Chapter 6 Middle-earth & Feminist Analysis of Conflict

1. Chapter 6Middle-earth & Feminist Analysis of Conflict

2. What do gender-sensitive lenses tell us about war? War depends on telling gendered war stories based in a logic of protection, and on silencing or deligitimizing stories that challenge them

3. Where are the women? If women are present in the LOTR, their roles tend to be minor

4. What work is masculinity doing? Strategies and relationships among the Fellowship are highly masculinized Members are all unmarried, and the group is hierarchically structured

5. How can the “hero” story be challenged? The story of the LOTR is told from Frodo’s perspective, but what about other narratives which might be “messier” than Frodo’s view?

6. Hobbits illustrate how gendered and hierarchical relationships can perpetuate insecurity and inequality for feminized “dependents”

7. Eowyn and Merry emerge as unexpected heroes in the Battle of Pelennor Fields People who are not recognized as important actually do influence key events in significant ways

8. Private politics are critical to the practice and understanding of public politics

9. Non-dominant perspectives have important and underrecognized sources of wisdom

10. World War 1 through a Gender-Sensitive Lens

11. Gendered perceptions/assumptions influence how war is conducted and how decisions about going to war are made

12. Aircraft battles were more chivalrous than dropping bombs – but the German squadron-style combat was seen as cowardly

13. Military leaders valued boldness, bravery, strength and chivalry over defensive positioning, balancing, patience and calculation

14. Dehumanizing or feminizing enemies allows for projecting of dominating relationships onto the international relations between groups

15. World War 1 was seen as a cure for society’s ills and a way to promote positive masculine values

16. Masculinized, militarized nationalism promoted beliefs that war would be quick and easy because “our men” were superior

17. “Just warriors” were called on to defend defenseless women and children (“beautiful souls”) from bad guys (barbaric Germans)

18. The decision of potential recruits whether or not to enlist was determined by their “manliness”

19. The War in Iraq through a Gender-Sensitive Lens

20. Marriage, sexual assault, prostitution, ethnic politics, sexist economies more accurately and clearly illuminate the causes, costs, consequences and meanings of war

21. Gendered militarization has an enormous impact on society

22. …because beauty was “subverting civic order”

23. Moral criteria identify when a “just war” may be undertaken and how it may be fought

24. Jus in bello(just conduct) Jus ad bellum(just reasons) Requires that war be fought only for reasons characterized by right intention, just cause, right authority, proportionality of ends, and for last resort Requires that war be conducted only when noncombatants are insured immunity, and when wars do more good than harm

25. A redefinition of “reasonable chance of success” should include Justice in the longer term during and after war

26. The political context that constructed and sustained Iraq was gendered and unjust Sanctions imposed before the war were unjustly aimed at civilian targets Post-war civil strife was the opposite of a feminist understanding of what “success” in Iraq would look like

27. Gender-sensitive analysis recognizes the costs of war that are often ignored