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Feminist Geopolitics
Vanessa A. Massaro1* and Jill Williams2
1
Department of Geography, Department of Women’s Studies, The Pennsylvania State University
2
Department of Geography, Clark University

Abstract
This paper traces the development of feminist geopolitics as a distinct analytical, epistemological, and
methodological approach in geography. Feminist geopolitics is explained as an analytic approach that
connects seemingly disparate people, places, events, and issues to show the connections across various
operations of power and productions of inequality and exploitation. In so doing, we demonstrate the
ways in which feminist geopolitics challenges the scales of geopolitics and refocuses on the mundane,
everyday reproductions of geopolitical power. We further discuss recent work in the field that
examines issues of security and insecurity to illustrate what insights can be gained by employing a
feminist geopolitical framework.

Introduction
How might US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan be related to domestic abuse, securing the
US–Mexico border, or drug enforcement in the US inner city? Paternalistic discourses of
vulnerability and rescue permeate and reproduce themselves in all of these cases. Imperialist
intervention in the Middle East is justified in the name of female liberation from sexist regimes
(Abu-Lughod, 2002; Eisenstein, 2002; Hyndman, 2003; Scott, 2002). Border enforcement
efforts are warranted in the name of saving undocumented migrant women from sexual assaults
and human trafficking (Agustin, 2007; Aradau, 2004; Sharma, 2005; Williams, 2011). Inner-
city spaces throughout the USA are militarized in the name of protecting residents under the
guise of the War on Drugs (Davis, 2006). And state anti-domestic violence policies regulate
the most intimate aspects of women’s (and men’s) lives in the name of their protection (Cuomo,
forthcoming). Feminist geopolitics, as an analytic approach, provides tools that enable us to see
the way in which power operates in similar ways across such disparate sites and scales. In so
doing, feminist geopolitics ties distant places and problems together, drawing what Cindi Katz
(2001) has referred to as counter-topographical lines of analytical understanding and political
possibility across a wide range of places and populations (see also, Mohanty, 2003).
Since its inception in the early 2000s, feminist geopolitics has developed as a distinct branch
of critical geopolitics and feminist geography that traces nascent forms of power, oppression,
and resistances at and between multiple scales (e.g. body, home, and nation-state), enabling
an understanding of the operation of various forms of power through situated, embodied,
and politically transformative theories and research methodologies. Feminist geopolitics
redefines what counts as geopolitics and what is appropriately studied through a critical
geopolitical lens. In this paper, we illustrate the utility of feminist geopolitics as an approach
with two major effects. Firstly, feminist geopolitics unpacks geopolitical power and demon-
strates such power’s exceptional role in the everyday lives of real people. Secondly, it draws
attention to individuals and communities that push back, challenge, and rewrite geopolitical
relations. In what follows, we begin by tracing the development of feminist geopolitics as it
emerged from and as a reparative critique to critical geopolitics. We then examine current

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trends in feminist geopolitical scholarship, illustrating that work in the field is increasingly
bringing into question what counts as ‘geopolitics’. We then illustrate the utility of a feminist
geopolitical approach by reviewing recent analyses of the geopolitics of (in)security. We con-
clude by querying the continued utility and relevance of the geopolitical in feminist analyses.
Geopolitics and Critical Geopolitics
Classical geopolitics emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries within the context of
colonial expansion as the study of the relationship between politics and territory. This field
of scholarship sought to explain, in scientific terms, the direction in which history was
moving to facilitate the development and expansion of ‘strong states’ (e.g. MacKinder,
1904; Ratzel, 1879). Early geopolitical scholarship drew on social Darwinism to imagine
states as growing organisms, the strongest of which, based on technology and population
growth, would not only remain but also inevitably expand. The scientific framework adopted
by early geopoliticians assumed an objective truth driving the growth and decline of nation-
states. It was discovering and understanding this truth that would allow scholars of geopolitics
to understand and predict global territoriality. Not surprisingly, this so called objectivity proved
problematic as the discipline figured centrally in justifying the exploitative processes of colonial
expansion and shaping the political philosophy of Nazi Germany.
Although geopolitics shifted in various ways throughout the 20th century, it remained
largely a discipline focused on the scientific study of the development of nation-states and
their relationships with each other. However, in the early 1990s, a new branch of geopolitics
emerged that challenged the general tenets of classical geopolitics. Scholars such as O’Tuathail
(1996); Dalby (1994), and others (Spark, 2000) drew on poststructural and postcolonial
theory to suggest that geo-graphy—the literal writing of the earth—was not an innocent
activity but rather a technology for the deployment of power. These scholars returned to
the work of classical geopoliticians and showed how classic geopolitical discourses produced
the world they purported to describe. As Dalby discusses, the field that emerged, critical
geopolitics, is “the critical and poststructuralist intellectual practices of unraveling and
deconstructing geographical and related disguises, dissimulations and rationalizations of
power” (Dalby, 1994, p. 595, cited in Hyndman, 2004 p. 308). Geopolitics divided global
space into discrete territories and spheres of political-economic influence through which
systems of regulation could operate (Agnew and Corbridge, 1995). Rather than simply
understanding the way in which nation-states, international institutions, and other global
powers interact, critical geopolitics turned attention to the processes whereby global political
and economic spaces are produced. As Jo Sharp (2000) writes,

