacy and compromise in their state’s foreign policy. Another feminist critique of realism concerns how realists define and emphasize power in IR discussions. Feminists would ask: who defines power, who has it, and how is it used? If power is defined by a patriarchal and realist society, which seeks global balances of power, then power is equated with military and economic strength. But how would this change if the discussion included women’s viewpoints? Would the indicators of power be measured differently? Would power be seen as leadership in peace agreements, or might it be measured in terms of the ability to achieve transnational cooperation?

That combativeness must be deliberately induced or constructed is equally evident elsewhere. A variety of techniques-including persuasion, sexual and other incentives, taunting and accusations, humiliation, flattery and exaltations, and ideological equations of warriorhood with manhood-maybe used to exhort or pressure (mostly) young men to engage in a form of self-sacrifice to which they are not readily disposed. The same holds true for state societies where extreme, traumatizing practices of basic training are employed to trans-form young (male) civilians into soldiers. Nor is resistance to combat unusual. Throughout history, individual men have attempted various means of evasion that have included flight, prison, self-mutilation, feigning illness, insanity or sexual deviance, hiring surrogates, going AWOL or even committing suicide. Often when they have fought, they have done so under the influence of mood-altering substances- or under threat of lethal violence from their superiors. During the Great War Canadian troops were commonly provided extra rations of rum prior to an offensive in order to prepare them for death or killing. Officers also let their men know that they had appointed battle police to shoot laggards or those who hid. 33 Such evidence dispels essentialist myths of innate male aggressiveness. Rather, it demonstrates that dramatic transformations, along with social boundaries and liminality, are needed to construct and maintain a combative identity and solidarity. In those pre-state societies where warfare is strictly gender segregated and marked as masculine, these practices are often accompanied by discourses of male-female antagonism, ambivalence and fear, the projection of dissension among men onto women, and a displacement of the fear of the dangers of war onto dangers associated with female "pollution." Such gender-divisive devices are actively cultivated in gerontocracies by male elders who themselves display a more relaxed attitude toward women than do the younger men in whom they deliberately induce this exaggerated fear of female contamination. It Elsewhere, I describe a similar, though much less exaggerated, dynamic in the Canadian armed forces that fulfills its mandate to wage war against the enemy through an organizational structure and meaning system that together incorporate a number of mutually informing binary oppositions such as war/peace, death/life, strong/weak, military/civilian, defenders/defended, friend/enemy, and uniformity/diversity. It is onto these sets of op-positions that gender is mapped: Men/masculinity is associated with the former (i.e., war, strong, military, uniformity, defenders, friend, etc.) and women/femininity with the latter (i.e., peace, weak, civilian, diversity, defended, enemy, etc.), embodying, in part, impediments to operational effectiveness. What makes women's presence so contentious is not what they are-their purported essential physiology-but what they represent, their associated social attributes." It is the aspect of femininity that is associated with weakness and other oppositional characteristics cited above that conjures up the enemy. In the same vein, as we will soon see, the military's masculinity has less to do with men's essential characteristics than with what they represent in relation to the military's mandate. The military's need to segregate its members from civilian society and to develop and sustain in them a solidarity, combative attitude entails identifying and shunning all that is associated with the debilitating elements of the civilian sphere. And because the value and practices of the civilian sphere are the inverse of those of the military, the conflation of the military with masculinity and violence serves to normalize and legitimate the military's lethal goals and practices-"Thus far we have seen that pre-state and state societies have in common the need to construct and sustain the bellicose identities of their combatants. But there are other commonalities as well. As in pre-states, war in state societies is multifaceted, drawing on a wide range of participants; and it is ritually complex, bound up with sacred meaning and practice." This is as true of Ancient Assyria, with its cultic functionaries for interpreting omens and providing religious justification for military campaigns. " As it is of early-twentieth-century Canada, in which propaganda framed World War I as a Christian struggle against the forces of evil. Clerics of various Christian denominations worked hand in hand with the military to encourage young men to exhibit a Christian spirit of self-sacrifice; death in battle was equated with saintliness. In addition to the sacralization of war, the social organization of war in state societies also differentiates populations into defenders and defended, in varying ways and degrees. And as is often the case for pre-state societies, as we saw earlier, combatants in state-sponsored militaries act as proxies for those who cannot or would not fight. 40 Although pre-state and state societies have this latter point in common, it is also the point on which they diverge. That is, despite the susceptibility of warriors in pre-state societies to interpersonal pressure or to structural inducements to engage in combat, often as proxies, the absence of an enforceable draft, of a coercive superior authority, renders the process from recruitment to com-bat fundamentally democratic: The decision to engage in this form of collective lethal violence is ultimately voluntary, made by combatants themselves. No one is shot for refusing to fight. In state societies, in contrast, motivating soldiers to place themselves in harm's way-with little to gain and much to lose is a principal preoccupation. How does the military appropriate the soldier's autonomy and ensure obedience to orders, especially to those that en-tail risking one's life? The organizational answer to the military's motivational dilemma is elucidated by Mumford in his description of the origins of the army as an organizational form at the "dawn of civilization" in the fourth millennium B.C.E. in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Yucatan, and Peru. The innovation of the army as one of several in a constellation of new institutions and cultural inventions lay not in new mechanical inventions but in a new form of social organization that harnessed a human multitude into what comprised the first gigantic machine, which Mumford terms the "megamachine." It is this human machine that produced the grand projects, both sacred and profane, many of which still stand today: temples, pyramids, ziggurats, and giant irrigation works. The basis of this new culture, with the army as its central paradigm, was its dedication "to the expansion of collective power ... by perfecting new instruments of coercion. The individual initiative of the hero was replaced by the strict obedience of disciplined troops governed by the technical rationality that mobilized them into integrated, mechanized groups acting on orders is-sued by a solitary individual at the top and transmitted through a series of intermediaries to the very lowest of units and individuals. For the machine to function effectively, orders had to be reproduced and followed precisely; rank was sacrosanct and disobedience intolerable. The army represented a new instrument of coercion, directed not merely at the enemies of a ruling elite but at its very own subjects. Wittfogel describes a similar dynamic for what he terms "hydraulic society"; its objective of harnessing water required the harnessing of the will of populations. He identifies the same shift to authoritarianism in the army, noting that soldiers in the hydraulic state lacked the protection of II democratic check or feudal contracts ... they came when they were summoned; they marched where they were told; they fought as long as the ruler wanted them to fight." 44 Feudal armies, by contrast, were notorious for their lack of discipline, with officers as likely to disobey as were the rank and file to be careless and reckless. In sum, this review of the army's ancient origins highlights the internal repression unique to this form of social organization. It is the archaic army's form of authoritarian social organization that has come down to us through the millennia. Whereas warriors in pre-state societies must be induced, persuaded, or humiliated into fighting in the absence of overarching coercive structures, in state societies armies are coercive structures, and control the principal agents and executors of state violence against their own members. WHY MILITARY MASCULINITY? To recapitulate, the above anthropological and historical narratives on war and gender prompt us to question the masculine social organization of warfare in the form of the military and to investigate the military's organizational means for extracting obedience from its members: its authoritarianism. More-over, these comparative perspectives are mutually informing: examining the military's authoritarianism furthers our understanding of the means by which this organization commits its soldiers to its high-risk, potentially lethal practices, and of how these are gendered. Whereas the problem of getting soldiers to place themselves at risk was difficult under ancient authoritarian rule, motivation for hierarchically controlled lethal violence on the part of those who are structurally excluded from the decision-making processes and benefits of war is far more challenging in democracies, which guarantee the franchise and prom-ise individual rights and freedoms, and where most social practices are ostensibly based on consent. As an anomalous holdover from a distant and largely forgotten past, the military has in many ways remained true to the despotic social conditions in which it originated. Even as Western societies have inched their way toward expanded legal and political rights, the military's segregation from the larger civilian society has allowed it to retain many of the social and legal parameters of its historic roots." In democracies there is a particular tension between the larger society's political and legal institutions and the military's coercive mandate and conditions of service. This tension exacerbates the military's existing preoccupation with the internal coercion of its members, with maintaining discipline, ensuring obedience, and mitigating resistance to the performance of this hazardous work. Tasks such as peacekeeping or peace enforcement aside, militaries are instruments of lethal force with mandates to deliver collective lethal violence. Managers of violence are carefully distinguished from those responsible for engendering and sustaining the violence of still others who are charged with its execution. Rank marks the internal differentiation, or conflicts of interest, between more and less powerful men. But rather than being transparent, these differences must be camouflaged in order to construct the military's unity of purpose-which is its operational effectiveness. This is the benchmark against which all else is evaluated. How are these differences in interests contained? The most obvious method is through the construction of the ranking system as inviolable, sacrosanct. Challenging rank is in the order of heresy, since it would mean exposing the oppositions of interest inherent in the ranking system's dispersal of power, thereby disrupting the disciplinary system that enforces obedience. The second method of containment consists in the construction of gender along a male-female axis of opposition, evident above in the elaborate discourses of male-female differences in physiological and social characteristics that render women less able to serve. It is this emphasis on male-female difference that serves to deflect attention from the fault lines along which military masculinity fractures internally. Further, it allows for the perpetuation of the military's attachment to a uniform masculinity (uniformity, strength, ete.) and an opposition to femininity (diversity, weakness, etc.) which, as in some pre-state societies, is used to de-flect, mask, and contain these tensions between multiple and unequal military masculinities. Masculine unity, an ally of masculine military uniformity, is a third method of containing, as well as actually masking, differences in military masculinities, and it forms the basis for constructing and fostering troop solidarity in order to achieve the military's unity of purpose, which, again, is its operational effectiveness. CONCLUSION The objective of this chapter has been to set out some of the parameters for understanding why the military constructs itself as uniformly masculine and why it is disrupted by the entry of women. Comparative cross-cultural and historical perspectives of the gendered social organization of war demonstrate that military masculinity is neither universal nor inevitable. Instead, a uniform military masculinity is carefully constructed through deliberate social practice as a means of operationalizing a unique mandate-waging war-through an authoritarian organization that is preoccupied with ensuring the obedience of potentially resistant practitioners. The military is an organization that values, promotes, and engages in practices that are the inverse of those valued, promoted, and practiced in the civilian sphere. Militaries are mandated to perfect the techniques of lethal violence, of killing; to fulfill this mandate they must construct different kinds of lives and deaths, and they must assign them meaning. Military masculinity has less to do with men's essential characteristics than it does with the characteristics and assigned meanings of the different world-the military world-that soldiers inhabit. It is in describing something of the nature and requisites of this world, and in shifting our sights from the male-female axis of opposition to the oppositions between military men and to the fractures within military masculinity, that we have been able to delineate some of what masculinity and femininity-embodied in real men and women- represent. It remains to be seen what long-term effects the increasing presence of women will have on the military as a gendered organization and on its mandate, values, and practices.

