Worlding Women

A Feminist International Politics

Jan Jindy Pettman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134744909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Worlding Women Jan Jindy Pettman asks 'Where are the women in international relations'? She develops a broad picture of women in colonial and post-colonial relations; racialized, ethnic and national identity conflicts; in wars, liberation movements and peace movements; and in the international political economy.
Bringing contemporary feminist theory together with women's experiences of the `international', Pettman shows how mainstream international relations is based on certain constructions of masculinity and femininity. Her ground-breaking analysis has implications for feminist politics as well as for the study of international relations.

PART 1

THE GENDERED POLITICS OF IDENTITIES

1

Women, gender and the state

States and sovereignty are at the centre of the practice and study of international relations. ‘States continue to monopolise our understanding of how we organise ourselves politically, how political identity is constituted, and where the boundaries of political community are drawn’ (Peterson, 1992a: 31). This is seen in the many who identify themselves as ‘Australian’, ‘Japanese’ or ‘Chilean’, for example, and in the widespread rallying behind a state in times of war.

Feminist critiques reveal the state, and citizenship, to be gendered. This chapter asks how the ‘body politic’ comes to be associated with male bodies, and why women find it so difficult to become full citizens of their state. This is especially so with regard to the IR state in its foreign policy, and in its military and security concerns. This warfare state is highly problematic for women, and for many men (Peterson, 1992a; Tickner, 1992).

IR has long taken the state for granted. Yet women's and men's experiences of states and citizenship vary enormously, within and between states. And states are changing, as intensifying processes of globalisation and fragmentation undermine states from above and below. States, sovereignty, and so IR, require rethinking, in ways that take both global dynamics and gender relations seriously (Peterson, 1995).

Sovereign states

State sovereignty makes a place for IR, as the discipline carves out territory for itself in the space between states. It does so by drawing a distinction between the inside of states, which it relegates to other disciplines, such as sociology and political science; and the outside of states, misnamed international, but usually meaning interstate relations. This distinction between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘international’ is used to construct a particular understanding of the world. The inside of states is imagined as a place where order reigns, while the outside is seen as beyond community, a place of anarchy, danger and foreigners.

The linked ideas of ‘states and sovereignty’ encourage a conflation of space, territory and identity (Walker, 1993). Sovereignty declares the supreme political authority of the state against both internal and external competition. Sovereignty is an assumption about authority (R. Pettman, 1991), a right of command and an expectation of obedience and loyalty. It is backed up by the state's claim to a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, and by its readiness to use force in pursuit of national interests. This is the special form of the IR state, where security becomes national security, the security of the state; hence IR's focus on wars and violence between states, despite the overwhelming experience of violence within states.

‘States and sovereignty’ privilege the particular over the universal, placing loyalty to the state above loyalty to humankind. It allows for the fictive ‘state as person’ of IR, so that we speak of ‘Iraq’ invading Kuwait, or ‘Australia’ protesting against French nuclear testing in the Pacific. Sovereignty refers to a set of rules or social practices, to ‘what a state must do to be (recognised as) a state’ (Weber, 1992: 200). These include consolidating dominant authority within the state, and representing the people of the state in the international, even though many states do not have effective control over all their territory or population. Sovereignty allows the state to speak for its people, regardless of how many of those people recognise its legitimacy. In this sense, it becomes a substitute or an alibi for a ‘domestic community’ (Weber, 1992: 215).

‘States and sovereignty’ territorialise political identity, so the people within the territorial boundaries of the state are expected to give their primary loyalty to the state. States also homogenise political identities in ways that disguise differences within the state—including gender differences—and create differences between states. They draw border lines along bounded space containing people, and charge the state with policing the boundaries, to keep the right people in and the wrong people out. To do this, the state requires a bureaucracy and centralised authority, the means of organised violence and of manufacturing consent, and a citizenry that it both disciplines and represents. The state's construction of “security” and “sovereignty” and its mobilisation of militarism and nationalist ideologies are particularly significant factors in consolidating and effectively reproducing centralised authority’ (Peterson, 1992a: 4–5).

There is a close connection between state-making and war-making. States claim a monopoly of legitimate use of force, and the power to determine what force is legitimate. States have been described as protection rackets (Tilly, 1985), assuming rights, control and reward for ‘protecting’ citizens, while their own behaviour is often what most threatens those it supposedly protects. Ken Booth suggests that many states resemble mafia neighbourhoods.

To countless millions of people in the world it is their own state, and not ‘the Enemy’, that is the primary security threat. In addition, the security threat to the regimes running states is often internal rather than external. It is almost certainly true that more governments around the world at this moment are more likely to be toppled by their own armed forces than by those of their neighbours (Booth, 1991: 318).

