Introduction
In the summer of 2015, the moderate administration of former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and world powers reached a diplomatic agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), after two years of marathon negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme. According to the historic deal, Tehran agreed to curb its nuclear activities in return for reductions of international and American sanctions. In the weeks and months following the accord, there were exceptionally heated debates in the Iranian political sphere on whether the JCPOA was in favour of the Islamic Republic or the moderate negotiators had compromised and, in more vernacular jargon, ‘given in and away’ too much under pressure. Hardliners such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) top brass and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself to a large extent sided with the latter reading of events: not only had Iran projected a weak and soft self-image in the face of its archetypal adversaries by compromising on hard-earned nuclear achievements, but also the consequent exposure and openness would now gradually erode its revolutionary identity and metamorphose it into an emasculated submissive subordinate, a ‘feminized’ and ‘devalorized’ state.Footnote 1 Viewed in this light, JCPOA constituted a moment of major identity dislocation for the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) that went beyond a simple disruption in its routinised conflictual relations with Western powers as its significant others or a historical disconnect in its biographical self-narrative as an uncompromising revolutionary state.Footnote 2 In fact, the nuclear accord seemed to have simultaneously dislocated significant aspects of the IRI’s imagined self best captured by apparent changes in the state’s gender identity. It was an unsettling and agitating source of deep ontological insecurity, as if for a moment the Islamic Republic had ceased to feel like the Islamic Republic.
This article seeks to tease out the theoretical relevance of gender and gender identity to state actors’ ontological (in)security as articulated in their foreign policies, and demonstrate it empirically in the case of IRI with special reference to its nuclear programme. Despite growing attention to gender, including gendered narratives of self–other in ontological security studies (OSS) – which places the analytical premium on the security of self and being/becoming – OSS has engaged with gender as a performative-constitutive discourse mostly within rather than between states in making sense of state identity and behaviour in international relations. Building on the extant scholarship, the article contributes towards theorising gender more systematically into OSS by showing how actors pursue ontological security through gendering themselves, and what transpires when that gendering endeavour undergoes disruptions or entrenched aspects of those gendered selves, that is, the state’s gender identity, are dislocated. To capture and clarify the process, it introduces the concept of ontological dislocation as a horizontal–spatial rather than vertical–longitudinal phenomenon where the imagined state self’s established relationship with significant gendered pairs arising from the phallocentric feminine/masculine dichotomy and constituting its identity – such as weak/strong, soft/hard, passive/active, peaceful/confrontational, and so on – are destabilised all at the same time.
It is contended here that this theoretical and conceptual innovation, namely ontological dislocation, is necessary in order to adequately articulate destabilisation of gender identity at the state level and its ramifications for ontological security. The necessity arises from the notion that, on the one hand, as Sjoberg argues,Footnote 3 gender analysis offers a ‘wide gaze with many explorations and observations’ that can shed light on a multiplicity of security concepts, including security of self and identity.Footnote 4 Recourse to gender is indeed prevalent in composing ontologically securing or securitising narratives of identity by social actors including states, particularly compared to stories that centre around other identity dimensions and differentiating categories such as race, religion, and class – with which gender of course intersects and overlaps in what has come to be famously known as ‘intersectionality’ in feminist theory.Footnote 5 And, on the other, as Basu illustrates in the context of the UN Security Council, gender itself, with all the identity implications it carries, constitutes a core determinant of national interest for states,Footnote 6 shaping how they go about identifying themselves on the world stage and securing those interests through foreign policy practices. In a similar manner to how security as a ‘thick signifier’ functions, that is, by transcending a mere description of an external reality as potentially signified and instead creating a security condition as soon as the signifier is enunciated,Footnote 7 gender too wields performative force and performs an ordering function through processes of discursive formation; it organises how the signification of reality happens in the first place and configures social relations in complex hierarchical fashions. The concept of ontological dislocation proposed here is meant to speak to this wider order of identity conception and self–other construction, and the ontological disorder that may ensue when those conceptions and constructions are destabilised and dislodged, a critical problématique that OSS scholarship has yet to theorise.
The chief theoretical questions this research aspires to answer, therefore, are how gender informs the state’s ontological (in)security in its international relations and foreign policy interactions with others, what ontological ramifications follow when a state’s gender identity thus informed is disrupted, and how states may respond to disruptions of state gender. Inspired by Judith Butler’s gender performativity theory as well as Hélène Cixous’s and Luce Irigaray’s critiques of phallocentrism, the article adopts the concept state gender to refer to a state’s historical and time-congealed relationship with the whole constellation of phallocentric binary oppositions – masculine/feminine, hard/soft, strong/weak, and so on – of which it tends rather ritualistically to privilege one over the other over time. In fact, gender as performativity acquires greater clarity in the case of states or other institutional actors, hence the terminological choice of state gender, in important part because sex as a biological category that usually reifies understandings of gender as such is not as relevant to states as it is to persons. Empirically, the study zooms in on Iran’s nuclear behaviour as a critical site where its gender identity has played out prominently, to explain why and how the historic nuclear deal of July 2015 posed foundational identity challenges to the Islamic Republic, dislocating the state’s sense of self in terms of gender and undermining its ontological security. In distinction to what some engagements with the nexus of gendered narratives and ontological (in)security in the literature suggest,Footnote 8 this inquiry argues that gender is far more than a useful tool in state actors’ identity toolkit or psychopolitical repertoire that they pick up and utilise in their narrative constructions of self, other, ‘nationhood’, ‘community’, and so on to generate a certain ontological sense or outcome. Inseparable from identity and language, or the discursive system of signification within which the former take shape, gender dynamics are part and parcel of that ontological sense in the first place and inherent to feelings of ontological (in)security. In the process of manufacturing biographical narratives or developing routinised relations and attachments, states inevitably gender themselves and others in their own peculiar ways, which constitutes a significant dimension of who they are or want to become, a dimension that is intimately linked to other aspects of identity and closely implicates them.
After critically engaging with the extant literature on the instantiated linkages of gendered discursive practices and ontological (in)security in world politics, the article will draw on Judith Butler’s theory of ‘gender performativity’Footnote 9 and post-Lacanian feminist theorists’ critique of discursive-epistemic ‘phallocentrism’ to propose a theoretical framework for understanding gender identity at the state level and its implications for ontological security of the imagined state self. Phallocentrism, it will be shown, represents the masculine as the universal subject and the feminine as its non-subject ‘other’ characterised by ‘lack’ and thus subsumes the female difference under the male self-sameness.Footnote 10 In the section reviewing the existing scholarship, the article will address the ways in which gendering the self–other may be approached and explored in the OSS framework, that is, ‘exogenously’, or how gender mediates the ‘choice’ of significant others and of attachment dynamics in relation to them; and ‘endogenously’, or how gender governs the consistency of actors’ autobiographical narratives. The study will then proceed to expound ontological dislocation as a process instigated by destabilisation and disruption of state gender identity and how it may agitate the state actor into a restless scramble to repair and relocate its self. The final section will be dedicated to the investigation of Iran’s nuclear policy in light of these theoretical propositions and a discourse analysis of its gendered foundations.
