Fixing gender:the paradoxical politics of training peacekeepers

Fixing Gender is a book about the epistemic life of the term ‘gender’ and the political work that this lively concept does. In recent years, gender training has become the go-to solution for any number of institutional issues. Among others, it has become a requirement for soldiers and police officers deploying overseas as peacekeepers. Through such training, ‘gender’—a term with critical feminist lineage—is taken up by martial institutions shaped by hegemonic masculinity. This conceptual travel poses important questions for feminist theorizing and political advocacy: What epistemic and political work does ‘gender’ come to do in these spaces? Fixing Gender sets out to explore what meaning the term is imbued with in this practice and, consequently, what political work gender training does. Drawing on extensive textual analysis of training materials and participant observation across varied geographic regions, this book follows the concept into institutions of state power, investigating how gender is framed as an analytical category and operational problem. It explores how knowledge about gender is produced in gender training settings, and what dynamics of translation, negotiation, and resistance are involved. This inquiry sheds new insight into the political potential and dangers associated with travelling concepts. Drawing on queer and postcolonial feminist thought, Fixing Gender argues for attending to contradiction and complexity in endeavours such as gender training, highlighting the urgent need to develop feminist conceptual vocabulary to contend with paradoxical politics.