———. 1993. “Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War.” In Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 1989. Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———.1993. The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2000. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tickner, J. Ann. 1992. Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security. New York: Columbia University Press. “Feminist Security Studies”: Toward a Reflexive Practice Carol Cohn, University of Massachusetts –Boston doi:10.1017/S1743923X11000389 My comments take the form of a brief rumination about the politics of “Feminist Security Studies” — as a field of knowledge and as a practice. I start by raising some questions about the meaning of the term itself and the politics of defining the field. Then, in light of these questions, I turn to the politics of the practice of Feminist Security Studies. In thinking about Feminist Security Studies, my first impression is that there is — potentially, at least — an inherent ambiguity in the label itself, related to which two of the three words one sees as most closely linked. If the two words most closely linked are “security” and “studies,” then the preexisting field of security studies is the subject, and the question — both grammatical and epistemological — is in what way the adjective “feminist” modifies it. Does it suggest a claim to the legitimacy of a new subfield within security studies, a particular substudy that has value in and of itself, and that secondarily might or might not have any impact on security studies’ other subfields or the field writ large? In this case, a researcher brings a “feminist curiosity” to the field of security studies as it has been conventionally defined, and asks some new questions — questions that were previously overlooked by researchers whose thinking was hobbled by a lack of feminist curiosity, but which the feminist researcher sees as still legitimately within the conventional ambit of the field (Enloe 2004). The resulting research may be seen as opening up a new pocket of knowledge (e.g., how do we understand the motivation of female suicide bombers?), although it may be a challenge to have that new knowledge seen by security studies as genuinely relevant, rather CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES 581 terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1743923X11000389 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Brandeis University Library, on 02 May 2018 at 01:19:57, subject to the Cambridge Core