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Historically, there has been reluctance, from mainstream IR scholars as well as feminists, to seriously engage with women's agency in warfare. Instead, scholarship has tended to focus on women's activism for peace or to ignore women's agency altogether.This book rectifies this omission by exploring the cultural understanding of actors, agents and structures of war and how can we make sense of attitudes towards women, agency and war today. By using a poststructuralist feminist perspective and by analysing empirical cases from a Western 'war on terror' cultural context, Ahall argues that all typ

This article explores affective, embodied encounters between military and civilian bodies in the everyday as choreography of war. It argues that by paying attention to the intersecting political sphere of bodies, affect and movement – through the metaphor of 'dance' – we are not only able to understand how security operates as a logic reproducing the militarisation of the everyday, but also able to identify a representational gap, an aesthetic politics, potentially useful for resistance to such practices normalising war in the everyday. It draws on two British examples of where military moves disrupt civilian spaces in the everyday: an arts project commemorating the Battle of the Somme, and a football game taking place during Remembrance week. Through embodied choreographies of war in the everyday, dance is used as a metaphor to understand militarisation as an example of feeling Everyday IR. Thus, dance is useful to 'see' the politics of Everyday IR, but also to understand, to feel and possibly to resist the politics of normalisation of war in the everyday. This is one example of how feeling Everyday IR offers alternative openings into political puzzles of security logics informing war as practice.

This article explores affective, embodied encounters between military and civilian bodies in the everyday as choreography of war. It argues that by paying attention to the intersecting political sphere of bodies, affect and movement – through the metaphor of 'dance' – we are not only able to understand how security operates as a logic reproducing the militarisation of the everyday, but also able to identify a representational gap, an aesthetic politics, potentially useful for resistance to such practices normalising war in the everyday. It draws on two British examples of where military moves disrupt civilian spaces in the everyday: an arts project commemorating the Battle of the Somme, and a football game taking place during Remembrance week. Through embodied choreographies of war in the everyday, dance is used as a metaphor to understand militarisation as an example of feeling Everyday IR. Thus, dance is useful to 'see' the politics of Everyday IR, but also to understand, to feel and possibly to resist the politics of normalisation of war in the everyday. This is one example of how feeling Everyday IR offers alternative openings into political puzzles of security logics informing war as practice.

International relations scholars are increasingly paying attention to "the emotional" as a way to understand global politics. What is often missing from these conversations is feminist knowledge on affect, and also discussions about methodology. By presenting a feminist methodological approach to the affective-discursive to analyze the politics of emotion, this paper aims to fill this gap. It starts by discussing feminist critiques of the "affective turn." Then, a methodological framework of gender, discourse, and affect as a structure that "goes-without-saying" is presented. Hemmings' concept of affective dissonance is used as a tool guiding a feminist curiosity, useful to zoom in on the political puzzle of what emotion (in its broadest sense) does. The third section draws on two examples of being emotional about violent "Woman" to illustrate how moments of affective dissonance spark a feminist curiosity about gender, agency, and political violence. In conclusion, the paper argues that feminist knowledge on affect offers a way to re-tune, reset, and reimagine research on the politics of emotion. By prioritizing affect as methodology, feminist knowledge should be valuable for critical endeavors interested in changing the status quo, no matter if the political puzzle is about gender or not.

This article explores the way in which female agency in political violence is enabled through gender. It looks at two examples of heroine stories – the cases of British Navy sailor Faye Turney and the popular film Female Agents (2008) – to illustrate how female agency in political violence is constructed at the expense of motherhood. The article argues that representations of female agency in political violence involve a tension between a life-giving and a life-taking identity, and that agency is only enabled if this tension is removed or overcome. This suggests that heroism, as agency in political violence, is in a symbiotic relationship with motherhood: heroism functions as motherhood's constitutive other and vice versa. This means not only that the writing of heroines depends on ideas about female bodies' association with motherhood but also that essentialist ideas about gender are reinforced. Accordingly, this article suggests that female agency in political violence is communicated and negotiated through motherhood, even in cases where this might not be immediately apparent.