Coda

A key contribution that this special section makes is to recast understandings of two key facets of state functioning in our time: neoliberalism and national security apparatuses. The authors question the received orthodoxy that we are witnessing a period of pared-down state functioning, pointing instead to the ratcheting up of state expenditure not only in the domain of security—however problematically that term is construed, as Hagar Kotef and You-me Park find—but also in welfare management, as Margaret Little and Lynne Marks note. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of neoliberal globalization that declares the reduced relevance of the state, our authors remind us of the importance of states as key arbiters of bare life, as Kotef and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan observe, in their capacity to kill at will and deny subjecthood. In their respective contexts of welfare provision, Little and Marks as well as Park find that states not only have the potential to provide sustenance, but they also continue to shape the experience and meanings of a dignified life.

In the course of our diverse exchanges, we independently question whether the primary mode of feminist engagement with contemporary states should be a stance of rigid oppositional detachment and call instead for more nuanced, and self-implicated, critique. Gita Sen and Sunder Rajan describe a robust mode of engaging with states, with the possibilities of failure and entangled complicity. In doing so, they echo a version of feminist politics that respects contingent outcomes; it is a version that follows in step with Wendy Brown's States of Injury in 1995 and Mrinalini Sinha's recent historical narrative Specters of Mother India.

This special section opens with an essay that lays out two contrasting modes of engaging with states, arguing for a preferred vision shared by many other contributors. Sunder Rajan takes two heroic antagonistic female figures, Antigone and Kannaki, and examines in situ their contrasting motivations for confronting rulers and their differing valence as mourning subjects. She then elaborates how mourning and antagonism are nonetheless limited strategies and suggests instead the possibilities of agonistic engagements. An interdisciplinary piece in its use of literary, oral, and historical texts, it raises an enormously intriguing question about the compulsions of genre: that the form that literary theorists deal with—tragedy in particular—necessitates absolute, pure, ethical subjects, and these are subjects who are not really useful models in orienting political action, which has to be focused on contingent outcomes. Sen's reflections on the varied entanglements of feminist activist-scholars indeed reveal the successes of a sustained network attending over a shifting period to a variety of issues without a commitment to purist, single-issue politics. She importantly notes that anarchism and communitarianism—two approaches found in current theoretical work on the state and development—are not options for a network such as theirs, which does not have the luxury of detachment from state actors and policy outcomes.

Kotef's and Park's essays both present important corrections to the manner in which women's victimhood is conceptualized in discussions of state militarism. Kotef notes that the perception is eroding that violence against female civilians is excessive violence (in surplus of necessary violence against male enemies) in Israel's current security regime, and I would add in Sri Lanka's also. Such violence serves to allow perpetrators to periodically engage in rhetorical retractions—it can be apologized for, Kotef notes. In new security orders, all subjects are gender-indistinctly killable. In such an environment, humanitarian actions serve as accessories to violence by making it more palatable. Park, in a related vein discussing comfort women in South Korea, questions the very nature of the state apology, asking instead what kinds of compensation are forthcoming if the focus shifts to the welfare rather than the shame/dignity of victims of state-regulated rape. While the issue of comfort women has become iconic for some feminists, it has been taken up in the tragic mold described by Sunder Rajan, with a focus on absolutely silenced figures who have no capacity for redress. Park proposes that a conversation about redressal for injuries begin, shorn of the calculus of apologizing...