My book, Gender Is a Weapon: Liberalism, Difference, and US Counterinsurgency, will be published as the first book in the new Critical Militarization Studies series at the University of Michigan Press in October 2026. https://press.umich.edu/Books/G/Gender-Is-a-Weapon2

Based on over fifteen years of archival and ethnographic research, this book is an account of the US military’s institutionalization of gender difference as a strategic and tactical instrument for its counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Historically contextualized amid the socio-economic transformations of the late twentieth century and centering the narratives of Black women, Indigenous women, women of color, queer women, and immigrant women, this book carefully attends to violent paradoxes and impossible promises of liberal inclusion.

My research has also been published in leading American Studies, International Relations, Security Studies, and Feminist Studies journals. Select publications are below.

Select Publications

  1. “Affective Technologies of War: US Female Counterinsurgents and the Performance of Gendered Labor,” Radical History Review (123): 60-86.

  1. “Sexual Violence and the U.S. Military: Feminism: U.S. Empire, and the Failure of Liberal Equality,” Feminist Studies 42 (1): 41-69. * Winner of the Claire Moses Goldberg Award* 

  1. “Men, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence in the U.S. Military,” in Zalewski, M., Drumond, P., Prügl, E. and Stern, M. (eds.) Sexual Violence against Men and Boys in Global Politics. New York: Routledge, pp. 57-70. 

  1. “Counterinsurgency, Community Participation, and the Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism Agenda in Kenya,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 33 (4-5): 720-741.

  1. “Beyond Instrumentalisation: Gender and Agency in the Prevention of Extreme Violence in Kenya,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 15(3): 610-631.

  1. “Combat Exclusion Policies and the Management of Gender Difference in the U.S. Military,” in Bailey, B., Doan, A., Portillo, S., and Vuic, K. (eds.) Managing Sex in the U.S. Military: Gender, Identity, and Behavior. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 245-274.
  1. “P/CVE-as-Counterinsurgency: Police Violence and Police Reform in Kenya’s Counterterrorism Agenda.” Security Dialogue 56 (4): 299-315. Co-authored with Darja Schildknecht.