“Gendered language” refers to words that carry unnecessary masculine connotations, but are purportedly gender-neutral according to users and dictionaries. But the intention of the speaker and the denotation of a word do not control the meaning that is received and internalized by listeners. Research in psychology suggests that word choice influences our perception and cognition, such that gendered language actually reinforces patriarchal attitudes about who is qualified or expected to be a “congressman” or “statesman.” In other words, the connotation shapes the meaning of words, which shapes our understanding of concepts. Many gendered words, like “mankind,” have perfectly good alternatives that eschew any reference to gender, like “humankind” or “humanity.” These linguistic options, in addition to the decreasing popularity of gendered words in the social sciences, present a puzzle for IR: why are so many IR academics still using gendered language, when they don’t have to, and when they should know better?¶ The list of gendered IR terms is long: “statesman,” “brinksmanship,” “man-made,” “mankind,” “manning,” and “manpower” are some of the most common. As a young woman pursuing a career in mainstream IR, and with an interest in security studies, these words add insult to the injury of seeing panels, syllabi, and the TRIPS survey dominated by men. These discouragements to women entering a male-dominated field are often overlooked because they are psychological. Being one of few women in an ISA panel makes one feel highly visible at best, and unwelcome at worst. Gendered language sends the message that I am not expected to be a foreign policymaker (because authors choose “statesman”) or the chair of a committee (because authors choose “chairman”). These kinds of daily exclusions weigh on my psyche.¶ I am often told, in response to such complaints, that I should take a class, attend a panel, or contact a scholar who works on Feminist IR theory. I am a materialist, a theorist of geopolitics. I should not have to change my scholarly interest in order to find an inclusive community. No subject or topic is inherently male-dominated, so there must be something discouraging women from pursuing the most masculinized areas of study. It is the responsibility of all IR scholars to help identify and extirpate the reasons young women are deterred from particular topics. The best places to look are those where we make active choices, choices that can be re-thought and re-directed to neutralize the highly gendered spaces we create with our words and actions.¶ Replacing “man-made” with “anthropogenic,” or coining “brinkship” to replace “brinksmanship,” will not solve the gender problem in International Relations, but it will increase the visibility of our quotidian contributions to patriarchy. What we read reinforces what we see, and what we write reflects what we want to see. I do not see myself in most of the texts that I study and engage with. I do not see people who look like me on the Presidential Theme Panels at the ISA. Affirmative action in admissions, hiring, and panel placement can only do so much because there is problem of “self selection.” We need to seriously consider the idea that women select their field at least partially because of the “man-made” social environment that surrounds it.¶ My power is not “manpower,” but it is just as strong.

Revised Version of “Yellow Peril” and “China Threat” by American Hegemonism since 21 st Century, with the Inheritance from and Development to Its Predecessors With the entering into 21 st century, the revised version of “Yellow Peril” and “China Threat” by American hegemonism mainly took the form of the Annual Report to Congress: Military Power of the People’s Republic of China released by U.S. Department of Defense and the annual report released by the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission37 . They could be fairly deemed as the official American versions of “Yellow Peril” and “China Threat” on the highest level, at the highest frequency and with the biggest influence for the past 11 years. They are the outcome of the following triple sources: American Congress, the U.S. Department of Defense and various high-ranked think tanks. 38 As is well known, there long existed a group of hawkish anti-China Congressmen in American Congress, who, from perspectives of extreme ideology, narrow interests of their constituencies and their personal interests, always proposed various unfriendly or even hostile policies against China. With their decision-making power on budgetary allocations, they also often thrust their personal preferences into budgetary bills and authorization acts. Report regarding Military Power of PRC is right according to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 200039 adopted by American Congress. Under this Act, American Department of Defense is therefore under a “legal responsibility” to annually synthesize and compile all military intelligences regarding PRC collected through all kinds of methods (including various vile spying measures) into a comprehensive report to American Congress. It is after the review by Congressmen that the Department of Defense could receive budget for military expenditures from the Department of Treasury. The departmental interests of American Department of Defense could be easily discerned in this regard. As is mentioned above, after the Cold War was over, it was always the inertial thinking of “curious” Americans – and certainly a major task for American Department of Defense – to find a definite and powerful new “threat”. And China is the new “serious threat” on security that Americans have been endeavoring to establish. 40 As compared to other reviewing the sharp disclosure of famous German historian H. Gollwitzer, as well as the frank confession of senior American diplomat G. F. Kennan. As is mentioned above, “Yellow Peril” slogan “indistinctly revealed certain basic characteristics of imperialist thoughts ”: “ It is more often an instrument to fool and agitate the people, means to instigate people into evil business, or excuse to defend themselves. ” “[Americas] have created immense vested interests in the maintenance of a huge armed establishment in time of peace and in the exportation of great quantities of arms to other peoples – great vested interests, in other worlds, in the cold war.” “So great a military economy requires constant justification, and this… leads to an almost automatic and systematic overrepresentation of the military potential of the supposed adversary, thereby heightening the suspicion of that adversary, and the fear and antagonism addressed to him, in our [American] population.” See: supra notes 8, 32 and their relating texts. As is known to all, Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinese territory. In 1950, the U.S sent out its powerful Seventh Fleet for a direct invasion into Taiwan Strait of China, seriously threatening and thwarting the great cause of China’s reunifications. When it established diplomatic relations with PRC in 1979, America played as a double-dealer “with two faces”. On the one hand, it officially recognized Government of PRC as the sole legal government of China (“ One-China Principle” for short) in the Communiqué on the Establishment of Sino-U.S. Diplomatic Relations . departments of U.S. Government, officials of Department of Defense always stress more on the “threat” posed by PRC, and sometimes their Defense Secretary is himself the major figure to preach “China Threat” (as was the former Secretary Donald Rumsfeld). The most intolerable thing to China is that for every year, in a flagrant yet rude way, there are descriptions on specific points and of wide coverage with regard to China’s Taiwan district in this Report, which irresponsibly criticize and interfere with China’s domestic affairs, rampantly support the splitting forces in Taiwan, spare no effort to thwart the great course of China’s reunifications, and cause damage to China’s core interests. 41 The main reason that Report of China’s Military Power could rouse high attentions from various parties rests with its political influence. On the other hand, it acted perfidiously in Taiwan Relations Act , publicly betrayed “ One-China Principle” and wantonly interfered with China’s internal affairs. The Act claims that “It is the policy of the United States to consider any efforts to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States” [U.S.Code,Chapt.48,Section 3301 (b) (4),available at www.taiwandocuments.org/tra02.htm ]. By shielding and supporting certain forces in Taiwan endeavoring to split China, the U.S. continuously threatened and thwarted the great course of China’s reunifijication. Moreover, American Department of Defense was obliged to provide an Annual Report on Military Power of the PRC to the Congress according to the above-mentioned National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000, in which the (3), (4), (5) and (8) points of Section 1202(b) are specifically on the internal afffairs of China regarding Taiwan region. All these could boil down to the following remark: To judge by the common sense of contemporary international law, isn’t it quite obvious that who is the actual threatener, while who is actually the one being threatened ? As is mentioned above that peeling off the covering, it could be found that the essence and core of various “Yellow Peril Doctrines” lie at the preaching and justification of invading into China, excluding Chinese, opposing against China and containing China; and such exclusion, opposition and containment always come before and lead to a final invasion . Consequently, it could be held a same view, assessment, and prediction towards the 21 st century versions of “Yellow Peril” and “China Threat”, which have been repeatedly advocated by American hawkish anti-China Congressmen, by the annual Report of China’s Military Power and annual Report of U.S.-China Economic and Security, as well as by the echoing of various Medias along with them