For critical geopolitics, space is power: no description is merely a reflection of some prior or exterior
condition but instead is a ‘will to power’, a move to contain possible interpretations and limit
meaning in a cartograph (p. 361).

In recent years, critical geopolitics has been increasingly insightful and significant as the
field has expanded to include analyses of matters as varied as identity, economy, resources,
development, fear, and emotional geopolitics (Dalby, 2010; Jones and Sage, 2010). The
discipline has documented the shifts in warfare (e.g. where the battlefront is, how war is waged,
and the boundary between combatant and civilian), framing of enemies, and the complex rela-
tionship between the production of insecurity and power (Amoore, 2009; Bigo, 2002; Boyce
and Williams, 2012; Graham, 2010; Grondin, 2011). This work illustrates how state power
effectively produces its necessity through the discursive construction and physical production
of insecurity. Some securities (e.g. national security and securing capital accumulation) become

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worthy of state protection, whereas many others do not (e.g. human security) (Hyndman, 2003,
2008). Critical geopolitics works to demonstrate that the relations of modern states are not given
and, in turn, the terming of a terrorist, an enemy, and increased state sanctions, surveillance and
control are not inherently necessary. Although some have argued that the expansion of critical
geopolitics has resulted in less attention being paid to the use of geographical discourse in
legitimizing violence (Dalby, 2010), this remains at the heart of critical geopolitical analysis.
Feminist Geopolitics
Drawing inspiration from the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, critical geopolitics is
less a theory of how space and politics intersect than a mode of interrogating and exposing the
grounds for knowledge production. Critical geopolitics decentres the nation-state, but in its quest
to destabilize the normative, it rarely engages in transformative or embodied ways of knowing
and seeing. Feminist geopolitics has offered a fix to this conundrum (Hyndman in Jones and Sage,
2010, p. 317).

