The Neoliberal policies result in the loss of value of life and cultural diversity

Neoliberalism constructs gender-specific division of labor that ascribes traditional identities based on gender and encourages patriarchy.

Masculine and feminine roles in agriculture are constructed within the gender-specific division of labour and in the context of the dual agricultural production system – commercial, chemical-intensive monocultures, on the one hand, and mixed cultures geared towards local markets and self-sufficiency, on the other. Under the influence of local regional and global market forces and in the socio-cultural allocation of gender-specific tasks and capacities, traditional responsibilities and social ascription of masculinity and femininity are entangled in ever-new ways and transform power relations(Krishna 2004; Rupp 2007). The Guatemalan peasant women who design their kitchen garden like many spirals turning into each other of corn, sweet potatoes and other vegetables are tied by a mixture of survival pragmatism, ancestor worship and natural philosophy to their land and biodiversity. They treat both as an inheritance from their ancestors, from which they are not allowed nor want to separate themselves through sale. The plots should remain in the clan or in the ethnic community, in order to ensure their survival and well-being.The peasant women have had their own understanding of biodiversity and of the seed as their own means of production ‘for centuries’. They see their work self-consciously as value-creating activity and their knowledge as productive capacity, with the help of which they have not only maintained the genetic stock, but have productively further developed it. Furthermore, they have accumulated detailed knowledge of the nutritional value and healing powers of local species. Traditional knowledge in these reproduction contexts is a constitutive element of survival spaces and a central livelihood resource (Kuppe 2002).The women peasants therefore understand themselves as investors: they give value to the plants and develop their productivity, which in its turn ensures that the women enjoy esteem in the community. Their practical and strategic interest in biodiversity and in food security often brings the women peasants into conflict with their men. Official government agricultural advisors offer the men commercial seeds and praise the advantages and earning possibilities of monocultures, recently above all those of organic fuel. In Burkina Faso, many peasants followed the desire of the government and planted cotton, reducing the fields of the women, in order to have more land available for the allegedly lucrative cotton. The women nevertheless continued to foster and care for biodiversity in the kitchen gardens. It was precisely that which ensured their food supply when ¶ the cotton prices on the world market fell into the basement. Peasant women in Tanzania had a similar experience. In a subversive action, they planted banana trees and cabbage between the coffee trees, even though the government had forbidden mixed farming on the export fields.

Expropriates Movement

Neoliberalism appropriates the feminist agenda for its own purposes while removing their political agency

Cornwall et. al, professor of anthropology and development in the school of global studies at the University of Sussex 08 (Andrea, Jasmine Gideon, and Kalpana Wilson, “Introduction: Reclaiming Feminism: Gender and Neoliberalism “, IDS Bulletin 39:6, 12/08, Wiley Online Library)//AS

