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 In addition, as the U.S. government has withdrawn from its earlier role as the guardian of American citizens’ social welfare, it has increasingly lost its former legitimacy; with this loss, the U.S. state has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.

1. While the concept of “new world order” harks back to Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations following World War I, I refer here to the more recent usage in the George H. W. Bush’s September 11, 1990 speech “Toward a New World Order.” Here he used it to name post-Cold War U.S.-led world political governance in which the U.S. and Russia would cooperate to contain third world instability, whether in the form of Asian economic challenges, Islamic movements, or Latin American social movements. At that time, the New York Times observed that many on the American left called “new world order” a “rationalization for imperial ambitions” in the Middle East. Many charged that it was a unipolar political vision, under the guise of multipolar collaboration. The term receded in the 1990s under the presidency of Bill Clinton, when liberal institutionalist policies were dominant. Since 2003, however, the term has recurred to name the designs of President George S. Bush’s U.S.-led “war on terror.”[↑]
2. In 1999, China lifted the prohibition on foreign-private economic cooperation. As the world’s seventh largest trading country, China joined the WTO in 2001, and by 2002, China surpassed the United States as the most favored destination for foreign direct investment. Reports of U.S. trade deficits with China have grabbed headlines and fanned protectionist flames throughout the U.S. For some time, China has been extremely competitive in labor intensive manufacturing, but it has now moved ahead in sophisticated technology and innovative electronic design. The U.S. trade deficit with China is soon likely to pass $150 billion.[↑]
3. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, 2002, 12.[↑]
4. On the “Washington Consensus,” as well as neoliberal assumptions held by the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. Treasury since the 1980s for developing countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa, see Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents; and Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity. London: Verso, 2003.[↑]
5. Stephen Krasner, Ed. International Regimes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.[↑]