Are ‘core’ feminist critiques of securitization theory racist? A reply to Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit

Theory and critique contra methodology

Moving to your specific reading of my work, I would like to begin by insisting on the status of ‘The Little Mermaid’ as a critique of securitization theory and as a theoretical contribution in its own right. I stress this because you slide from describing feminist scholarship as one of ‘four key critiques of’ securitization theory to referring to feminists as ‘scholars of’ securitization theory, and by the end of the paragraph you use the terminology of ‘feminist securitization theory texts’. Your account of my critique as ‘methodological’ undervalues the theoretical and epistemological contribution of ‘The Little Mermaid’. My critique of the Copenhagen School is first and foremost ‘theoretical’ (Hansen, 2000: 294) and ‘epistemological’ (Hansen, 2000: 285). Not only is ‘The Little Mermaid’ a critique of the ‘limitations’ and ‘shortcomings’ of securitization theory, but it presents a theory that enables threats to gender insecurity that fail to meet securitization theory’s criteria for successful securitization to come into analytical and political view.

I do not have the space here to go through this theorization in detail. I hope, therefore, that readers who are interested in our conversation will (re)read ‘The Little Mermaid’ with the role of theory in mind. But let me stress a few theoretical points, as these are central to your reading of my article as reaffirming racist thought.

I critiqued securitization theory for being unable to account for those potential security problems where speech itself further endangers the threatened subject. This ‘silent security dilemma’ has probably been the most frequently cited contribution from ‘The Little Mermaid’. But my critique ran deeper than that: I pointed out that the concept of successful securitization requires that the securitizing actor is able to make the audience accept that something is an existential threat that requires – and thus legitimates – the breaking free of normal rules or procedures. Drawing on the case of honour killings in Pakistan, I showed that ‘the protest of Pakistani individuals and women’s groups’ were unable to meet those criteria for successful securitization (Hansen, 2000: 295). In addition to the ‘silent security dilemma’, I critiqued securitization theory for its conceptualization of the referent object, which, in the sector presumably of most relevance to gendered insecurity – namely, societal security – was ‘large, self-sustaining identity groups’ (Buzan et al., 1998, cited in Hansen, 2000: 297). I argued that gender insecurity would rarely, if ever, be articulated around a self-sustained identity group, but would be intertwined with, for example, ‘national, religious, and racial referent objects’ (Hansen, 2000: 298).

The positive contribution of ‘The Little Mermaid’ was to offer an alternative security theory that drew on Judith Butler’s theory of the performativity of identity, including gendered identity, to advocate the need ‘to include the body as an additional epistemological focus, and to examine the individualising strategies employed in keeping security problems from appearing at the collective level’ (Hansen, 2000: 300). ‘The Little Mermaid’ was, more generally, a contribution to security studies that employed post-structuralist feminist theory to further the analysis of how discourses enable and constrain who can appear as subjects worthy of having their insecurity acknowledged and what form of insecurity is made possible is this process.

To deem or not to deem

An understanding of ‘The Little Mermaid’ as theory is important for unpacking what is at stake in your central claim that the article goes to Pakistan and Bosnia, where it ‘finds “honour killings” and “raped Muslim women” who are deemed to be silent’. This claim runs completely counter to the theorization of discourse, performativity, bodies and security laid out. Put bluntly: I do not deem anybody to be silent. Rather, I provide a theory through which practices – discursive and bodily – that seek to silence (gendered) subjects can become part of feminist analysis. To theorize how subjects are sought silenced by others is not the same as deeming them to be silent.

This difference is clear from the passage in ‘The Little Mermaid’ about mass rapes and the Bosnian War. Here, I pointed to how raped Muslim women were ‘silenced’ by ‘the Bosnian and Serbian governments’. To quote the passage in full:

The mass rapes in Bosnia provide another good illustration of the inter-linkage between national and gender security: the rapes were subsumed by the Bosnian and Serbian governments in a security debate centred on the nation. Gender was deemed highly important, but read through a national optic which silenced threats to raped Muslim women coming from their own society. (Hansen, 2000: 299, emphasis added)

This passage made a reference to an article under publication (Hansen, 2001), which provided a longer analysis of the constitution of the mass rapes in Bosnia. In keeping with the theoretical perspective laid out in ‘The Little Mermaid’, in that article I identified and analysed three different discourses. All recognized that mass rapes had taken place, but they differed on whether they were to be seen as a security issue, and, if so, on whether the rapes should be understood through the lens of the nation or the lens of patriarchy. I pointed to sources that had identified threats to raped Muslim women from within their own society and brought in a larger array of material, including interviews with women who had survived mass rape.