Before moving to the next section, a number of significant points, theoretical as well as methodological, warrant clarification. First, since this research basically brings feminist security studies (FSS) to bear on ontological security studies (OSS) through gender analysis of state identity/subjectivity, it is important to elucidate their positioning with respect to each other and their theoretical linkages. Perhaps the concept that best underpins the connection between these two bodies of scholarship is what Sjoberg dubs ‘security as felt’, sensed and experienced,Footnote 11 which constitutes a core element in formations of ontological (in)security. Taking cues from Parashar and Sylvester among others on ‘sensory experiences’ of conflict,Footnote 12 she contends that adoption of such a perspective would push the boundaries of gender and security analyses into ‘new directions’ and as such holds ‘transformative potential for security studies’ beyond considerations of women ‘or even gendered narratives and constructions of security’.Footnote 13 More specifically, a feminist conception of gendered (in)security as felt and experienced, that is, as ontological, reflected already in the ‘affective turn’ in IR,Footnote 14 can enlighten us on how (in)security functions and produces its referent objects and the conditions of possibility that make those referent objects feel (in)secure in the first place. ‘A feminist politics of security studies’, in Sjoberg’s words, ‘needs to be matched with, interspersed with, and incorporated into other politics of security studies – from the local to the international to the global, from realist to postcolonial, from core to periphery’.Footnote 15
The current inquiry takes a step in that direction. However, while Sjoberg focuses on the inherently gendered felt (in)security of ‘people, individually and collectively’ to argue for ‘expanding and recentering security research’,Footnote 16 this article addresses the gendered felt (in)security of states and sovereign state subjects and how it may drive efforts to define and redefine their gender identity. The puzzle that immediately arises, then – and this is the second point worthy of delineation – is how feelings, affects, emotions, and experiences at the individual human level can be scaled up to that of the nation-state as a sovereign heterogeneous collectivity. Unlike much OSS literature that proceeds from the Giddensian-Wendtian ‘state as person’ analogyFootnote 17 to deal with the so-called level of analysis quandary and theorise about state self and its ontological (in)security, I do not treat states as persons but instead adhere to a performative conception of statehood. The reasons for choosing this alternative framework are twofold.
On the one hand, as Epstein makes it abundantly clear,Footnote 18 the Wendtian state personification is grounded in biological essentialist thinking that relegates a ‘pre-social “rump materialist” self’ to the human body as a premise to postulate that the state unit too is similarly pre-social with an essential identity. This is what she dismisses as ‘IR’s fallacy of composition’,Footnote 19 which would also contradict the metatheoretical underpinnings of this inquiry, centred as it is on a non-essentialist post-structuralist theory of gender. On the other, in contrast to Wendt’s pre-given ‘essential state’ as the main point of departure for his systemic constructivist analysis, the performative state has no ‘a priori existence’ but in fact comes into being through affectively and emotionally organised discursive performances.Footnote 20 More specifically, according to this view, the state as an entity has ‘no ontological status apart from the claims, representations, assumptions and routines performing it in political and legal practices’.Footnote 21 Thus, an aggregate-level analysis of state gender identity, agency, and subjectivity requires engagement with not only the question of ‘who speaks’Footnote 22 but also that of ‘who feels’, as feelings and emotions are clearly implicated in the articulation of gendered subject-positions, practices, and performances that constitute the state. Accordingly, an inquiry into ontological (in)security of gender at the state level needs to draw out the emotions and affects that inform the political subjectivity and self-concept of a given state actor in relation to gender in order to make sense of related practices and policies and what drives them.
In light of these (meta)theoretical parameters – and this is the last point – I will employ discourse analysis as a politically conscious methodology of inquiry, where discourses refer to ‘sets of statements that construct objects and an array of subject positions’.Footnote 23 Such a discourse analytic approach to qualitative research calls for special attention to the concepts, terms, and expressions that their producers use to manufacture differing versions of reality and enable, or exclude, certain modes of being, thinking, acting, living, and governing. It is premised on the social constructionist perspective that ‘the words we choose to speak about something and the way in which they are spoken or written, shape the sense that can be made of the world and our experience of it’.Footnote 24 In this sense, discourses are closely implicated in configurations of power and constitute different modalities of politics and hierarchies of social relations, warranting adoption of ‘critical’ lenses for their analysis.Footnote 25 Empirically, therefore, textual material generated by and about the state in question and its representatives, such as policy documents, political statements, and media reports, will be examined. In particular, the article will probe how explicitly gendered and emotionally laden concepts like harim (sanctum), namous (carrier of honour), narmesh (flexibility/softness), gheirat (moral virility), pofyouzi (pimposity), and nofouz (infiltration) frame the Iranian nuclear discourse along masculinity/femininity lines and reveal deep ontological insecurities about the possibility of the 2015 nuclear accord resulting in collective identity transformation and state feminisation.
Ontological security through gender lenses
In her pioneering work on the political psychology of globalisation and religious nationalism, KinnvallFootnote 26 locates gender at the core of religious nationalist identities and essentialist views of masculinity and femininity that subjects adopt as an ontological security shield against mounting existential anxieties. By ‘conceptualizing the “other” as weak, effeminate, and devoid of rational decision-making, nationalism and religion help in degrading the other and in taking away its status as a subject’.Footnote 27 Projections of masculinity through practices of ‘gendered nationalism’Footnote 28 have also been problematised in the OSS body of research as attempts by nationalist movements and far right governments across Europe, Asia, and America to create boundaries of ontological security around the nation and provide answers to pressing questions of insecurity and anxiety. While these works accentuate the gendered aspects of identity-making and security-seeking, it is not yet clear how a gender identity can be conceived of for the state self – that produces such exclusionary narratives – outside of the discourse of nationalism as such. What if the chief perceived threat does not come from, say, national minorities or immigrant others against the nation’s females – which nationalism purports to protect – but from other states against the state self’s perceived manhood?
