Description
Building on feminist analyses of militarization (Enloe 2000), femonationalism (Calderaro 2025), and the regulation of racialized women's bodies in France (Vergès 2019), this paper investigates the historical entanglement of natalist, feminist, and militarist discourses in French statecraft. It asks: under what historical and discursive conditions have pronatalist and militarist agendas converged with state feminism to produce a logic of "feminist militarization"?
Grounded in historical feminist perspectives, this paper conceptualizes feminist militarization as the co-optation of gender equality discourses to legitimize security and demographic imperatives. It argues that President Emmanuel Macron's call for a "demographic rearmament" (January 2024) exemplifies a broader reconfiguration of the French state's security reasoning, where feminist language becomes a vehicle for militarization. Central to this recent transformation is the rise of a universalist feminism within French feminist diplomacy - an approach rooted in far-right and femonationalist registers that explicitly marginalizes intersectional perspectives, thereby marking a puzzling shift in the genealogy of feminist state practices.
Methodologically, this paper combines discourse analysis with archival research in diplomatic archives (Paris), colonial archives (Aix-en-Provence), and digital archives documenting the post-Charlie Hebdo securitization moment.
By tracing key critical junctures (from the interwar period and decolonization to Europe's current remilitarization), this paper historicizes how state feminist has rearticulated white women's bodies as both instruments and symbols of the nation's demographic health while simultaneously securitizing racialized women and their children.
Ultimately, this paper contributes to feminist and postcolonial debates on norm co-optation by showing how feminist vocabularies, when entagled with security and demographic logics, reproduce the genderd and racialized foundations of state power.
