Keeping the fires burning: Militarisation and the politics of gender in South Africa
Date
1987-08
Authors
Cock, Jackie
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Abstract
This paper focuses on the linkages between women and
militarisation. Women are understood as a social category with
distinctive and specific experiences. Such experience is structured not
only by gender but by other social relations - most importantly those of
race and class. Militarisation is understood to mean the mobilisation
of resources for war. The process of militarisation is one of the most
dramatic characteristics of the contemporary global scene.
Militarisation is manifest in sharp increases in military expenditure,
in the growing destructive capacity of military weapons, in the spread
of the power and influence of the military and in the increasing number
of people under arms. This process is evident both in global terms and
more specifically in South African society.
The linkages between women and the process of militarisation
are obscured. They are mystified by two opposing analyses - those of
sexism and feminism. Both analyses exclude women from war on the
grounds that women are bearers of 'special qualities'. Sexism excludes
women from the ranks of the military on the grounds of their physical
inferiority and unsuitability for combat roles. One variant of feminism
similarly excludes women but on opposite grounds - that of women's
innate nurturing qualities, their creativity and pacificism. The
outcome of both positions is that war is understood as a totally male
affair - the military is a patriarchal institution from which women are
excluded, and by whom they are victimised.
Women are victims in all wars. Men plan them, they train
for them and they conduct them.
(As, 1982: 355)
However, militarisation - as a global process - is increasingly
using women as a military resource. Both manpower constraints and equal
rights feminism have contributed to this process. Equal rights feminism
has stressed women's rights to achievement, power and opportunity;
women's rights to make both money and war. It is argued that equal
rights implies equal responsibilities including the obligation of
military service. Consequently some equal rights feminists demand the
right of women to serve in the armed forces and claim that women are as
capable as men for combat roles. A different variant of feminism argues
the theme of exclusion; women's capabilities are understood to involve
a creativity and nurturance which must be transformed into active
support for the peace movement. Their argument is that women
especially wives and mothers - have a special concern with peace, with
preserving rather than destroying life.
This paper attempts to undermine both these positions. It
focuses on the connection between women and war, both theoretically and
in relation to South African society. It argues that women contribute
Keeping the Fires Burning 02.
to the militarisation of our society in both material and ideological
terms. It attempts to show that these linkages are complex and
reverberate with contradictions which are embedded deep in the peculiar
social conditions of South Africa. Writing this paper - in the winter
of 1987 - it is clear that the apartheid regime faces a major crisis -
both in terms of external pressure through sanctions and increasing
moves to isloate the regime, and internal pressure through rising black
resistance which three states of emergency, large scale detentions and
torture have failed to crush. Discontent and anxiety are apparent in
all areas of our society. Against this background of pressing external
and internal dangers to the regime, the state may introduce the
conscription of white women in some form. It thus seems urgent - for
both analytical and strategic reasons - to scrutinise the relation
between women and militarisation.
With this end the paper proceeds in five parts. Part 1
examines militarisation as a contested concept; Part 2 attempts to
delineate the militarisation of South African society; Part 3 outlines
the different ways of conceptualising the relation between women and
militarisation; Part 4 attempts to demonstrate this relation
empirically in South Africa; and Part 5 points to some of the
contradictions involved. The paper is tentative and exploratory but
hopefully suggestive of further debate and research.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented October, 1987