Christine de Matos - Gender, Power, and Military Occupations: Asia Pacific and the Middle East Since 1945

1 The Womens Movement and

Womens Employment in

Nineteenth Century Britain

Ellen Jordan

2 Gender, Sexuality and Colonial

Modernities

Edited by Antoinette Burton

3 Womens Suffrage in the British

Empire

Citizenship, Nation and Race

Edited by Ian Christopher

Fletcher, Laura E. Nym Mayhall

and Philippa Levine

4 Women, Educational

Policy-Making and

Administration in England

Authoritative Women Since 1800

Edited by Joyce Goodman and

Sylvia Harrop

5 Women, Gender and Labour

Migration

Historical and Global Perspectives

Edited by Pamela Sharpe

6 Women, Accounting, and

Narrative

Keeping Books in Eighteenth-

Century England

Rebecca Elisabeth Connor

7 The Educated Woman

Minds, Bodies, and Womens

Higher Education in Britain,

Germany, and Spain, 18651914

Katharina Rowold

8 Political Women

The Womens Movement,

Political Institutions, the Battle for

Womens Suffrage and the ERA

Alana S. Jeydel

9 Women, Education, and Agency,

16002000

Edited by Jean Spence, Sarah

Jane Aiston, Maureen M. Meikle

10 Gender, Migration and the

Public Sphere, 18502005

Edited by Marlou Schrover and

Eileen Janes Yeo

11 Gender, Property, and Law in

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim

Communities in the Wider

Mediterranean 13001800

Jutta Sperling and Shona Wray

12 Gender, Power, and Military

Occupations

Asia Pacifi c and the Middle East

since 1945

Edited by Christine de Matos and

Rowena Ward

First published 2012

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2012 Taylor & Francis

The right of Christine de Matos and Rowena Ward to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Gender, power, and military occupations : Asia Pacific and the Middle
East since 1945 / edited by Christine de Matos and Rowena Ward.
p. cm. (Routledge research in gender and history ; 12)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Control (Psychology) 2. Military occupation. 3. Sex role.
4. Violence. I. De Matos, Christine. II. Ward, Rowena, 1965
BF632.5.G46 2011
355.49081dc23
2011039884

ISBN: 978-0-415-89183-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-12346-1 (ebk)

To those who are currently experiencing occupation, and those who continue to deal with the legacies of former ones.

Christine de Matos and Rowena Ward

Military occupations are implicitly masculine affairs. It is men who compose the majority of the military forces that undertake the tasks of occupation, and primarily men who command an occupation force. These men operate within the structures and culture of the hyper-masculinized military institution. Yet not only is the attempt to make masculinities more explicit in war, occupation and peacekeeping research quite recent, the more complex gendered impacts of military occupation have only begun to be interrogated. Women can be part of an occupation force. Both men and women are affected as the occupied. There are gender complexities and hierarchies within each side of the occupation power binary, that is within the occupiers and within the occupied. These webs of hierarchical and interactive gendered relationships are enacted in complex, diverse, and often contradictory ways. The aim of this edited collection of chapters by scholars, activists and those affected by occupation is to reveal the diversity of the gendered impacts of military occupation on both the occupier and the occupied. Attention is paid to the ways that occupation power is performed, negotiated and subverted on a daily basis through the questioning and interrogation of both normative and changing gender roles in occupation power hierarchies and in occupied societies and spaces.

Glenda Sluga (2004, 238) states that just as gender is crucial to understanding the canon of war, it is a critical aspect of the history of peacemaking, the conceptualization of post-war orders, and the definition of national and collective identities. This statement can also be applied to military occupationa place somewhere between war and peace. Gender and its role in the construction of hierarchical relations of power under conditions of military occupation is a neglected though fast developing area of research (Renda 2001) and informs the fundamental rationale for this collection. An analysis of the performance of gendered power will, in turn, shed light on the gendered (and raced, and classed) identities of those engaged in the performance of occupation power. Analyzing gendered occupation power triggers many questions. What were the relations of power between occupier men and occupied women? What about occupier and occupied men? How do women act as occupiers toward occupied women and men? How did occupied men and women negotiate or subvert their role in the occupation power dichotomy, and (re)construct an identity in a time of epistemic rupture borne from occupation? Does military occupation create opportunities for the reform of gender relationships, or does it conversely reinforce established patriarchal norms? Before these issues can be explored, it is necessary to define what we mean by military occupation.