“Women helping women”: deploying gender in US counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Central to the goal of ‘hearts and minds’ counterinsurgency is the need for knowledge, understanding and influence in relation to local populations. Building on feminist scholarship on counterinsurgency, the article focuses on the ‘female engagement’ work undertaken by four programmes developed by the US military between 2003 and 2014. The article offers three key arguments. First, it maintains that the gendered subjectivities of Iraqi and Afghan women and US female counterinsurgents are constructed as strategic assets and as vulnerable subjects. Second, these programmes reveal the extent to which gendered counterinsurgency is constituted and regulated by emotional and embodied norms and rules for both female soldiers and civilians. Third, it suggests that the discursive construction of ‘winning hearts and minds’ works to render less visible the violence of gendered counterinsurgency practices. Although gendered counterinsurgency mobilizes a relational ontology predicated on the emotional labour required for developing knowledge of the Iraqi and Afghan ‘other’, female engagement activities cannot escape the logic of instrumental reasoning within which they are located. Ultimately, recognizing the policy of female engagement as central to forms of knowledge production reveals the extent to which the violences of war rely on a complex set of gendered and affective relations