Description
In this paper I argue that gendered programmes such as Team Lioness, the Human Terrain System, Female Engagement Teams, and Cultural Support Teams deployed by the US military during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are part of a longer history of gendered knowledges located in colonial encounter, pacification, war, and counterinsurgency. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, historians, postcolonial and feminist scholars, I demonstrate that a historical genealogy can be traced through colonial encounters that centre gendered ways of knowing and understanding the other that privilege Western epistemology and associated hierarchies of knowledge and value. Drawing on “the figure of the ‘third-world woman’; the problematic history of the ‘feminist-as-imperialist' [and] the colonialist deployment of ‘feminist criteria’ to bolster the appeal of the ‘civilising mission’” (Gandhi 2019: 83), an analysis of the military’s gendered counterinsurgency programmes reveals that it fits within – and does not stand outside or transcend – this history and logic of coloniality.
