A2: Intersectionality (Perm)

A2:

A2: Intersectionality (Perm)

Feminism is a good lens for analyzing Intersectional politics

For a variety of reasons elaborated elsewhere (Peterson 2005), I find the theory/practice emerging from feminist and critical race scholarship particularly fruitful for analyzing intersectionality. On the one hand, feminisms have transdisciplinary and complex analytical resources for investigating and theorizing about identity, difference, and structural hierarchies. On the other hand, differences among women have forced feminists (too often reluctantly and always uncomfortably) to reflect critically on the meaning of feminism, operations of power among women, the politics of representation, and the dangers of overgeneralizing. As one consequence, feminist scholarship has contributed to a richer understanding of analytics and politics, or theory and practice, as interdependent. Key to this development is understanding gender as both an empirical and an analytical category. The former refers to the embodied and ostensibly biological binary of male–female sex difference. Understood empirically, gender can be deployed as a variable to investigate, for example, how women and men are differently affected by, and differently participate in, political and economic practices. This is the more familiar use of gender in contemporary research, especially in the social sciences. Analytical gender is less familiar; it refers to the signifying system of masculine–feminine differentiations that constitutes a governing code. The claim here is that gender pervades language and culture, systemically shaping not only who we are but also how we think and what we do. As historically constituted, the dichotomy of gender codes masculine qualities as oppositional to and more highly valued than feminine qualities. Understanding gender analytically then generates a crucial and transformative feminist insight: the (symbolic, discursive) cultural privileging of that which is identified with masculinity is key to naturalizing the (symbolic, discursive, cultural, corporeal, material, economic) power relations that constitute multiple forms of subjection. This knowledge allows for more adequately theorizing, and hence politicizing, intersectionality.

A2: Women’s Inclusion in Politics/Society Solves

Gains for women haven’t solved the problem – women’s needs AS WOMEN are not addressed and the gendered structures of government and economics remain in tact

Sjoberg and Via 10 [Laura: professor at University of Florida, feminist scholar of international relations and international security, PhD from USC, JD from Boston College and Sandra: professor of Political Science at Ferrum College. Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives Praeger security international, Santa Barbara p. 6]

It remains a puzzle to some scholars and policy makers why the situation of women around the world is not improving exponentially with their integration into war fighting and the proliferation of policies meant to protect them. Feminist scholars have argued that the disconnect between woman-friendly policies and results in women’s lives is twofold. First, although women are being included in different areas of global politics with greater frequency, their needs as women often remain unconsidered and unaddressed. In other words, women are being integrated into a world that remains defined and shaped by men’s interests and needs. Second, attempts to better the situation of women often do not pay attention to the gendered nature of the structures of government and economics that remain in place even when women are formally included. In no area of global politics are these problems more evident than in the realm of armed conflict. More than 20 years ago, Betty Reardon (1985) identified the “war system,” a cycle of violence that at once relies on and perpetuates the oppression of women. Many feminist scholars have observed the continuity of gender subordination in the realm of war and conflict. Women’s needs as women are often not understood in international conflict. For example, for the first years of the United Nations sanctions regime on Iraq, Iraqi women had difficulty finding ways to buy prenatal vitamins and baby milk on the black market because they were not seen as basic needs and exempted from the embargo (Vickers 1993). The second point, the gendered nature of the structures that remain in place from before women’s integration, is equally challenging. Cynthia Enloe pointed out that women’s integration into state and other military groups does not change the gender basis of those groups’ identities and expectations (2000). In other words, women who join war fighting and peacemaking do not do so in armies or negotiations that are suddenly gender neutral because they are willing to include women. Instead, they join groups whose terms, premises, and behavioral norms are already defined in terms of the masculine values that they have prized before the inclusion of women.

A2: We Can Reform / CPs

We’re not benevolent---logic of liberal empire allows political elite to hijack the discussion of militarism

Andrew J. Bacevich 13 Jr. (born 1947) is an American political scientist specializing in international relations, security studies, American foreign policy, and American diplomatic and military history. He is currently Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University.[1] He is also a retired career officer in the United States Army. He is a former director of Boston University's Center for International Relations (from 1998 to 2005) and author of several books, including American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy (2002), The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (2005) and The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008). He has also appeared on television shows such as The Colbert Report and the Bill Moyers Report and has written op-eds which have appeared in papers such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Financial Times. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The new American militarism: how Americans are seduced by war,” 2013, Oxford University Press, DOA: 8-1-13, y2k

Even among Left-liberal activists, the reflexive anti-militarism of the 1960 s has given way to a more nuanced view. Although hard-pressed to match self-aggrandizing conservative claims of being one with the troops, progressives have come to appreciate the potential for using the armed services to advance their own agenda. Do-gooders want to harness military power to their efforts to do good. Thus, the most persistent calls for U.S. intervention abroad to relieve the plight of the abused and persecuted come from the militant Left. In the present moment, writes Michael Ignatieff, empire has become a precondition for democracy. Ignatieff, a prominent human rights advocate, summons the United States to use imperial power to strengthen respect for self-determination [and] to give states back to abused, oppressed people who deserve to rule them for themselves. 41 Likewise, liberals have grown comfortable with seeing the military establishment itself not as an obstacle to social change but as a venue in which to promote it, pointing the way for the rest of society on matters such as race, gender, and sexual orientation. Advanced thinking on the Left calls not for bashing Colonel Blimp or General Halftrack as a retrograde warmonger but for enlisting his assistance (willing or not) on behalf of progressive causes. The imperative of political leaders always and in every case offering unconditional and unequivocal support for the troops gives rise to a corollaryone that illustrates militarization’s impact on the calculus governing elite political behavior on questions of war and peace.

