Description
The 2023-27 UK National Action Plan for implementing Women Peace and Security (WPS) includes a commitment to “enhance the day-to-day experience of women in the Armed Forces through the implementation of policies and initiatives to tackle women’s health and wellbeing issues (such as urination, menstruation, breastfeeding and menopause)” as a means to increasing women’s participation in the UK peace and security sector. This is a surprising and perhaps unexpected inclusion of feminised body fluids within a military institutional context. This paper explores how bodily fluids have been conceptualised within the context of WPS, and how the UK NAP came to include bodily fluids. We ask what this means for how we can understand leaky militarised bodies, and the ways in which they are leaking. We note the reality that leaky bodies arise from gendered differences, where in fact all bodies are leaky but in different ways. This challenges the UK conceptualistion of sexed differences, where sex, biology and gender are continually fudged by military institutions and policies. This fudging, we argue, means despite the apparent innovation of gazing at (women’s) bodily fluids, we still do not escape institutionalised ambitions for WPS to be bound and constrained to gender parity.
