Research Methods in Critical Security Studies, 2nd Edition

32 Reading the maternal body as political event

Tina Managhan

DOI: 10.4324/9781003108016-37

Objects of inquiry: bodies as events¹

When the knock on the door came on April 4, 2004, Cindy Sheehan, an American woman and a mother of three, said she already knew the message that was to come: her son, deployed in Iraq only five days prior, had been killed in the line of duty. According to Sheehan (2006), a part of her died that day as well; she would, or could, never be the same. Such were the beginnings of a profound personal/political transformation that was born from a collision of the local and the global which would reverberate with both local and global effects. The events that were to follow were of weighty consequence for Sheehan, her ...