Emerging from the context of the U.S.-China trade war, the 2019 targeted crackdown of Chinese American scientists certainly can be perceived as part and parcel of the Trump administration’s comprehensive plan to cripple China’s global economic advance. These specific attacks against individual scientists aim to stamp out China’s alleged practices in acquiring/extracting intellectual property—both scientific and technological—of U.S.-based researchers, the kind of intellectual property that could be commoditized and entered into the calculus of economic trade. Indeed, the fear of scientific espionage is fueled by the fear of loss of economic competition. In a global market driven by scientific-technological innovation, it is the potential loss of the commoditization of science and technology in the race for control of global market shares that drives this “witch hunt” for possible intellectual property theft and Chinese scientific espionage. Yet, despite their joint efforts, the NIH and the FBI seem to share divergent opinions of what might be the cause of NIH rule infractions. The NIH has attributed the main source of the problem to the scientists’ neglecting, willfully or not, to report their participation in China’s TTP program, which recruits U.S.-based scientists with substantial funding. While participation in the TTP program is not prohibited, the reporting of both their participation and funding are required. In some cases, scientists are charged for the failure to recount all the names of their foreign research collaborators. Others set up businesses in China and neglect to report those sources of income. Few seem to rise to the level worthy of removal from university posts. In an e-mail message sent to the campus community, Massachusetts YELLOW PERIL AND TECHNO-ORIENTALISM • SIU AND CHUN • 431 Institute of Technology (MIT) President L. Rafael Reif stated, “Looking at cases across the nation, small numbers of researchers of Chinese background may indeed have acted in bad faith, but they are the exception and very far from the rule. Yet faculty members, post-docs, research staff and students tell me that, in their dealings with government agencies, they now feel unfairly scrutinized, stigmatized and on edge—because of their Chinese ethnicity alone.”26 Scientists of all backgrounds now feel uneasy about foreign research collaborations, pointing to the contradiction between the long-standing encouragement to engage in global collaborations and the recent criminalization of those same collaborations. Thus far, only five scientists have been removed from two research institutions. Meanwhile, at least several universities, including MIT, Yale, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, have issued statements addressing the corrosive effects that heightened scrutiny and stigmatization of Chinese American scientists have had on the research community. The FBI, however, offers a much more dangerous theory. According to Bloomberg Business reporter Peter Waldman, FBI Director Christopher Wray, in an April speech given at the Council on Foreign Relations, “described the reason for the scrutiny of ethnic Chinese scientists. [Wray claims that] ‘China has pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation in any way it can from a wide array of businesses, universities, and organizations.’ Everyone’s in on it . . . China’s intelligence services; its state-owned and what he called ‘ostensibly’ private enterprises; and the 130,000 Chinese graduate students and researchers who work and study in the US every year. ‘Put simply, China seems determined to steal its way up the economic ladder at our expense.’ . . . In Wray’s retelling, China’s challenge to the US today is unlike any this nation has faced. Whereas the Cold War was fought by armies and governments, the contest is being waged, on China’s side, by the ‘whole of society,’ the FBI director said, and the US needs its own whole-of-society response. But what does that look like in a society with more than 5 million citizens of Chinese descent, many of whom work in the very science and technology fields said to be under assault?”27 Wray’s message suggests that anyone of Chinese descent is a potential spy working for China. Herein lies both the logic and justification for racial profiling, as ethnicity alone is evidence enough for the potentiality of guilt and wrongdoing. Yet, this logic is deeply flawed, given that the category of ethnic Chinese encompasses a wide diversity of people with a broad spectrum of ideological leanings. Certainly, ethnic Chinese in Taiwan and Hong Kong may not always agree with, if not directly oppose, Chinese state ideology. Moreover, the message also suggests any and all (non-Chinese) 432 • 23.3 Americans should stand ready to respond to this widespread “societal attack.” Undoubtedly, these comments have heightened anxiety and fear among Chinese/Asian American scientists and engineers. A retired federal employee, Nancy Chen, commented during a panel discussion on this new academic climate at the University of Chicago, “The great fear is that history may repeat itself in this political climate, and Chinese Americans may be rounded up like Japanese Americans during WWII . . . The fear and worry is real.”28 The specter of Japanese American mass incarceration continues to haunt Asian Americans. Indeed, the incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans during WWII exemplifies the most wide-sweeping state-sanctioned response to yellow peril. War propaganda around the potential infiltration of Japanese military intelligence of the U.S. Pacific Coast incited popular fear and anger against people of Japanese descent in the United States. When President F. D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 to evacuate people of Japanese descent (citizenship notwithstanding) from the West Coast and to relocate them to concentration camps throughout the United States, an entire population of Japanese Americans—men, women, and children—became racially marked as potential enemies and threats to national security.29 Extending this order beyond the U.S. nation-state, the Roosevelt administration lobbied its Canadian and Latin American neighbors to adopt a similar strategy, with the stated aim of establishing hemispheric security. All but a few Axis-leaning Latin American countries instituted their own form and degree of surveillance, incarceration, and deportation of Japanese “enemy aliens.”30 Similarly, in this current context, the United States has been lobbying other nation-states to impose trade sanctions against China, end contracts, and hold China responsible for the pandemic. Yellow peril creates enemies of entire racialized-national populations; it does not care to differentiate variations within this “enemy” population. The case of Japanese American incarceration makes clear that citizenship matters little when pitted against the formidable racializing discourses of the yellow peril, especially when national loyalty is presumed to align unquestionably with racial-ethnic descent. During WWII, the geopolitics involving the United States and Japan directly affected the treatment of ethnic Japanese in the United States, namely, the removal and incarceration of an ethnic population mobilized by racist fear and without any substantiated evidence of real threat or wrongdoing. In this pandemic moment, the warnings of FBI Director Wray take on an ominous ring. This language of the “whole of society” attack by China powerfully invokes, once again, the image of yellow peril as an undifferentiated mass of Chinese threatening to overtake the West. This notion that YELLOW PERIL AND TECHNO-ORIENTALISM • SIU AND CHUN • 433 any Chinese—whether a student, a professor, an engineer, an executive, a neighbor, a U.S. citizen or not—can be a potential spy of the Chinese state resonates with the language that led to and eventually justified Japanese American incarceration. When aligned with the reference to “the Chinese virus,” we have an explosive image of the teeming, uncontainable bodies (yellow peril) of Chinese/Asian contagion—in the forms of both a biological virus (coronavirus) and a societal virus (scientific espionage)—circulating and contaminating everything and everyone within its reach. Certainly, unlike Japanese Americans in WWII, the strategy of containment for potential Chinese scientific espionage has focused on relatively quiet, isolated, and individualized removals rather than massive relocation and incarceration. Such a strategy has hindered public visibility and undermined collective response. Could it be that Wray’s call for a “whole of society” response actually is already being carried out through these variegated forms of responses that range from highly coordinated institutional removals of Chinese American scientists to interstate policy stand-offs to dispersed, irregular outbursts of violence against Chinese/Asian Americans? If the cases of Japanese American incarceration and the imprisonment of Dr. Wen Ho Lee offer any lessons, it is that ethnic Asians, perceived as perpetually foreign, are always subject to the rigged test of national loyalty. It matters not what factual evidence there is, if it exists at all. The machinations of the “yellow peril” rely on the perpetuated belief that ethnicity determines national loyalty and allegiance. Moreover, projected as an undifferentiated mass, Chinese/Asian Americans are represented as the servile minions that both embody and extend the anti-West and its efforts to dominate the “West.” Filtered through the U.S. racial lens, East Asian phenotype—no matter one’s ethnic background—is sufficient enough to provoke hate, anger, and violence. This was the fate of the aforementioned Burmese American family and the fate of Vincent Chin in the late 1980s, when he was beaten to death because his perpetrators had mistakenly assumed he was ethnic Japanese (Japan at that time was constructed as the main economic antagonist to the United States). No Asian American is safe from the current anti-China and Chinese/Asian American attacks. The enumerated cases of increasing violence experienced by Asians of all ethnic backgrounds attest to this reality. Technological Behemoth: the Racial Capitalist Frontier of Techno-Economic Warfare The American media coverage of Wuhan’s shutdown and the Chinese state’s deployment of surveillance technology to contain the virus through 434 • 23.3 contact tracing and quarantine enforcement measures offered the American public a preview of the PRC government at work. Enfolded in these stories are both the underlying admiration and fear around the Chinese state’s efficiency and efficacy in using technology for population control. Similarly, the same kind of admiration and fear are evident in American perceptions of China’s explosive economic development and global reach since the 1990s. And arguably, these