Between a gender and a feminist analysis

Abstract

This article argues that professional literature on national security in Israel, especially during the second Intifada (2000—4), reinforced the invisibility of a range of insecurities informing the lives of women and members of marginalized groups. The authors discuss the problematic of using ‘gender’ without a feminist perspective and examine the challenges of incorporating the latter into quantitative studies of security, then briefly present their research on women under a situation of political turmoil in Israel to offer intersectionality as a possible resolution. Instead of focusing on (and reifying) differences between women and men, this study located complexity in variations among women by intersecting different social locations, different types of violence and different types of knowledge. The discussion highlights the contribution of intersectionality to overcoming essentialist explanations of women’s insecurities during armed conflicts.