The Gender of Sovereignty
There are currently two U.S. national campaigns that appear to draw
legitimacy from the definition of state sovereignty traditionally
understood as the exclusive right of the modern nation-state to govern
people and territories, a definition harking back to the time of the
Treaty of Westphalia (1713) up through most of the twentieth century.
Proponents, first, for the proposed legislation to criminalize an
estimated 12 million immigrants living and working in the U.S., and
second, the U.S. "war on terror"—ranging from the invasion of
Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq—seek to draw justification from these
traditional understandings and to associate the measures with the
securing of a "new world order."[1]
Both efforts view the nation-state
as the primary political actor on the global stage, and define the
sovereignty of the nation-state in terms of its power to control its
borders, as well as the populations within and outside of those borders.
While this definition of sovereignty refers to a particular genealogy
of academic political science, from an interdisciplinary feminist
perspective, the recent fortification of the U.S.-Mexican border appears
less as a rational index of a new "immigration crisis," and more
an expression of a gendered transformation of the meaning of U.S. state
sovereignty within the context of globalization.
The operations that
have prioritized transnational markets and gendered labor supplies have
challenged the traditional autonomy of the U.S. state, and rendered its
coherence increasingly disaggregated; migrant flows that satisfy
agribusiness and service industries simultaneously disorganize the
Immigration and Naturalization Service and border patrols. In addition,
as the U.S. government has withdrawn from its earlier role as the
guardian of American citizens' social welfare, it has increasingly lost
its former legitimacy; with this loss, the U.S. state has struggled to
maintain its authority by exerting juridical or military controls,
rather than by broadening its electoral base of support. In this sense,
the U.S. war in Iraq has been from the outset not a political
response to a traditional threat to territorial sovereignty, but the
nation's attempt to occupy Iraq in order to gain political control of
Middle Eastern petroleum reserves on which many industrialized nations
depend; with the scarcity of oil, military occupation of the oil-rich
region has been imagined as the means to control not merely the
resource, but to exert influence over the most economically productive
competitors in the global system, including China and India.[2]
It has become clear that the Iraq war provides neither answers to waning U.S.
sovereignty nor restoratives for the country's economic anxiety; to the
contrary, it has increasingly turned the international public against
the U.S. as it has destabilized the Middle East and incurred enormous
financial debts.
In my essay, I discuss the role of U.S. political
science in shaping understandings of contemporary world governance; yet
the mainstream discipline's ideas of state sovereignty are
incommensurable with the practices that characterize globalization, and
"gender" is one significant index in which we may "read" this
incommensurability. Transnational modes of gender discipline within
globalization articulate the shift from the Cold War management of third
world nation-states to a biopolitical governmentality focused on
bodies and populations, which disrespects such borders. Not aiming to
provide anything as exhaustive as a history of the field, I restrict
myself to tracing how the dominant paradigm of U.S. political science
has defined the study of the "political" in terms of the
nation-state form, a definition that has both produced and
restricted knowledge about the present conditions of globalization, and
has provided the framework within which the "war on terror" and
legislation of the "immigration crisis" are currently rationalized. I
conclude with an examination of a cross-border feminist environmental
campaign, representing a counter-politics that provides an alternative
to the modern definition of sovereignty as inhering in the power of the
state and its institutions.
The U.S. wars after September 2001 mark a particular stage in the
global dialectic of political and economic priorities. The near
unilateral militarism of the U.S. war on Iraq has been not only
reminiscent of a much earlier era, but the hijacking of public fear, the
enforcement of public patriotism, the breach of civil rights of
prisoners held at Guantanamo—all of these measures have demonstrated a
supersession of "political freedoms" of U.S. citizens by corporate
interests in "free trade," or what some call "free market
fundamentalism," to denote the dogmatism that fervently subordinates
interests in social justice or political equality to purely economic
ones.[3]
More to the point, the U.S. war in Iraq militates against
longer term international institutions like the United Nations, the
multilateral diplomacy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),
and regional interests and coalitions like the European Union (EU),
which political science, over two decades ago, had argued were
commensurate with the neoliberal economics of globalization. "Keeping
the world safe for capitalism" had in effect already been secured by the
"Washington Consensus" during the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and
Bill Clinton presidencies in the 1980s-90s, and even officials who were
inclined to expect little from international institutions had discovered
their value in achieving American economic purposes.[4]
Yet the global
unilateralism of the U.S. invasion of Iraq not only broke with what
political scientists call an "international regime"—the principles,
norms, rules and governing arrangements that affect interstate
interdependence—it broke with the international regime that had been
in effect for at least three decades.[5]
This national government has
used the so-called "war on terror" to create an apparent "crisis" to
justify the state's monopoly on both violence and power; it combines
extreme military force in extraterritorial war with the state-supported
suppressions of civil and political dissent to protect unimpeded
progress of corporate capitalism.
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