Description
As work on gender and nuclear weapons continues to evolve, there is a current lack of understanding as to what this workstream specifically implies for the practitioners carrying out this work, and what can be learnt from this about the process of knowledge creation in nuclear weapons politics more broadly. Ferguson’s concept of the ‘Gender Person’ has been theorized in the field of International Development (Ferguson, 2015), and more recently in Academia (Henderson, 2019). Yet, what it means to carry out work on ‘gender’ within the gendered realm of nuclear weapons remains unexplored. This paper draws on interviews with members of the nuclear policy community working closely with the topic of gender, to further understanding of the specific dynamics at play within the nuclear policy community when gender is brought to the fore. The paper draws on my own experience as a researcher on this topic, using participant observation to explore how gender and ‘the gender person’ is received across distinct spaces where nuclear policy is negotiated. The paper seeks to understand how the ‘gender person’ is characterized in the specific case of nuclear weapons politics, with a view to explaining how gender as a concept is at work in defining what gets taken seriously in nuclear policymaking. As such, the paper concludes with reflections on what this suggests for the sustainability of gender work in nuclear policy, and on whether there is something specific about the intersection of gender and nuclear weapons which makes gender work in this space, distinct to other academic disciplines and policy backdrops.