same sentiments re-emerge when we read about the seemingly rapid success of Huawei Technologies, which has become the world’s largest telecommunications technology company, overtaking Western companies that were once household names, like Eriksson, Nokia, and Motorola. The exemplary case of Huawei brings our discussion of yellow peril into the explicit terrain of techno-Orientalism where the idea of the Chinese techno-virus—emerging at the nexus of technology, international trade, and cyber-security—is articulated through the racialized fear of Chinese technological domination achieved purportedly by stealing trade secrets, engaging unfair trade practices, and enabling Chinese state surveillance. What the case of Huawei illustrates is the extension of the “Chinese virus” trope that already exists in the domains of public health (as biological pathogen) and research institutions (scientist-spy) into the realm of everyday consumer technologies. Our point in discussing Huawei is not to defend it or to judge its activities. Rather, we want to call attention to the increasing significance of media/communications technologies as sites of interstate techno-economic-security struggles (in addition to already existing corporate surveillance). Toward that end, the Huawei example clearly shows the entwined issues and discourses of technology, international trade, and cybersecurity, all of which are filtered through and constitutive of the racializing techniques of the “Chinese virus.” Between January 2019 and February 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice filed three indictments against Huawei and its subsidiaries. That Huawei is the first foreign company of recent memory that is singled out by the United States for charges related to sanctions violations, conspiracy to steal trade secrets from American companies (including source code and wireless technology manuals), and federal racketeering (including fraud, obstruction of justice, money laundering) is noteworthy in itself. This last charge of racketeering is used historically to address organized crime (i.e. mafias) and points to the U.S. government’s intended juridical delegitimization of Huawei as an irrational institution mired in secrecy and an unlawful global corporation that cannot be trusted. In response to these allegations, Huawei accused the Department of Justice of exercising a form of political persecution and asserted that “[the charges] are based YELLOW PERIL AND TECHNO-ORIENTALISM • SIU AND CHUN • 435 largely on resolved civil disputes from the last twenty years that have been previously settled, litigated, and in some cases, rejected by federal judges and juries.”31 The case will likely take years to resolve, but its function will become apparent by the ensuing interstate trade and diplomatic negotiations between China and the United States. Meanwhile, the White House and various U.S. state departments have begun to exert pressure on both domestic institutions and allied nation-states to end contracts and research collaborations with Huawei. For instance, the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2019 blacklisted the firm on charges of intellectual property theft and barred U.S. companies from selling products to Huawei without federal authorization.32 Also, as discussed in the above section, the FBI has placed pressure on universities to increase oversight of Chinese American researchers and to divest from research collaborations funded by Huawei and other Chinese firms. Multiple universities, including MIT, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois, have terminated research partnerships with Huawei.33 In addition to these domestic pressures, U.S. officials have asked allied nation-states to cancel any existing contracts with Huawei, especially ones that involve using the firm’s equipment for developing 5G wireless networks. Cybersecurity serves as the stated rationale, conjuring the potential of the Chinese Communist Party through its ties to the firm to engage in cyber surveillance/espionage by intercepting individual, corporate, and government data flowing through the 5G wireless networks. According to this logic, the “Chinese/Asian contagion” manifest as “Chinese/Asian espionage” can now be hardwired into the infrastructural fabric of our telecommunications systems through which data will travel from our phones, computers, online accounts, and other kinds of technologies to Chinese companies and, potentially, the Chinese state. The assertion is that the use of Huawei’s equipment will create massive security vulnerabilities not just to U.S. intelligence but also to American individuals whose personal information can be captured and used for endless possibilities of commoditization. It is also argued that Chinese technology integration into any Western cyber infrastructure project “would give China the upper hand in any potential cyber war.”34 Recently, this racialized fear of Chinese technology has materialized with intensified urgency in the privacy debates surrounding the immensely popular video-sharing platform, TikTok, and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. With over 100 million users in the United States alone, TikTok has ascended to social media ubiquity, exacerbating American anxieties around China’s technological dominance.35 Rehearsing much of the same rhetoric used to condemn Huawei, U.S. lawmakers have argued that TikTok 436 • 23.3 poses a threat to the “national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” citing concerns over TikTok’s handling of user data and the company’s alleged allegiance to the Chinese government.36 Indeed, in early August 2020, the Trump administration released an executive order that would effectively ban the social media app from the United States if ByteDance failed to address concerns regarding the app’s surveillance mechanisms, including the Chinese Communist Party’s “access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information . . . ”37 Worth noting is the fact that TikTok was the platform of choice used by K-pop fans to flood the Trump campaign with fake ticket reservations to the Tulsa, Oklahoma, rally. The spectacular embarrassment of a half-empty arena no doubt left an impression on the White House. However, even as the U.S. government is accusing Chinese corporations like ByteDance and Huawei of colluding with the state, it too is expanding collaborations with U.S. technology companies. For instance, in 2019, Microsoft was awarded a $10 billion contract from the Department of Defense to update and transform the U.S. military’s cloud computing infrastructure. The project, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), is the Pentagon’s largest technology contract to date38 and represents the growing relationship between the high-tech industry and the military. Ironically, these are the very same nationalistic ties that the U.S. government has accused TikTok of advancing. The strategic framing of potential foreign violation of individual privacy is part and parcel of the racialized construction of the “Chinese/ Asian techno-virus” as a danger to both American liberal personhood and national capitalist democracy. Indeed, the potentiality for China to gain the upper hand in any possible cyber and technological war with the United States compounds the economic threat that conglomerates like Huawei and ByteDance pose to U.S. global capitalism. The perceived dual dangers of compromised national security and economic competition—as embodied by Chinese transnational tech firms—positions Chinese technology, its commoditization, and its capture of the global market as evidence of China’s advance in “techno-economic warfare.” In this way, the specter of the Chinese/Asian threat is central, if not necessary, to legitimizing the insistence of American hegemony. Conclusion The unprecedented havoc caused by the coronavirus offers us an opportunity to pause and take note of both the deepening fractions within the YELLOW PERIL AND TECHNO-ORIENTALISM • SIU AND CHUN • 437 U.S. and the shifting dynamics between the national and the global. At the time of writing, on July 29, 2020, the virus has infected more than 17 million and has killed upwards of 667,000 people globally.39 The disproportionate impact on U.S. communities of color—Black, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American—has revealed the deep historical and structural inequalities that have shaped the profoundly unjust outcomes. Meanwhile, the racialization of the coronavirus as a “Chinese virus” has given rise to anti-Asian aggression globally. While this pandemic moment compels us to critically interrogate the construction of the contagion, our goal is not to focus solely on the racialization of the pathogen but to situate this particular discourse of the Chinese/Asian viral threat within the broader context of the U.S.-China trade war. The essay has examined how the ideology of yellow peril has been playing out in current techno-Orientalist discourses of disease, scientific espionage, and cybersecurity. Although this multivalent Chinese/Asian viral threat is the most recent iteration of yellow peril, it emerges from and is made possible by an already existing repertoire of racial tropes that are now coalescing to forge the consolidated phantasm of the Chinese contagion, spy, and technological behemoth as national security threat. All along, our goal has been to illuminate the intensive and enduring ideological work that undergirds the shifting political-economic agenda of U.S. racial capitalism. We conclude this essay by returning to the ever-unfolding scenario of this techno-Orientalist moment. The recent legislations restricting entry of certain international graduate students to the United States and prohibiting U.S. residency to all international students whose curriculum is fully based on remote learning reflect not only the continuation but also the extension of the anti-China campaign into immigration policies. Reminiscent of the late nineteenth century anti-Chinese era, we are witnessing a similar consolidation of racial tropes that have constructed Chinese bodies as presenting multiple forms of threat. Yet, unlike the previous era, such policies are targeting the educated elite rather than the working class. The effects, however, have been similar in instilling fear and anxiety, though of different kinds, among both Chinese and non-Chinese Americans alike. As we enter into the unchartered territory of this next phase of the U.S.- China face-off, what will be the position of Chinese/Asian Americans in this national and global order? If crisis moments offer an opportunity to reimagine, transform, and rebuild, what kind of future do we want when we emerge from this current “crisis”? 438 • 23.3 Acknowledgements Lok Siu thanks Sandhya Shukla and Kathy Chetkovich for their generative feedback.

