This book traces practices of militarization and resistance that have emerged under the sign of motherhood in US Foreign Policy. The book traces this discourse against the background of three key moments of American foreign policy formation: the antinuclear movement of the 1980s, the Gulf War of the early 1990s, and the recent invasion of Iraq. For each of these moments it examines the emergence of a historically specific and emblematic maternalized mode of female embodiment (ranging from the hysterical' antinuclear protester to the figure of Supermom' to the grieving-mom-turned-war-protester), to shed light onto the various practices which define and enable expressions of American sovereignty. In so doing, it argues that the emergence of particular raced, gendered, and maternalized bodies ought not to be read as merely tangential to affairs of state, but as instantiations of global politics. This work urges an approach that rereads the body as an event' -- with significant implications for the ways in which international politics and gender are currently understood. This book will be of much interest to students of gender politics, critical security studies, US foreign policy and IR in general.

This book offers new insights into the excesses and uncanniness of the 'War on Terror' via an engagement with the pleasures of risk. Engaging with the unconscious, the excess, the uncanny and the spectacular dimensions of the 'War on Terror' - as made evident, for example, in the 2012 London Olympic Games and the 2013 manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers - leads this book to probe the so-called order of things that has made this war intelligible in both mainstream and critical approaches to Security Studies and International Relations. Specifically, this book brings to light and theorizes the obscene pleasures of the 'War on Terror' and its supplementary precautionary risk logic. Coming to grips with this (i.e., the pleasures of risk), ultimately via an engagement with critical psychoanalytic theory, leads this book to argue that we may be other than we think we are within critical International Relations (IR) traditions. Furthermore, albeit without discounting the madness, if not desolation, of the present (extending from the 'War on Terror' to the politics of Brexit and Donald Trump), it suggests there may be some relief in that yet. This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies, critical security studies, political theory and International Relations broadly.

This book traces practices of militarization and resistance that have emerged under the sign of motherhood in US Foreign Policy. Gender, Agency and War examines this discourse against the background of three key moments of American foreign policy formation: the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, the Gulf War of the early 1990s, and the recent invasion of Iraq. For each of these moments the author explores the emergence of a historically specific and emblematic maternalized mode of female embodiment (ranging from the 'hysterical' antinuclear protester to the figure of 'Supermom'), in order to shed light onto the various practices which define and enable expressions of American sovereignty. In so doing, the text argues that the emergence of particular raced, gendered, and maternalized bodies ought not to be read as merely tangential to affairs of state, but as instantiations of global politics. This work urges an approach that rereads the body as an 'event' - with significant implications for the ways in which international politics and gender are currently understood. This book will be of much interest to students of gender politics, critical security studies, US foreign policy and IR in general.