Base Women and Beyond

This project seeks to revive and extend feminist approaches to the everyday politics of military and nuclear installations. As a starting point, we follow Cynthia Enloe’s invitation to take women and gender seriously in the analysis of military bases in her classic chapter “Base women”. We aim to develop a more systematic decolonial feminist analysis of a variety of military/nuclear site-specific installations around the world, such as bases, laboratories, and training academies, in relation to the following three lines of enquiry:

• the infrastructures and quotidian practices through which these sites are sustained; 
• how these sites are experienced by, and resisted in, local communities;
• the material and affective legacies they leave behind. 

In order to study these aspects of military/nuclear installations, we propose an innovative synthesis of two hitherto separate fields of cutting-edge feminist scholarship, the first on the embodied, affective and performative aspects of militarism and the second on the coloniality of the global nuclear order. In so doing, we hope to expand critical understanding of the material geographies underpinning military/nuclear assemblages and the ways in which they are sustained and resisted in the everyday. We will thus contribute to the denaturalisation of such assemblages at a time when they are consolidating and intensifying around the globe. 

The project will centre on a 3-day intensive research workshop in which contributors will explore synergies in their existing case study material and participate in the construction of a coherent theoretical and methodological framework. It will result in further online meetings, a co-authored article and a special issue proposal, along with a website likely to be of significant interest to both scholars and wider publics.