Reflections on narratives of gender, war, conflict.

How do we tell our stories about gender, war and conflict? What animates or fuels the telling of these stories and what functions do our stories serve? We are inspired to reflect on these questions for a number of reasons. The practices of international politics have clearly called for attention to the workings of gender and for the services of feminism. Indeed, recognition of the importance of understanding the connections and relationships between war, conflict and gender now far exceed the small circles of 'feminist IR' or feminist Peace studies. This has typically led to calls for the inclusion of both gender and women in thinking about questions of security, armed conflict, conflict resolution and peace building. Yet, we are troubled by the concern that the gendered stories of war that we, as feminists and critical IR scholars, have laboured to construct and present as valid and indeed crucial for the study of war more generally, have arrived at a cul-de-sac precisely at the moment when the relevance of these stories seems so prescient. As such, two crucial questions drive this paper: the first is the simple yet necessarily undecidable query: where do we go from here? This concern becomes even more urgent when we consider that gendered stories of war are currently also required to respond to requests for the formulation of policy. There seems to be an element of renewed urgency that we 'get our feminism right'. Yet given our misgivings about the knowledge that is generated through feminist enquiry -- articulated as a cul-de-sac above -- our second driving question relates to the constitution and appropriation of those knowledges: From where do these knowledges emerge and what happens to and with them? In order to reflect on these questions, this paper proceeds in three sections. The first section further introduces and clarifies our introductory comments about the 'problem with gender' by addressing the some of the seeming paradoxes of feminism. In the second section we read this problem through stories about 'militarization'. The concluding section re-visits and re-considers the problems and questions articulated in the introduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]