Our everyday lives are increasingly being mediated by technology. Social networks are shaping our interpersonal communications, algorithms are driving our decisions and behaviours, and smart devices are modulating our home and workplace environment. Haraway postulated this rising penetration of technology in practically all aspects of life through the image of “cyborg bodies” entangled in its discourses and effects to the point where “who makes and who is made in the interaction between human and machine” is impossible to decipher. With the ever-increasing dependence of our everyday lives on technology, the internet directly interpellates subjects while also engaging with other social discourses that contribute to subject formation. As technology becomes fundamental in shaping not only our everyday lives but also our subjectivities, the question of security in cyberspace becomes increasingly personal.

Although cybersecurity has been recognized as a global concern, there is no agreement on how it should be conceptualized. The question of “who or what is to be protected” lies at the heart of these debates. A growing body of literature moves beyond the protection of “cyberspace and the underlying ICT infrastructure”, and defines cyber security as the protection of those “who function in the cyberspace, i.e. individuals, organisations, and nations”. In practice, however, it is seen that the sovereignty of the state is considered as the dominant objective of cyber security and powerful actors like states, military and corporates drive the discourse at the risk of invisibilizing the ordinary user.

According to the first criticism, the prevalence of sexual metaphors and phallic images in public discourse about nuclear weapons provide a means “to create excitement about, support for and identification with both the weapons and the political regime possessing them” (Duncanson and Eschle 2008, 548). For instance, feminist scholars Cohn and Ruddick (2004, 415, 418) argue that nuclear “weapons (and their use) are theorized and legitimated” with alluring and exciting sexual metaphors, which “breed the idea that nuclear explosions give ‘virility’ to the nation.” Keep in mind that feminists make this argument about societies and national security discourses, this is not a point targeted at Dr. Strangelove. However, it certainly reflects a strange love. One standard popular and well-known reference about phallic imagery is antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott’s (1986, 238) notion of “missile envy” and “the psychosexual overtones” of nuclear weapons terminology. However, the empirical and theoretical work of feminist scholar Carol Cohn is especially important on this theme. Cohn (1987, 688) spent 1984 “immersed in the world of defense intellectuals” as a “participant observer” in workshops and lectures focused on nuclear strategy, weapons, and arms control. Since that time, she has also devoted much of her career to studying nuclear weapons, strategy, and gender. Cohn (1987, 687, 696) found that the men, “and indeed, they are virtually all men,” who work as “defense intellectuals” typically employ language filled with “sexual imagery.” In a lengthy and much-cited article about her experiences among defense intellectuals, Cohn points out numerous examples of sexual images and language, including standard references to penetration, throw-weight, and spasm attacks (see also Sylvester 1994, 176). Additionally, Cohn (1987, 694) noted that “The history of the atomic bomb project itself is rife with overt images of competitive male sexuality, as is the discourse of the early nuclear physicists, strategists, and SAC commanders.” Based on his extensive personal experience in the field, nuclear physicist Brian Easlea (1987, 146) likewise acknowledged that military scientists and nuclear strategists employ “frightening” and even “obscene” sexual metaphors in an effort to “demonstrate indisputable masculine status.”

As demonstrated in the prior section, Dr. Strangelove is certainly filled with sexual metaphors and phallic images. Again, “all of the major characters have names which are either explicitly or subtly sexually denotative” (Linden 1977, 76). In addition to the phallic images already noted, General Ripper’s scenes often include this imagery. Notably, Ripper smokes a large phallic cigar in his meeting with Group Captain Mandrake, which Kubrick made much more prominent by use of another low-angled camera shot. Later, Ripper fires a long cylindrical machine gun, another phallic symbol, when his base comes under attack from American forces trying to learn the codes to recall the bombers and stop the war he has initiated. In the ending, as Starck (2010, 61) notes, Major Kong’s “positioning on the rocket [he straddles] and the camera angle produce the impression of a giant penis.” Film scholar M. Keith Booker (2007, 103–4) echoes the feminist critique when he argues that Kubrick’s repeated use of sexual images and metaphors work to characterize “the Cold War as a phallic competition” as the military leaders attempt to demonstrate that they “have the bigger and more effective weapons.”

The reproduction of survival/ the survival of reproduction Extinction is almost always understood against the horizon of survival and the imperative to sustain it – at least for life forms deemed to be of value to humans. In many cases, this imperative takes the form of deliberate strategies for enforcing existence. Donna Haraway’s influential book When Species Meet devotes considerable attention to the logics, practices and politics of Species Survival Plans. These plans monitor and enforce reproduction amongst ‘endangered’ species, not least by collecting data on populations, genetic profiles and genetic materials to enable selective breeding. This strategy assumes that all organisms can, should, and can be made to exercise their reproductive capacities in order to resist extinction, and it actively mobilizes members of ‘endangered species’ into this project. In so doing, it helps to entrench norms regarding gender, sexuality and reproductive labour that are deeply entrenched in modern, Western human cultures. Attention to these programmes highlights an important way in which extinction is gendered in dominant scientific and policy frameworks. Specifically, strategic breeding programmes share in the belief that reproduction is an imperative for those capable of reproducing if ‘the species’ is at risk’. This belief is directly related to Western norms of the reproductive imperative for women. Indeed, Haraway points out that it is precisely “‘woman’s’ putative self-defining responsibility to ‘the species’ as this singular and typological female is reduced to her reproductive function”. In a similar sense, within SSPs and other strategies of enforced survival, entire life forms are reduced to their reproductive capacities. Moreover, programmes of enforced survival can, in the context of sexual reproduction, disproportionately burden female organisms with the task of avoiding extinction. This logic is particularly fraught in discussions of the possibility of human extinction, in which female fertility (captured in the standard policy language of ‘births per woman’) is framed simultaneously as a threat to survival, and the only hope for escaping extinction (see, for instance, Alan Weisman’s comments on this). In these ways, the securitization of survival entrenches the intersectional categories of gender, species and race discussed above. Dominant discourses of extinction and conservation also entrench and privilege sexual reproduction, in ways that entrench heteronormative assumptions and norms. This is reflected in the way that the subjects of extinction and conservation are framed. The standard object of conservation is the biological ‘species’, a term which is defined by the ability of organisms to reproduce sexually. As Myra Hird has pointed out, this conception of ‘species’ makes it appear as if sexual reproduction is the ‘best’ means of sustaining the existence of a life form. However, Hird’s work demonstrates that Earthly life forms actually engage in myriad forms of reproduction, from the free exchange of DNA between bacteria to the hermaphroditic practices of some fish. The upshot of these arguments is that Earthly life is sustained through a huge variety of reproductive activities that do not conform to biological understandings of life processes or species. Crucially, Hird argues that there is no necessary hierarchy between forms of reproduction. In Darwinian terms, all species that manage to survive are equally successful. However, by conflating survival with sexual reproduction, existing discourses of extinction embed hetero-normative frameworks that devalue other forms of reproduction. They also reduce reproduction to the imperative to survive, ignoring the myriad cultural, political, aesthetic, sensual and other dimensions of reproduction.

In the era of 21st century globalization and technological development, Asians are constructed as (hyper-)technological beings in both cultural and political terms. Prior to the technologization of Asian countries in this period, Orientalist logics framed Asian countries as backwards, primitive, and inferior to the West. Post-colonial theorist Edward Said (1987), writes that Orientalism, “create[s] not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe” (p. 94). Under an Orientalist framework, the West constructs and over-determines Asian countries. It is the Occident that inscribes logics which produce the conditions for threats and that we must be eradicated and/or exploited for capitalist gain.

Through the incorporation of specific Asian countries (Japan, China, and now India) into capitalist institutions through globalization, however, techno-Orientalism manifested as a form of white panic over the perceived foreign threat to Western hegemonic primacy. “Techno-Orientalism” is a phrase coined by David Morley and Kevin Robins (1995) in Spaces of Identity, which they originally contextualized to the rise and commodification of Japan writing:

In the United States (US), how much or how little academia can contribute to US foreign policy or policy relevance in general is entirely contingent upon whether or not the perception by the academy and its various and sundry academics is in line with the goals and role of the United States in the world. In the aftermath of 9/11 the US government and particularly the Bush administration took up the “Clash of Civilizations” narrative (Huntington 1993), not because the broadly ignorant text best fit the world it sought to portray, but because the perception of the Bush administration fit with the narrative of inevitable civilizational conflict. This narrative was then used to push the Global War on Terror and various US invasions in Middle Eastern and South Asian countries. During the Obama administration, similarly, the notion of tech-friendly, democratic utopianism fit explicitly with the rationalist world view that Obama adopted (Goldberg 2016). To be policy-relevant is not necessarily a badge of honor, most often because whatever administration or foreign policy perspective currently holds sway will cherry-pick the particular section or subsection of the literature that best conforms to the prejudices and proclivities of the foreign policy. Thus, it may not make much sense to chase policy windows or shuffle down avenues of research most digestible to those in political power; rather, it may behoove those interested in lines of research considered to be outside the policy canon to simply pursue the work that most closely hews to their world view, and provide the best research and methodology possible. Chasing phantoms in the policy world of “relevance” may pay few dividends in the long term.

Importantly, Russo’s work pulls together recent scholarship (including Agathangelou and Ling 2004; Butler 2004; Shepherd 2006; Nayak 2006) that examines how hegemonic actors deflect and distort criticism by explicitly invoking concern about gender violence. Thus, those who address gender violence in the same way as the hegemonic actor, are actually supporting and endorsing the hegemonic project even if they are resisting gender violence itself. Resistance movements and organizations, without careful and thorough interrogation of power, often leave undisturbed those power relations even as they attempt to address gender violence. In effect, resistance becomes about saving one’s own antagonistic relation to the Other.

