BOOKS
Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy Extract from Chapter One – “Terminally Unserious”: Ideologies and Oppressions of nuclear weapons. Published by Rowman & Littlefield, re-printed here with permission from the author. Ray Acheson
A s a feminist disarmament activist, I have come to believe that more than anything else, the association of weapons with power is one of the foremost obstacles to disarmament. And, as feminist scholars have articulated time and again, that this association is gendered. Gender refers to the socially constructed expectations and norms about how we are supposed to perform as women, men, and others, or in relation to sexual orientations; i.e. concepts of masculine and feminine and the normative demands of how to behave in order to “properly” represent the bodies we inhabit or are perceived to inhabit. It comes from a particular—and unfortunately, very dominant—understanding of masculinity. This is a masculinity in which ideas like strength, courage, and protection are equated with violence. It is a masculinity in which the capacity and willingness to use weapons, engage in combat, and kill other human beings is seen as essential to being “a real man”.1 Feminists have long explored the ways in which gender norms, particularly militarized masculinities, drive conflict and violence, and the acquisition and proliferation of weapons. These scholars and activists argue that the association of power and strength, coded as masculine traits, with the accumulation and use of weapons, has a negative impact on disarmament and peace.2 Militarized masculinity harms everyone. It harms those who do not comply with mainstream gender norms—queeridentified people, non-normative men—and it harms women. It requires oppression of those deemed “weaker” on the basis of gender norms. It also assumes men to be inherently violent and inclined to participate in violent acts— and thus also more expendable.3 And it makes disarmament seem weak. It makes peace seem utopian. It makes protection without weapons seem absurd. When it comes to nuclear weapons, there are several dimensions to the connection between patriarchal power and militarist masculinities that contribute to the difficulty to advocating for nuclear disarmament. We can start with the “ubiquitous weight of gender” throughout the entire nuclear weapon discourse and the
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Chain Reaction #140
August 2021
association of nuclear weapons with masculinity described by Carol Cohn in her ground-breaking work in the 1980s. She described the “sanitized abstraction and sexual imagery” including metaphors that equate military and political power with sexual potency and masculinity— such as “vertical erector launchers, thrust-toweight ratios, soft lay downs, deep penetration, the comparative advantages of protracted versus spasm attacks,” and discussions about how “the Russians are a little harder than we are.”4 She and Sara Ruddick suggested that this type of highly sexualized language serves to “mobilize gendered associations and symbols in creating assent, excitement, support for, and identification with weapons.”5 It is also “a way of minimizing the seriousness of militarist endeavors, of denying their deadly consequences.”6 In later years Cohn, along with Ruddick and Felicity Ruby, expanded the inquiry into the sense of masculine strength afforded by nuclear weapons, tying this into some of the broader feminist analysis about violent and militarized masculinities discussed above. They listened to a nationalist leader after India’s 1998 nuclear weapon tests explain, “We had to prove that we are not eunuchs.” They argue this statement is meant to “elicit admiration for the wrathful manliness of the speaker” and to imply that being willing to employ nuclear weapons is to “have the balls” or to be “man enough” to “defend” your country.7 This link between masculinity and the power of force persists today. Think of Trump “becoming presidential” by launching missiles at Syria 8 or of Kim Jongun and his massive parades of missile hardware in a literal showcase of “mine is bigger than yours”.9 Think of Theresa May giving a resolute yes to the question of whether she would be willing to “personally authorize a nuclear strike that could kill 100,000 innocent men, women and children.”10 It is, after all, women leaders as well as men who are conditioned to prove their capacity to lead by a “manly” show of force. Simply adding women to the situation is not sufficient to achieve nuclear disarmament. And “men,” as a category are not specifically or exclusively the problem. Gendered norms, in
