Stern, Maria. "Gender and race in the European security strategy: Europe as a 'force for good'?". Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol.14, No.1 (2011): 28-59.

Stern, Maria. "Gender and race in the European security strategy: Europe as a 'force for good'?". Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol.14, No.1 (2011): 28-59.

• The author adopts a gender dichotomy between the US as a masculine Mars and Europe as a feminine Venus as the starting point for her analysis of the European Security Strategy [ESS], as well as racial undertones in that document (29-31). The reasons why European security policy is 'gendered' are totally unclear.
• The author argues that "protector-protected, hard-soft, order-anarchy, rational-emotional, state-nation, war-peace, civilisation-barbarism and Mars-Venus", are all gendered pairs (33).
• "In the introduction to the ESS, Europe is firmly established as a ‘global player’ [...] there are several lines of distinction which carve it [the globe] into spatio-temporal zones of (modern) civility and community, of rational good governance and zones that lag both developmentally (temporally) and morally behind. These lines of distinction produce [...] notions of ‘Europe’, which, [...] establish Europe as a ‘coherent, capable, and active’ security actor" (36).
• The author claims that the order-chaos dichotomy set up between Europe and the outside -- wherein Europe is orderly and secure, and the outside poses danger -- is a racial and gendered dichotomy between 'masculine, white' Europe and a 'feminine, black' outside (36-38).
• The discussion of organized crime and terrorism in the ESS constructs Europe as a vulnerable 'feminine' body prone to misuse and threat by bad 'masculine' threats from abroad. Therefore, 'good men' from Europe must be vigilant and protect the 'feminine' motherland from attack (41-42).
• "The new (masculine) Europe (as depicted in the ESS) has overcome its uncivilised, violent turmoil and chaos and adopted its true form of rational, capable, and morally superior countenance". Dr. Stern also claims that this past is 'feminine' while the modern contemporary Europe is 'masculine' (43).
• The superiority of European morality, rationality, and governance expressed in the ESS is suggested to be necessary to uplifting the backward portions of the world. This is another expression of the 'white man's burden', suggesting that the inferior outside needs European help to advance to the moral standard of Europe (44).
• The expansionist nature of organized crime, terrorism, and state failure actually require rapid intervention to prevent situations nearby from worsening. This implies that the outside world really will fail without European assistance (46).
• "These emotional Others appear as barbaric, backwards, aggressive, authoritarian and unpredictable (chaotic), and thereby pose a great threat to both Europe and the world more generally. The emotional irrationalities of the ‘Others’ render them feminised. However, the constructions of barbarianism and aggression make the ‘Other’ also dangerously (and by far inferiorly) masculine at the same time" (47).
• "Some of the very characteristics typically accepted as feminine (i.e. ‘soft’ power, moral purity, cooperation, and internationalist good-will) can also be marked as masculine in relation to divergent feminised Others and subordinated masculinities" (48). 
• This is a great example of how insane and meaningless a lot of 'gendered' analyses are. The characteristics can be attached to either gender, because gender is not a great lens for the relationship.