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Queering women, peace and security

JAMIE J. HAGEN

International Affairs 92: 2 (2016) 313–332 © 2016 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ox4 2dq, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

In all regions, people experience violence and discrimination because of their sexual orien- tation and gender identity. In many cases, even the perception of homosexuality or trans- gender identity puts people at risk.1

After 15 years of advocacy and policy action related to the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) architecture,2 the continued silence about homophobic and trans- phobic violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) individuals in conflict-related environments is alarming. Those vulnerable to insecurity and violence because of their sexual orientation or gender identity remain largely neglected by the international peace and security community. This neglect is in part the result of heteronormative assumptions in the framing of the WPS agenda. The goal of this article is not only to point out this silence but also to propose ways in which a queer security analysis can address and redress these silences in policy through paying attention to the damaging role heteronorma- tivity and cisprivilege play in sustaining the current gap in analysis of gendered violence.3 A queer theory analysis reveals a wide spectrum of identities that do not fit neatly into a binary conception of gender restricted to exclusive categories of male/female or man/woman. This article reviews the policy implications of excluding sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) against LGBTQ individuals from policy implementation and NGO monitoring of the WPS agenda.

Because LGBTQ individuals are under constant threat in many places, viewing the shifts in insecurity for this population in conflict-related environments through a gender lens offers a significant contribution to how policy-makers understand human security more broadly. Understanding what drives violence against individuals marginalized for their sexual orientation and gender identity will also shed light on the larger question of how SGBV operates in conflict-

1 Human Rights Council, ‘Discriminatory laws and practices and acts of violence against individuals based on their sexual orientation and gender identity’, Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, A/HRC/19/41, 17 Nov. 2011, para. 1.

2 For the history of WPS, see Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd, ‘Reintroducing women, peace and security’, International Affairs 92: 2, March 2016, pp. 249–54 above.

3 Cisprivilege is a term that refers to the privilege enjoyed by individuals who identify with the sex/gender they are assigned at birth. Heteronormativity is the world-view within which heterosexual relationships are the preferred or normal orientation.

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related environments. International NGOs including Human Rights Watch and OutRight Action International4 have already begun to look into homophobic and transphobic violence in some conflicts, for example in Iraq.

Peace and security for LGBTQ individuals too

Violence against LGBTQ individuals takes a similar shape to the targeted violence against women the WPS architecture has long worked to address. Of the utmost importance to recognizing gendered vulnerabilities is understanding how an indi- vidual’s multiple social identities compound the risk of violence against them. For example, the UN Human Rights Council report regarding violence against indi- viduals on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity explains: ‘Lesbi- ans and transgender women are at a particular risk because of gender inequality and power relations within families and wider society.’5 Carol Cohn notes that ‘gender is, at its heart, a structural power relation’.6 Gendered power relations drive homophobic and transphobic violence in similar ways to the now well-documented systemic use of rape as a weapon of war in some conflict-related environments.

Queer theory, a term coined in the early 1990s, draws from the fields of literary criticism and post-structuralist philosophy ‘to emphasize deviance and unstable sexualities and question established norms, categories, and orders’.7 Using a queer lens to understand global SGBV remains a fringe approach within international rela- tions. Cynthia Weber describes how scholars outside the traditional International Relations discipline have been made into ‘intellectual immigrants’, explaining:

The poorest neighborhoods of IR have always been those populated by new intellec- tual immigrants to IR. These include Marxists, poststructuralists, feminists, critical race scholars, postcolonial scholars, critical studies scholars and queer scholars. These scholars are poor because they wield the least disciplinary capital in IR. This is because their analyses deviate from an exclusive focus on ‘the states-system, the diplomatic commu- nity itself ’ and because they refuse Disciplinary IR’s epistemological and methodological claims about knowledge collection and accumulation.8

Gender mainstreaming and the documentation of SGBV by the WPS archi- tecture can be a force of oppression and erasure of LGBTQ experience. Exclu- sion of LGBTQ individuals from monitoring and reporting on WPS resolutions pertaining to SGBV is both theoretical in the way gender is framed and political in the resulting inclusion or exclusion of individuals as a result of this framing.

4 OutRight Action International was formerly the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. 5 Human Rights Council, ‘Discriminatory laws and practices and acts of violence against individuals based on

their sexual orientation and gender identity’, para 21. 6 Carol Cohn, ‘Women and wars: toward a conceptual framework’, in Carol Cohn, ed., Women and wars

(Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 4. 7 Manuela Lavinas Picq and Markus Thiel, ‘Introduction: sexualities in world politics’, in Manuela Lavinas Picq

and Markus Thiel, eds, Sexualities in world politics: how LGBTQ claims shape international relations (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 8.