Gendering ontological security exogenously
With a few exceptions that expand the debate into the domain of foreign policy and relations between states, scholarly interventions on the interface of ontological security pursuits and gendering practices have largely concentrated on nations’ domestic politics and the role of the state as a purveyor of ontological security for its nationals. Interrogating the ‘masculinisation’ of Indian politics, for example, KinnvallFootnote 29 shows how under Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a populist leader, India’s foreign policy discourse has been recalibrated to feature hegemonic reinventions and reiterations of ‘nationhood’ along the gendered lines of ‘Hindu masculinity’. Drawing on feminist IR theory, Bilgic examines gendering as a means of ‘constructing power hierarchies between the West and non-West’Footnote 30 and how it may generate a sense of ‘gendered ontological insecurity’. Bilgic’s study in particular advances our understanding of the ways in which gendered interstate relations and hierarchical positionings of masculinities in international politics have a direct bearing on actors’ feelings of ontological (in)security. The emphasis on Connell’s differentiation between ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and ‘subordinate masculinities’Footnote 31 as well as on Hooper’s historical typology of individual and collective masculinities – ‘citizen-warrior masculinity’, ‘bourgeois-rational masculinity’ etc.Footnote 32 – is particularly notable in this respect.
That OSS has not accorded state gender much systematic consideration could be seen in Mitzen’s otherwise ground-breaking inquiry into the stability of security dilemmas for ontological security reasons,Footnote 33 where a gender analysis of attachment to routinised conflicts with significant others is conspicuous by its absence. This is perhaps because neither Anthony Giddens and R. D. LaingFootnote 34 nor the Realists on whose works Mitzen builds her theorisation of ontological security-seeking behaviour account for gender and how the gender aspects of identity construction may influence quests for ontological security. Interrogating the structural realist explanation that persistent security dilemmas – exemplified by ‘intractable conflicts’ or ‘enduring rivalries’ – are driven by uncertainty about states’ intentions, MitzenFootnote 35 contends that on the contrary states may in fact desire continuation of conflictual relations with significant others due to the ontologically reassuring sense of continuity, predictability, and certainty they cultivate.
Of course, adoption of gender lenses would further complexify this interaction-based, hence ‘exogenous’, account of ontological security. The gendering of state actors in terms of the gendered ways in which they conduct themselves in relation to others becomes more apparent when considering state type or ‘role identity’, which Mitzen does to postulate that ‘in trying to secure their types, states will secure the relationships that make those roles meaningful’.Footnote 36 The gender role or identity that a given state thus performs can affect its attachment to routines in at least two principal ways, that is, by informing the very choice of significant others with whom a certain mode of interaction – conflictual, cooperative, and so on – is to be routinised, and by influencing the degree to which such routinisation and attachment may be pushed and sustained. In other words, both the act of assigning social significance in the othering process and the manner of operationalising it in practice are mediated by gender identity and gendered construals.
Along these lines, as an empirical example, Mitzen’s attachment-centred ontological security frameworkFootnote 37 compellingly explains post-revolutionary Iran’s long-standing conflict with the United States despite its massive material and physical security costs. It can be equally persuasive in making sense of Tehran’s lasting, and costly, enmity with Israel as yet another source of ontological reassurance for the Islamic Republic, a ‘revolutionary’ actor with entrenched patriarchal and masculinist tendencies.Footnote 38 However, unless state gender identity and gendered conceptions of the self and others are accounted for, the theory may not be able to shed much light on the nature of, and variations in, these ontological security-generating conflictual relations.
It is not well equipped, for instance, to tell us why Iran has generally sought to maintain a manageable degree of antagonism to the United States, with a strong preference for ‘management’ of tensions,Footnote 39 but keeps pursuing unconditional enmity with Israel to the extent of openly calling for its ‘annihilation’. Notably, following a famous statement by Supreme Leader Khamenei in September 2015 that ‘Israel will not see the next 25 years’, a digital doomsday clock was unveiled in Tehran’s Palestine Square in June 2017, counting down the number of days Israel had left according to the prediction. The twelve-day Israel–Iran war in June 2025 reflects the culmination of this zero-sum hostility dynamic. In fact, while the United States is often viewed in a masculine light as the leader of the global system of domination and ‘headman’ of the global village,Footnote 40 Israel is remarkably feminised, infantilised, and dehumanised in the Iranian state discourse as ‘feebler than a spider’s nest’, ‘the region’s rabid dog’, and a ‘cancerous tumor’ that has to be uprooted.Footnote 41 Pertinently, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi derided Israel in a viral social media post after the war as having ‘NO Choice but to RUN to “Daddy” to avoid being flattened out by our missiles’.Footnote 42 In the ideological context of Iranian state patriarchy, these descriptions have strong gender implications, as they foreground association of Israel in an essentialist manner with weakness and inferiority, on the one hand, and with uncleanliness, contamination, and ‘pollution’, on the other.Footnote 43 This is one iteration of how ‘masculinization as valorization and feminization as devalorization’Footnote 44 operate in the OSS framework, demonstrating that integration of gender into the attachment dynamics can furnish OSS with greater nuance and purchase.
Gendering ontological security endogenously
The ‘endogenous’ approach to ontological security studies, which in IR tradition is primarily based on state actors’ ‘autobiographical narratives’ and espoused most characteristically by the writings of Brent Steele,Footnote 45 lends itself more readily to gender analysis. In addition to the narrative-oriented works on nationalism, populism, and globalisation reviewed earlier, there have been notable calls for taking onboard insights from feminist IR to ‘amend’ the narrative perspective of OSS by recognising that states’ self-conceptions are gendered and the dominant narratives they are centred upon are ‘masculine’.Footnote 46 This implies that, on the one hand, these masculinised stories about the self often depend for their viability and legitimacy on an ‘internal’ othering process that serves to suppress competing feminine counter-narratives of identity and thus, on the other hand, they could be interrogated, resisted, and subverted ‘from within’.Footnote 47 The mutual constitution of autobiographical narratives also points to the fluidity of states’ sense of self and cautions against assumptions or attempts that tend to homogenise self-identities.
Yet, while such a gender analysis of the competition of dominant/masculine and subjugated/feminine narratives within the state addresses an important lacuna in endogenous OSS, its exclusive emphasis on the internal dynamics of identity runs the risk of reifying the inside by overlooking threats to self that emanate from other, potentially more powerful and hegemonic, masculinities lying outside of the state. This gendered threat from without is salient not only from the perspective of exogenous OSS but also in light of the possibility that those internal feminine counter-narratives could be viewed by proponents of the dominant narrative as extensions of masculine external others bent on feminising the state self-identity, that is, as enemies within. In the case of Iran, this dynamic was exemplified by the so-called infiltration (nofouz) discourse introduced by the Iranian leadership in the wake of the July 2015 nuclear accord to warn against internalising identity narratives about the political malleability of the masculinist revolutionary state; this is discussed further in the empirical section.
