Gender & Sexuality Studies 2026

Abstract

This paper examines sexuality and intimacy as constitutive—rather than peripheral—dimensions of modern warfare, directly engaging the GSS 2026 theme of “Sexuality and Modern Day Conflict: Moving Beyond the Binary.” While conflict is often analyzed through binaries such as combatant/civilian, public/private, or masculine/feminine, this paper argues that contemporary warfare systematically unsettles these distinctions by reshaping intimate life, sexual norms, and embodied relationships. Warfare is not only a geopolitical or military phenomenon but also an intimate social condition that reorganizes desire, attachment, vulnerability, and care.

The paper is grounded in an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that brings together feminist international relations, queer theory, and affect theory. Feminist IR scholarship highlights how war is structured through gendered power relations and everyday practices (Enloe 2000; Tickner 2001), while critical military studies expose how militaries govern bodies, emotions, and sexual conduct (Higate 2012; Basham 2013). Queer theory further destabilizes heteronormative and binary assumptions underpinning military institutions by foregrounding non-normative sexualities, desires, and kinship formations (Butler 2004; Puar 2007). Finally, affect theory enables an analysis of how intimacy operates through emotional labor, attachment, and embodied proximity, even within technologically mediated and spatially distant forms of warfare (MacKenzie 2015; Sylvester 2018). Together, these approaches conceptualize intimacy as a terrain of governance, resistance, and meaning-making within modern conflict.

Building on this framework, the paper synthesizes existing scholarship on militarized masculinities, sexual regulation, and conflict-related sexual violence with newer approaches that emphasize affective labor and everyday lived experience. While prior literature has productively examined rape as a weapon of war (Wood 2006) and the regulation of sexuality within armed forces (Belkin 2012), less attention has been paid to how intimacy itself becomes a site through which war is enacted, sustained, and normalized.

The paper advances this argument through two case studies. The first examines international peacekeeping missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, focusing on the regulation of sexual relationships between peacekeepers and local populations. This case reveals how military institutions simultaneously police intimacy through moral discourses of protection and consent while producing sexual economies shaped by asymmetrical power, racialization, and economic precarity. The second case study explores remote warfare and drone operators in the United States and United Kingdom, analyzing how intimacy is reconfigured through physical distance, mediated killing, and the militarization of domestic space. Here, the boundaries between war zone and home collapse, generating new forms of emotional proximity, ethical strain, and intimate disruption.

Together, these cases demonstrate how modern warfare destabilizes binaries between violence and care, distance and proximity, coercion and consent. By foregrounding sexuality and intimacy, this paper contributes to gender studies debates on embodiment, affect, and power, arguing that intimate life is not merely affected by conflict but actively mobilized within it.

Biography

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