Feminism K - Northwestern 2024

Feminism K Aff and Neg – NDI 2024
Neg---Feminism K
Shells
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Repetition compulsion of doomsday scenarios is wedded to a performance of apocalyptic manhood. Their rhetoric confirms white masculine victimage, ensures a surge of mass violence.
Kelly ’20 [Casey Ryan, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood, 2020, p 30-32.]
One overarching lesson of American doomsday culture is that the future is indefinite but that hegemonic white masculinity—aggression, self-reliance, stoicism, competitiveness—remains necessary. In Martin’s grave divinations, the recuperation of traditional manly skill sets will rebuild America after inevitable disaster. Like most doomsday preppers, Martin is enraptured by a regression to the state of nature—a fantasy consummated through repetitive scenario planning and preparation for the apocalypse. Here, the world is made to disappear only to be returned to the viewer with an illusory sense of control and mastery over an uncertain future. Doomsday Preppers powerfully illustrates the culture of politics of melancholia at work in the contemporary crisis of masculinity: there was a primal moment to which we will and must return when our survival hinged on the strength and natural ability of men.
Although American television audiences are accustomed to seeing their world eviscerated on screen, outlived by small bands of maleled survivors, the apocalyptic turn in popular culture gives viewers purportedly unmediated access to the masculinized survival rituals performed by ordinary Americans. National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers promises to take viewers “into lives of . . . committed preppers who have devised extensive plans, gone to great lengths, and made huge personal sacrifices to guarantee their very survival.” Each episode’s participants are “ordinary Americans from all walks of life” who are “taking whatever measures necessary to prepare and protect themselves from what they perceive as the fast approaching end of the world as we know it.” Unlike spectacular disaster films, Doomsday Preppers portrays the manly art of survival as a sensible ritual already practiced by millions of Americans. Drawing from the educational ethos of the Nat Geo, Doomsday Preppers invites audiences to emulate “real life” performances of manly survival skills against the background of an uncertain future.
This chapter attends to how the mainstreaming of doomsday prepping figures into the contemporary rhetoric of white male victimhood. As a dominant form of new media, reality television has played a prominent role in modeling white masculinity in precarious political and economic times. Reality television purports to offer unmediated access to everyday-life performances through a valence of authority borrowed from anthropology and educational television. It is a form that affords its subjects an aura of authenticity or realness. Yet, reality television is belabored and produced under conditions of heavy mediation, including the crafting of character types, mise-en-scene, continuity editing, cinematography, and dialogue to name a few. Reality television is also a genre with an agency all its own. Like other forms of media, it is formulaic, but its premises, sets, and concepts can be easily and cheaply copied, recycled, and reused across cable television. For example, the success of Doomsday Preppers generated a series of copycat programs on other cable networks, including related programming that features extreme survival trials (Alone, Dual Survival, Man vs. Wild, Naked and Afraid, Survivor Man, The Alaska Experiment, and The Colony). Hence, reality television is, in part, responsible for the sudden cultural visibility of masculine survivalism. What is novel about reality television is that it imbues extreme everyday-life performances with both authenticity and compelling dramatic structure. This chapter explores how the rhetoric of reality television delivers to the culture a manly sense of apocalyptic excitement.
My central argument is that seemingly “authentic” representations of doomsday prepping have helped reclaim white male sovereignty in the name of survival and resuscitated premodern archetypes of primal masculinity as befitting the laws that govern human nature and, consequently, the postapocalyptic future. Doomsday preppers argue that the feminine attributes that characterize modernity are ultimately unsustainable luxuries that will inevitable collapse into barbarism. Simulating the apocalypse, then, is an opportunity for white men to display masculine traits as a set of survival tools—the antidote for a crumbling and emasculated society. Longing to resuscitate a past that never existed, doomsday preppers seek to domesticate the trauma of white masculinity’s displacement by promising a future in which white men are restored to their proper place in both nature and the social order. In short, the apocalypse serves as the ultimately resolution to the so-called crisis of masculinity. Along with a series of other networked platforms, reality television has ushered in the apocalyptic turn in white masculinity.
Once a fringe ritual among survivalists and white supremacists, apocalyptic manhood is now constituted through rhetoric and per-formances that confirm the necessity of masculine skills as modern society meets its demise. This chapter uses the National Geographic Channel’s reality program Doomsday Preppers to show how the figure of the doomsday prepper cultivates a militarized version of white manhood capable of reclaiming the future from women and racial Others. Through repeated displays of manly preparedness rituals in machine shops, gun ranges, and wilderness, Doomsday Preppers offers a rebuttal to the progressive case for gender and racial equality by testifying to the enduring primacy of white male identity. In a broader context, this chapter also explains how apocalyptic paranoia has contributed to a surge in hypermasculine mass violence in American culture where feelings of white male alienation translate into militaristic preparations for an uncertain future.
Vote neg for postcolonial feminist IR critique of the ‘global masculinity game’ of nuclear politics.