What transpires in ontological (in)security terms in such circumstances and how agents may respond to radical disruptions in their gender identity has remained pretty much a moot point in the OSS framework. One port of departure would be a consideration of the experience of ‘shame’, which Steele theorises as ‘a discursive expression of remorse or regret’ that takes place ‘when actors feel anxiety about the ability of their narrative to reflect how they see themselves…when there exists too much distance between this biographical narrative and self-identity’.Footnote 48 Even though shame could be a by-product of disconnects in an actor’s gendered self-concept, a few caveats need to be considered: first, shame is usually the result of a ‘negative event’, a morally reprehensible and/or materially ruinous outcome that the agent has somehow brought about or contributed to, whereas destabilisation of gender self-identity does not necessarily follow from negative occurrences and might not culminate in a sense of shame as such; second, not all actors could be assumed to feel shame, which according to Young requires a ‘self-directed adverse judgment’ and an ‘audience before which he now feels degraded’.Footnote 49 This is especially true of those agents, such as Iran, that commit themselves to carving out a ‘revisionist’ self-identity that is defined by opposition to the prevailing order and reaffirmed every time they challenge its underlying structures, infusing them with a sense of ontological security.Footnote 50 These states might even take pride in, rather than feel ashamed of, defying certain norms of behaviour predominantly adhered to and upheld by the majority ‘audience’. Yet even agents who are so immune to shame and remorse could be susceptible, and responsive, to variations in their gender self-concepts.
Lastly and most crucially for the purposes of this study, due to the broad socio-political implications of gender and the numerous cultural meanings attached to it, disruptions in gender identity are expected to engender more radical and overarching ontological repercussions as the actor’s self-perceived position in relation to those meanings and categories will be dislocated. This is mainly because gender is a ‘categorization imbued with…an unpredictable array of further signifiers…a signal that sex and sexuality become power relations in society, and international society is no exception’.Footnote 51
Gender identity and ontological dislocation
Ontological dislocation is the concept this article employs to capture the phenomenon of gender self-identity destabilisation, as a process of horizontal and multidirectional rather than vertical and unidimensional disruption, indeed a multiplicity of simultaneous disconnects, that the self perceives or experiences in the form of what might amount to a metamorphosis of subjectivity. In other words, and as elaborated in detail below, ontological dislocation is a process of experiencing existential anxiety and insecurity spawned by a critical situation that specifically targets state gender or a state’s gender self-identity, destabilising all symbolic masculine/feminine qualities and characteristics associated with it. It is crucial to immediately clarify that gendering the state here is not to suggest that states are ungendered or genderless entities and thus need to be gendered or even to assign a state a specific gender (as a given), but basically means unpacking the ways in which states manufacture their self-concept with reference to gender as a simultaneously constructed and constitutive category. As Yuval-Davis has demonstrated in her study of gender and nation-states, notions of manhood and womanhood, masculinity and femininity, are integral to constructions and reproductions of nationhood and statehood, manifested in particular in her feminist argument that ‘it is women’ rather than gender-blind bureaucracies ‘who reproduce nations, biologically, culturally and symbolically’.Footnote 52
As pointed out earlier, a crucial underlying premise here is that subjects, including sovereign national-statal ones, do not have ‘natural identities’, but in fact their identities are ‘the effects of citational processes’ and constructed through ‘impersonation – whether one is impersonating someone of another sex or gender, someone of the same sex or gender, or even oneself’.Footnote 53 Pertinently, gendering the state requires far more than merely adding women, the feminine, or more broadly the ‘gender variable’ to explanations of state behaviour, identity, and international relations, simply because ‘gender constructions are relationally defined’ and intersect with other aspects of identity, involving ‘a whole series of gendered dichotomies’ where the masculine is generally valued over the feminine.Footnote 54 While mainstream IR has been critiqued by many feminists as reflective of a world of men and male dominance,Footnote 55 there is a nuanced spectrum of masculinities as well as femininities within and between ‘manly states’ that are valorised or devalorised based on a given actor’s gendered self-concept.
In this light, one may wonder, for instance, why the United States refused to enter hostage negotiations with the Islamic State (ISIS) terror group even though it was arguably the only way to save its kidnapped (and later beheaded) nationals.Footnote 56 And if the United States has an established policy or principle of ‘no negotiations with terrorists’, why has it held similar talks with the IRGC even though it has designated the Iranian military body as a terrorist entity? Was it because talks and concessions to a violent hyper-masculinist group like ISIS would project a weaker American masculinity or make it look and feel feminine, thus dislocating its masculinised self-concept ontologically? And what does it tell us about the gender self-identity of France and Spain, which did negotiate with ISIS and reportedly paid massive ransoms to bring home their kidnapped citizens?Footnote 57 Indeed, a performative view of both gender and statehood would help answer such questions and in particular elucidate what might ensue when a gender identity a state aspires to is disrupted by gendered practices and performances that do not align with that self-construal. Significantly, it is through such performative lenses that in Faking It, as a foundational work of queer IR, Cynthia Weber deconstructs the nexus of sex–gender–sexuality in US foreign policy, psychoanalysing the ‘identity crisis’ of a ‘masculinized’ sovereign American subject triggered by the ‘loss’ of a ‘feminized Cuba, its symbolic object of desire’.Footnote 58 In the face of Fidel Castro’s hyper-masculinised Cuba following the 1959 revolution, which had earlier served as the US’s ‘trophy mistress’, the United States ‘seemingly faced two options: either a symbolic castration – a loss of phallic power coded as an inability to produce meaning that resulted from a lack of a feminine object in which to “express” its masculine identity – or a queering/nonnormalizing of its subjectivity if it retained Cuba…as its object of desire’.Footnote 59 Since 1959, therefore, Weber concludes, the American state ‘has been “faking it” – “it” being a straight/normalized masculine hegemonic identity and the phallic power…that comes with such an identity’.Footnote 60
Feminist theorists, including in IR, have been prolific on the simultaneously constructed and constitutive nature of gender in social and political spheres. According to Connell, gender is a ‘structure of social practice’ where the ‘everyday conduct of life’ is organised not only in relation to what she dubs ‘a reproductive arena, defined by the bodily structures and processes of human reproduction’ but also through ‘symbolic practices’ in the realm of discourse, ideology, and culture.Footnote 61 Echoing Carver’s famous expression that gender ‘is neither a synonym for women nor for sex’,Footnote 62 Sjoberg similarly defines it as ‘a system of symbolic meaning that creates social hierarchies based on perceived associations with masculine and feminine characteristics’.Footnote 63 For Runyan and Peterson, it consists of ‘the socially learned behaviors, repeated performances, and idealized expectations that are associated with and distinguish between the prescribed gender roles of masculinity and femininity’.Footnote 64