These challenges to feminist engagement come at a time when the wider changes wrought by the impact of neoliberal economic policies and ideology have taken their toll on feminist activism. Hawkesworth notes that neoliberal policies "˜cut back the very aspects of the state that feminist activists seek to build up' (2006: 121) and were accompanied by a gendered reconfiguration of responsibilities between dtizens and the state. Once the burden of social service provision had been shifted decisively onto poor women and community level "˜civil society organisations', 'civil society' itself was cast in an ever more significant role: as an all-purpose intermediary which would simultaneously keep the state in check, make up for its shortcomings, use proximity to "˜the poor' to help them to help themselves, and represent the masses who could not speak for themselves. As this implies, 'civil society' has increasingly come to be regarded by development agencies and donors as a key space for intervention and control. Donor funding for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on a massive scale has led to women's movements and organisations in many countries undergoing a process of depoliticising 'NGOisation' (Fllvaiez 1998) - with damaging consequences for the mobilisation of women, as Islah Jad (this IDS Bulletin) shows This has contributed to a lack of political muscle, as once-active feminist organisations become (or are displaced by) increasingly depoliticised service providers, reliant on contracts from the state or grants from the development industry, As the 'invited spaces' of neoliberal governmentality have come to displace and be used to delegitimise the "˜invented spaces' (Miraftab 2004) of social mobilisation, "empowerment has come to be associated with individual self- improvement and donor interventions rather than collective struggle (Sardenberg, this IDS Bulletin). Contemporary development policy narratives speak not just of women, but of the term that became a rallying cry for southern feminists in the early 19905; 'women's empowerment'. With this has come a series of narratives about women as more efficient and responsible that accentuate women's compliance with normative expectations. Women appear in these narratives as hard-pressed mothers struggling for the wellbeing and betterment of their families. Development is presented as giving women a well- deserved chance to improve their circumstances, so as to be able to benefit their families, communities and their nations The World Bank's Buvinic and King (2007) for example, offer a neat chain of causalities that begins with empowering women and girls and leads to economic growth and poverty reduction. Similar stories are told in the promotional materials of a number of agencies. Words like 'agency' and even 'power' come to be appropriated for this purpose (see, for example, Alsop 2005) Indeed, contributors to this IDS Bulletin highlight how, along with 'empowerment', an entire lexicon of terms that were once associated with feminist activism have come to be laden with the attributed meanings of development agencies. Srilatha Batliwala, author of a foundational 1994 report that helped to put "˜women's empowerment' on the development map, reflects on how the term 'empowerment' has been eviscerated of its original political content (Badiwala 2007). As Kalpana Wilson argues, 'agency' has become a particularly troubling object for neoliberal appropriation. Reduced to the exercise of individual preference - or even to the acquisition of assets, in the World Bank's framework - 'agency' joins "˜choice' in a coupling of concepts that permits little scope for any talk about power, inequities or indeed any structural constraints at all.

Neoliberalism strips empowerment of political meaning and imposes economic standards of success while generalizing women’s condition

Cornwall et. al, professor of anthropology and development in the school of global studies at the University of Sussex 08 (Andrea, Jasmine Gideon, and Kalpana Wilson, “Introduction: Reclaiming Feminism: Gender and Neoliberalism “, IDS Bulletin 39:6, 12/08, Wiley Online Library)//AS

Neoliberal empowerment narratives not only empty ‘empowerment’ of any contentious political content, they also make money – microcredit loans, conditional cash transfers, enhanced access to markets and livelihood assets – the magic bullet, as if that were somehow enough to effect wholesale transformations in women’s lives. As Charmaine Pereira, reflecting on the package of interventions promised in the Nigerian Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy, notes: The assumption here is that a package that brings together single measures to address women’s concerns will, in and of itself, bring about empowerment. This is a far cry from challenging the ideologies that justify gender inequality, changing prevailing patterns of access to and control over resources (as opposed to providing the resources themselves), and transforming the institutions that reinforce existing power relations. [p45] That a concern for women finds its way into national economic policies is, of course, some mark of success. Indeed one might think surely feminists ought to be glad to see that the issues that they fought so hard to get onto the agenda are now appearing in the pronouncements of development agencies with such regularity and apparent commitment. Yet, if we look at the shape that this success has taken, or been translated into, a positive reading of development’s absorption of the language of ‘gender’ is harder to sustain. Josephine Ahikire talks of the ‘apparent divergence between the terms gender and feminism’ in Uganda. It has come to be the case in many contexts that ‘gender’ has come to gain a softer, more conciliatory touch, its use a device to distance the user from association with ‘feminism’. And when ‘gender’ is used by mainstream agencies to talk about women, as it generally is, the women who come into view are not everywoman. Rather, the predominant representation of women is as those who lack agency and opportunities. One of the problems, as Ahikire points out, is that the: … broad motive to highlight the plight of women, the fact that women tend to be the worst victims of poverty, wars, disease (such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic) unfortunately translates into a field of ‘lamentations’ that may in the end carry a critical anti-feminist message. [p30] A consequence, Ahikire goes on to highlight, is that the language of vulnerability and marginalisation that 4 has come to be associated with ‘gender’, runs the risk of infantilising women, lumping them together with children as the deserving objects of intervention. It is precisely the nature of the response to the victim narrative that a number of the contributors to this collection highlight as one of the contradictions produced by the convergence of Gender and Development and neoliberal thinking and practice. Any vestige of a more dignified way of talking about women who are living in poverty falls away. The stereotypical woman that these discourses evoke is always heterosexual, usually either with an abusive or useless husband or a victim of abandonment struggling to survive as a female-headed household. She is portrayed as abject and at the same time as eager to improve herself and her situation if only she could be ‘empowered’.

