Discussions of feminism and its practical social and political goals often take on a military language and framework: feminists say that we need to strategize, strive, fight, outflank, maneuver, regroup, tactically analyze, form alliances, drop truth bombs, and keep pushing (Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!) until we eventually conquer and dismantle the combination of issues commonly referred to as the patriarchy. What is more, we try to do these things, too; we attempt to make our, and others’, actions fit with our ways of talking, and vice versa.
This is not merely a rhetorical move. As Michael Walzer argues in the first chapter of Just and Unjust Wars, the language of war is conceptual as well as descriptive. It frames situations by both telling a story, or a series of stories, about what some person or group is doing, and also sets the limits of what they can possibly do and still be so described. For example, heroic fighters don’t attack or kill innocents; if they do, they’re no longer heroic fighters.
Additionally, strategic military terms have a normative component. Calling someone a traitor to the cause is not only conceptual and descriptive—in that certain facts must be true, and a specific story must be told, for the call-out to be accurate—but also carries with it a moral weight that makes sense within, and calls to mind and reinforces, a military framework of understanding and conceptualization.
Bluntly, words matter. They not only tell other people what you’re doing (or, at least, they tell other people how you want your actions to be interpreted), but they are also how you tell yourself what you’re doing. This in turn can influence your, and others’, attitudes, actions, and reactions. As a number of theorists argue, including Sally Haslanger and Leland Harper and I, language practices have a tendency to create and reinforce ideologies and habits of mind that can be difficult to break. For example, if you continuously say that the 2020 U.S. election was stolen by the left, you, as well as others, might come not only to believe that falsehood, but also to regard liberals with a mix of anger, fear, suspicion, and disgust, and to accept, if not promote, the common ideological implication that violent action is urgently needed to defend U.S. democracy.
Given the power of language, should feminists continue to use military language practices, and a concomitant military framework, to describe, depict, understand, and conceptualize their real-world activities? Some feminists, including Anita Taylor and M.J. Hardman and Lynne Tirrell, worry about doing so. There is a good and important point to be made here, that co-opting such military language and framing brings with it some concerning patriarchal baggage. As Cynthia Enloe notes, cultural—and thus linguistic and ideological—militarization brings with it certain assumptions about who and what is tough and who and what is soft, about what losers are like (collectively evil) and about what winners are owed (adoration without question). But in this post, I contend that feminists should adopt military language practices and framing in their praxis, despite the important concerns raised by anti-military feminists.
There are at least three positions one can adopt regarding using military language and framing in the feminist movement: one, those of us teaching feminist praxis can redescribe the meaning of the military terms we tend to use. Two, we can work to avoid the militaristic framing of our methods and goals. Or three, we can argue that the military framework is, contra the worries described above, appropriate to practical, applied feminism today. As mentioned above, I endorse the third option: feminist philosophy, and feminists, should willingly and actively adopt a more comprehensive military framework when thinking through our practical social and political methods and goals.
Considering the first option, perhaps those of us teaching feminist praxis could do a better job of describing what counts as “winning” for feminism. We do want to dismantle the patriarchy, but in seeking the end of the patriarchy, we do not want to become like the patriarchy. When I teach feminism, the men in my classes are often very resistant to it, because they can only imagine that feminists want current gender power relations to be reversed or inverted. They believe that feminists simply want, as one student put it, “for women to be on top, in all arenas.” This isn’t what feminists want, of course. But the notion of equal power relations, or relatively equal power relations, is so alien that most students cannot conceive of it. They can only conceive of our gendered world flipped. It is perhaps not surprising that when feminists discuss conquering the patriarchy, male students envision a world wherein they are the conquered. (This echoes Betty Reardon’s point that it is difficult, if not impossible, to theorize war without also theorizing gender.)
Dismantling the patriarchy need not, and should not, include the creation of an oppressive matriarchy. Fighting sexism and misogyny does mean attacking toxic masculinity in all of its permutations; but those attacks need not, and should not, destroy all forms of masculinity. So although we talk about conquering and destroying, we don’t mean wholesale destruction, or to situate ourselves as conquerors. Rather, some feminists mean to move this language beyond the dichotomous worldview that is part and parcel of a standard militaristic frame of reference.
But appropriating and redescribing military language is tricky, because meaning is to a large degree set by history and social and political practices that are outside of individuals’ control. As I explain time and again to my students, the Confederate flag just is racist, regardless of whether they think it is or not. It is a social fact, and as such, isn’t subject to their individual beliefs. On the other hand, changing or broadening the meaning of linguistic and ideological frameworks does follow one prominent feminist tradition, that of reclamation and reconceptualization. In other words, it is at least possible, and might be desirable, to broaden the common meanings inherent in the language of war, so that it aligns with practical feminist methods and goals. As Laura Sjoberg argues, what we need is not to abandon, but rather to provide a feminist reinterpretation of war and the military framework. (Feminist philosopher Claudia Card made a similar argument regarding the need to reconceptualize terrorism along feminist lines.)
