The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State

Abstract

The American and European women’s movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s contained a large segment that organized around issues of weapons, war, and peace. Creative civil disobedience actions wove webs of yarn at entrances to the Pentagon and set up colorful camps on cruise missile sites in England’s Greenham Common. Writings of the women’s peace movement tried to make theoretical connections between male domination and militarism, between masculine gender and the propensity to settle conflicts with violence, and these echoed some of the voices of the women’s peace movement earlier in the twentieth century. By the early 1990s the humor and heroism of the women’s peace actions