I’m Associate Professor in Gender Studies, Director of the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, and a fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge.
I research political violence, subjectivity, and embodiment from the perspective of feminist and queer theory. My first major work, Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, addresses a deep irony in war/security studies: that while war is actually inflicted on bodies, or bodies are explicitly protected, there is a lack of attention to the embodied dynamics of war and security. I draw on feminist theory that offers a challenge to the policing boundaries between human bodies and the broader political context to address this irony in the first major work to centre questions of bodies and embodiment in IR. My central argument—that bodies are both productive of and produced by practices of international political violence—addresses a major lacuna in both feminist IR scholarship and Security Studies, as both traditions are limited in their theorization of the relationship between politics and embodiment. I argue that explicitly theorizing the subject as embodied allows us to account for the logic behind, and effects of, political violence that cannot be understood if we assume bodies to be inert, biological objects. In making this argument, I read contemporary modes of political violence- torture, hunger striking and force-feeding at Guantánamo Bay, suicide bombing, airport security assemblages, and drone warfare.
Currently I’m working on a monograph tentatively entitled "War Beyond the Human". In this work, I explore the political and technological assemblages of bodies that make up the so-called ‘posthuman’ nature of war and political violence for the ways in which they challenge we theorize the relationship between violence, desire, embodiment, race, sex, and gender. This book aims to produce an account of political violence in contemporary international relations building upon queer theorizations of gender and sexualized subjects that ultimately argues for new conceptual understandings of violence.