What Tina Jung (2009) calls “genderism” (149) refers to making use of gender as a mere variable and not as a category of research. It is based on a steadfast belief in gender binarity that takes gender into account if it appears politically opportune, but is unlikely to allow challenges by profound analysis. We encounter it in many places, and this makes it very difficult to insist on feminism as such, let alone raise queerness as an issue of interest. Patriarchal genderism has entered many fields of research and politics without necessarily having anything to do with feminist or queer claims at all. On the contrary, a wide, but superficial post- and anti-feminist genderization of debates may efficiently lead to not having to take sex–gender-based analysis and critique into account. Its proponents – we can think of them as relatives and friends of ¶ “cosmo man” (Agathangelou and Ling 2004, 37) – can be of any gender. The corresponding mode of thinking about gender and sexuality is clearly hetero- normative, binary, top–down and mostly formulated from rather comfortable positions in society, which is why I call it patriarchal in quality. Patriarchal genderism is characterized by potentially benevolent, but preferably moderate, gender charity rather than radical queer or feminist politics. Still, it claims to be aware and supportive of gender issues as benchmarks of liberal democracy. This often amorphous genderism tends to make universal claims, but it can turn into a very specific form when it comes to speaking about other women that come “under western eyes” (Mohanty 1991). With the rise of gender awareness and policies in the relevant domains of so-called international/uni- versal knowledge production, patriarchy has successfully been transferred to distant “Others” in the Global South/East or to its representatives inside global capitalism’s metropoles through a sustainable “ethnicization of sexism” (Ja ̈ger 1999). By way of this procedure, the centers of political and epistemic power in the Global North/West appear as the natural address of progressive gender regimes and sexual policies. In fact, this tradition of sexualized and gendered racism is indeed as old as imperialism (McClintock 1995), and it has taken on many forms. It is very efficient, because “[g]ender operates as a kind of technology of empire enabling the West to make the case for its own modernity and for its civilizational projects around the globe” (Razack 2008, 18). We are about to now decipher the latest forms of existence of this success- ful technology, and we have to modify our instruments of analysis and critique accordingly. The notion of patriarchal genderism and other concepts presented below can help us in this process.

The reproduction of survival/ the survival of reproduction Extinction is almost always understood against the horizon of survival and the imperative to sustain it – at least for life forms deemed to be of value to humans. In many cases, this imperative takes the form of deliberate strategies for enforcing existence. Donna Haraway’s influential book When Species Meet devotes considerable attention to the logics, practices and politics of Species Survival Plans. These plans monitor and enforce reproduction amongst ‘endangered’ species, not least by collecting data on populations, genetic profiles and genetic materials to enable selective breeding. This strategy assumes that all organisms can, should, and can be made to exercise their reproductive capacities in order to resist extinction, and it actively mobilizes members of ‘endangered species’ into this project. In so doing, it helps to entrench norms regarding gender, sexuality and reproductive labour that are deeply entrenched in modern, Western human cultures. Attention to these programmes highlights an important way in which extinction is gendered in dominant scientific and policy frameworks. Specifically, strategic breeding programmes share in the belief that reproduction is an imperative for those capable of reproducing if ‘the species’ is at risk’. This belief is directly related to Western norms of the reproductive imperative for women. Indeed, Haraway points out that it is precisely “‘woman’s’ putative self-defining responsibility to ‘the species’ as this singular and typological female is reduced to her reproductive function”. In a similar sense, within SSPs and other strategies of enforced survival, entire life forms are reduced to their reproductive capacities. Moreover, programmes of enforced survival can, in the context of sexual reproduction, disproportionately burden female organisms with the task of avoiding extinction. This logic is particularly fraught in discussions of the possibility of human extinction, in which female fertility (captured in the standard policy language of ‘births per woman’) is framed simultaneously as a threat to survival, and the only hope for escaping extinction (see, for instance, Alan Weisman’s comments on this). In these ways, the securitization of survival entrenches the intersectional categories of gender, species and race discussed above. Dominant discourses of extinction and conservation also entrench and privilege sexual reproduction, in ways that entrench heteronormative assumptions and norms. This is reflected in the way that the subjects of extinction and conservation are framed. The standard object of conservation is the biological ‘species’, a term which is defined by the ability of organisms to reproduce sexually. As Myra Hird has pointed out, this conception of ‘species’ makes it appear as if sexual reproduction is the ‘best’ means of sustaining the existence of a life form. However, Hird’s work demonstrates that Earthly life forms actually engage in myriad forms of reproduction, from the free exchange of DNA between bacteria to the hermaphroditic practices of some fish. The upshot of these arguments is that Earthly life is sustained through a huge variety of reproductive activities that do not conform to biological understandings of life processes or species. Crucially, Hird argues that there is no necessary hierarchy between forms of reproduction. In Darwinian terms, all species that manage to survive are equally successful. However, by conflating survival with sexual reproduction, existing discourses of extinction embed hetero-normative frameworks that devalue other forms of reproduction. They also reduce reproduction to the imperative to survive, ignoring the myriad cultural, political, aesthetic, sensual and other dimensions of reproduction.

In practice, this theoretical approach lets us think of the constitutive other of the research subject as a social construction rather than as separable from the would-be researcher/scholar. Thinking of the constitutive other of the research subject as a social construction broadens the ways that we can think about the impact of research in four ways. First, the research has impact on the researcher: impact that is political, sociological, economic, and psychological (e.g., Kusic and Zahora 2020). Second, research has everyday impacts. Thinking back to Marysia Zalewski’s (1996) typology of theories, theory can be problem-solving (the traditional use in mainstream IR), critique (the modal use in critical IR), and action or lived. It is this last sort of theorizing that deconstructing the subject/object dichotomy sheds light on: theory as action. When would-be IR researchers do research, that itself is action “in the world” which has impacts in that world—that is, the everyday, around the researcher and the researched—in the community in which the research is produced, in the community in which the research is done, and in the community in which the research is disseminated. Third, research has political, social, and economic impacts in its citation, repetition, promotion, and publication. Each time research is shared, tweeted, and discussed, that is an act in itself with implications. Fourth, research has impacts on the ways that readers of research understand and see the people or institutions understood to be the subject of the research; such that research becomes a lens through which those othered in it are consumed by those who read it.

Across these four contexts, we make the argument that there is no such thing as non-violent or non-harmful research. We contend that reflection on the violences involved in one’s own participation both in the system of research production in which we live and work, and in particular research, is key to understanding the perverse effects and potential harms of research, in both substantive and methodological choice. Each research design choice includes and excludes some people; benefits and harms some people; supports some people distributing benefits and harms to others; has political, economic, social, and planetary footprints. The question becomes not whether harm is done, but what harm and to whom, and how it can be managed, understood, and minimized. Coming to terms with the violence in one’s own research, and one’s own (disciplinary and other) sociological and political choices, is a key part of understanding the links between (and distinctions among) ontology, epistemology, methodology, and methods, and the political content that crosses those concepts. Significant existing work on epistemic violence (Behl 2019; Brunner 2021), the violences of inclusion (Haritaworn et al. 2013; Haritaworn et al. 2014; Mbembe 2019), and the violences involved in IR research (Van Milders and Toros 2020; Zalewski and Runyan 2013), provide a strong foundation for having these conversations in a serious and useful way. Still, it is only when these texts and their ideas are brought into dialogue with the instructive content in a textbook like this that they could start being built into disciplinary discussions about how research is constituted and performed.

In practice, this theoretical approach lets us think of the constitutive other of the research subject as a social construction rather than as separable from the would-be researcher/scholar. Thinking of the constitutive other of the research subject as a social construction broadens the ways that we can think about the impact of research in four ways. First, the research has impact on the researcher: impact that is political, sociological, economic, and psychological (e.g., Kusic and Zahora 2020). Second, research has everyday impacts. Thinking back to Marysia Zalewski’s (1996) typology of theories, theory can be problem-solving (the traditional use in mainstream IR), critique (the modal use in critical IR), and action or lived. It is this last sort of theorizing that deconstructing the subject/object dichotomy sheds light on: theory as action. When would-be IR researchers do research, that itself is action “in the world” which has impacts in that world—that is, the everyday, around the researcher and the researched—in the community in which the research is produced, in the community in which the research is done, and in the community in which the research is disseminated. Third, research has political, social, and economic impacts in its citation, repetition, promotion, and publication. Each time research is shared, tweeted, and discussed, that is an act in itself with implications. Fourth, research has impacts on the ways that readers of research understand and see the people or institutions understood to be the subject of the research; such that research becomes a lens through which those othered in it are consumed by those who read it.

Across these four contexts, we make the argument that there is no such thing as non-violent or non-harmful research. We contend that reflection on the violences involved in one’s own participation both in the system of research production in which we live and work, and in particular research, is key to understanding the perverse effects and potential harms of research, in both substantive and methodological choice. Each research design choice includes and excludes some people; benefits and harms some people; supports some people distributing benefits and harms to others; has political, economic, social, and planetary footprints. The question becomes not whether harm is done, but what harm and to whom, and how it can be managed, understood, and minimized. Coming to terms with the violence in one’s own research, and one’s own (disciplinary and other) sociological and political choices, is a key part of understanding the links between (and distinctions among) ontology, epistemology, methodology, and methods, and the political content that crosses those concepts. Significant existing work on epistemic violence (Behl 2019; Brunner 2021), the violences of inclusion (Haritaworn et al. 2013; Haritaworn et al. 2014; Mbembe 2019), and the violences involved in IR research (Van Milders and Toros 2020; Zalewski and Runyan 2013), provide a strong foundation for having these conversations in a serious and useful way. Still, it is only when these texts and their ideas are brought into dialogue with the instructive content in a textbook like this that they could start being built into disciplinary discussions about how research is constituted and performed.

