Description
Women’s military participation and the military’s gendered culture have long been a focus of feminist International Relations (IR) scholarship. In their 2016 landmark article, “Regendering the Military,” Claire Duncanson and Rachel Woodward explored the question of how the unequal military gender order can be transformed. Their intervention was significant as it went beyond the earlier juxtaposition between liberal feminist advocacy for women’s equal right to fight and anti-militarist feminist concerns about women’s deepening cooptation into militarism. However, feminist IR research on militaries remains methodologically limited because it tends to treat women as objects of research—with feminist scholars speaking about and on behalf of military and veteran women. Inspired by interventions from Critical Military Studies (Bulmer and Jackson 2016; West and Antrobus 2021) which question the unequal relationship of veterans and researchers, this paper presents an ongoing Canadian research project about and with women veterans. The project “Invisible No More: Canadian Women Veterans Moving the ACVA [Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs] Report Recommendations to Full Implementation” employs a Participatory Action Research (PAR) framework that includes women veterans as full-fledged research partners. In this paper, we reflect on the implications, potentials, and limitations of this PAR project for feminist IR research.