Neoliberal policies marginalize and attempt to eliminate feminist politics—viewed as illegitimate special interest

Teghtsoonian, Professor of Policy and Practice at the University of Victoria 03 (Katherine, “W(h)ither Women's Equality? Neoliberalism, Institutional Change and Public Policy in British Columbia”, Policy and Society 22:1, 2003, ScienceDirect)//AS

Commentators in a number of jurisdictions have noted that governments pursuing a neoliberal agenda have often displayed a hostility to women’s policy agencies, which has been reflected in their transfer to more peripheral locations within the public service, staffing and funding cuts, or outright elimination. This was evident in Australia during the late 1990s, when the right-wing government led by John Howard eliminated a number of federal women’s policy agencies and implemented significant cuts to the resources available to those that remained (Sawer 1999, 43-8). Similar policies have been pursued by governments at the state level in Australia (Chappell 1995; Sawer 1999, 41), as well at the federal and provincial levels in Canada (Burt 1997; Malloy 1999) as neoliberalism has taken root in the corridors of power. Such changes have often been carried out as part of a wider restructuring and downsizing of the bureaucratic state. As a result, the staff of women’s policy agencies have found that, in addition to a reduction in the material resources available to them, their work has been made more difficult by significant disruptions to their working relationships with staff in other government departments. As Sawer has argued, writing in the Australian context, one result of this “increased volatility of bureaucratic structures and the continuous change environment” is that “it is difficult to sustain the structures needed for long-term projects such as improving the status of women, and there is a continuing loss of corporate memory. ... [In addition], there is a devaluing of process, including the information sharing that has been central to feminist work” (Sawer 1999, 42). The demotion or elimination of women’s policy agencies reflects that element within neoliberalism that frames feminist and other identity-based forms of politics undertaken by marginalized groups, as the illegitimate and unrepresentative expression of “special interests”. This formulation contrasts these interests and the groups articulating them, presented as particularistic and self-serving, with the interests and policy preferences of gender-neutral “ordinary citizens” and “consumers”, understood to be expressive of a broader public interest (Brodie 1995). In this discursive framework, which was particularly30 - Katherine Teghtsoonian prominent in Canada during the 1990s, the activities – indeed, the very existence – of women’s policy agencies seem suspect.

Domestic Violence

Neoliberal policies reentrench heterosexist structures and prevent aid for domestic violence victims

Cornwall et. al, professor of anthropology and development in the school of global studies at the University of Sussex 08 (Andrea, Jasmine Gideon, and Kalpana Wilson, “Introduction: Reclaiming Feminism: Gender and Neoliberalism “, IDS Bulletin 39:6, 12/08, Wiley Online Library)//AS