Some early work in the field of critical geopolitics drew on feminist insights in international
relations to suggest that gender tropes, ideologies, and discourses were key to the framing of
global space (Dalby, 1994). However, despite limited acknowledgement that hegemonic geo-
political thinking served to (re)produce hierarchies of race and gender, much critical geopolitical
scholarship served to reproduce geopolitics as a masculinist enterprise. For example, in her
review of O’Tauthail’s pivotal book Critical Geopolitics, Joanne Sharp (2000) powerfully illus-
trates how O’Tauthail’s focus on the ‘Big Men’ of geopolitics (e.g. Mackinder, Ratzel, Mahan,
Kjellen, and others) fails to acknowledge the role feminist scholars (e.g. Cynthia Enloe, Joni
Seager, and Cynthia Weber) have played in producing geopolitical knowledge and challenging
dominant geopolitical narratives. Subsequently, the masculinist tradition of geopolitics is per-
petuated rather than challenged. In failing to acknowledge these spaces of knowledge produc-
tion and contestation, critical geopolitics risks reproducing the (masculine) view from nowhere
and everywhere it aims to challenge (see Haraway, 1988). Feminist scholars, on the other hand,
work to illustrate geopolitical relations are produced in the home as much as the battlefield and
by a whole suite of actors outside the formal political realm.
Beginning in the early 2000s, feminist political geographers were particularly vocal in
challenging the limitations of critical geopolitics (Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Hyndman,
2004). In addition to drawing attention to the exclusion of women and feminist insights in
much critical geopolitical scholarship, they argued that critical geopolitics’ focus on discursive
deconstruction failed to incorporate material aspects of the world—how geopolitical pro-
cesses shaped and were shaped by everyday experiences and interactions. Moreover, feminist
geopoliticians suggested that these discursive abstractions reinforced global scale and placeless
state power. In other words, the attention to traditional geopolitical discourse, even in the
form of critique, perpetuated the removal of people and everyday practices from geopolitical
analysis (Sharp, 2000). It was from this critique that feminist geopolitics emerged as a frame-
work for understanding the operation of power in a way that links the discursive aspects of
identity and representation to the lived realities of individuals and community and offers
up a constructive framework from which geopolitical realities can be reworked (Dowler
and Sharp, 2001).
Informed by feminist scholarship in geography more broadly (e.g. Gibson-Graham, 1996;
Nagar et al., 2002; Rose, 1993), feminist geopolitics decenters dominant geopolitical narra-
tives and challenges exclusions inherent in geopolitical scholarship. Feminist geopolitics has
established itself as a distinct branch of critical geopolitics by noting the need for a more
grounded critique of geopolitics—one that adds women but also goes beyond this and

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attends to the gendered, racialized, classed, sexualized, and otherwise differentiated everyday
spaces previously ignored in geopolitical analysis. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway
(1988, 1991) and others, feminist scholars argue for a situated epistemological and method-
ological framework that recognizes the embodied and partial nature of knowledge production
and the complicated and power laden relationship between the researcher and researched
(Hyndman, 2001; Katz, 1994; Mountz, 2004).
In so doing, feminist geopolitics offers a specific analytic framework from which to under-
stand international geopolitical and geoeconomic relations. Specifically, feminist geopolitical
analysis draws on work in the field of feminist international relations (Enloe, 1983, 1989;
Marchand and Runyan, 2000; Seager, 2003; Weber, 1999) to challenge the exclusion of
women from geopolitical debates by drawing into question the parameters of the ‘political’.
A feminist geopolitical approach examines the way global political processes impact everyday
experiences (framed as ‘feminine’) on one hand and are influenced by them on the other.
Thus, feminist geopolitics grounds geopolitical discourse in practice and place, attending to
“the ways in which the nation and the international are reproduced in the mundane practices
we take for granted” (Dowler and Sharp, 2001, p. 171). Feminist geopolitics subsequently
demonstrates how the ‘apolitical’, ‘feminine’ private realm is a key component in the oper-
ation of global power.
Feminist geopolitics additionally challenges the nation-state as the sole or primary subject
of geopolitical thinking by attending to the social construction of scale (Marston, 2000) and
the interconnections among and across scales (Herod and Wright, 2002; Pratt and Rosner,
2006). For example, Hyndman (2004, 2008) suggests that our understanding of security
(a classic topical consideration in geopolitics) is fundamentally transformed if we begin
questioning security at the scale of the individual body as opposed to that of the nation-state.
A focus on human security, rather than national security, provides a way to attend to the lived
realities of individuals as they are shaped by and influence geopolitical processes. Furthermore, a
shift to the scale of the body enables an analysis of the way geopolitical processes are experienced
unevenly across differently situated populations. Finally, feminist geopolitics challenges the de-
constructive project of critical geopolitics in drawing attention to the importance of offering
commentary and prospects for resistance (Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Hyndman, 2004). Feminist
geopoliticians suggest that the project of deconstruction must be accompanied by active theo-
rizing and practices that reframe and remake geopolitics in more just ways.
Feminist scholars increasingly use the tools provided by feminist geopolitics to illustrate that
seemingly non-geopolitical sites and concerns are key to the operation of global power. The
point of entry to such topics of study is often the less visible everyday lives of individuals (e.g.
citizens, undocumented migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers) across the globe and often times
less focused on the traditional sites of geopolitics (e.g. state institutions and militaries). Additional
scholarship in the field takes the alternate approach of ‘studying up’—“studying the powerful,
their institutions, policies, and practices instead of focusing only on those whom the powerful
govern” (Harding and Norberg, 2005). By studying up, researchers can understand the ways
in which knowledge is produced and problems are conceptualized in ways that shape social re-
lations in uneven and hierarchical ways. For example, Jennifer Fluri (2011) and Jennifer
Hyndman’s (1997) examinations of international development and humanitarian aid organiza-
tions sheds light on how efforts to ‘assist’ those in need function to (re)produce hierarchical
power relations at various scales.
The explicit effort of feminist geopolitics to produce a view of power that operates from
somewhere (Haraway, 1988)—often the situated lives and experiences of marginalized
populations—and through surprising sites has opened up fruitful new dialog. For example,
the Sara Smith’s examination (2011) of the role love and desire play in the geopolitics of