8 Cynthia Weber, ‘Why is there no queer international theory?’, European Journal of International Relations 21: 1, 2015, p. 42; Martin Wight, ‘Why is there no international theory?’, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight, eds, Diplomatic investigations (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966), p. 17–34.

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Sexual and gender-based violence is physical, mental or sexual harm or suffering, or threats of such, coercion and other deprivations of liberty, based on socially ascribed differences between men and women and can occur in both public and private life.9 SGBV targeting LGBTQ individuals remains largely unaccounted for in conversations about gender and conflict as a result of a binary categorization of gender. In one promising exception, at the Security Council debate on 15 years of WPS, the NGO Working Group on WPS did make explicit reference to SGBV against LGBTQ individuals in Iraq.10 This kind of focused attention on the lives and needs of LGBTQ individuals as a matter of peace and security is lacking, however, in all eight of the UN Security Council resolutions on WPS documents11 and throughout the formal WPS architecture. Whether the WPS community intends to include the human rights of LGBTQ individuals in WPS-driven protective measures with a more expansive understanding of who experiences SGBV is unclear. Certainly some of the challenges faced are the same, as Budhiraja, Fried and Teixeira point out: ‘Those who challenge traditional norms of gender and sexuality—among them feminists, sex workers, lesbian/gay/ bisexual and transgender people—are situated within such a common context of struggle.’12

It should be noted that the primary acronym used in this article, LGBTQ, encapsulates not only the categories most often used by international NGOs to describe sexual and gender minorities, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, but includes the Q as well to refer to the radical impact of queer identities in terms of non-normative framing. As the editors of the collection Sexualities in world politics explain, adding ‘queer’ to LGBT is a way to ‘highlight the inherent linkage between inclusionary and transgressive approaches towards sexual equality for all’.13 Furthermore, the Q allows for the inclusion of those questioning their gender identity or sexual orientation as well as a broader community of allies invested in recognizing the rights of non-heteronormative individuals. Neverthe- less, the LGBTQ acronym is a predominantly West-centric description and as such is limited in its capacity to represent sexual and gender minorities across the globe.

The particular security problems faced by LGBTQ individuals, exemplified by the violence targeted at gay men and transgender women, are not addressed by the dominant heteronormative gender assumptions within the WPS architecture. Some examples of this type of violence are described in a 2009 study by Human Rights Watch that found targeted violence against men in Iraq who were not

9 UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), ‘Action against sexual and gender-based violence: an updated strategy’, June 2011, http://www.unhcr.org/4e1d5aba9.pdf, accessed 22 Jan. 2016, p. 6.

10 UN News Centre, ‘Security Council renews commitment to landmark resolution on Women, Peace and Security’, 13 Oct. 2015, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=52252#.Vlmx2XtX9Jg. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 15 Jan. 2016.)

11 United Nations Security Council (UNSC), Resolutions 1325 (Oct. 2000), 1820 ( June 2008), 1888 (Sept. 2009), 1889 (Oct. 2009), 1960 (Dec. 2010), 2106 ( June 2013), 2122 (Oct. 2013) and 2242 (Oct. 2015).

12 Sangeeta Budhiraja, Susana T. Fried and Alexandra Teixeira, ‘Spelling it out: from alphabet soup to sexual rights and gender justice’, in Amy Lind, ed., Development, sexual rights and global governance (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 132.

13 Picq and Thiel, ‘Introduction: sexualities in world politics’, p. 5.

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viewed to be ‘manly’ enough or were assumed to be ‘gay’.14 The report notes that the social comprehension of gender is vital to understanding homophobic violence. Furthermore, the media portrayal of ‘gay’ as a ‘third sex’ threatening the male and female binary is an extension of socialized homophobia. The report notes: ‘Fear of “feminized” men reveals only hatred of women. No one should be killed for their looks or clothing. No one should be assaulted or mutilated for the way they walk or style their hair.’15 The report reveals ways in which lesbians continue to be overlooked as a population vulnerable to SGBV, stating:

Despite wide acknowledgement that violence against women is a serious crisis in Iraq, state authorities have ignored it and most NGOs have concentrated on ‘public’, political patterns of attacks on men. Amid this neglect, the question of whether and how violence targets women for non-heterosexual behaviors has been doubly neglected.16

Indeed, lesbians as a group of women vulnerable to SGBV remain nearly invisible in today’s conversation about conflict-related violence.

