Description
In January 2021, The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) entered into force. Henceforth, states party to the treaty are prohibited from participating in activities linked to nuclear weapons. The TPNW is novel to the global nuclear order in both the consideration it gives to the gendered harms of nuclear weapons and the significant role of feminist activism that has underpinned its fruition. Yet, at present there is little research to consider how gender is constitutive of meaning within the discourses of the TPNW, and how gender is constituted through these discourses. This paper takes the official discourses of the TPNW as a case study to investigate the work done by gender in shaping meaning about nuclear weapons and security. The paper raises the discursive tensions emerging within TPNW discourses whilst unearthing the resilience of gendered notions of security. It scrutinizes the resilience of colonial and patriarchal logics, whilst drawing on the productive power of discourse to explain how these logics persist. These factors come to bear upon the question of what it means to seriously consider gender in relation to nuclear weapons, examining the extent to which ideas within feminist International Relations scholarship have been transposed into contemporary discourses on nuclear weapons.