Indeed, a conception of gender as a socially and historically constructed set of ‘repeated performances’, practices, and acts seems to be fittest for the purpose of ontological security studies, a broad framework for analysis that accentuates the central role of repetitions, routines, and continuity in managing existential anxiety and ensuring security of the self over time. In the ‘Preface’ to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble, Butler lays out a refined introduction to her theory of performativity along two major lines: that gender lacks an ‘interior essence’ but is basically the product of an anticipation that ‘conjures its object’, an expectation that produces the appearance or effect of an essence that it anticipates, and that gender comprises ‘a repetition and a ritual’ manufactured through a set of stylised bodily acts and ‘naturalized gestures’.Footnote 65
Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical claims on the ‘metaphysics of substance’ – that ‘there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed’ – Butler further postulates that the ‘substantive effect’ of gender is a matter of performative production, ‘constituting the identity it is purported to be’.Footnote 66 Thus for her, gender is invariably a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being’, that is, ‘not a doing by a subject that might be said to preexist the deed’, meaning that in point of fact it is the sustained commission of certain acts that compose and concoct gender identity rather than the other way around: ‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.’Footnote 67 The following excerpt offers a lucid synopsis of the theory:
Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender.Footnote 68
Equally crucial in this respect is the recognition that while gender is performatively constituted, it is at the same time constitutive of social structures, formations, and ‘configurations of practice’. In Connell’s words, ‘we find the gender configuring of practice however we slice the social world, whatever unit of analysis we choose’.Footnote 69
At the level of the symbolic, namely language, knowledge, and discourse, this constitution is primarily due to the opposing dualisms or ‘binary oppositions’ of masculine/feminine underpinning the ‘phallocentric’ logic at the heart of our system of signification, where masculinity is equated with positivity–presence and femininity with negativity–absence or lack. Articulated in Freudian psychoanalysis by ‘penis envy’, with ‘the penis being the only sexual organ of recognized value’, the female ‘lack’ or ‘atrophy’ here refers to that of phallus, ‘the transcendental signifier’ in Lacanian terminology that operates as the ‘primary organizer of the structure of subjectivity’ and constitutes the ‘a priori condition of all symbolic functioning’, a signifier whose absence in woman places her ‘outside the Symbolic’.Footnote 70
Unpacking the phallocentric order of signification, Luce Irigaray, a post-Lacanian feminist philosopher, postulates that phallocentrism functions through erasing and subsuming female ‘sexual difference’ – embodied by the fluid ‘self-caressing’ autoeroticism of ‘two lips in continuous contact’ as opposed to the dependent and needy pleasure economy of the penis – under the masculine ‘One’, ‘Oneness’, and ‘Sameness’ as the standard of a priori value, ‘of form…of the proper name, of the proper meaning’.Footnote 71 It is this ‘sexual indifference that underlies the truth of any science, the logic of every discourse’, with the feminine never defined ‘except as the inverse, indeed the underside, of the masculine’.Footnote 72 Thus, the phallocentric logic of consciousness constructs woman as the non-subject ‘other’ of man and reduces her ontology to an indefinitely ‘unrealized potentiality’ on which the phallic order, rather paradoxically, depends for its ontological sense-making. ‘Man’s only “passion”, therefore, is being’, Irigaray posits pointedly, ‘[y]et if this is the garden man cultivates, where is the soil? … Is she, by nature, a being that exists for/by another?’Footnote 73 Keen to articulate a feminist ontology beyond the grips of phallocentrism, she continues to deconstruct the ontological foundations of a phallic order and woman’s place in it by a series of critical interrogations:
Ontological status [of the phallus] makes her incomplete and uncompletable. She can never achieve the wholeness of her form. Or perhaps her form has to be seen – paradoxically – as mere privation? … She is both one and the other… She is equally neither one nor the other… Is she the reverse of the coin of man’s ability to act and move around in the physical world we are calling ‘place’? Is she unnecessary in and of herself, but essential as the non-subjective sub-jectum? As that which can never achieve the status of subject, at least for/by herself. Is she the indispensable condition whereby the living entity retains and maintains and perfects himself in his self-likeness? … In order to take full possession of himself, man will need to take over not only the potentiality and potency, but also the place, and all the little chinks (re)produced in his ceaseless drive to transform anything different and still self-defining into his own likeness.Footnote 74
Phallocentrism forges an oppositional–hierarchical system of ‘subordination of the feminine to the masculine order’ that operates on ‘the appearance of being the condition for the [epistemic] machinery’s functioning’.Footnote 75 It is a whole scheme or constellation of knowing, thinking, feeling, and being that simultaneously determines and hierarchises Man against/over Woman, Culture against/over Nature, Head against/over Heart, Form against/over Matter, and Day against/over Night, thus alienating the female from the ‘dark continent’ of her subjectivity and channelling her desire into ‘the flights of the sorceress and the fugues of the hysteric’.Footnote 76 Hélène Cixous, another post-Lacanian feminist philosopher, encapsulates the phallic logic of representation and signification pithily:
So…she is laid, ever caught in her chain of metaphors, metaphors that organize culture…ever her moon to the masculine sun, nature to culture, concavity to masculine convexity, matter to form, immobility/inertia to the march of progress, terrain trod by the masculine footstep… This opposition to woman cuts endlessly across all the oppositions that order culture. It’s the classic opposition, dualist and hierarchical… In fact, every theory of culture, every theory of society, the whole conglomeration of symbolic systems – everything, that is, that’s spoken, everything that’s organized as discourse, art, religion, the family, language, everything that seizes us, everything that acts on us – it is all ordered around hierarchical oppositions that come back to the man/woman opposition…Footnote 77
Gender identity, therefore, performatively composed as it is, is in fact the subject’s stylised and time-congealed relationship with the vast nexus of these dualist and hierarchical oppositions – hard/soft, tough/tender, competitive/caring, strong/weak, dominant/submissive, rational/irrational, prudent/impulsive, objective/subjective, orderly/disorderly, forceful/peaceful, and so forth.Footnote 78 In other words, the repeated and routinised ways in which an actor acts in relation to gender-laden dichotomous pairs and privileges one side of the dichotomy over the other constitutes their gender identity over time. The question that emerges for ontological security studies, then, is: what occurs when such a relationship is disrupted and destylised?
