Risky Assignments

This article analyzes the post-feminist, neo-liberal construction of “risk” and “security” in a recent set of post-9/11 training manuals for non-embedded journalists who prepare to work in what security texts call “hostile environments.” It investigates the ways these training documents translate ideas about risk and reporting, through the language of choice, into sexed and gendered prescriptive cues about securing professional comportment in the field. While the documents present the potential risks of hostile environments in terms of a kind of “sexual equity of risk,” this article argues that security training texts re-sex journalism through photographs and diagrams which put the man back into the war zone.