(Cynthia, May 2010, The City University London, UK and University of Warwick, UK, Gender Relations as Causal in Militarization and War, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12:2, 139-157)

Ethno-nationalist issues, foreign-ness, the expression of the perceived security interests of an ethnic or national self in relation to its others, is a second major cause of war (Horowitz 1985; Gurr and Harff 1994; Hutchinson 2005). It is often an antecedent cause, in Fogarty’s terms, if not an immediate one. Raids against the ones outside the walls of the first city states, the barbarians on the borders of the early empires. Later, the Infidel. Some contemporary wars are fought by an insurgent ethnic group trying to get recognition inside a larger polity, looking for more autonomy or its own state: as Chechen separatists seek to escape from the Russian Federation while the Russian military mobilize to stop them. How can this kind of racializing cause in war be detected? By listening to what the ideologues are saying, the religious leaders. What is the propaganda, who is putting it out? What names are claimed, what names are being imposed on others? ¶ By contrast, patriarchal gender relations as a cause of war, I would suggest, most often fall in the ‘root cause’ or ‘favourable conditions’ category, and here we have to pay attention to culture. With the exception of the abduction of the mythical Helen of Troy (and the spurious attempt of George W. and Laura Bush to portray the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 as a war to save Afghan women from repression by the Taliban) wars are not fought ‘for’ gender issues in the way they are sometimes fought ‘for’ oil resources, or ‘for’ national autonomy. Instead, they foster militarism and militarization. They make war thinkable. They make peace difficult to sustain. As noted above, women close to militarization and war are observant of cultures, cultures as they manifest themselves in societies before, in and after armed conflicts. If we think of the war system as having a cyclical or spiralling life, as a continuum over time, proceeding from the discourse of militarist ideology, through material investment in militarization, aggressive policy-making, outbreaks of war, short firefights, prolonged stalemates, ceasefires, demobilization, periods of provisional peace, anxieties about security, rearmament and so on, and if we look closely at the social ¶ relations in which individuals and groups enact these various steps, that is where it is possible to see gender relations at work, pushing the wheel around. The above account of a feminist standpoint, generating an understanding of war that contradicts the hegemonic view, is derived first and foremost from my empirical research among women’s antiwar organizations and networks. But, closely involved with that movement, there is a world of feminist scholars (men as well as women) who have striven over the past three decades to articulate in a growing library of written work the understandings arising among women war survivors and activists. Many collected editions bring together research and reporting from a range of different countries and periods (for instance, Cooke and Woollacott 1993; Lorentzen and Turpin 1998; Moser and Clark 2001; Giles and Hyndman 2004). Research-based monographs show the influence of gender relations at points along the continuum of militarization and war. Robert Dean (2001), for instance, in his study of the Kennedy administration taking the USA to war in Vietnam, shows masculinism at work in preparation for war. Susan Jeffords (1989) in The Remasculinization of America, shows, through an analysis of films and novels, national efforts to salvage masculine pride after such a defeat. Many firsthand accounts show in painful detail how, in military training, patriarchal masculinity lends itself to exploitation for war-fighting, and how violence is eroticized in masculine fantasy (Theweleit 1987). Together such studies articulate the feminist perception that patriarchal gender relations are among the ‘root causes’ of ¶ militarism and war.

For the purposes of this project, we define gender violence as systematic, institutionalized and/or programmatic violence (sexual, physical, psychological) that operates through the constructs of gender and often at the intersection of sexuality, race and national identity. Gender violence comprises the acts and practices that systematically target a person, group or community in order to dictate what ‘men’ and ‘women’ are supposed to be and to discipline marginalized communities or any other perceived threats to dominant political structures and practices. In addition, we fundamentally conceive of ‘gender violence’ as a contested concept that may only represent specific practices and experiences. While certain behaviors or practices are commonly associated with gender violence (such as violence against some women) we do not claim that it is a ‘ready’ category. It is not a static or non-normative category particularly since naming certain experiences/practices as examples of gender violence may in fact delimit those experiences. We want to de-naturalize the category of gender violence to show how dominant representations are imbricated in national and global politics and exist at the intersections of racial, class and international politics. Similarly, in the context of this Special Issue, we understand hegemonic projects as constituted through systematic power relationships that privilege certain ways of knowing, being and acting and that give voice to only certain people’s experiences and agendas in the realm of families, communities and political entities. The processes, practices and discourses that demarcate a hegemonic project are not homogeneous, uncontested or settled. Because sociopolitical forces of actors participate in normalizing power relationships they can potentially pose different ways of knowing, being and acting that could rupture and reshape those relationships. Thus, hegemonic projects are not free-floating monolithic phenomena but rather contextually specific and historically produced, defining the realm of political possibilities. We situate our understanding of hegemony within the context of critical theorists such as Roxanne Doty (1996) and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001).As distinct from narrow (neo)realist understandings of hege- mony as a preponderance of resources or Gramscian understandings of how the ruling class maintains its position of power, these critical theorists see hegemony as the discursive linkage of particular ideas (Doty 1996: 8): The hegemonic dimension of global politics is inextricably linked to representational practices ... Hegemony involves the very production of categories of identity and the society of which they are a part. Hegemonic practices . . . seek to create the fixedness of meaning that . . . is ultimately impossible. For example, current hegemonic practices of neoliberalism and neocolonialism circumscribe what democracy and rights are supposed to look like in terms of their appropriate forms and definitions, the legitimate actions taken in the name of democracy and rights as well as the parameters of justice and political participation. In this way, hegemonic actors (political elites and privileged acti- vists for example) deflect criticism by feigning neutrality or ubiquity and, as we argue, require and shape discourses and practices of gender violence. While there may be identifiable actors, this does not mean that domination is sufficiently challenged by ‘cutting off the oppressor’s head’ because of how domi- nation is imbricated in interpersonal, local, global, cultural, economic and social dynamics. As noted above, gender violence accomplishes certain things and fixes particular meanings and practices. Given that hegemonic pro- jects also attempt to create a particular world of meaning and being, both gender violence and hegemonic projects can help each other ‘succeed’. Although it is not only the epistemic that generates hegemonic projects, we pay particular attention in this Special Issue to the hegemonic projects of ‘the state’. We do not conceive of the state as an actor but rather as an idea or what Pierre Bourdieu (1994) calls a ‘bureaucratic field’ that wields symbolic power and centralizes power. It is possible that the principal hegemonic project of the modern world is the project of ‘the state’. Our predominant focus on the state as a hegemonic project, then, is not to affirm state-centrism but to acknowledge that the state is still a central organizing political category of our lives. The politics of opposition, categories of identity and contemporary forms of dom- ination work through the state in many ways. Our focus is on hegemonic pro- jects – such as economic development (and its proxy neoliberalism), women’s rights activism, nation-building and national security – that are implicitly executed in the name of ‘the state’. These issues of gender, violence and power have been dealt with to some extent in feminist IR scholarship on the issues of gender, violence and power. Whereas traditional IR theory often views power as an ability to leverage material resources to get others to do what is not in their interests, feminists have exposed the gendered context of power thereby revealing more nuanced dimensions of hegemonic projects such as nationalism, militarism and globalization. The militarization of daily life when states promote military apparatuses as the solution for stability, security and development, the use of rape as a tool of war and the disproportionate effects of violence on particular women are three examples of a gendered conception of power (Enloe 2000; Jacobs, Jacobson and Marchbank 2000; Giles and Hyndman 2004). Feminist understandings of power have also exposed how gender is used to legitimize the operations of hegemonic projects. One example is the use of gendered conceptions of ‘protecting family and nation’ to promote military operations; another is the gender hierarchy that grounds, enables or cements the separation of public and private spheres (Peterson and Runyan 1998). While the issue of gender violence is indeed more prominent now because of the growth of feminist IR theory, we want to push for a further examination of the constitutive role gender violence plays in hegemonic projects. The scholar- ship on gender violence in IR certainly shows how hegemonic projects, such as nationalism or war, are deeply gendered and thus result in violence against women. But, while this vantage point is critical and often gets at the construction of gender, this framework generally only sees gender violence as primar- ily an example of hegemonic projects – one effect of power through the register of gender, rather than as contested, productive and coterminous with power. If we, as feminist theorists, respond to the obsessive focus on war in the mainstream IR field by documenting power relationships in terms of ‘Man’ over ‘Woman’/State over Citizen, we may inadvertently reaffirm understandings of violence as a ‘tool’ for particular goals of power. We acknowledge that power itself is an understudied political concept, par- ticularly regarding the multiple and layered forms that it takes. It would be easy to set up the realist, masculinist conceptualization of power as a ‘straw- person’ against which to posit the importance of feminist scholarship. However, we are pushing for feminist intervention in various discussions of power, whether it takes the form of compulsory control over others, indirect control via institutions and rules, structural ‘constitution of social capacities and interests of actors in direct relation’, particularly in terms of ‘producing social positions of capital and labor’, or ‘the socially diffuse production of sub- jectivity in systems of meaning and signification’ (Barnett and Duvall 2005: 3–4). Therefore, building on the work of feminist challenges to traditional IR views on power and of feminist scholarship on the gendered effects and pro- duction of various forms of power, we seek more nuanced understandings on this topic through the examination of the relationship between hegemony, gender and violence. It is often the case that the very contours of what constitutes gender violence in feminist IR scholarship are drawn by the issue of ‘violence against women’. Keck and Sikkink (1998) rightly explain how a transnational advocacy network actively developed the ‘violence against women’ frame, coalescing several campaigns worldwide into a platform that gets at the politics of pain which disproportionately targets women. The approach has raised awareness, galvanized support, given rise to much professional and political activity and enabled women’s groups to secure funding. But these political goals may have been secured at a certain cost. In the first place, the ‘violence against women’ approach relies on representational understandings of gender violence. In other words, the focus on violence against women also potentially ignores vio- lence against men and against groups in ways that are gendered, raced and internationalized. For example, feminist IR scholars invoke the presumably disproportionate targeting of women during conflict in ways that emphasize particular gendered effects of conflict and the masculinized state; the general effect is the lack of due attention to what it means to ‘make’ gender through violence or to the way codes of masculinity negatively affect men. Second, we also note that responses to gender violence, in many ways more so than any other political category, have sanctified racism, imperialism and Orientalism among feminists and critical theorists. For example, the obsession with ‘Islamism’ as the explanation par excellence for gender troubles around the world as well as the romanticization and infantilization of indigenous and/or marginalized women, belie feminist concerns about hierarchy (Nayak 2006; Shepherd 2006). Feminists participate in these problematic dis- cussions about gender violence when we presume that the only reason a woman may die elsewhere is because of her (monolithically) oppressive culture in contrast to the choices and freedom of women in the West. Ironically, it may be such limited understandings of gender violence that unintentionally keep the topic of gender on the sidelines of political science. If gender violence is just an effect of power and does not substantively contri- bute to how we understand the operations of power, then the issues that gender violence raises may be dismissed as ‘women’s issues’ rather than instrumental to knowledge in political science. This dynamic also increases the ghettoi- zation of feminist IR scholarship and scholars (cf. Weber 1994).1 The current lacuna in IR scholarship on hegemony as well as on gender violence is not accidental but rather signals the production of knowledge in this field. Work on gender violence is not predominant in political science or the IR field pre- cisely because it is conceived as ‘just’ violence against women. In other words, in order to further our understandings of violence, we must interrogate gender violence as constitutive of power, and to understand power, we must go beyond current understandings that see ‘it’ in terms of tools or phenomena that act on gender. And, as we do so, we simultaneously ask why the questions we examine in this Special Issue are left on the margins of scholarship. Thus, we come to the following: why does our argument that gender violence is more than a case study of the effects of hegemony and, rather, is constitutive of hegemonic projects, matter? By re-orienting the relationship between gender violence and hegemonic projects we challenge the ‘natural- ness’ of the category of gender violence and assert it as constitutive of the productive forces of hegemonic projects. This framework provides a fresh and critical approach to understanding hegemonic projects and the construction of difference(s). We reference the work of postcolonial and critical race feminists who explain how neocolonial and neoimperial state formations are productive of and reliant upon gendered and racialized conceptualizations of citizens, immigrants and of ‘us/them’ dichotomies (McClintock 1995; Chatterjee and Jeganathan 2000; Stoler 2002). Postcolonial theory also explains how a fix- ation on violence ‘over there’ sidesteps how power works via international hierarchy (Chowdhry and Nair 2002). Similarly, we also believe that gender violence, rather than simply a result of war or culture, is vital and pivotal to the possibility of political violence and hegemony in the first place. Recent critical feminist engagements with international political economy (IPE) have also shown how the exploitation of women, and particularly women of color, is not simply an unintended consequence of global capitalism. Rather, the advancement of global capitalism under the dominant ideological ration- ale of neoliberalism depends on women’s secondary gendered status and global class hierarchy (Mies 1998; Peterson 2003; Agathangelou 2004). Drawing on these important literatures, we seek with this Special Issue to push the connections between gender violence and hegemonic projects beyond the ‘effects of power’ view towards an understanding that places the constitutive function of gender violence at the forefront.

