Description
The paper develops the role of emotions within the literature on Feminist Institutionalism. Although Feminist Institutionalism raises questions concerning the gendered and racialised power relations that institutions may challenge or perpetuate within the socio-political order, the current literature lacks a sustained scholarly engagement with emotions, embodiment and affect (Celermajer et al. 2019). The paper bridges the gap between Feminist Institutionalism and feminist IR and cultural approaches on emotions in order to develop a novel conceptual framework that facilitates the study of embodied subjectivities and emotional narratives within military institutions. It argues that military education entails not only bodily training but also affective training, which is part and parcel of cultivating collective and individual military subjectivities. To this aim, the paper focuses on military educational practices through which Israeli recruits are trained to work with and through their emotions in order to develop their military subjectivities. Therefore, it shows emotions are not only part and parcel of Israeli military education, but they are also complicit in and with the emergence of racialised and gendered military subjectivity that elevates the moral standing, the vulnerability and the cosmopolitanism of Israeli military subjectivity, and which weakens accusations of Israeli military’s human rights violations against Palestinians. Apart from developing a novel conceptual framework that bridges the gap between Feminist Institutionalism and Feminist IR through the lens of the role of emotions in military education, the paper examines the political consequences of the Israeli military’s self-representation as a benign entity within the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
