The intimate politics of insurgency

Abstract

How is women’s engagement in armed insurgency shaped by intimacy? This article seeks to answer this question by exploring how political struggle for women is caught up in the entanglements of the intimate and the political. Drawing on fieldwork on the Bangsamoro conflict in Mindanao, Philippines, it analyzes four women’s stories about their trajectories as insurgents. Their accounts reveal that relational ties of kin, community, and marriage bound them to the insurgency and preceded ideological commitment; however, these relational ties also ruptured their involvement. Moreover, collective and personal closeness with war made political struggle an inevitable part of growing up and surviving. Contradictory commitments, dilemmas, and disruptions in their relational lives caused by critical events of conflict are read in the women’s political participation. The article’s conceptual answer is an intimate politics of insurgency, which underwrites women’s engagement and, more importantly, their maneuvers to fulfill conflicting political, ideological, relational, and gendered obligations. Intimate politics, I argue, brings attention to women’s work of unsettling and remaking boundaries between the intimate/private and the political/public, which allows them to reconcile continued political action and life as a whole inside conflict.

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