Description
This paper seeks to revisit and extend Cynthia Enloe’s invitation to take women and gender seriously in the analysis of military bases. Taking the chapter “Base women” in her pathbreaking book Bananas, Beaches and Bases as a starting point, we aim to develop a more systematic feminist analysis of military/nuclear site-specific installations, such as bases, laboratories, training academies. We are interested in exploring the infrastructures and quotidian practices- material, embodied and affective- through which these sites are sustained, experienced, and resisted. To do so, we propose an innovative synthesis of two fields of cutting-edge feminist scholarship: the first understands militarism as embodied, affective and performed, sustained and resisted in the everyday (e.g. Åhäll and Gregory 2015; Baker, 2020) while the second develops a material, decolonial analysis of nuclear politics (Choi and Eschle 2022; Runyan 2022), centring scholarship on the coloniality of the nuclear order (e.g. Das 2010; Biswas 2014) and the intertwined tentacles of militarism and empire (Teaiwa, 2017; Hong, 2020). By bringing under the same frame military and nuclear installations and enabling rigorous analysis grounded in contextual complexities and feminist decolonial scholarship, we hope to expand the material geographies underpinning our critical study of military/nuclear assemblages and the logics of coloniality that sustain them.
