Gender, violence and nuclear weapons

Tools

Li, Ruoyu and Eschle, Catherine; (2025) Gender, violence and nuclear weapons. In: Handbook on Gender and Violence. Edward Elgar. (In Press)

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Abstract

In dominant imaginaries, gender violence and the violence of nuclear weapons are held far apart. Most scholarship and advocacy on the former effectively politicises micro-level experience—the personal, intimate or everyday—while mainstream thinking on the latter foregrounds state- and global-level violence and is haunted by potentially world-ending cataclysm. What happens, however, if we purposely breach this conceptual separation and reconsider nuclear weapons through the lens of gender violence? This chapter explores the fruitful intersection between studies on gender violence and nuclear violence, first at the conceptual level and then at the empirical. In the first part, we show how these separate academic fields may have distinct conceptual trajectories but also speak to each other in productive ways, most obviously in feminist-informed work on nuclear politics. In the second part, we show how this feminist-informed work illuminates both the material and discursive dimensions of nuclear violence. We reverse our focus in the third and final part to argue that the literature on nuclear violence can push feminist thinking on gender and violence in more expansive and inclusive directions.

ORCID iDs

Li, Ruoyu and Eschle, Catherine ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4566-9176;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)