Ontological dislocation, implying a horizontal disjuncture or a series of simultaneous disconnects, is the answer to the above query. It is a ‘rhizomatic’ dispersal of destabilisation, to borrow a term from post-structuralist theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,Footnote 79 where disruptions and displacements spread across multiple sites and in manifold directions to permeate the totality of the subject rather than implicate a certain facet of subjecthood. While such dislocation of self-identity might be triggered by a single act of significant gender implications such as concessions in a round of negotiations or reconciliation with a powerful ancient adversary, its ontological effects are likely far more radical and less manageable, extending beyond those caused by a simple disruption in routinised relationships or a break in biographical continuity as a consequence of a shame-evoking course of action.
This is basically because gender identity, as shown earlier, does not consist of a single act or performance but is encompassing by nature, a ‘thick signifier’ that governs a wide network of privileged practices repeated and ritualised over time, so ontological dislocation may be presumed to involve at least three anxiety-inducing formations: 1) a loss of grip and control over salient aspects of the self that used to feel familiar and ‘in place’ but are now slipping out of hand, generating a sense of confusion, alienation, and estrangement; 2) a state of unease and apprehension about the self-perceived need to fall in line with and live up to new expectations of gender performance, that is, to start repeatedly privileging a different set of acts and navigate uncharted territories of practice; and finally 3) a sense of agitation and restlessness to restore the familiar order of gender and reclaim the jeopardised identity. In more concrete terms, the feeling of, say, acting like a woman for an agent who has historically sought to act like a man and thus whipped up a masculine self-identity as his principal compass of performance must be one of confusion, indeterminacy, and agitation produced, first and foremost, by the loss of self-sameness, a feeling that he is no longer the same subject, nor in the same subject position, as he has biographically and ritualistically known himself to be (in).
A common response to these radical modes of ontological insecurity, especially in a ‘manly’ milieu like the international society, is what Kinnvall has dubbed ‘securitization of subjectivity’, which refers to building walls of closure, protection, and purity around the (collective) self in relation to a ‘stranger-other’ and in an attempt to manufacture a singular, stable, and secure identity.Footnote 80 Securitisation of this sort is oftentimes underpinned by the logic of masculinist protection whereby ‘the role of the masculine protector puts those protected, paradigmatically women and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience’, as a security state wields paternalistic power over its subjects in the name of shielding them against threats, internal and external.Footnote 81 The Iranian state’s policies towards women serves as a telling instance of the masculinist control. The IRI leadership, for instance, opposed the UN 2030 agenda for its emphasis on gender equality as a prerequisite for sustainable development, with the Supreme Leader Khamenei repeatedly condemning such views as part of Western ‘enemies’ soft war’ against the nation through efforts to disintegrate the ‘family’ institution.Footnote 82 ‘On the basis of which logic’, he questioned in an April 2014 speech, ‘should we introduce women, whom God has created physically and emotionally for a special zone [in life], to areas that cause them suffering and hardship?’Footnote 83
What might render disruptions and variations in gender identity particularly unsettling for an agent is the prospect that once new structures of performance and expectations of how to act with respect to gender-signalling signifiers congeal and solidify, it would be tricky, socially and ontologically, to reconfigure them back to the ‘status quo ante’, creating an increasingly unpredictable and irreversible slide down the identity road. It is, therefore, no wonder that ontological dislocation prompted by jeopardisation of gender identity spurs a restless scramble for extraordinary measures to relocate, reclaim, and securitise the self. Along these lines, the Islamic Republic’s delegitimation of the 2022 ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement for women’s rights and liberties as a sedition to spread ‘promiscuity’ is highly relevant.Footnote 84 The state response to the feminist-spirited protests was not only one of brutal suppression that killed over 550 people,Footnote 85 but it was also followed by the passage of an overarching law called ‘Chastity and Hijab’ to criminalise ‘improper’ feminine behaviour in society and control women’s bodies.Footnote 86 This institutionalised exercise of masculinist control over women as reproducers of the nation echoed fears of state feminisation, gender identity transformation, and ontological dislocation in the wake of the 2015 nuclear accord and measures to counter them, which will be empirically illustrated in the next section.
Gendering Iran’s revolutionary identity and nuclear discourse
Ever since it came under the international spotlight in 2003, Iran’s controversial nuclear programme has been the central site of state identity politics and ontological (in)security dynamics. Today, over two decades on, who the IRI is (becoming) is intimately intertwined with how it acts and conducts itself in the nuclear policy area. It is a locus where almost all salient components of Iran’s state self-identity can be seen at play. Pitting the IRI against established world powers, the controversy has afforded it, inter alia, a position of singularity and uniquenessFootnote 87 as purportedly the only remaining ‘revolutionary state’ around that has refused to ‘betray its ideals’ but ‘defended its dignity and originality’, as Supreme Leader Khamenei highlighted in a speech marking the ‘second stride of the [1979] revolution’ on its fortieth anniversary.Footnote 88
The subjective complexities of this self–other construction process, however, cannot be adequately understood without close attention to its gendered aspects and the state’s gender identity. In the framework of both Iran’s foreign policy in general and that of its nuclear programme in particular, projection of a revolutionary self marked by defiance and resistance is inseparable from pursuit of an idealised masculine identity defined most characteristically by an exhibition of ‘moral virility’ (gheirat) as well as an ability to exercise ‘authority’ with ease (eghtedar). These highly political and gender-laden qualities connote the ideological primacy of a masculinist logic that deems paternalistic protection of honour signifiers and/or forceful fulfilment of supposedly sacred religious values an ethical obligation, that is, a virtue in and of itself.Footnote 89 Bakhtiar analyses gheirat from a cognitive linguistic perspective as ‘an emotional alarm system’ whose key function is to protect the self and anything/anyone that it holds dear against threatening others.Footnote 90 Gheirat in this sense also implies an underlying sense of entitlement and possession towards its objects. It would be safe to argue that for the Islamic Republic, revolutionary identity is, at its core, a hegemonic masculine identity imbued with moral self-righteousness, a desire for authority, and a propensity for protection of what the manly subject feels entitled to.Footnote 91
It is difficult to envisage a masculine identity thus informed absent a delineation of the principal objects of moral virility and patriarchal protectiveness that lie at the heart of it, namely namous and harim. Harim in Persian means sanctum, a site of sanctity with associations of privacy and intimacy that merits protection. Pertinently, namous is an originally Greek term that describes, in the Iranian context, a significant carrier or locus of honour that is exemplified by the female kin in marital and familial-tribal relations and whose uncontested protection and control represents the height of moral virility and underwrites the integrity of manliness. Perhaps the most notorious performance of gheirat as a fundamentally masculinist attribute that involves namous is honour killing, where the signifier of honour, usually a female, who is believed to have been violated or otherwise adulterated by a stranger-other in breach of the possession–protection nexus, is eliminated in order for familial-tribal honour to be cleansed and restored. Namous, however, is not limited to individuals and humans but may be extended to encompass collectivities and entities as well, like an ethnic ingroup, a popular cultural institution, a symbolic monument of historical import, a religious site of pilgrimage, a national initiative or military body, and so forth.
