Queer/Trans K’s

Ethics

You should focus on the differential allocation of humanness: this structural inequality patterns the entirety of the sovereign global order, justifying the discursive forces that distribute access to safety, security, and intelligibility along the demarcating line of the construction of the human. You are compelled not to question which team mitigates against the most “physical” violence, because this approach will always replicate the patterns of hegemony. You should focus on disrupting the forces that control the production of the human by prioritizing resistance to normative violence, which prefigures and predetermines the orientation, intensity, and flow of sovereign violence.

Wilcox 2015 (Lauren B., University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, “Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations,” 187-188)CJQ

The core conclusion that the previous discussion suggests is that ethics and responsibility cannot only be considered a matter of responding to others as if “we” and “they” existed as socially and politically separate entities. By taking embodiment seriously as an effect of, and cause of, entangled engagements, responsibility is rethought as accountability for who and what “matters” in the world—and who and what does not matter—in sharp contrast to discourses of “responsibilization” that shift the site of ethics onto individuals, as in neoliberal discourses. We are mutually entangled with each other such that we cannot separate. Our bodies themselves do not precede social entanglements, and thus we cannot consider an ethics of violence differently from existing frameworks that separate bodily existence from power. Rather than ethics being conceptualized as the proper treatment of others, “ethics is therefore not about the right response to a radically exterior/ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part” (Barad 2007, 393). Responsibility has to do less with seeking security than with resisting regimes of inequality by addressing what Athena Athenasiou describes as “the differential allocation of humanness; the perpetually shifting and variably positioned boundary between those who are rendered properly human and those who are not” (Butler 2013, 31). The broader implications of theorizing bodies as precarious and bound to one another in their production as seemingly autonomous entities is that the question of ethical responsibility lies not only in protecting or rescuing those who have been constructed as grievable but also in the challenging of those discursive practices that constitute some people as grievable tragedies in death, others as justifiably killable. Because we are formed through the violence of norms, it is incumbent upon us to resist imposing the same violence on others (Butler 2009, 169). Butler posits a mode of protection, but it is clear that she does not mean, or does not only mean, the protection of an existing body from violence. Protection from violence is also a struggle with the social and political norms that structure the production of livable lives: to be responsible, to protect from violence in this instance is to work to lessen the violent effects of the norm, to trouble the power of bodily norms to mark certain lives as unlivable and unreal. Responsibility is about where the “cut” between self and other is made. We do not have recourse to the “god’s eye view,” to approach the question of ethics in terms of a disconnected appraisal of a situation in which “we” have no part. Our constitution in and through the world is not only a matter of our perspective being limited or partial. Our subjectivity is a material engagement in the world, creating it as it produces knowledge about it. Taking seriously the bodily precariousness means being attentive to the discourses that produce certain subjects as inhuman or as only bleeding, suffering bodies outside the full political context under which we and they are constituted.

War

Traditional gender roles reproduce conditions necessary for war.

Sjoberg 2015 (Laura, Department of Political Science, University of Florida, “Seeing sex, gender, and sexuality in international security,” International Journal 0(0) 1–20)CJQ

Another place that women are—namely, in the American military—begs a different set of gender-based questions. Research has suggested that traditional gender roles have played very important parts in the organization of militaries and the ways in which soldiers are motivated to fight.47 Joshua Goldstein found that men will fight for women even when they are averse to conflict and have nothing else to fight for.48 Jean Elshtain found that this is because male ‘‘just warriors’’ are held to an expectation of the provision of protection, and female ‘‘beautiful souls’’ are the object of that protection.49 In other words, protection of women is defined into masculinities, and men are expected to be masculine. These dynamics create what scholars have recognized as militarized masculinities, that is, expectations of masculinities related to militarization, war-making, and warfighting.50 To say that the United States military has an institutional culture of militarized masculinity does not make sense to many people, however: they point out that it’s one-third women. How can it have a masculine culture? Feminist scholars have argued that changing masculine institutional cultures requires more than just putting women into those institutions.51 In fact, in their attempt to critique the assumption that ‘‘adding’’ women automatically produces representation for both women and femininity, feminists have called the approach ‘‘just add women and stir.’’52 Instead, these scholars have pointed out the ways that the masculinized expectations of militaries remain in place when women are integrated into their ranks, until and unless values associated with femininity are (also) integrated.53 The result is holding male and female members of militaries to expectations of militarized masculinities, high levels of sexual violence within militaries, and aggressive (and even homoerotic) military cultures based on highly gendered structures and functioning in highly gendered ways.54 In Libya, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, sex and gender integration of the US military, and in militaries around the world, is complicated and incomplete.

Conflict between states is a result of the gendering that occurs by and to institutional bodies- war is a result of competition over the ‘best’ masculinity.

Sjoberg 2015 (Laura, Department of Political Science, University of Florida, “Seeing sex, gender, and sexuality in international security,” International Journal 0(0) 1–20)CJQ

Feminists have also argued that because gender-based factors have not been taken into account, the causes of war and conflict have been incompletely understood. Some would respond quickly that gender did not cause the civil war in Libya. Feminist scholars have countered by suggesting a number of ways in which gender matters in how war happens. They have argued that gender is a structural feature of international politics: that is, while relative positions between genders and the relationships between sexes and genders have varied over time, place, and culture, gender hierarchy has been a feature of political organization throughout recorded history.60 In other words, gender is a social organizing principle in states and other political actors, and it is relatedly a social organizing principle among states and other political actors.61 System-structural gender hierarchy means that states are incentivized to behave in ways that emphasize traits associated with masculinity (e.g., the challenge to Obama’s masculinity for failing to intervene in Libya quickly enough), and to feminize their enemies (e.g., the characterizations of Gaddafi as so weak that he needed to be defended by women and teenagers).62 This has been a condition of possibility of warfighting in global politics.63 The characterization of Gaddafi’s ‘‘use’’ of women as weak can also be read as gendered on the dyadic (or between-state) level. States, national groups, and ethnic groups compete along a number of axes: one is which group is more masculine and/ or displays the best masculinities. The post-Cold War United States has focused on a ‘‘tough but tender’’ notion of masculinity that combines strength and protection,64 while the Gaddafi regime’s notion of masculinity has been characterized as hypermasculine, unfettered, and brutal.65 Each side implicitly or explicitly characterized its masculinities as superior, agreeing only on the contention that state masculinity is desirable. Gender analysis has revealed the ways that states compete for superiority along hierarchies of gender in the international system.66 Pre- and post-revolution Libya did that in very different ways.