These are just some examples of the forms of SGBV that could well be addressed by policy directed by the WPS architecture, were it to incorporate a queer lens. Similarly, heteronormative UN policies and national action plans that neglect the consideration of how homophobic and transphobic violence erupts in conflict- related environments fail LGBTQ individuals.

Citizen security and the LGBTQ population

Determining who is in need of protection by the state is a charged and political act. Human security, a term introduced by the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report, is ‘people centered’ security.17 A gendered approach to human security allows a focus on the links between the types of insecurity faced by individuals in conflict-related environments. For example: ‘It is not unusual for violent conflict to leave in its wake famine, disease, and even ecological devastation.’18 Recog- nizing how the same gender constructions give rise to SGBV against women and against the LGBTQ population is part of establishing these links.

Feminists who influenced the writing of UNSCR 1325 and UNSCR 1820 drew on the human security framework.19 As Lene Hansen writes: ‘For problems or facts to become questions of security, they need therefore to be successfully constructed as such within political discourse.’20 Feminists look to human security framing as one way to include gender in this discourse of security. Yet Hansen

14 Human Rights Watch, ‘“They want us exterminated”: murder, torture, sexual orientation and gender in Iraq’, Human Rights Watch online (New York, Aug. 2009), https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/ iraq0809web.pdf, accessed 22 Jan. 2016.

15 Human Rights Watch, ‘“They want us exterminated”’, p. 11. 16 Human Rights Watch, ‘“They want us exterminated”’, pp. 42–3. 17 United Nations Development Programme, ‘New dimensions of human security’, in Human Development Report

1994 (New York: UNDP and Oxford University Press). 18 Aili Mari Tripp, ‘Toward a gender perspective on human security’, in Aili Mari Tripp, Myra Marx Ferree and

Christine Ewig, eds, Gender, violence and human security (New York: New York University Press, 2013), p. 15. 19 Tripp, ‘Toward a gender perspective on human security’, p. 11. 20 Lene Hansen, Security as practice: discourse analysis and the Bosnian war (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 33–6.

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continues: ‘Even if one speaks security in the name of the individual, claiming the rights, threats or concerns of the individual constitutes an engagement in the public and political field; “individual security” is in this respect always collective and political.’21 Human security discourse about securitizing the human rights of the individual ultimately requires engaging in a politics of citizen security.

A full picture of those who experience gender-based insecurity requires an inter- sectional context-specific analysis of the individuals who may be most vulnerable to rape and other forms of SGBV. This analysis must account for ethnic, religious, social and political drivers of violence. An intersectional approach is a way to better understand whose interests are represented when the categories women or women and girls are listed in policy documents. Intersectionality is a tool for recog- nizing simultaneous and cross-cutting oppressions, originally introduced by black feminists.22 An intersectional awareness of the type of woman present at the table during peace negotiations enables an understanding of what an individual’s race and class background brings to her lived experience in addition to her gender. A related point is the continuing controversy attached to the issue of who gets to be labelled a woman, especially as trans visibility increases globally. Intersectionality is also fundamental to framing violence against men who are perceived feminine as deriving from vulnerabilities similar to those faced by women raped during conflict. Some argue that, as a more intersectional approach is used to understand the drivers of sexual violence in conflict, data will reveal that, rather than sexual violence against men being a rare occurrence, men may number as many as one in three survivors of sexual violence. Dubravka Zarkov explains: ‘The invisibility of men who endured sexual violence is related to the position of masculinity and the male body within nationalist discourses on ethnicity, nationhood and statehood.’23 Zarkov’s work shows that it is impossible to separate the parts played by ethnicity, nationalism, sexuality and gender in the context of violence in conflict, and that all must be present for a complete intersectional analysis that encapsulates the targeted demographic. Using this intersectional lens, we see that SGBV targeting the LGBTQ population occurs in similar ways to the SGBV already highlighted by the WPS architecture.

