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This chapter introduces the book by exploring what is at stake in seeing the digital frontiers of gender and security. It introduces readers to potentially relevant international policies and to emerging international efforts to pursue security in the digital space, including via international law, state-level initiatives, and multi-stakeholder frameworks that engage technology companies and civil society. It argues that the current system fails to fully integrate gender and more broadly intersectional perspectives into an emerging discourse about security, technology, development, and rights. It further argues that a critical feminist security studies approach to these issues finds natural points for dialogue with – and should include – other critical perspectives including surveillance studies, queer theory, Black feminism, and postcolonial theory – necessitating an intersectional feminist inquiry.
President Rafael Correa (2007–17) was the leader of the Ecuadorian Citizens’ Revolution advanced by his movement Alianza País. Although a former critic of indefinite presidential re-elections, in 2014 Correa asked his bloc of parliamentarians to abolish presidential term limits. His request was approved and the constitution was amended. How can we account for Alianza País’ sudden decision to abolish presidential term limits, considering it had ratified these limits as recently as 2008? This article conducts a discourse analysis of the argument in favour of indefinite presidential re-elections in Ecuador. Courtesy of Lacanian psychoanalysis, in this article I argue that the Citizens’ Revolution’s shift can be fruitfully explained if we consider how the transgressive logic of enjoyment operates in ideology.
This chapter explores the possibility for a more inclusive digital space, drawing on case studies and interviews with peacebuilders and practitioners who have used technology in novel ways. Common themes expressed by interviewees include an enduring concern about gender-based violence and harassment, the need to address inequalities as they manifest in the digital space, ambivalence in the relationships between activists and technology developers, and a concern about the future for in-person advocacy in the post-COVID-19 world.
Exploring the digital frontiers of feminist international relations, this book investigates how gender can be mainstreamed into discourse about technology and security.
With a focus on big data, communications technology, social media, cryptocurrency, and decentralized finance, the book explores the ways in which technology presents sites for gender-based violence. Crucially, it examines potential avenues for resistance at these sites, especially regarding the actions of major tech companies, surveillance by repressive governments, and attempts to use the Global South as a laboratory for new interventions.
The book draws valuable insights which will be essential to researchers in International Relations, Security Studies, and Feminist Security Studies.
Drawing on insights from feminist and critical theories of international relations, this chapter examines how states engage in abusive uses of technology, creating gendered and racialized forms of insecurity. Cases discussed include the surveillance of feminist activists in China and the deployment of Pegasus spyware against activists for women’s rights and minority rights. It argues the need for an intersectional dialogue between feminist security studies and intersectional work that discusses the racialized nature of surveillance.
Based on lengthy ethnographic fieldwork in Southwest China, this article unpacks how precarity and migration have deeply shaped young migrant workers’ understanding and experiences of friendship. The precarious work and living conditions compel young migrants to put more emphasis on the instrumental aspects of friendship, in which they deeply value friends’ help and practical support, which also intertwine closely with the emotional aspects of friendship. High mobility does not mean that migrants are not able to form and maintain ‘meaningful’ social relationships; rather, it is friends’ support and help which sustain migrants’ precarious and highly mobile ways of living. This article also discusses the burdens and risks that are associated with such friendship practices, and how, despite these ‘dark sides of friendship’, young migrant workers still largely rely on their friends to survive and keep going in the city.
The article begins by presenting the collection of Die Antike, found in Freud’s library in London. By examining the contents of some articles by Werner Jaeger, the famous classicist author of Paideia, and at the same time contrasting his ideas with those of Freud’s Moses, one can perceive the position that the two authors took during the political upheavals in the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis. Questions about historical construction, temporality, language and political ideologies are addressed. With this, Moses and Monotheism emerges as a deeply political text, linked to a psychoanalytic social structure different from that proposed in Totem and Taboo.
This article aims to explore how children are exposed to emotional demands in the transition from kindergarten to school. Psychosocial research and Hochschild’s work provide the underlying theoretical inspiration for the study. Hochschild’s concepts are used to frame the emotional demands children experience in everyday life in kindergarten and school, settings that can be seen as a workplace, albeit for children. Hochschild’s concepts and researchers inspired by her are often referred to when the work-life of adults is being studied, also when exploring stress and burnout at work. My study shows how children react to the emotional demands in their everyday lives in and across kindergarten and school and indicates that the emotion work they perform can sometimes cause emotional dissonance for children, just as it does for adults. The empirical basis for the discussion and conclusions consists of participatory observations conducted with children in the transition from kindergarten to primary school in the context of the Danish welfare state.
This article explores how boredom emerged as a central threat to Americans’ sense of well-being in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing upon media coverage from a range of sources, I ask: What do responses to the COVID-19 pandemic reveal more generally about the way boredom has emerged as one of the central dis-eases of modern life? Why has free time become something that increasingly generates intolerable anxiety? In what ways can studying responses to the COVID-19 lockdown help us trace larger transformations in the social construction and subjective experience of time? The article argues that while many Americans experienced boredom as a form of social death engendered by the deroutinising aspects of lockdown life, responses to the COVID-19 pandemic also reveal the way boredom has emerged as a form of psychic alienation permeating the very core of American society. Drawing upon insights from psychoanalytic theory, I will ultimately propose that our dis-ease with free time may be linked to a growing incapacity to fantasise as more and more of our mental lives are colonised by the digital infrastructures and extractive imperatives of our 24/7 society ().
The authors, whose trainings include as group analytic psychotherapists, use the theoretical framework of group analysis to facilitate experiential small and median groups for students on trainings in individual psychodynamic psychotherapy. Even though in group analytic practice it would usually be a definite no, the authors found themselves debating whether members who revealed they were a couple in the past could in fact be together in a group. This discussion prompted the authors to reflect closely on their co-facilitator relationship, causing them to consider what they understood by ‘couple’.
It offered up an opportunity (previously unconscious) to explore the binary fixing of conductors as male/female and heterosexual, and whether such fixing may be a defence by the group, including the group conductors, against allowing and exploring a more fluid, nuanced exploration of gender and sexuality. The authors propose that instead of small experiential groups, co-conducted median groups may offer a richer opportunity for such exploration.
