SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This essay seeks to define the current regime of national security, tracing a shift within the gender categories that subtend notions of justified (state) violence. It focuses on Israel's occupation, and in particular its violent control over the Gaza Strip, to examine the relations between war and enmity on the one hand and humanitarianism and subject-citizens on the other. I argue that security relies on a new mechanism of justifying violence, wherein the distinction between (feminized) civilians and (masculinized) aggressors is replaced with more “gender-blind” violence, which incorporates both humanitarian language and aberrant, thin disciplinary processes to form a subject whose killing is always already justifiable.