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territoriality in the Leh District of India illustrates how the most intimate aspects of our lives
are shaped by and, in turn, shape geopolitical processes. Through this attention, feminist
geopolitics makes the relationship between the intimate and the global evident (Pratt and
Rosner, 2006; Hyndman and Mountz, 2006).
In addition to a focus on the intimate aspects of geopolitical relations, recent scholarship
has shifted attention to the emotional realm of geopolitical relations. Drawing on the con-
ceptual and theoretical insights of feminist geopolitics, Pain and Smith (2008) call for an
emotional geopolitics that challenges hierarchical understandings of fear and risk. Instead
they investigate the ways fear and risk are actually experienced, resisted, and contested by
differently situated populations. Based on the double helix structure of DNA, they develop
a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between geopolitics and everyday
life. In this model, two equivalent strands—geopolitics and everyday life—“wind into a sin-
gle structure and form the building blocks of every assemblage of fear” (7). The two strands
are bound together by numerous connectors such as events, encounters, dialogs, actions, af-
fects, and things that connect geopolitics and everyday life. However, these connections are
fragile and breaks and discontinuities occur, opening spaces for political possibility through
the rewriting of the emotional geographies of everyday life. Rather than fixed or simply im-
posed, Pain and Smith draw attention to the ways geopolitical relations are manifested
through emotional geographies. As such, geopolitical relations are dynamic, constantly
shifting, and opening and closing spaces of political possibility. Pain and Smith’s introduction
and the pieces included in their edited volume demonstrate the ongoing effort of feminist
geopolitics to recognize the geopolitical and the everyday as entangled and mutually consti-
tuted spheres (see also, Williams and Boyce, forthcoming).
Although much work in the field of feminist geopolitics attends to the theoretical and con-
ceptual frameworks through which we understand geopolitical relations, others have turned
attention to the ways in which geopolitics are made, undone, and remade in particular places.
For example, Koopman (2011) attends to the grassroots practices outside of the formal political
realm and academia through which individuals and groups do geopolitics. Premised on her
work with international accompaniers—individuals who live in communities that are under
threat to provide security by placing bodies less at risk next to bodies at risk—in Colombia,
she calls upon feminist scholars to reconsider and make visible sites and processes through which
dominant geopolitical relations are being challenged and reworked. As she writes,

I am interested in how geopolitics is thought differently not just by writing about bodies, but by
moving bodies. I am interested in the thinking that is being done in and through action, particularly
by those that are using their bodies, together, to build alternative nonviolent securities. I want to
engage with feminist geopolitics as it is being done by bodies ‘in the streets’ (and in homes,
churches, the jungle, on youtube, etc., but at any rate ‘off the page’ as Pain has put it) (p. 277).

