Description
Family as a gendered social institution sustains war both symbolically and materially. Building on feminist understandings of family as ‘militarized’, this paper examines the role of familial ties within and beyond fighting forces. Feminist scholarship has highlighted the ways in which family becomes entangled with military and political aims. How political leaders depict the nation as a family, assigning gendered roles in wartime (McClintock 1993); or how it is the family that provides the gendered distribution of social reproduction, which is indispensable for sustaining war (Hedstrom, 2020). This paper examines familial ties as a form of gendered relationality that is emergent from, and profoundly transformed through, war’s violence. How might familial ties be targeted as part of militarized violence – to be shattered and/or reconfigured? How do familial ties – and their transformation through violence – shape the lived experiences of women (ex)-combatants? We pursue these questions in relation to narratives that emerge from our research with women who participated as fighters/combatants in two distinct contexts: Nepal and Bosnia & Herzegovina. Our lens of familial ties offers crucial insights into how women are mobilised into participating in fighting forces as well as the forms of physical and emotional labour that underpin this participation.