Speaking of which, Iran’s nuclear programme acquired such a gender-laden status during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–13), who rose to power on a platform, among other things, of protecting and reviving the nation’s ‘nuclear rights’.Footnote 92 This came after Tehran agreed in negotiations with European powers under former president Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005) to curb its nuclear activities, temporarily suspend uranium enrichment, and voluntarily implement the Additional Protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which granted the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors greater powers in their verification scheme, including unannounced inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities. Against this backdrop and upon assuming office in 2005, the Ahmadinejad administration, politically espoused by Supreme Leader Khamenei and the IRGC, started promoting a discourse of resistance against ‘world bullies’ on the nuclear question that revolved around the notions of gheirat, namous, and harim.Footnote 93 Accordingly, Tehran resumed uranium enrichment and suspended implementation of the Additional Protocol, with Ahmadinejad emphasising in numerous speeches at the time the ‘non-negotiability of the nation’s nuclear rights’.Footnote 94 In the words of Ahmad Shirzad, a former reformist parliamentarian who has been critical of the discursive attempt to render the atomic programme a ‘state namous’, ‘when something turns into namous, one can no longer bargain over it’.Footnote 95 Ahmadinejad went as far as to repeatedly declare the ‘closure’ of Iran’s nuclear file,Footnote 96 setting the stage for a wide array of international, including UN, sanctions against the country. From July 2006 to June 2012, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed altogether eight resolutions specifically concerning Tehran’s nuclear activities.
The widespread dissatisfaction with the political and economic costs of a gheirat-centred approach to foreign policy, including an exacerbated ‘strategic loneliness’ on the world stage,Footnote 97 manifested itself most unequivocally in a landslide victory in 2013 presidential elections for moderate forces headed by Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Javad Zarif. The ascent to power of moderates who, unlike their predecessors, were open to realistic concessions as part of a negotiated settlement of the nuclear dispute helped replace the dominant discourse of masculinist possession–protection – of the nuclear rights as namous – with a comparably feminist ‘ethics of care’Footnote 98 for national prosperity and public well-being. The new discursive reprioritisation was best encapsulated by then President Rouhani’s emblematic statement that along with the continued rotation of centrifuge cylinders for uranium enrichment – that guaranteed the progress of the nuclear programme – ‘the wheels of economy and people’s lives should also continue to rotate’.Footnote 99 Crucially, this shift in politics of discursive privileging reflected the rare empowerment of a long-subdued national desire for change in the IRI’s masculine self-conception and masculinist performance of foreign and security policy accordingly. This compelled Supreme Leader Khamenei to publicly advocate ‘heroic flexibility’Footnote 100 on the nuclear question that paved the way for a historic accord between Iran and world powers in 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Khamenei’s qualification of ‘flexibility’ with ‘heroic’ was particularly significant from a gender identity perspective as it revealed deep anxieties and an underlying sense of ontological insecurity about the potentially feminising effects of a major reconciliation with the ‘arrogant’ and ‘bullying’ West on Iran’s masculine self-construal, revolutionary identity, and righteous nuclear behaviour. Indeed, a sense of ontological dislocation had started to take form, characterised at this stage by perceived imminent loss of control over familiar facets of the revolutionary self as masculine and a consequent feeling of alienation. ‘A wrestler who exercises flexibility for a tactical reason should not forget who his rival is and what his goal is’, Khamenei cautioned in the same speech.Footnote 101 And the embattled wrestler’s chief goal was in fact to reaffirm and perpetuate, rather than reform and propitiate, his manly revolutionary character by utilising what was ideally meant to be a single-issue tactical agreement with powerful opponents to take much enervating pressure off his shoulders for as long as possible and obtain as much breathing room at home and abroad as he could.
The JCPOA was, however, far more than a tactical or technical deal. The unprecedented flexibility it involved and epitomised was hoped by its architects and proponents to soften up the Iranian state, to permeate other arenas of political practice, and therefore transform its revolutionary tradition of performance and masculinist self-identity over time. This was supposed to be achieved externally through integrating Iran in the international community and internally through empowering the Iranian civil society to press its democratising demands with greater vigour. As a result, the hardline patriarchal leadership in Tehran felt that not only had it been compelled to show some substantive softness on a highly significant matter of ‘state namous’ but also that this was just the beginning of the state feminisation process and much more flexibility was to be exercised down the road. In fact, the manly state felt it had acted like a woman and far more of such feminine acting, practicing, and performing was on the horizon. Sovereign nation-states, as Weber astutely points out, ‘are not pre-given subjects but subjects in process’, and ‘all subjects in process (be they individual or collective) are the ontological effects of practices which are performatively enacted’.Footnote 102
Thus perceived, the historic diplomatic accord of July 2015 represented a rare moment of ontological dislocation for the Islamic Republic of Iran, destabilising the gender foundations of its masculine revolutionary self-concept, that is, the time-congealed state gender. The idea for JCPOA proponents was that if the IRI could subscribe to a compromise of such scope and significance it could probably repeat the same kind of performance with respect to so many binary oppositions of which it had characteristically privileged the masculine side in the name of revolutionary acting for decades. And if so, then those repeated performances would congeal into a new state identity away from moral virility and revolutionary manliness over time, an identity that would structurally privilege detente over confrontation, prosperity over resistance, cooperation over defiance, integration over isolation, flexibility over rigidity, and so forth. Indeed, to leave no doubt about the plausibility of this anticipated trajectory, proposals were publicly propounded about the initiation of a ‘regional JCPOA’ as well as a ‘domestic JCPOA’ by no other figure than moderate President Rouhani himself – and vehemently dismissed by hardliners, not least Supreme Leader Khamenei.Footnote 103 And this reflected the second facet of ontological dislocation where a deep sense of anxiety developed about the emerging expectations of performance in contradiction with Iran’s masculine self-concept and the need for privileging a different set of practices perceived as feminine.