Although the groups she studies do not refer to their work as feminist or geopolitics,
Koopman argues that it is useful to think of this work as a form of feminist geopolitics,
because it is work that builds connections across distances and difference and in doing so
reworks “who has access to what, and where, and how we stay safe and well together”
(p. 280). Koopman charts a path of feminist geopolitics in action that actively resists
hegemonic power relations, placeless geopolitics of domination, and power-laden states by
attending to people’s embodied and enacted forms of alter-geopolitics.
Over a decade after the birth of the discipline, feminist geopolitics has proven hugely
influential in the field of critical geopolitics more broadly (e.g. Dixon and Marston, 2011;
Pain and Smith, 2008; Pratt and Rosner, 2006). The grounded analysis offered by feminist

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geopolitical scholars has met early calls for a feminist intervention to critical analysis. At the
same time, it has developed a new set of questions, answers, and possibilities for geopolitical
analysis. In the next section we turn to a discussion of securitization to illustrate how a
feminist geopolitical approach redraws the boundaries of the geopolitical and allows for a
more nuanced understanding of the operation of power at multiple scales.
Rethinking the Terrain of Geopolitics
By drawing attention to the banal, everyday, and embodied sites through which geopolitical
relations are (re)produced and contested, feminist analysis has redefined the geopolitical. By
heeding the initial call of Dowler and Sharp (2001) to examine the mundane reproduction of
the national and the international, contestation and negotiation become crucial in
understanding geopolitical relations. Rather than fixing analysis on the loci of state and su-
pranational power, feminist geopolitics provides a lens from which to study struggles over
power, territory, and security as they present themselves in unexpected sites. In this section,
we use the issue of securitization to illustrate the utility of a feminist geopolitical approach
and how it serves to challenge the traditional scale of the geopolitical. This seemingly narrow
subject matter, interrogated through a lens of feminist geopolitics speaks to both the new
trends in the discipline and its continued relevance.
Securitization refers broadly to the processes whereby issues, spaces, and subjectivities
become targets of regulation and surveillance by state and non-state actors in the name of
ensuring ‘security’ at multiple scales, most often the national (Buzan et al., 1998; Huysmans,
2006). Understanding contemporary processes of securitization, particularly in advanced
capitalist society, requires cracking open the question of both security and conflict. Let us firstly
consider the shifting terrain of conflict and the role feminist geopolitics plays in understanding it.
It is of course the case that wars of the 21st century are not the wars of the 20th century. This is
highlighted by the erosion of nation-states as the pretense to geopolitical ordering (Sassen,
2006), the production of ever-present threats and heightened senses of (in)security (Katz,
2007), and the utility of such threats to maintain spatial control in everyday spaces (Massaro
and Mullaney, 2011). Wars are no longer against enemy nations so much as abstract conceptions
of other-ness (Puar, 2007). Feminist geopolitical analysis enables an examination of precisely
how otherness is produced through gendered, racialized, and sexualized discourses and then
mobilized to justify various forms of violence and oppression. The attention to everyday
practices and the inscription of geopolitics onto particular bodies turns our attention to new sites
and issues to be studied in a geopolitical frame.
For example, the work of Alison Mountz (2011) illustrates both the concrete spatial prac-
tices and discursive maneuvers whereby states justify the exclusion of asylum seekers from
national territory (see also Hyndman and Mountz, 2007; Mountz, 2003, 2011; Mountz
and Hiemstra, 2012). By reconfiguring national space and adopting novel spatial practices
(e.g., off-shore detention centers), states limit asylum seekers’ access to national territory
and associated legal rights and entitlements. These spatial practices are made possible by
gendered and racialized discourses of ‘bogus refugees’ who present a threat to the physical,
economic, and cultural security of the nation-state. Similarly, Hyndman and Giles (2011)
argue that efforts to manage refugee populations globally can be thought of as a ‘feminization
of asylum’ where those in long-term camps are feminized based on location and legal status.
The boundaries between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ refugees, and related access to various rights and
entitlements, are increasingly defined around their (im)mobility. ‘Good’ refugees are those
who passively wait in indefinite limbo in refugee camps in the global South without perma-
nent legal status. In contrast, refugees ‘on the move’ who attempt to reach states in the global
North where they can apply for asylum are framed as potential threats to national security