Choi & Eschle ’22 [Shine Choi, Senior Lecturer in the School of People, Environment, and Planning @ Massey University. Catherine Eschle, Senior lecturer in the School of Government and Public Policy @ the University of Strathclyde. ‘Rethinking global nuclear politics, rethinking feminism.’ International Affairs 98: 4. July 2022. 1129–1147. doi: 10.1093/ia/iiac118]
This leads us to the second puzzle: where are the more diverse lineages of contributions to this topic in feminist IR? More specifically, where are the perspectives of women of colour and/or from the global South—not as ‘native informants’ or voices under analysis, but as theorists and researchers of global nuclear politics? Why isn’t the work of Das, for instance, considered an appropriate starting-point for feminist interrogations of global nuclear politics in IR in the same way as that of Cohn? Or what about Teresia Teaiwa’s analysis of how the bikini swimsuit simultaneously sexualizes the generic female body and erases the specificity of the embodied experience of nuclear colonialism by Pacific Island women?13 The fact that such works are so rarely centred in feminist IR leads us to wonder whether developments in feminist approaches to foreign policy, diplomacy and WPS have encouraged a focus on ‘gender’ abstracted from other power relations, and/or the elevation of Eurocentric dialogues on international norms and politics. Further adding to the puzzle is that while postcolonial feminist IR scholarship on war, militarism and security has been growing for some time,14 nuclear politics have not featured much, beyond the work of Das and Teaiwa. Conversely, postcolonial IR scholarship on the ways in which nuclear diplomacy is shaped by colonial legacies and racialized hierarchies is now well established;15 but it leaves uninterrogated the ‘global masculinity game’ that ‘transnationalizes insecurity supposedly to protect the “homeland”’ and ensures ‘brutal expressions of hegemony through technological efficiency’.16 Thus, with a few notable exceptions, feminist and postcolonial IR have tended to talk past each other on the topic of global nuclear politics.17
In response, this article argues that feminist IR scholarship on the global nuclear order and its discontents should be revitalized, in ways that take fuller account of the colonial matrix of power, its racialized underpinnings and its contemporary realignments. Coloniality, defined succinctly by Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh as a colonial matrix of power that is constitutive of modernity,18 has not yet become a substantial foundational starting-point for conversations in feminist IR, except as a specialism for some.19 If feminists are fully to understand its implications for global nuclear politics, critical conversations will have to take place across theoretical traditions and disciplines, as well as across geopolitical locations and experiences of different forms of colonialism. This will require the provincializing of western nuclear experiences and discourses, along with the development of location-sensitive, non-totalizing and non-hierarchical understandings of how coloniality has shaped and continues to shape the global nuclear order in gendered and racialized ways. The articles in the special section of this issue of International Affairs are an important step in this direction.
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Linear predictions of state behavior rely on the false presumption of internal coherence and rationality. This view from nowhere ensures self-fulfilling wars and gendered violence.
Sjoberg ’13 [Laura Sjoberg, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida, Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War, Columbia University Press]
“Some dyadic accounts of war are interested in how states’ interactions lead to (or help prevent) conflict between them in the sense of signaling, rather than in the sense of relating. “Steps-to-war” models lay out “a set of closely related paths to war that involve a series of steps between states that are roughly equal in power.”50 As Levy and Thompson explain, “they show each ‘step’ increases the probability of war, and that the process is cumulative.”51 Relatedly, rivalry theories of war see specific interstate relationships as more likely to lead to war than others. They suggest that because states “focus selectively on the states that appear to represent the greatest threat,” the act of singling out antagonists is key in predicting interstate wars, suggesting that “repetitive war behavior” points to conflict probability.52 In this view, states’ interactions are cumulative in causing conflict and war(s), and some states’ rivalries account for the majority of wars.” “Another theoretical approach to war that takes account of interaction focuses on bargaining. bargaining theories of war are interested in why war(s) happen(s) despite the(ir) cost, and therefore focus on why war-fighting parties were unable (or unwilling) to reach a (cheaper) negotiated settlement to their dispute(s),53 with emphasis on possible pathologies in negotiations, including commitment problems,54 private information (and/or incentives to misrepresent),55 the lack of a “bargaining” space of outcomes that are mutually preferred to war,56 and/or indivisible issues.57 This work implies that it is difficult to reach a negotiated settlement even when such a deal would be optimal for all parties involved.58” “All three of these models assume that states interact with some linear action and reaction, in which “the primary factors in determining war and peace are the foreign policy strategies adopted by states to deal with their disputes.”59 All three models also assume an internal coherence, or unitary nature, of the actors interacting, whereby each is making decisions for an internally united whole. The bargaining models add the assumption that the unitary actors interacting progressively do so rationally and calculate cost–benefit analysis in conflict decision-making. Feminist research has questioned each of these assumptions, arguing that states interact more relationally than reactively; suggesting that states are, rather than unitary, diverse and full of internal conflict that should not be neglected when defining (or critiquing the idea of) “interest”; and that states are not the rational actors that bargaining theorists assume them to be.60” “Action and Reaction
As I mentioned above, a number of dyadic-level theories of the causes of war either do not theorize how states interact explicitly,61 or, in the case of bargaining, rivalry, and steps-to-war models, assume states’ interactions are individuated and progressive. by individuated and progressive, I mean that one state acts, the other (or others) respond, and then the first actor acts again in a sequence of interaction that can be understood chronologically62 and told as a coherent story.
