Gendering (in)security: interrogating security logics within states of exception

This collection contributes to debates, which seek to move feminist scholarship away from the reification of the war/peace and security/economy divides. However, rather than focusing on the terms of the debate, it foregrounds the empirical reality of the breakdown of these traditional divisions, paying particular attention to the ‘state of exception’ and similar frameworks. In doing so, contributors to this collection trouble the ubiquitous concept and practices of ‘(in)security’ and their effects on differentially positioned subjects. By gendering (in)securities in ‘states of exception’ and other paradigms of government related to it, especially in postcolonial and neo-colonial contexts, it provides an approach, which allows us to study the complex and interrelated security logics, which constitute the messy realities of different – and particularly vulnerable – subjects’ lives. In other words, it suggests that these frameworks are ripe for feminist interventions and analyses of the logics and production of (in)securities as well as of resistance and hybridisation

'Gendercide,' Abortion Policy, and the Disciplining of Prenatal Sex-selection in Neoliberal Europe

This article examines the contours of how sex-selective abortion (SSA) and ‘gendercide’ have been problematically combined within contemporary debates on abortion in Europe. Analysing the development of policies on the topic, we identify three ‘turns’ which have become integral to the biopolitics of SSA in Europe: the biomedical turn, the ‘gendercide’ turn, and the Asian demographic turn. Recent attempts to discipline SSA in the UK and Sweden are examined as a means of showing how the neoliberal state in Europe is becoming increasingly open to manoeuvres to undermine the right to abortion, even where firm laws exist

Between Returns and Respectability: Parental Attitudes towards Girls' Education in Rural Pakistan

This article focuses upon perceptions of girls’ education in the family context within which decisions around children’s education and opportunities are made. The article presents a framework showing how parental attitudes to girls’ education are shaped by an objective logic framed by the notion of returns, relating to potential benefits of daughters’ education, and respectability, relating to girls’ modesty and threats that education may present to normative expectations for girls. Drawing upon data collected in 2011 in rural areas of the districts of Faisalabad (Jaranwala town) and Chiniot (Tehsil Chiniot) in the province of Punjab, the study highlights how assumptions around the liberating effects of education implicit in global education programmes fail to take into account cultural values around gender norms that are central to informing parental attitudes towards their daughters’ prospects for education

Disrupting the gender and development impasse in university teaching and learning spaces

Gender and development (GAD) is coming under increasing scrutiny for its entanglements with hegemonic systems of governance, policy, and knowledge. This article argues that GAD programs and/or development studies programs with teaching provision on gender have not sufficiently responded to the imperatives of race and intersectionality most recently intensified by COVID-19 and the decolonising of the curriculum and Black Lives Matter movements. The article explores the ways in which GAD frameworks have resisted rather than embraced paradigmatic critiques. We argue that this resistance to the imperatives of intersectionality has resulted in a GAD impasse which is reproduced and perpetuated through pedagogy and teaching, which shapes teaching and learning spaces in the UK. Despite the potentials for teaching to question dominant paradigms and frameworks, the impasse has hindered the field of GAD from adopting an introspective, intersectional, and transformative approach

The Bio-Politics of Population Control and Sex Selective Abortion in China and India

China and India, two countries with skewed sex ratios in favor of males, have introduced a wide range of policies over the past few decades to prevent couples from deselecting daughters, including criminalizing sex-selective abortion through legal jurisdiction. This article aims to analyze how such policies are situated within the bio-politics of population control and how some of the outcomes reflect each government’s inadequacy in addressing the social dynamics around abortion decision making and the social, physical, and psychological effects on women’s wellbeing in the face of criminalization of sex-selective abortion. The analysis finds that overall, the criminalization of sex selection has not been successful in these two countries. Further, the broader economic, social, and cultural dynamics which produce bias against females must be a part of the strategy to combat sex selection, rather than a narrow criminalization of abortion which endangers women’s access to safe reproductive health services and their social, physical, and psychological wellbeing

Interrogating the Rights Discourse on Girls’ Education: Neo-Liberalism, Neo-Colonialism, and the Beijing Platform for Action

This article examines how girls’ education since 1995 has emerged as a prominent symbol within the ‘rights’ discourse coming out of the Beijing Platform for Action. By highlighting the neoliberal and neocolonial processes during this time, particular shifts are traced which show how girls’ education has been a symbolic part of the geopolitical canvas in Pakistan and Afghanistan alongside the ‘war on terror’ and universalisation of education. The article refers to alternative voices which have attempted to disrupt the global narrative of the post-Beijing ‘rights’ agenda and points to the problems of this in the context of occupations, militarisation, and markets being used simultaneously as strategies for global governance and order