While neoliberalism may be archetypically associated with the individual as atomistic rational agent, its roots lie in liberal theory, which has always excluded women from this notion of individuality. So perhaps we should not be surprised if, as several of the contributions to this IDS Bulletin demonstrate, neoliberalism subsumes women into an image of the protective mother who will translate any gains from the market into the means for household survival, and will be prepared to make unlimited personal sacrifices to provide the household with a safety net against the ravages of neoliberal macroeconomic policies. Ideologically, this works to re-embed women within familial relations. As a result, the family becomes a key site for the exercise of neoliberal governmentality. Sarah Bradshaw and Kate Bedford (this IDS Bulletin) draw attention to the extent to which Latin American social policies both presuppose and reinforce a model of the family that has the heterosexual couple at its heart. Bradshaw shows how contemporary social protection programmes divert attention away from the female householdhead to the nuclear family. Bedford, focusing on a World Bank-funded family strengthening programme in Argentina, explores the extent to which programmes like these are reinscribing and renaturalising a particular form of heterosexual IDS Bulletin Volume 39 Number 6 December 2008 5intimate and familial relations. ‘Good mothers’ come to be coupled with ‘responsible men’ as ‘partners’, as the state retreats further from supportive social provision. Bedford shows the defining role that was played by the bank in the programme, naturalising private provision of care within the family as ‘an efficient and empowering way to resolve tensions between paid and unpaid labour’. The net result, she contends, is reduced policy space for domestic violence, greater policy openings for conservative religious organisations concerned with ‘the family’ and difficulties arguing for social provision outside the family, such as institutionalised childcare. She highlights the ironies of the extent to which an articulation of the problem that seemed to address long-standing feminist concerns led to a solution that few feminists might agree with: After all, many feminists wanted men to stop shirking domestic work and International Financial Institutions to take care seriously. However we did not necessarily want childcare erased as a policy priority, replaced by more shared (but still privatised) caring labour within couples ... [or] poor men held responsible for women’s poverty. [p64–5]

Neoliberalism overtakes feminist movements and prevents access to aid for victims of domestic violence

Bumiller, Professor of Political Science and Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College 08 (Kristin, “In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence”, Duke Univeristy Press, 4/25/08, http://books.google.com/books/about/In_an_Abusive_State.html?id=6m3GzvoBWYkC)//AS

By the late 19705, the tenets of neoliberalism began to influence American public policy at home and abroad. Ronald Reagan's firstterm as president marks the shift to neoliberal principles of governance which are associated with less restraint on free-market policies, pro-corporatism, privatization, and in particular, the transfer of public services to private organizations. This shift significantly affected the already established feminist anti-violence movement in its attempts to reform the criminal justice programs and build up victim services. The call for state responsibility for preventing and treating victims was in direct contrast to the new ethics of personal responsibility that was the cornerstone of the neoliberal agenda. This contradiction was resolved, but the cost was the incorporation of the feminist anti violence movement into the apparatus of the regulatory state. For example, the rationale for providing services for women was transformed by the neoliberal agenda." The organizers ofthe shelter movement saw the necessity of encouraging women to take advantage of available government benefits, but only as a temporary means to provide for their children. Importantly, seeking government help was part ofa growing recognition both within shelter organizations and in the feminist movement more generally of the fundamental insecurity of marriage as an institution. Now, in many battered women's shelters women are required to apply for all appropriate state benefits as part ofa process of showing that they are taking all necessary steps to gain self-suH'iciency. These requirements entangle women in an increasingly value-laden welfare program tied to the promotion of the traditional nuclear family, fear of dependency, and distrust of women as mothers." These ties, moreover, come with fewer benefits as the "de volution" of welfare systems has brought about cutbacks in services and rescaling to the local level. "' At the same time, the welfare system has become more linked to other forms of state involvement, in~ cluding probate court actions concerning custody, paternity hearings, child protective serwdces, and relationships with school officials. As a result, when women seek help from shelters, it now produces an inevitable dependency on the state.

Ignores Identity Politics

Neoliberlaism simultaneously ignores and exacerbates women’s oppression and removes the consideration of gender in politics

Teghtsoonian, Professor of Policy and Practice at the University of Victoria 03 (Katherine, “W(h)ither Women's Equality? Neoliberalism, Institutional Change and Public Policy in British Columbia”, Policy and Society 22:1, 2003, ScienceDirect)//AS