According to the first criticism, the prevalence of sexual metaphors and phallic images in public discourse about nuclear weapons provide a means “to create excitement about, support for and identification with both the weapons and the political regime possessing them” (Duncanson and Eschle 2008, 548). For instance, feminist scholars Cohn and Ruddick (2004, 415, 418) argue that nuclear “weapons (and their use) are theorized and legitimated” with alluring and exciting sexual metaphors, which “breed the idea that nuclear explosions give ‘virility’ to the nation.” Keep in mind that feminists make this argument about societies and national security discourses, this is not a point targeted at Dr. Strangelove. However, it certainly reflects a strange love. One standard popular and well-known reference about phallic imagery is antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott’s (1986, 238) notion of “missile envy” and “the psychosexual overtones” of nuclear weapons terminology. However, the empirical and theoretical work of feminist scholar Carol Cohn is especially important on this theme. Cohn (1987, 688) spent 1984 “immersed in the world of defense intellectuals” as a “participant observer” in workshops and lectures focused on nuclear strategy, weapons, and arms control. Since that time, she has also devoted much of her career to studying nuclear weapons, strategy, and gender. Cohn (1987, 687, 696) found that the men, “and indeed, they are virtually all men,” who work as “defense intellectuals” typically employ language filled with “sexual imagery.” In a lengthy and much-cited article about her experiences among defense intellectuals, Cohn points out numerous examples of sexual images and language, including standard references to penetration, throw-weight, and spasm attacks (see also Sylvester 1994, 176). Additionally, Cohn (1987, 694) noted that “The history of the atomic bomb project itself is rife with overt images of competitive male sexuality, as is the discourse of the early nuclear physicists, strategists, and SAC commanders.” Based on his extensive personal experience in the field, nuclear physicist Brian Easlea (1987, 146) likewise acknowledged that military scientists and nuclear strategists employ “frightening” and even “obscene” sexual metaphors in an effort to “demonstrate indisputable masculine status.”

As demonstrated in the prior section, Dr. Strangelove is certainly filled with sexual metaphors and phallic images. Again, “all of the major characters have names which are either explicitly or subtly sexually denotative” (Linden 1977, 76). In addition to the phallic images already noted, General Ripper’s scenes often include this imagery. Notably, Ripper smokes a large phallic cigar in his meeting with Group Captain Mandrake, which Kubrick made much more prominent by use of another low-angled camera shot. Later, Ripper fires a long cylindrical machine gun, another phallic symbol, when his base comes under attack from American forces trying to learn the codes to recall the bombers and stop the war he has initiated. In the ending, as Starck (2010, 61) notes, Major Kong’s “positioning on the rocket [he straddles] and the camera angle produce the impression of a giant penis.” Film scholar M. Keith Booker (2007, 103–4) echoes the feminist critique when he argues that Kubrick’s repeated use of sexual images and metaphors work to characterize “the Cold War as a phallic competition” as the military leaders attempt to demonstrate that they “have the bigger and more effective weapons.”

In practice, this theoretical approach lets us think of the constitutive other of the research subject as a social construction rather than as separable from the would-be researcher/scholar. Thinking of the constitutive other of the research subject as a social construction broadens the ways that we can think about the impact of research in four ways. First, the research has impact on the researcher: impact that is political, sociological, economic, and psychological (e.g., Kusic and Zahora 2020). Second, research has everyday impacts. Thinking back to Marysia Zalewski’s (1996) typology of theories, theory can be problem-solving (the traditional use in mainstream IR), critique (the modal use in critical IR), and action or lived. It is this last sort of theorizing that deconstructing the subject/object dichotomy sheds light on: theory as action. When would-be IR researchers do research, that itself is action “in the world” which has impacts in that world—that is, the everyday, around the researcher and the researched—in the community in which the research is produced, in the community in which the research is done, and in the community in which the research is disseminated. Third, research has political, social, and economic impacts in its citation, repetition, promotion, and publication. Each time research is shared, tweeted, and discussed, that is an act in itself with implications. Fourth, research has impacts on the ways that readers of research understand and see the people or institutions understood to be the subject of the research; such that research becomes a lens through which those othered in it are consumed by those who read it.

Across these four contexts, we make the argument that there is no such thing as non-violent or non-harmful research. We contend that reflection on the violences involved in one’s own participation both in the system of research production in which we live and work, and in particular research, is key to understanding the perverse effects and potential harms of research, in both substantive and methodological choice. Each research design choice includes and excludes some people; benefits and harms some people; supports some people distributing benefits and harms to others; has political, economic, social, and planetary footprints. The question becomes not whether harm is done, but what harm and to whom, and how it can be managed, understood, and minimized. Coming to terms with the violence in one’s own research, and one’s own (disciplinary and other) sociological and political choices, is a key part of understanding the links between (and distinctions among) ontology, epistemology, methodology, and methods, and the political content that crosses those concepts. Significant existing work on epistemic violence (Behl 2019; Brunner 2021), the violences of inclusion (Haritaworn et al. 2013; Haritaworn et al. 2014; Mbembe 2019), and the violences involved in IR research (Van Milders and Toros 2020; Zalewski and Runyan 2013), provide a strong foundation for having these conversations in a serious and useful way. Still, it is only when these texts and their ideas are brought into dialogue with the instructive content in a textbook like this that they could start being built into disciplinary discussions about how research is constituted and performed.