Part I - Notes About the Course: Feminism, War and Peace II - Tariqa Tandon

10-October-2017

            I was talking to another master’s student in political science about the course, and we landed on the topic of nuclear power. We were discussing India’s nuclear capabilities, and I asked him if Canada had nuclear weapons, knowing fully well it did not. The reason I feigned ignorance was because I wanted to see the way he reacted – was he going to be happy with Canada’s decision to not develop nuclear weapons, or be disappointed? As I had expected, he seemed disappointed with the fact that Canada did not possess nuclear weapons – militarization of the state was directly related to how masculine and hence how strong and worthy a country is, in his view. This is a recurring theme in the readings for this class, especially in Cohn’s work, and I wanted to redirect him to her work, but I am not sure if he would have truly appreciated it.

22-October-2017

            I went with a friend to her cousin’s birthday party – he had turned 9. One of his uncles gifted him a toy assault rifle – it was plastic but looked very realistic. Instead of pellets, it had water jelly ‘bullets’. His parents did not look too pleased, and while dropping us to the bus stop, my friend’s aunt mentioned how she is uncomfortable with guns, especially with the rise of shootings and violence. She said that since the new gift looks so realistic, she probably would not allow her son to play with it outside, even though the ‘bullets’ are harmless.

            My friend and I were discussing the gift on the bus ride back, and how there it is almost seen as a rite of passage for a young boy to have a toy gun. Boys are masculinized from such young ages, and there is not much happening to dismantle this. Socialization into hypermasculinity is almost a given nowadays, and the masculinity is always tied to militarization. This incident reminded me of the readings from week 4, especially those by Altinay and Sinclair-Webb, which talked about conscription. In many countries, conscription is not only required by law, it has been accepted by society as a rite of passage for boys (just like getting a toy gun). Thus, militarization is part of this coming of age for young men, and masculinity becomes integral, not just socially, but legally as sanctioned by the state. My cousin, who is a Singaporean citizen, will have to join the army in a few years. It is amazing to see how my aunt, who is of Indian origin, is very much looking forward to the day he joins the military – she thinks it will help him become more disciplined and outgrow some of the teenage awkwardness that is quite natural. She also believes it will be a good way for him to assert his ‘manliness’, since she believes that Singaporean pop-culture is too feminine. It is also interesting that these masculinities transcend national and ethnic boundaries – there is a push for masculinization (at a young age) regardless of the country you are in, or the culture you belong to.

These thoughts reminded me of Cockburn’s (2007) quote “even civil society can be seen to be deeply implicated in the military system. Indeed, one measure of militarization is precisely the extent to which ordinary people are enlisted in popularization of military values ad in societal preparedness to undertake war” (p. 238). I had mentioned in my presentation that we can see the militarization of police forces in the US, but taking this further, I do not think that many of us are very repulsed by violence in everyday life. So many movies and TV shows have a lot of violence, and perhaps we do not like the explicit blood and gore that may be present, but we are now so accustomed to gunshots and bombs on our TVs. This translates to our numbness when we see news of killings and bombs, especially in non-Western countries. We look to see the death toll, but the misery that should come with human death evades us.

26-October-2017

The idea presented in Peterson’s (2013) article about understanding gender analytically, which leads to a masculinization or feminization of not only subjects, but also subjective things like “concepts, desires, tastes, styles, ‘ways of knowing’, cultural expressions (art, music), roles, practices, work, nature, and so on” (p. 19) is so important. For me, the importance is especially in understanding knowledge, and knowledge production. As I had mentioned in my presentation, there have not been many papers that I have read in my undergraduate or my graduate studies thus far written by people that have been educated in and teaching in non-Western countries. There is certainly a bias in academia as to whose knowledge is valued, and who validates someone’s knowledge.

Peterson's article with the title of "Gendered identities, ideologies, and practices in the context of war and militarism" was published in Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives

For work, I have been reading articles about how new immigrants to Canada, with stellar post-secondary education credentials, find it difficult to land a job when they arrive in Canada, because Canadian employers do not value their educational degrees or work experiences from foreign countries. However, immigrants with education and work experience from the US, UK, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand usually do not face these problems. Thus, there is a privileging of knowledge produced in Western countries. I read a wonderful article by Shibao Guo (2009) which examines how “immigrant professionals experience devaluation and denigration of their prior learning and work experience after arriving in Canada” (p. 37). He claims that “epistemological misperceptions of difference and knowledge lead to a belief that knowledge of immigrant professionals, particularly from Third World countries, is deficient, incompatible and inferior, hence invalid” (p. 37). He also claims that there is “an ontological commitment to positivist and universal measurement [which] exacerbates the [issue]” (p. 37). He uses an intersectional understanding of how these perceptions hurt women of colour immigrants more than any other group. He also gives two case examples to highlight the implications of this feminizing of knowledge on real people. If knowledge truly is power, feminizing knowledge and privileging “masculinized” knowledge then takes away from a person’s power and has deep implications.

This feminization of knowledge also happens in the political science department at Carleton. My friend, a PhD student, who is taking a mandatory course on research design, told me how few fellow male students questioned her feminist approach to politics, citing it as being theoretically invalid. Thus, her knowledge and approach were deemed not as significant as theirs, because it was labelled as being too subjective, and not mainstream enough. As Cohn mentions in “Wars, Wimps, and Women”, subjectivity is feminized and deemed less important than objectivity, which is masculine. There is this implicit bias that feminist studies is too subjective, too emotional, and thus not academically valid. Especially in political science, there is such an effort to highlight the “science” portion of the title that importance is given to objectivity, positivism, and reason.
Part II