A2: RAND / Think Tank Ev

Reject evidence from RAND and other defense institutions

Andrew J. Bacevich 13 Jr. (born 1947) is an Americ2an political scientist specializing in international relations, security studies, American foreign policy, and American diplomatic and military history. He is currently Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University.[1] He is also a retired career officer in the United States Army. He is a former director of Boston University's Center for International Relations (from 1998 to 2005) and author of several books, including American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy (2002), The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (2005) and The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008). He has also appeared on television shows such as The Colbert Report and the Bill Moyers Report and has written op-eds which have appeared in papers such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Financial Times. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The new American militarism: how Americans are seduced by war,” 2013, Oxford University Press, DOA: 8-1-13, y2k

With others joining Brodie, that calling formed the basis of a new profession, its members known as defense intellectuals. It gave birth to new institutions such as the RAND Corporation, the federally funded research facility founded in Santa Monica, California, in 1946 , with Brodie as one of its first hires. RAND assembled a circle of mathematicians, economists, and political scientists that in addition to Brodie included such luminaries as Charles Hitch, Herman Kahn, and John von Neumann. The defense intellectuals produced a vast literature, most of it highly classified and bristling with jargon “not incredible counterforce first-strike” and “Doomsday Machine,” “overkill” and “mutual annihilation,” “MAD,” and “N+ 1.” Although ostensibly of enormous importance to the survival of humankind, these arcane writings were accessible only to a few. As charter members of the new postwar national security elite, Brodie and the other high priests of nuclear strategy came to wield great influence, without the burden of actual responsibility. Members of this priesthood remained largely hidden from public view and thus unaccountable. By comparison, the curia of the Roman Catholic Church seemed a model of openness and transparency. There was, however, a problem. Brodie’s Dictum, the text from which the priesthood drew its raison dtre rested on an utterly false premise. Hiroshima had not, in fact, robbed violence of its political utility. It had certainly not made war obsolete. The events of August 1945 had at most blocked up the channel through which military history had coursed during the previous several decades.toward the Somme, Sedan, and Stalingrad. and diverted it in the direction of Inchon, Dien Bien Phu, and the Sinai. Moreover, even before the battlefields of the 1950 s and 1960 s made the point self-evident, members of the priesthood already grasped that Brodie Moreover, even before the battlefields of the 1950 s and 1960 s made the point self-evident, members of the priesthood already grasped that Brodie’sDictum was in error. But they persisted in pretending otherwise, for the Dictum provided useful camouflage, concealing the priesthoodactual purpose. The Pentagon was not, in fact, funding the research undertaken by Brodie and his colleagues in a high-minded search for ways to prevent the recurrence of Hiroshima. From the outset, the object of the exercise was entirely pragmatic: to perpetuate the advantages that had accrued to the United States as a consequence of Hiroshima and to use those advantages to advance vital American interests, without triggering World War III. This was the challenge that imbued nuclear strategy with excitement and allure. In that regard, the really interesting arguments were not with the hopelessly naive One Worlders or the hopelessly simple-minded generals but with the economists, mathematicians, and political scientists across the corridor or down the hall, whether at RAND or any of the other institutions such as Harvard, MIT, and the University of Chicago where members of the priesthood congregated. To inhabit the world that Brodie and his compatriots created was to engage daily in the cut and thrust of high-level intellectual combat, where the issue at hand was not truth as such.the nuclear strategistworld contained few fixed truths.but the honing of alternatives, trade-offs, and risks, conceived and evaluated in a context of political uncertainty and rapid technological change.

A2: “We can just read the stories”

Divorcing narratives from the alternative simply casts them as exotic stories to be consumed

Mohanty 2004 Professor of Women’s Studies at Hamilton College,

(Chandra Talpade, Feminism without Borders p 77-78)

For example, critics have pointed to the proliferation of experientially oriented texts by Third World women as evidence of "diversity" in U.S. feminist circles. Such texts now accompany "novels" by black and Third World women in women's studies curricula. However, in spite of the fact that the growing demand among publishers for culturally diverse life (hi)stories indicates a recognition of plural realities and experiences as well as a diversification of inherited Eurocentric canons, often this demand takes the form of the search for more "exotic" and "different" stories in which individual women write as truth-tellers and authenticate "their own oppression," in the tradition of Euro-American women's autobiography. In other words, the mere proliferation of Third World women's texts, in the West at least, owes as much to the relations of the marketplace as to the conviction to "testify" or "bear witness." Thus, the existence of Third World women's narratives in itself is not evidence of decentering hegemonic histories and subjectivities. It is the way in which they are read, understood, and located institutionally that is of paramount importance. After all, the point is not just to record one's history of struggle, or consciousness, but how they are recorded; the way we read, receive, and disseminate such imaginative records is immensely significant. It is this very question of reading, theorizing, and locating these writings that I touch on in the examples below. The consolidation and legitimation of testimonials as a form of Latin American oral history (history from below) owes as much to the political imperatives of such events as the Cuban revolution as to the motivations and desires of the intellectuals and revolutionaries who were/are the agents of these testimonials. The significance of representing "the people" as subjects of struggle is thus encapsulated in the genre of testimonials, a genre that is, unlike traditional autobiography, constitutively public, and collective (for and of the people).

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