But the consequences of neoliberal resistance to understanding gender as a relevant and legitimate dimension of politics extend far beyond the terrain of the state. Feminist scholars and activists alike have noted the debilitating impact that the policy agenda flowing from neoliberal orientations has had for diverse groups of women in a number of countries in the industrialized west, including Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the United States (Brodie 1995; Bunkle 1995; Hancock 1999; Kingfisher 2002). Women’s economic and social well-being has been undermined by significant reductions in the supports available to women who experience a variety of barriers to participation in the paid labour force (including caregiving responsibilities, disability, and racism); cuts to funding for community-based organizations advocating for, and providing services to, women; and an exponential increase in unpaid caregiving work, as services are cut back and women take up the slack in their families and communities. And yet the gendered impacts of key features of the neoliberal program are erased within neoliberal discourse. As Janine Brodie has argued, the elements of neoliberalism “act simultaneously to intensify gender inequality and to erode the political relevance of gender” (Brodie 2002, 99). It is important to note that the emergence of neoliberalism as a logic informing government priorities has not waited on, or required, the electoral victory of parties of the right. In many cases, neoliberal impulses have been reflected in the policies pursued by (ostensibly) social democratic administrations, coexisting uneasily with more progressive policy directions (Hancock 1999). Certainly a tension between neoliberal and social justice commitments was visible in the governing agenda of the left-of-centre New Democratic Party (NDP), in office in British Columbia during the 1990s (Teghtsoonian 2000), and was particularly pronounced under the Fourth Labour Government in New Zealand between 1984 and 1990 (Larner 1996). Attending to these internal complexities within government programs assists us in identifying important threads of continuity, as well as disjunctures, when the partisan composition of government changes. Neoliberal continuities across the left-right divide are discernible not just in the content of particular policies, but in the more general “strategies of rule” that neoliberalism prescribes (Larner 1996; 2000).W(h)ither Women’s Equality? - 31 Nikolas Rose (1996, 1999) argues that, rather than trying to exert direct control over service providers and agencies, governments deploying neoliberal strategies of rule govern indirectly, “at a distance”. Various “technologies” of accountability, audit and budgetary discipline that are mobilized by government exert a significant constraining influence on the decisions and self-understandings of organizations outside of government, even as these appear to be autonomous agencies, free to define their organizational structures, priorities and modes of working. Although Rose is interested primarily in understanding the network of relationships between government and the panoply of agencies and organizations outside of it, we can observe many of the “technologies” that he identifies also being deployed within government itself, accumulating over time under the aegis of governments of both the left and the right. As with other elements of neoliberalism, there is an important gendered dimension to these strategies of rule which will be explored in the discussion below.

Neoliberal policies ignore women’s concerns—especially when they intersect with other identity groups

Teghtsoonian, Professor of Policy and Practice at the University of Victoria 03 (Katherine, “W(h)ither Women's Equality? Neoliberalism, Institutional Change and Public Policy in British Columbia”, Policy and Society 22:1, 2003, ScienceDirect)//AS