Gender limitations in the WPS architecture

The WPS architecture refers not only to the eight Security Council resolutions passed between 2000 and 2015, but also to the international NGOs monitoring WPS and the policy developed to implement the WPS documents. Each of these three elements offers different spaces for voices and representation of women concerned with international peace and security. Individuals’ ability to participate

21 Hansen, Security as practice, p. 36. 22 Kimberle Crenshaw, ‘Margins: intersectionality, identity politics and violence against women of color’, Stan-

ford Law Review 43: 6, 1991, pp. 1241–99. 23 Dubravka Zarkov, ‘The body of the other man: sexual violence and the construction of masculinity, sexuality

and ethnicity in Croatian media’, in Caroline Moser and Fiona Clark, eds, Victims, perpetrators or actors? Gender, armed conflict, and political violence (London: Zed, 2001), p. 73.

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in the WPS architecture is limited by their lived intersection of social, economic and political access.

The words ‘gender’ and ‘women’ are often used interchangeably, an especially problematic practice in implementing the WPS resolutions and operationalizing the WPS architecture. The conceptual slippage between woman and gender is a topic with which feminists have long grappled, as Terrell Carver explains: ‘In many contexts one finds that a reference to gender is a reference to women, as if men, males, and masculinities were all unproblematic in that regard—or perhaps simply nothing to do with gender at all.’24 Carver continues: ‘Why map gender onto sex as one-to-one, just when the term was helping to make visible the ambiguities of sexuality, orientation, choice, and change that have been undercover for centuries?’25 To develop this point, violence against gay men is arguably not relevant to the work of the WPS architecture when considered from the perspective of sex, though this limited view neglects to account for the way assumptions pertaining to masculinity and femininity operate as a part of social norms and practices about gender.

Cisprivilege is apparent in the WPS architecture, probably owing in part to a lack of participation by LGBTQ individuals in its creation. Examples of cisprivi- lege include the fact that cisgender women are not denied access to medical atten- tion, bathrooms or domestic violence shelters on the basis of their bodies and identities.26 Without an awareness of the limitations faced by those who do not enjoy cisprivilege, these concerns are overlooked; and this is most often evident in assumptions built into a binary understanding of gender. Attention to the power relations between the masculine and the feminine in a gendered hierarchy is also absent from those implementing and developing the WPS architecture. Impor- tantly, feminist security scholarship engages with security issues in a way that highlights gendered power relations not generally interrogated in international relations work. An especially important aspect of this understanding of gendered power relations is an awareness of how masculinity operates in a way that may normalize and promote rape of the ‘other’ during conflict.27 This ‘other’ may be the homosexual, as has been observed when conflict-related SGBV targets the LGBTQ population where same-sex relationships are perceived as threatening to traditional heterosexual social norms.

While UNSCR 1325 directs attention to gender-based insecurity in conflict- related environments, it also reinforces a limited discourse of gender. This creates narrow categories of who is most vulnerable to violence owing to their gender. These limiting categories, meant to secure all women, can ultimately create even more insecure environments for certain women who endure intersecting oppressions because of their sexual orientation and gender identity. For example, 24 Terrell Carver, Gender is not a synonym for women (London: Lynne Rienner, 1996), p. 5. 25 Carver, Gender is not a synonym for women, p. 5. 26 Julia R. Johnson, ‘Cisprivilege, intersectionality, and the criminalization of CeCe McDonald: why inter-

cultural communication needs transgender studies’, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 6: 2, 2013, pp. 135–44.

27 Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, ‘Why do soldiers rape? Masculinity, violence and sexuality in the armed forces in the Congo (DRC)’, International Studies Quarterly 53: 2, 2009, pp. 495–518.

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often lesbians who are raped experience SGBV because of how heteronormative masculinity operates socially and politically. As another example, the identifica- tion of women and girls as a category of SGBV victims requires further analysis. The categorization assumes that women are the caretakers of children and that raising children is a feminine trait; it also prioritizes motherhood as a vulnerable category. While motherhood may make women vulnerable in certain ways, it is equally if not more important to recognize other aspects of gender identity as targets of violence. For example, a person’s gender in addition to their race or class may make them much more vulnerable to violence than motherhood alone. Also, this categorization almost always assumes that the children most vulnerable to SGBV are girls, despite growing evidence that boys are also targets of SGBV. Gender mainstreaming in UN operations is intended to work towards some of the objectives at the core of the WPS documents. Yet the way in which UN gender specialists understand gender is at the crux of the gender discourse used in the national action plans that states develop to track and monitor implementa- tion of WPS documents pertaining to SGBV. Appointed gender specialists have a mandate to work for gender equality under UN-directed initiatives. Although the title ‘gender specialist’ suggests the office should handle issues of gender more broadly, a focus on women or women and girls may result, depending on the defini- tion of gender applied by the specialist.

