Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Training Peacekeepers

The practice of ＂gender training＂ has gained widespread popularity among numerous professions in the last few decades. Designed to address a range of problems--from corporate advancement, to sexual assault, to economic development--gender training is reliably presented as a solution to gendered disparities. Gender training has even become a requirement for soldiers and police officers deploying overseas as peacekeepers. But what happens when the concept of gender, the analytical purchase of which we owe to feminist activism and scholarship, is taken up by martial institutions shaped by hegemonic masculinity? How is gender training made to work in and for military and police organisations? Is it a normative good from the point of view of intersectional feminist politics?

Through an ethnographic study of gender training practices in peacekeeping institutions, Aiko Holvikivi examines how gender is conceptualised, taught, and learned in these settings, and with what political effects. She finds that this training constitutes a deeply ambivalent practice from the point of view of intersectional feminist political commitments. On the one hand, it reinscribes the logic that martial force is an appropriate solution to gendered insecurities, and it affirms attachments to normative heterosexuality. On the other hand, this training simultaneously exposes contradictions that inhere to the logics of martiality, coloniality, and heteronormativity that structure the peacekeeping enterprise. Drawing on queer and postcolonial feminist thought, Fixing Gender examines the contradictory politics of gender training, arguing that we need to develop the analytical tools to grapple with paradoxical practices that are simultaneously good and bad feminist politics.

Aiko Holvikivi is Assistant Professor of Gender, Peace and Security at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her work is interested in transnational movements of people and of ideas, and her writing appears in several journals, including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; European Journal of Politics and Gender; and International Peacekeeping. Her scholarship is informed by her professional background working on questions of gender and security at an international civil society organisation, and her research is characterised by ongoing dialogue and exchange with policy and practitioner communities.