This failure to address the intersections among multiple dimensions of marginalization in women’s lives arguably reflects the neoliberal antipathy to identity-based politics discussed earlier. We see this orientation embedded in the Liberal Party’s approach to the value of “equality” as outlined in the “New Era” documents it produced prior to the 2001 election indicating the directions that it planned to pursue if returned to office. Thus, in “A New Era of Equality” (the second-to-last of thirty-three pages) the Liberals prioritized the need to get “a fair shake” for the province of British Columbia within the Canadian federal system and to attend more carefully to the interests of “rural British Columbians”, rather than the interests of identitybased groups. These latter were delegitimized in the following terms:The NDP have ... treated equality issues as so-called ‘wedge issues’, using women, aboriginals, seniors, gays and lesbians, multicultural groups and others as political pawns to try to gain partisan advantage. That’s no way to build our future. We must start treating all citizens fairly, equally, and with respect, regardless of where they live or who they are. A BC Liberal Government will be guided by the principle of equality. ... Equality of opportunity, responsibility and rights is what our Constitution guarantees. And all British Columbians are entitled to no less. (BC Liberals 2001, 32) With the exception of the promise to “ensure that all aboriginal governments have the same legal status in BC as they do in every other province” (intended to minimize, rather than enhance, that status), the twelve commitments presented as avenues to “A New Era of Equality” discuss plans for “British Columbians”, “Canadians”, “rural communities”, and “local government” – conceptual containers which render invisible the specific interests of identity-based groups, including (multiply-marginalized) women.6 The transformation of Women’s Equality into Women’s Services and Social Programs has been accompanied by a number of shifts in the unit’s responsibilities and priorities. One of the most noticeable of these has been the return of responsibility for support for child care services, which had been transferred from Women’s Equality to the Ministry for Children and Families in 1997. The return of child care services to the branch might appear to be a positive move for women: the significant increase in the women’s policy agency budget resulting from this transfer could enhance its “clout” within government. Further, the reintegration of child care services into a bureaucratic context charged with gender analysis might auger well for ongoing sensitivity in policy decisions to women’s particular interest in access to affordable, quality child care for their children. And yet this is not how events have unfolded. Instead, the Liberal government moved quickly to undo progressive changes to child care policy that had been adopted by the previous administration. For example, it repealed the NDP’s Child Care Services Act, which went into effect on January 1, 2001 and was providing funding that reduced the cost to parents of after-school child care from $12 to $7 per day per child up to the age of twelve years. In addition to the material benefit to families that this policy entailed (estimated by the government at $1,100 per child annually for the average family), it was intended by the NDP government as one component of an on-going process of reframing access to quality, affordable child care as a universal service, rather than as a meanstested benefit. By contrast, the Liberals have insisted that government subsidies should be restricted to those who are most in need; in their view, as Lynn Stephens has argued, reduced government spending on child care is necessary in order to make the system “more affordable for taxpayers”.7 As a further contribution to this latter goal, the funding provided by Women’s Services and Social Programs for the forty-seven child care resource and referral agencies throughout the province will be cut to zero effective March 2004.8 Women’s Services will continue to fund and administer transition and second-stage houses, to support related services for women and their children who are fleeing families in which they have been the targets of violence by intimate partners, and to fund anti-violence projects more generally. However, the thirty-seven community-based Women’s Centres, which provide a range of information, referral and advocacy services to women throughout the province, have suffered a very different fate. The funding they receive from Women’s Services – which amounted to $1.9 million during the final year of the NDP administration – is to be eliminated entirely as of 31 March 2004. In addition, the $4.7 million provided by the Ministry of Women’s Equality under the previous government to support the province’s innovative bridging programs, designed to facilitate a transition to employment for women who have experienced violence, will also be eliminated at the conclusion of the 2003/04 fiscal year (MWE 2001a, 15; CAWS 2002a, 12). The elimination of these expenditures from the Women’s Services’ budget have been accompanied by deep and wide-ranging cuts to programs and community-based organizations funded through other government departments.9 These cutbacks, which have impeded girls and women’s access to health services, education, housing, disability supports, social assistance benefits, and legal and advocacy services, have been driven by the legislated requirement that the provincial government bring in a balanced budget in fiscal year 2004/05 and subsequently. Their magnitude reflects the need to compensate for sizable tax cuts that the Liberal government announced immediately after the 2001 election, and which have delivered the greatest benefits to the most well-off individuals in the province (Lee 2001). with higher incomes may benefit from the tax cuts, but most women in the province are paying a significant price one way or another for the policy package as a whole. And, far from having an advocate for their interests within government, they have a Minister of State for Women’s Equality who has indicated that “I agree with everything our government does”.10

Terminal Impact: Fem

Feminist movements are essential for peace—patriarchal institutions are a root cause of war

Cockburn, feminist researcher and writer, is Honorary Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, 10 (Cynthia, “Gender Relations as Causal in Militarization and War”, International Feminist Journal of Politics 12:2, 2010, Taylor and Francis)//AS

Based on empirical research among women's antiwar organizations worldwide, the article derives a feminist oppositional standpoint on militarization and war. From this standpoint, patriarchal gender relations are seen to be intersectional with economic and ethno-national power relations in perpetuating a tendency to armed conflict in human societies. The feminism generated in antiwar activism tends to be holistic, and understands gender in patriarchy as a relation of power underpinned by coercion and violence. The cultural features of militarization and war readily perceived by women positioned in or close to armed conflict, and their sense of war as systemic and as a continuum, make its gendered nature visible. There are implications in this perspective for antiwar movements. If gender relations are one of the root causes of war, a feminist programme of gender transformation is a necessary component of the pursuit of peace.