The characterization as either masculine or feminine can be ascribed not just to people, but also to states and institutions. Women’s organizations continue to be characterized as weak and to suffer from substantially limited funding when compared with the amount of money devoted to the military-based operations perceived as masculine. Similarly, former colonizing states continue to carry a masculine identity while those that have been colonized are typically viewed as feminine. Elizabeth Philipose explains:

If we consider the colonial configuration of modern Western versions of gender, it is the case that masculinity is a raced, classed and sexualized category, encompassing the attributes of the idea of the human as white, Euro-derived, propertied, heterosexual and male. In this sense, to be male and called underdeveloped is to be feminized as an unfit male, terms that signal both the subject and object of the assumptions of deviant sexuality, impotency and pollution.28

V. Spike Peterson also draws our attention to privilege and gender hierarchy, noting that not all men are privileged and that in privileging what is masculinized, what is feminized is in turn devalued.29 Without awareness of how masculinity informs gender relations in post-conflict sites, important power dynamics cannot be recognized.

Questions about the safety of LGBTQ individuals continue to be lost in work in the international peace and security arena that is intended to be gender-inclusive. The WPS architecture does not address homophobia or transphobia as a form

28 Elizabeth Philipose, ‘Decolonizing the racial grammar of international law’, in Chantra Mohanty, Minnie Bruce Talpade and Robin L. Riley, eds, Feminism and war (London: Zed, 2008), pp. 104–05.

29 V. Spike Peterson, ‘Thinking through intersectionality and war’, Race, Gender & Class 14: 3/4, 2007, p. 13.

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of SGBV. Silence on these issues may be intentional if those who are creating the reports and indicators do not consider tracking homophobia and transphobia relevant to the work of the WPS architecture. An absence of LGBTQ individu- als is apparent in the indicators proposed by the UN Technical Working Group on Global Indicators for 1325 (TWGGI 1325).30 These indicators pay no attention to sexual minorities as potential targets of SGBV. Of the 26 indicators currently proposed by TWGGI 1325, none specifically mentions the LGBTQ population. Five of the indicators specifically mention ‘women and girls’ as a category and seven of the indicators refer to ‘gender’. Three examples of these indicators are: ‘percentage of peace agreements with specific provisions to improve the security and status of women and girls’; ‘extent to which national laws to protect women’s and girls’ human rights are in line with international standards’; and ‘percentage of referred cases of SGBV against women and girls that are reported, investigated and sentenced’.

While the WPS resolutions at the Security Council were crucial to bringing attention to SGBV at the international level, civil society organizations have done much of the work of tracking and monitoring the WPS-related documents. Both the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders (GNWP) and Peacewomen, a project of the organization Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), monitor various aspects of the implementation of UNSCR 1325.31 GNWP writes annual reports with the help of local members of civil society in UN member states to report on progress from the grassroots perspective. Peace- women assesses Security Council resolutions and country-specific resolutions using gender and thematic analysis. As Peacewomen states: ‘Civil society has taken ownership of the agenda and used it as a tool to advance equality and human security.’32 While this is encouraging, the LGBTQ population has been overlooked in this process, which uses a limited conception of gender that primarily monitors the needs of women narrowly understood and captured within a heterosexual family and social structure. Because civil society organizations such as these are leading the way in holding states accountable to implementing the WPS resolu- tions, any efforts by these organizations to queer this conversation could have a significant impact.

GNWP develops indicators to monitor and assess different aspects of the WPS architecture, and has been producing an annual civil society report for the past several years.33 While local, civil society monitoring of WPS implementation is welcome, within these indicators there is a lack of gender analysis appropriate for non-heterosexual family structures. The October 2014 global summary of trends includes eleven indicators with two additional subsections A and B, four of

30 United Nations Security Council, Women and peace and security: report of the Secretary-General, 6 April 2010, http://undocs.org/s/2010/173.

31 The author was an intern for both Peacewomen and GNWP and a consultant for the 2012 GNWP report. 32 Peacewomen, Women, peace and security handbook: compilation and analysis of United Nations Security Council resolu-

tion language 2000–2012, 2nd edn, http://wilpf.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/women_peace_and_security_ handbook-_second_edition.pdf, p. 10.

33 GNWP, Security Council Resolution 1325: civil society monitoring report 2014: women count, Oct. 2014, http://www.

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