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and the welfare state. This geopolitical framing of refugees posits refugee security and state
security as contrary projects with dramatic material, physical, and legal consequences for
those involved.
Feminist geopolitics deconstructs the notion of state provided security to recognize its
uneven distribution across nationality, gender, race, and sexuality. The discussion of national
security obscures discussions of other securities across lines of race, class, gender and sexuality.
Security defined in post-9/11 rhetoric, in particular, is extremely narrowly defined and it is a
security based on sets of privileges and market norms. In the US case, increased security in the
form of intensified state surveillance has benefited some but created insecurity, exclusion and
oppression for many others. Feminist geopolitics works to trace such effects, examining the
processes of creating others and outcasts within the nation (Puar, 2007; Katz, 2007; Iveson,
2010) in the naming of broader international security measures. Driven by the emotional
geopolitics of fear (Pain and Smith, 2008), the expanded use of wiretapping and other
wide-net surveillance measures have quickly mapped onto “securing” the inner-city as such
legislation has been applied to surveil drug dealers in the urban economy (Wallace-Wells,
2011). Similarly, “securing” the US/Mexico border has made migrants and Mexican workers
in the US (both legal and illegal) decidedly insecure with the increase of racist legislation,
civil rights infringing surveillance, inhuman deportation and the general criminalization of
immigrants that quickly disassembles the mantra of a secure border (Nevins, 2008; Falcon,
2007; Varsanyi, 2008; Coleman 2007; Boyce and Launius 2011; No More Deaths, 2011;
Boyce and Williams, 2012). Feminist geopolitics forces the question of who is made more
secure by such geopolitical measures.
By attending to everyday practice and experiences of the marginalized, feminist geopolitics
reveals “security” is not easily defined or achieved and different notions of security do not
apply evenly to all. Rather, different groups are impacted in different ways by different efforts
to achieve security as such and this must be unpacked. Security from physical harm is differ-
ent form mental security, food security, financial security, housing security and so forth. Even
security from physical harm is quite different for women in patriarchal society than it is for
men. For example, Secor (2001) demonstrates the way the veil, often touted as a symbol
of the Islamic women’s oppression, actually offers a sense of security and mobility for young
women in Turkey. Secor demonstrates the complexity of the veil as a symbol but also as a
pass to traverse public space, as this seemingly simple garment becomes imbued with com-
plex meanings, spatialities as geopolitics. Similarly, Doshi and Casolo (2012) demonstrate
the so called security of creating capitalist economies to secure US interests has had dramatic
consequences for the people living under those regimes, be it rural Guatamala or Mumbai,
India. Their careful tracing of the parallels between such seemingly divergent cases is a classic
example of the power of a feminist geopolitical analysis as it traces solidarity across lines of
difference, redefines security from the perspective of the marginal, and aims to create more
socially just ways of being in the world. A feminist geopolitical analytic explicitly calls for
attention to the range of scales in which security is imagined and experienced making it
ideally suited to rethink processes of securitization.
Querying feminist Geopolitics
Feminist attention to everyday experiences of violence and insecurity decenters the state in
how we understand practices of war- and peace-making. Instead, sites as varied, grounded
and specific as the Islamic neighborhood (Secor, 2001), the city square in Ciudad Juarez
(Wright, 2004, 2006), a historical tour of Belfast (Dowler, 2012), an urban shopping center
(Massaro and Mullaney, 2011) and the intimate spaces of the home (Cuomo, forthcoming)
are illuminated as key to the (re)production and contestation of geopolitical relations. When,