Feminist theorists’ understandings of the incomplete independence of decision makers and their decisions 63 frequently suggest that this picture needs to be complicated significantly. For our purposes now, the idea of state interaction in these theoretical approaches takes account of (as discussed in chapter 3) Allen’s ideas of power-over (as domination) and power-to (as resistance of domination)64 but takes inadequate account of power-with, both directly (as states can act together) and in its implications for interpreting state interactions (as neither necessarily individuated or progressive).” “Power-with, or the ability to act in concert, pooling (symbolic or material) power, resources, and/or knowledge, suggests that a model of state behavior in which we understand actions and responses to actions dichotomously does not tell the whole story. Discussing methods such as participatory planning,65 multisited feminist social criticism,66 and empowerment,67 feminist theorists have suggested both that actors are interdependent and that they can act together, simultaneously, and in role-similar and role-differentiated ways.68 In this view, instead of seeing policy as (always) assertion and/or response, it can be seen as responsiveness, more complicated constitutively (in terms of who the actor is) and directionally (in terms of where policies are going).69 For process-based dyadic war theorizing, this suggests that there may be different, more empirically nuanced, ways of looking at the nature of relationships between states to understand how it is that they end up in conflict, particularly in terms of their (gendered) war narratives and (gendered) cycles of violence. before sketching out what that might look like, this section continues to think about the problems with assumptions of state unity, state rationality, and the gender neutrality of the “gender neutrality of the process to war in process-based theories.
Unitary Units
Feminist scholars have also interrogated the unitary nature of the state, pointing out that efforts to maximize the state’s security interests often threaten the security of people inside the state. Specifically, as I discussed in the previous section, the state’s most marginalized citizens are often made insecure by state security-seeking, making it clear that a state does not have a single interest in interstate interaction but many that conflict. J. Ann Tickner contends that “an explanation of the historical development of state sovereignty and state identities as they have evolved over time does indeed suggest deeply gendered constructions that have not included women on the same terms as men.”70 This is because, according to Tickner:”
“From the time of their foundation, states have sought to control the right to define political identity. Since their legitimacy has constantly been threatened by the undermining power of subnational and transnational loyalties, states’ survival and success have depended on the creation and maintenance of legitimating national identities; often these identities have depended on the manipulation of gendered representation.… Drawing on metaphors that evoke matrimonial and familial relations, the nation has been portrayed as both male and female.… The sense of community implicit in these family metaphors is deeply gendered in ways that not only legitimate foreign policy practices but also reinforce inequalities between men and women.71”
“Using these gendered metaphors, the state can, while shoring up its “national interest,” both threaten the interest of marginalized citizens inside it and reinforce power inequalities among its groups. Catherine MacKinnon has explained that the “state’s structures and actions are driven by and institutionalize strategy based on an epistemic angle of vision” that can “distinguish public from private, naturalize dominance as difference, hide coercion beyond consent, and conceal politics beyond morality.”72 These structures require a certain standard of behavior from some members of the state,73 while suppressing the voices of others altogether.74”
“With these tools, the state can appear unitary by suppressing its diversity and presenting one concept of national interest, autonomous of and not necessarily representative of its citizens. In this understanding, the sovereign state can be “an extension of the separation-minded realist man, also autonomous to various degrees from the diverse ‘domestic’ interests he-it allegedly exists to protect.”75 Additionally, states are complicit with gender subordination when they fail to intervene in domestic violence, perpetuate a heterosexist bias in education, exercise discrimination in welfare policies, and operate on patriarchal laws.76”
“In this conception, the unitary state is a misleading and malignant construction. Two implications for the process of state interaction follow: states that interact often promote unrepresentative interests, and those unrepresentative interests exclude gender, racial, and cultural minorities. In this sense, states’ elites often make wars (or fail to) “representing” a limited group or groups among their populations, while claiming full representativeness, effectively rendering a significant portion of their supposed “constituency” invisible in the process of interacting with other states. Empirically, this means that there are a number of levels of interstate interaction, many of which are omitted from process-based notions of dyadic war theorizing. Normatively, it suggests that our conceptions of how states interact (and the content of those interactions) are problematically skewed.”
“Rationality in Interaction
This skew is particularly evident in the assumption of rationality.77 The rationality assumption implies that the knower/actor can separate himself/herself from the “other” in interactions with that other. Feminists have argued that knowledge is always perspectival and political; therefore, states and their leaders’ decisions about how to interact with others are not rational, but informed by their situational and political biases. In this view, the rationality assumption may be seen as at once itself a political bias and obscuring other political biases. As Naomi Scheman argues, perceived rational cost–benefit analysis about war-making and war-fighting should “always be seen as especially problematical when… constructed only by those in positions of privilege… [which provide] only distorted views about the world.”78 In this view, rational calculation is not an objective, attainable, and desirable end, but a partial representation of both interest and actors’ representation of those interests. In this way, thro

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