Modernity and Modernization Revisited: Responses to Julia Adams and Ann Shola Orloff, “Defending Modernity? High Politics, Feminist Anti-Modernism, and the Place of Gender”

Extract

In their essay “Defending Modernity” (Politics & Gender 1 (March), 2005), Julia Adams and Ann Shola Orloff took gender and politics scholars to task for the ways in which they (we) engage gender and “high politics.” They call for a “more serious analytical engagement between gendered and mainstream students of politics,” with particular attention to “the relationship between gendered representations of war and actual military campaigns” (p. 179). Ultimately, they argue, scholars must consider that logics of masculine protection and domination “arise out of properly political sources that need to be better understood and incorporated into gender studies” (p. 179).