Intimacy, Warfare, and Gender Hierarchy

It is in the spirit of engagement that I read Pain’s paper with an eye toward the ways in which our thinking about gender, war, and experience overlap, and can contribute to each other. In so doing, I see three current trends in feminist work in IR which might productively dialogue with Pain’s approach, and serve to advance both understandings in potentially interesting and important ways. I use a particular recent work in my field to engage Pain’s analysis in each of three areas: the political economies of intimate war, understanding the body as a space of warfare, and theorizing gender hierarchy in the analysis of intimate war.