On the second view, we would be better off avoiding the militarization of applied feminism altogether. To reach a new world, we need entirely new ways of thinking, acting, and being. There are certainly other frameworks, in particular those that arise from care and virtue ethics, that feminists could use to articulate and promulgate their work. For example, I often explicitly tell students I am calling them in, rather than calling them out. My ostensible focus—regardless of what is going on in my head or my heart—when discussing students’ oppressive behaviors with them is maintaining and strengthening our professor-student relationship. This leads me to engage in a variety of behaviors, including gently redirecting them, suggesting a variety of alternative ways of seeing the relevant situation, and empathizing with their impulse to call feminism bullsh*t.
While these behaviors are somewhat inauthentic—they don’t match my innermost thoughts and feelings—they avoid even a hint of conflict and so block such students from latching on to the feeling that they are engaging in a righteous fight by denying that sexism and the patriarchy exist. (For more on how misogyny can feel righteous, see Kate Manne’s brilliant book Down Girl.) My evasive maneuvers here sometimes enable students to see that they should be more caring, and less myopic, in their views.
At this point, I can almost hear the internet crying out, “Truth over tactics! Don’t reinforce the patriarchal expectation that women, especially women teachers, must be caring and kind at all times!” But as a young, white, cisgender woman teaching philosophy, in particular feminist, anti-racist, intersectional philosophy, in a more-or-less conservative space, I have to think strategically about every teaching decision. Better to go hard and lose half the class in the beginning? Or better to go slowly and gently, and bring them ‘round in the end? All while managing the frustration of my students who are already feminist and anti-racist, and who don’t understand why we’re going So. Slow., and why I’m being So. Nice. Not to even mention the one eye that I must continually have on my teaching evaluations, as they are essential to the maintenance of my career.
Given my intersecting privileges and oppressions, I have determined that the third option is best. I can best fulfill my obligations by taking the caring, rather than the directly confrontational, route in the classroom. But notice what I am doing here—I am thinking about winning the war rather than engaging in particular battles. The genesis of avoiding an ostensible military framework is thus itself military to an extent, at least in my case. While it is of course true that not all strategy and tactics can be relegated to a military framework, at least as I am understanding it here, in this case my strategy is decidedly based on a military framing of the situation and context. I am considering what will best enable me to contribute successfully to the fight against the patriarchy, and for a feminist future, and operating accordingly.
This is an indicator that a military framework is actually an appropriate way of thinking about how to apply feminism in our personal, social, and political lives. When we are trying to tackle the elephant that is the patriarchy—although a giant squid might be a better metaphor, with its long tentacles that get into everything—we must not only take it one bite at a time, but also consider which bites, and in what order, are likely to both do the most good and set us up for future success. Following Gene Sharp’s theory of nonviolent resistance—which he developed by applying military strategic thought and theory to political action—we have to think about the pillars of patriarchal power and how to weaken them, in order to destabilize the whole structure and ultimately make it come crashing down. Sharp argues convincingly that a military conceptual lens is helpful to justice activists, because it involves mapping out the power relationships that support oppressive regimes in order to determine how those relationships might be transformed, shifted, or severed so as to draw support to the liberatory group/s. Feminists have done such mapping; the work now is to use these feminist analyses of patriarchal power webs and relationships to engage in, as Sharp calls it, “political jiu-jitsu” against sexist oppression.
This is a military framework, yes, but it is militaristic without being essentially patriarchal; it does not endorse problematic hierarchies, violence, or the rule of the stronger, but rather acknowledges that long-term struggles for power and political control require careful strategic planning, a willingness to rearrange those set plans in response to contextual and situational changes, and a tactically sound ground game. When put this way, it is clear that the adoption of a military framework and concomitant language practices is not detrimental, but rather helpful to achieving the real-world goals of feminism, understood as an interpersonal, social, and political program as well as an academic theory. To reference the musical Hamilton, we are fighting a war on like 75 different fronts; so, it would behoove us to use the conceptual, descriptive, and normative language and framework of war to strategize, plan, and tactically engage.
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Jennifer Kling
Jennifer Kling is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Legal Studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She is the author of War Refugees: Risk, Justice, and Moral Responsibility (Lexington, 2019), as well as articles in Radical Philosophy Review, Journal of Global Ethics, and The Routledge Handbook of Pacifism and Nonviolence, and is the editor of Pacifism, Politics, and Feminism: Intersections and Innovations (Brill, 2019). She is also the Executive Director of Concerned Philosophers for Peace, the largest, most active organization of professional philosophers in North America involved in the analysis of the causes of war and prospects for peace.