Returning to the analysis of honour killings in Pakistan – the main case study in ‘The Little Mermaid’ – I did not find and deem Pakistani women to be silent. I drew on available material about Pakistani honour killings from a range of sources that, in addition to academic work and reports by Amnesty International, included writings and statements by Pakistani women’s rights activists. You might argue that the latter were elite women who spoke on behalf of other Pakistani women, but this would then be an opposition within Pakistan rather than the one you claim in the next sentence between ‘white Western women’ and ‘subaltern women’.

The question of who can speak for the ‘subaltern’ is a long and complex theoretical and normative issue. As for now, given space constraints, let me just say two things about how (actual and potential) Pakistani victims of honour killings appear in ‘The Little Mermaid’. First, the starting point was to grant theoretical recognition to subjects who would aggravate their insecurity if they were speaking. Our discussion of how to theorize this situation must thus start from a recognition of the dangerous situation that those subjects were in and of the need to incorporate the discourses and practices of those who involve themselves politically to address that situation. The reason why Pakistani human rights activists feature prominently in the analysis is thus that the subjects they speak about are either threatened with death or already dead. Second, it was precisely in response to this situation that I made the theoretical move to include bodily practices as an epistemological focus. This move enabled Samia Sarwar – ‘a woman who was shot and killed in Jilani’s office on the initiative of her father for seeking a divorce from an abusive husband’ (Hansen, 2000: 294–295) – to speak, as it were, in the analysis.

The racial opposition that you ascribe to ‘The Little Mermaid’ cannot be sustained: Pakistani women are not absent or silent or a homogeneous subject. As I wrote, ‘some women also voice support for the hegemonic discourse’ and ‘differences do exist as to the exposure experienced by different groups of women’. Thus to ‘construct Pakistan as a uniform, repressive entity rather than as a site of contestation would paradoxically be to write out those forces who fight these very currents within their “own” society’ (Hansen, 2000: 293).

Eliding insecurities at home

Though the critique that Pakistani and Bosnian Muslim women are deemed to be silent constitutes your main critique of ‘The Little Mermaid’, there is a second element that I would like to address. This concerns your charge that the study of Pakistan and Bosnia ‘elides gendered insecurity in places like Denmark’. It is unclear to me how much this charge weighed in your conclusion that ‘The Little Mermaid’ reaffirms racist thought, so this question is the one that has featured most prominently in our imaginary conversations. Let me go through the possible interpretations I have.

First, I do not read you as saying that one cannot study locations other than where one resides at the time of study. Second, the brief account of mass rapes in Bosnia as ‘another good illustration’ was analysed at much greater length in Hansen (2001), as mentioned above. And though it is going beyond ‘The Little Mermaid’, I would like to mention that this study, published almost simultaneously, provided a critical analysis of how wartime rape as a collective security problem was constituted through a juxtaposition with peacetime rape (also in the West) as one of individual risk (Hansen, 2001: 59). In other words, this analysis connected to how gendered insecurity is constituted also ‘in places like Denmark’.

Third, I do not think you fully take into account that the status of the case of honour killings in Pakistan is not, strictly speaking, to provide ‘empirical evidence’. The case is an exploratory case study, and the criterion for exploratory case studies is whether they are valuable for illustrating and exploring theoretical arguments and ideas. As researchers, we have relatively free hands when we choose our case studies. I found – and find – that honour killings in Pakistan met the criterion for exploratory case studies when I wrote ‘The Little Mermaid’ in the late 1990s. The possibility that other cases could have been chosen does not constitute a methodological or theoretical weakness.

Fourth, what you are suggesting when you hold that ‘gendered insecurity in places like Denmark’ is elided is perhaps that the study of one kind of security problem – here, silent security dilemmas, where subjects are endangered by voicing threats to their security – can hinder our attention to other kinds of security problems or discourses; and that it is problematic, more specifically, if we identify and study security problems that arise within the global South, while other kinds of security problems set within the global North go unnoticed. I offer this interpretation because the main case study in ‘The Little Mermaid’ is of the silent security dilemma. Your account of ‘Denmark’ points to something different: the mobilization of ‘gender equality’ within ‘white supremacist discourses’ that constitute Muslim immigration as a threat. Your caution – if my interpretation is correct – is well put at a general level: we should be careful not to study certain topics and parts of the world over and over again, while forgetting or excluding others. Yet, looking to the specific instance of ‘The Little Mermaid’, it is fair to say, I think, that it offered a theoretical argument that was new at the time. Securitization theory was a highly cited theory in the late 1990s, but there was no systematic feminist critique of it yet. The formulation of the silent security dilemma offered a specific theorization of those situations where insecure subjects would be further endangered if they spoke. The question of what a text enables also raises the question of how it becomes used. It would be troubling if ‘The Little Mermaid’ could be said to have caused other scholars to not study the West. This, however, has not been the case. ‘The Little Mermaid’ has been brought to bear on a substantial number of studies of gendered – and other – insecurities situated within the West.