Patriarchal institutions cause war—feminist movements are integral in peace--empirics

Cockburn, feminist researcher and writer, is Honorary Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, 10 (Cynthia, “Gender Relations as Causal in Militarization and War”, International Feminist Journal of Politics 12:2, 2010, Taylor and Francis)//AS

In many countries and regions around the world, women are organizing inwomen-only groups and networks to oppose militarism and militarization,to prevent wars or bring wars to an end, to achieve justice and sustainablepeace. From early in 2005 I carried out two years’ fulltime empirical researchinvestigating the constitution and objectives, the analyses and strategies ofsuch organizations.2The research involved 80,000 miles of travel to twelvecountries on four continents, and resulted in case studies of ten countrybased groups, fourteen branches of Women in Black in five countries andthree other transnational networks – the Women’s International League forPeace and Freedom, Code Pink and the Women’s Network against Militarism.Yet this was only a slender sample of the movement of movements that iswomen’s engaged opposition to militarization and war in the contemporaryworld.In this article I summarize or encapsulate the unique feminist analysis of warthat women seemed to me to be evolving from their location close to armedconflict combined with their positionality as women, and the activism towhich they had been provoked. I draw out here only the boldest of itsthemes, the ‘strong case’ on gender and war. It is that patriarchal genderrelations predispose our societies to war. They are a driving force perpetuatingwar. They are among the causes of war. This is not, of course, to say that genderis the only dimension of power implicated in war. It is not to diminish thecommonly understood importance of economic factors (particularly an everexpansive capitalism) and antagonisms between ethnic communities, statesand blocs (particularly the institution of the nation-state) as causes of war.Women antiwar activists bring gender relations into the picture not as analternative but as an intrinsic, interwoven, inescapable part of the very samestory.

Patriarchal hierarchies must be resisted—cause war and violence

Tickner, distinguished scholar in residence atthe Schoolof International Services at American University92 (J. Ann, “Gender in International Relations Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security”, Columbia University Press, 1992, http://www.ces.uc.pt/ficheiros2/files/Short.pdf)//AS

Masculinity and politics have a long and close association. Characteristics associated with "manliness," such as toughness, courage, power, independence, and even physical strength, have, throughout history, been those most valued in the conduct of politics, particularly international politics. Frequently, manliness has also been associated with violence and the use of force, a type of behavior that, when conducted in the international arena, has been valorized and applauded in the name of defending one's country. This celebration of male power, particularly the glorification of the male warrior, produces more of a gender dichotomy than exists in reality for, as R. W. Connell points out, this stereotypical image of masculinity does not fit most men. Connell suggests that what he calls "hegemonic masculinity," a type of culturally dominant masculinity that he distinguishes from other subordinated masculinities, is a socially constructed cultural ideal that, while it does not correspond to the actual personality of the majority of men, sustains patriarchal authority and legitimizes a patriarchal political and social order. Hegemonic masculinity is sustained through its opposition to various subordinated and devalued masculinities, such as homosexuality, and, more important, through its relation to various devalued femininities. Socially constructed gender differences are based on socially sanctioned, unequal relationships between men and women that reinforce compliance with men's stated superiority. Nowhere in the public realm are these stereotypical gender images more apparent than in the realm of international politics, where the characteristics associated with hegemonic masculinity are projected onto the behavior of states whose success as international actors is measured in terms of their power capabilities and capacity for self-help and autonomy.

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