Introduction to Feminist Formations Special Issue: Feminists Interrogate States of Emergency

In the influential work Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (1990), Cynthia Enloe argued that "feminist analysis has had little effect on international politics" (3), a statement that arguably may still be true in terms of the interventions feminists have hoped to make, but is no longer accurate in discussing the instrumentality of women in international political discourse. In the United States, the Muslim woman has become a strategic sign of the need for militaristic intervention, as politicians incorporate "feminism-lite" into their discussions of the ways that women can be at risk under militaristic and fundamentalist states. If one of the raisons d'être of feminist scholarship is making injuries to women visible, feminist scholarship also explores the discursive effects of gender as a principal sign of state power, vulnerability, and futurity.

Such feminist interrogations have resulted in a long intellectual tradition of critiquing war, violence, and political conflict (Elshtain 1987; Enloe 1990; Giles and Hyndman 2004; INCITE! 2006; Yuval-Davis 1997). In recent years, with the proliferation of US military hegemony and volatile shifts in political and environmental systems, scholars have argued that an intersectional approach is vital to investigating the operations and impact of state attacks on women, of war, environmental "disasters," and political upheavals (Abdi 2007; Eisenstein 2007; Riley 2006; Ruwanpura 2008). Enloe (2008), Jasbir K. Puar (2007), and other scholars (for example, Cole 2008) have examined how gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation are deployed as part of the US post-9/11 political machinery and attendant systems of violence. Feminists have also questioned the environmental determinism of so-called natural disasters, and exposed how reactions to disaster are embedded in structures of gender, race, and class in places as varied as Sri Lanka (Hyndman and de Alwis 2003; Ruwanpura 2008), the polar North (Kafarowski 2009), and post-Katrina New Orleans (David 2008; David and Enarson 2012). At a basic level, all of this scholarship pushes back against various political discourses that (mis)name an emergency or ignore the crux of what actually causes crisis within a community. These interventions are not only made in response to international crises or events that are transparently national emergencies; for example, we need only look to competing debates about incarceration, marriage, education, and disease in African American communities to see how gendered and racialized discourses construct and obscure crises (Cohen 2010; Davis 2003; Wanzo 2011).

Building on and pushing the boundaries of this work, this special issue takes up the concept of states of emergency as an object of analysis. Moving beyond a hegemonic understanding of states of emergency, we question how power is wielded in the context of so-called emergencies, particularly when political actors work to define a moment as a state of emergency in order to mobilize publics, redefine citizenship, or deploy political machinery. At the same time, we include scholarship that names states of emergency made invisible by existing public discourses. The most recent wave of anti-immigration legislation in the United States is an example of how public discourses on national security and economic recession are manipulated in order to foment rhetorics of emergency. But regulation from the state has also produced emergencies in communities that have been named as threats to the state. While feminists have engaged the racialized and gendered politics of immigration and Native sovereignty in the United States (Falcon 2006; Smith 2005), the recent events in Arizona and other US states require fresh analysis (Romero 2011). Katie E. Oliviero provides just such an analysis in her article "The Immigration State of Emergency: Racializing and Gendering National Vulnerability in Twenty-First-Century Citizenship and Deportation Regimes." She argues that, since the founding of the United States, there has been a state of emergency concerning immigration whereby authorities create racialized and gendered laws that determine who belongs within the body politic and who threatens it. For Oliviero, the question is not whether there is an immigration state of emergency, but rather which groups and communities are recognized as threatening. She shows how emergency declarations, such...