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where, and how peace and security are experienced are complicated as new sites emerge from
which to understand the complexities of geopolitical power and conflict (Pratt and Rosner,
2006; Pain and Smith, 2008; Enloe, 2010). Security situated at the body through a feminist
lens radically changes our conception of security and subsequently offers a far more virulent
critique of the security industrial complex. Security cannot be merely protection from a
narrowly defined set of terrorist attacks or armed interventions, for efforts to limit these kinds
of insecurity are shown to increase insecurity for differently situated populations. Feminist
geopoliticians have implored us to consider the intimate, local or home, as a productive site
of (in)security (Laliberte, forthcoming; Clark, forthcoming). Any site at which power is
deployed and state paternalism is subsequently reproduced becomes open to geopolitical in-
quiry and feminist geopolitical analysis. Intervention in domestic disputes, for example, may
seem disconnected from the war on terror or US imperialism, but through feminist geopolitics
these become related in ways that shed light on the insidious nature of geopolitical domination.
We began this paper by connecting seemingly disparate issues, the multi-scalar approach
and attention to everyday practices brings these issues into discussion with one another.
However, are these worthwhile objects of an explicitly geopolitical inquiry? Because feminist
geopolitics argues it is precisely the logic of geopolitics that produces a geopolitical order,
then is it the case that feminist and geopolitics cannot go together? Is it analogous to a prac-
tice of critical capitalism, as Smith (2000) asserts (see also, Jones and Sage, 2010)? By compli-
cating our understandings of the shifting terrains and scales of both war and security, feminist
geopolitics drives a reconsideration of its very object of study: geopolitics. Given the term’s
history, questioning the utility of the very term geopolitics has created an important site of
productive tension in the discipline. In other words, if it is the case that geopolitical thinking
reproduces and maintains geopolitical orders and power relationships and it is also the case
that feminist geopolitics forces a rescaling of our geopolitical imaginaries, why call this work
geopolitical? This is of course a key conundrum for the discipline at this point.
The answer is elusive and highly contentious even for like-minded scholars. However, we
see the continued utility of feminist geopolitics in this conundrum. Although we may need
to consider reconfigured scales, abstracted wars and the removal of the nation-state, the geo-
political remains relevant as it still connects the mundane processes and situated positions that
are often the feminist object of study to insidious efforts to maintain hegemonic power
relations and justify violent state projects. The work of feminist geopolitics (be that done in
the academy or in the jungles and streets Koopman references) challenges the geopolitical
order—it engages with transnational processes of economic development, imperialism, state
violence, militarization, and securitization in a decidedly unique way. It draws attention to
the way in which the seemingly ‘apolitical’ or ‘a-geopolitical’ realms of the body, the home,
and intimate relationships are key sites at which discursive and material relations of geopolitical
power are continually reproduced and challenged. Through this attention, feminist geopolitics
challenges what counts as geopolitics and this is precisely its goal. Rather than abandon the
geopolitical in our activism and scholarship, feminist geopolitics calls for a reconceptualization
of the geopolitical. That is to say, the world may maintain a geopolitical order, but we must
engage that ordering to reimagine it and argue for its reconfiguration.
Conclusion
This paper argues for the continued utility of feminist geopolitics as an analytic from which
to understand power and exploitations at a variety of sites. Feminist geopolitics has reflexively
reframed what “counts” as geopolitics. This requires rethinking how security is defined and
the locus of power in the modern arena. Such a rethinking inherently undermines the very
notion of the geopolitical. However, current work in the field of feminist geopolitics clearly

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 Redefining the Geopolitical, Complicating (In)Security 575

demonstrates the import of continuing to engage geopolitics as such, demonstrating how

feminist theory can change the terms of the conversation, legitimize unique geopolitical
actors, and excavate the presumed center of geopolitical power (Dixon and Marston,
2011; Pratt and Rosner, 2006). Feminist engagement with contemporary geopolitical pro-
cesses is thus necessary for all those committed to understanding, challenging, and rewriting
global power at the various sites and scales at which it is (re)produced.

Short Biographies

Vanessa A. Massaro is a doctoral candidate at The Pennsylvania State University pursuing a

dual title degree in geography and women’s studies. Her research, based in Philadelphia, is
situated at the intersection of urban and feminist geopolitics and traces the gendered and
racialized nature of Philadelphia’s internal conflicts regarding marginal communities and
spaces. She has written about the ‘flash mob riots’ in Philadelphia. Her dissertation research
is focused on the role of the illegal economy in Philadelphia, explicitly considering both
why people participate in the drug economy and class, economic, and place-based anxieties
undergirding anti-drug enforcement.
Jill Williams is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark
University, Worcester, MA and holds an MA in Women’s Studies from the University of
Cincinnati. Her research broadly examines US–Mexico border militarization through a
feminist geopolitical framework. Her doctoral research is funded by the National Science
Foundation and explores the development of state-based efforts to reduce undocumented
migrant deaths in Southern Arizona.

Note
* Correspondence address: Vanessa A. Massaro, Department of Geography, Department of Women’s Studies, The Pennsylva-
nia State University, University Park, PA 16802. E-mail: vam127@psu.edu

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