Looking beyond ‘The Little Mermaid’

In sum, I do not think that you demonstrate that ‘The Little Mermaid’ reaffirms racist thought. That said, I do not wish to suggest that no critical questions could be asked of it, or that it provided all of the theorization that (feminist/critical) security studies ever needed. ‘The Little Mermaid’ is indebted to feminist and post-structuralist work, and it has been extended and elaborated on by others. As the article is 20 years old, it would be odd if nothing had changed since it was published. The article also did not address all possible relevant questions that could have been brought in, including an explicit engagement with the concepts of race and racialization or with the politics of racialized discourse. On that note, and in opening up our conversations to others who hopefully would like to join in, let me offer three reflections in the light of the 20 years that have passed.

The first is a more practical, methodological one, though with ramifications for how we discuss the choice of case studies and how we conduct them. There is no doubt that had I researched Pakistani honour killings today, I would have collected a larger and more diverse body of sources. I would look to social media, and I would use digital resources to better incorporate Pakistani activists and the words of women who have survived or identified themselves as at risk. The media environment in which we live today is very different from that of 20 years ago, and this has implications for how politics unfolds and research can be carried out. This, in turn, might create new challenges in terms of how we as academics theorize and analyse the words and practices of others.

My second reflection concerns a footnote that you do not quote, but that I think I need to address in the spirit of full disclosure/reading. Here, I wrote:

The choice of Pakistani honour killings as the illustration of a possible gendered security problem might run the risk of presenting gender insecurity as a non-Western problem. While the ‘silence problem’ is probably less outspoken in the West, the problems concerning the delineation of the referent object apply. (Hansen 2000: 297n41, emphasis added)

Looking back, it is possible that my assumption reflected a Western-centric bias and that the silent security dilemma was – and is – as pronounced in the West as it is outside of it. One way to approach whether that is the case is to examine the way in which ‘The Little Mermaid’ has been applied in later studies of gendered insecurity in the West. So, two research assistants coded a sample of 361 of the 685 works that cite ‘The Little Mermaid’ according to Google Scholar at the time of writing. There were 11 works that met the following three criteria: the analysis was feminist, ‘The Little Mermaid’ was central to the arguments made, and the location/case was Western/Northern Europe (including the EU), North America or Australia. Analysing those 11 works in more detail, I found that the silent security dilemma was elaborated on to identify not only situations where physical survival would be threatened by speech but also a wider set of exclusionary practices. As a consequence, a richness of critical analysis of gender and (in)security – in some cases, race and racialized insecurity – has been produced. For example – and resonating with your call for studying the racialization of gender insecurity in right-wing discourse – a recent study by Aharoni and Féron (2019) uses the concept of a ‘feminist security dilemma’ to analyse right-wing ‘gendered vigilantism’ in Finland. A Western-centric bias/blindness is still possible, of course: there might still be silent security dilemmas in the West that go unnoticed by feminist security studies.

My third reflection is that I would point to the historicity and politics of constituting ‘subaltern’ women – and ‘Muslim women’ specifically – as subjects in need of saving were I to (re)write ‘The Little Mermaid’ today. At the level of political discourse, the need to engage the specific figure of the Muslim female victim became even more pertinent as saving Afghan women was used as a justification for the war in Afghanistan by US President George W. Bush and others. The complicated theoretical, epistemological and methodological questions that arise as we theorize about speech and silence run through ‘The Little Mermaid’, but I did not address them as explicitly as I would today. I did not engage with Spivak’s (1988) classic text on ‘the subaltern’, for example – an absence I have sought to address recently (Hansen, 2019). Taking a wider look at the field of critical security studies, the growth of postcolonial feminist analysis and work on race and racism (such as your own) have challenged critical security studies scholars, myself included, to push our thinking further. Feminist international relations scholars have also drawn attention to the significant and varied ways in which silence might be an expression of agency and thus worthy of theoretical and political recognition in its own right (Parpart and Parashar, 2019, and many more).

So, to conclude, dear Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit, I disagree with your account of ‘The Little Mermaid’ as reaffirming racist thought, but your reading has made me think much harder about the role of race and racism, both in relation to my own work and in relation to critical security studies and international relations scholarship more broadly. Much more should be said, but I am running out of words, at least for now. I hope that you and many others would like to continue the conversation.