Description
In recent years, policymakers, advocates and scholars alike are ‘gendering’ nuclear weapons policy. Yet, the nature and implications of this work in policy and scholarly terms is under-researched. Gendering nuclear policy comes at a time characterized by escalating nuclear risk, the entrenchment of power politics between nuclear armed states, and increased hostility towards gender expression, gender politics and scholarship in its name. Funding cuts across the nuclear policy community places the non-proliferation and disarmament complex in questionable health. In this context, what does it mean to gender nuclear weapons policy? This paper presents my current PhD project asking: ‘what happens when gender-talk meets nukespeak?’. Drawing upon the experience of members of the nuclear policy community, the project takes up the mantle of using the co-productive potential of discourse and affect to consider alternative political realities. The project goes beyond a purely discursive approach, taking affective responses to gendering as a site of political struggle, with implications for transformative feminist politics. In providing a critical examination of how actors locate gender and feminism in nuclear policymaking, this paper considers how gendering nuclear weapons policy relates to specific ideas about political possibility and nuclear weapons politics.