The masculinist backlash was already underway. The agreement had clearly destabilised and dislocated the IRI’s highly gendered self-identity as if it were not the kind of ‘doing’ that would become a manly revolutionary state. It sent hardliners scrambling for new ways and narratives to discredit the deal, restore the virile self-image of the Islamic Republic, and reclaim their position in it as true revolutionaries. A powerful counter-narrative revolved primarily around the notion that the nuclear accord was a moderate ‘sellout’ to the West, that moderates in charge of the executive sold out Iran’s hard-won atomic achievements, that is, its national carrier of honour (namous), to the enemies of the state, and in so doing betrayed the moral ideals of the revolution.Footnote 104 Suggesting the deeply gendered nature of the identity threat posed by the deal, some hardline critics went as far as to accuse proponents of marathon negotiations that culminated in the JCPOA of ‘pofyouzi’ – pimposity or cuckoldry in Persian – for exhibiting ‘liberal’ tendencies and lacking gheirat in defending and protecting what they had long framed as a state namous and a national harim.Footnote 105 The subject noun ‘pofyouz’ or ‘dayyouth’ is a derogatory term in Persian reserved for a man who has a weak moral character and fails to show moral virility (gheirat) when his namous, female kin in particular, is disrespected or otherwise violated.Footnote 106
The ontological threat to the IRI’s gender identity had to be neutralised through a set of securitising moves. Perhaps the most decisive of them came in an address by Khamenei to commanders of mobilisation forces (Basij) – a paramilitary organisation affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards – a few months after the JCPOA was signed. In that influential speech, the Supreme Leader warned against the ‘great danger’ of infiltration-influence (nofouz) as an insidious endeavour on the part of Iran’s enemies to infiltrate various parts of the body politic and ‘build networks of influence within the nation’ in order ultimately to ‘change beliefs, change ideals, change perspectives, change lifestyles…that is, to do something so that the influenced subject thinks the same way a certain American does’.Footnote 107 These securitising iterations and practices suggested a deep desire for protection of the sovereign nation-state subject as masculine, reflecting the culmination of ontological dislocation evident above all in a sense of restlessness to restore the supposedly dissipating masculine self-concept of the state. Given the extremely broad semantic scope of the concept nofouz, any nonconformist and alternative way of thinking and acting could be interpreted at will as reeking of adversarial foreign influence, hence a legitimate target for suppression and elimination. By that token, as he and security authorities alike later emphasised, one could even be an infiltrator without knowing it herself.Footnote 108 The Iranian leadership’s threat framing was therefore not only an unmistakable signal to the state security apparatus to suppress change-seeking forces and initiatives that had been empowered by the nuclear accord, but more significantly it was a concerted attempt at ‘securitisation of subjectivity’ that sought to govern, control, and eventually homogenise hearts and minds in the self-image of a masculinist Islamic Republic.
Over the following months and years, the IRGC pursued a systematic ‘counter-infiltration campaign’, particularly targeting academics, environmentalists, entrepreneurs, civil society groups, and even non-governmental charities whom the state found to be a creeping threat to its revolutionary identity.Footnote 109 At the same time, Iran doubled down on its revisionist regional agenda and bolstered material and military support for the so-called axis of resistance in the Middle East, all to demonstrate that it had stayed true to its revolutionary self and that a historic breakthrough with the West, albeit potentially transformative, was not supposed to translate into a transformation of subjectivity and character. With the ontological dislocation caused by the JCPOA thus addressed and the identity threat of state feminisation thus averted, all the rest flowing from the accord was a bonus. Significantly, the Supreme Leader capitalised on the occasion of US withdrawal from the nuclear agreement in 2018 to categorically ban negotiations on ‘namous-category issues of the revolution’ with ‘others’ including Europeans, insisting that Iran will neither ‘bargain’ nor ‘compromise’ on its defence capabilities: ‘It is like the story of that suitor who was asked, what happened?’ Khamenei quipped, ‘And he said all has proceeded [well] except two things: we say we want your daughter, and they say you eat crap!’Footnote 110
Conclusion
This article has been an intellectual endeavour to advance ontological security studies (OSS) by theorising gender as a ‘property of collectivities, institutions and historical processes’Footnote 111 more centrally into its analytic framework and scrutinising the consequences of disruptions in gender identity at the state level. After a critical investigation of exogenous and endogenous approaches to ontological (in)security dynamics from a gender perspective, it adopts Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity as well as Hélène Cixous’s and Luce Irigaray’s feminist critiques of ‘phallocentrism’ to theorise state gender and demonstrate its relevance to OSS through a performative view of statehood. A critical probe into ‘phallocentrism’ and its ontological underpinnings and implications in the symbolic sphere of language and knowledge sheds further light on gendered acts and performances, discursively and historically organised around dualistic oppositions where masculinity is valorised by association with presence–activity and femininity devalorised by association with lack–passivity. In light of the vast expanse of these gender-defining oppositional dualisms that underpin our system of signification, ontological dislocation is proposed as a new theoretical conceptualisation to articulate processes of gender identity destabilisation and disruptions in state actors’ gender self-concepts. Due to its horizontal dispersal and rhizomatic rippling across a wide network of stylised characteristics and ‘naturalised gestures’ that constitute one’s gender identity, ontological dislocation, it is further argued, amounts to a radical sense of ontological insecurity and existential anxiety beyond what might be caused by a temporal disconnect in autobiographical narratives and/or a linear rupture in patterns of routinised attachment to significant others. The resultant theoretical framework is finally applied for empirical illustration to the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) as a masculinist revolutionary state, with special focus on how the nuclear accord of July 2015 with world powers destabilised its manly identity and masculine self-concept, and how the ensuing ontological dislocation manifested itself in the state’s radical response.
Lastly, this research is a testament to the wide reach of gender that extends far beyond quotidian dynamics of power relations to ‘existential questions and existentialist ideas’ of inevitable anxiety, ontological insecurity, perpetual struggle, and contingency of human existence that inform much IR theorising today while ‘lurk[ing], largely unnoticed, in its shadows and background’.Footnote 112 Operating within and through the symbolic, gender necessarily mediates subjectivity and conditions the individual as well as collective subjects’ ontological sense of self. After all, ‘where there are humans, there is gender’,Footnote 113 so if we accept that gender is inherently entangled with identity and identity constructions are necessarily gendered by nature, then it logically follows that ontological security studies as a framework of analysis that primarily concerns itself with security of being/becoming and self cannot be detached from, or neutral to, gender dynamics.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge Catarina Kinnvall’s unwavering support, Soumita Basu’s thoughtful guidance, and the three anonymous reviewers’ rigorous feedback, without which this publication would not be possible.
Open access