The narrowness of IR's focus, on wars and violence between states, was one reason the discipline was so taken by surprise by the end of the Cold War, and the dramatic conflicts around national identities and contestations for state power in the contemporary world.

Making the state

Gendered and feminist analyses reveal that the state is in almost all cases male dominated, and is in different ways a masculinist construct. It is simply not possible to explain state power without explaining women's systematic exclusion from it (Runyan and Peterson, 1991).

There is now much debate about the nature of politics and society, about the origin and development of states, and their relation to patriarchy. Feminist IR has reexamined foundation texts in western liberal political theory. It has tracked women's exclusion from public power, revealing the citizen who is presumed to be male (Elshtain, 1981; 1990; Grant, 1991). Indeed, it has revealed gendered states (Peterson, 1992a).

Feminist tracings of early state formation focus on the emergence and consolidation of public political power and the centralisation of authority, which simultaneously (though in different forms in different times and places) displaced autonomous kin communities, and constituted a separate domestic or private sphere that came to be associated with women and the feminine. Myths of the origins of Greek city-states inform western political theory, now incorporated into IR. The transition to institutionalised forms of domination and control were gendered. The Athenian polis marks the emergence of the (free) male citizen, and the construction of public space as male. Politics involved performance and appearance in the public space. In the private space of the home, women, children and slaves lived and worked to provide for the physical and emotional needs of men thus freed to go about their public and citizen duties.

In many non-western political economies, too, there was a long historical process of state formation, through which patriarchal norms became so extensive and entrenched as to become invisible (Lerner in Silverblatt, 1988: 445). Gradually and unevenly, states developed over the period 3100 to 600 BC in the ancient Near East. In Asia, for example in China, patriarchal states also developed. In many places regional or local authorities were rather less centralised or formalised, while in other places autonomous kin communities remained the basis of political and social order, at least until colonisation disrupted local power relations.

The modern state system dates from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, marking the end of the European religious wars. European state forms were imposed through wars and globally through colonisation. European settler states emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in the Americas, and later in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa for example. The modern state was globalised through decolonisation after World War 2, so that now almost everyone lives in an internationally recognised sovereign state.

Under colonisation, European state-making processes were reproduced in other parts of the world, through the consolidation of centralised government and power. Colonised elites mobilised against foreign control but rarely against the introduced forms of political authority, seeking to take over the state rather than to remove it. Beginning in colonial rule and often intensifying since decolonisation, state-making included the conceding of local political power and resources to the state by some men, in return for men's increased control over their families (Charlton et al., 1989: 180). These processes strengthened the public/private divide, and increasingly subordinated women within the private—though the location and meaning of this divide was never fixed or uncontested.

States are historical and contingent. They are ongoing projects and a lot of work goes into keeping them going. State-making is a process that is neither inevitable nor unilinear. States themselves, or those who control and administer them, define boundaries of belonging and authority. The state itself becomes a player in politics; it plays in its own interests.

Gendered states

Classical western political thinkers, such as Plato and Aristotle, and those theorising the development and meaning of the modern state system, such as Hobbes and Locke, didn't ignore gender in the ways that contemporary theorists often do. Instead they incorporated notions of difference, of biology or culture, as reasons for excluding women from the political. Carole Pateman's retelling of the myth of origin (1988) sees the overthrow of the despotic fathers through a fraternal contract establishing the political rule of (elite) men and the gender rule of men as a group over women as a group. This contract did not simply overlook women, but was constituted on the basis of their exclusion. It established men's sex right to women's bodies and labour, and was a contract of citizenship, a political fraternity or brotherhood. Not all men were admitted to public power, but all men were admitted to sex right, to women's unpaid labour, sexual services and reproductive powers—to women's bodies.

The enlightenment's man turns out, indeed, to be a man. The state subject becomes an individual male—citizen, soldier, worker—a reasonable man. Women are not only different, but constructed in relation to men, and given inferior value. This gender dichotomy includes men as active, women as passive; men as heads of households and breadwinners, and women as their dependents (Peterson and Runyan, 1993).

Men move from public to private and back again. They are in positions of authority over unequals in the domestic sphere and recognised as individuals and citizens in the public sphere (or elite men are). Women are contained and constrained in the home and in their sexed bodies. Because public space is male, and women are seen as belonging in the private, women appearing in public space appear ‘out of place’. ‘“The body politic” is masculinised, and a conflict is set up between female bodies and public space’ (Jones, 1993: 78). There is a complex, shifting and contested association of women with the domestic, but also with sexuality and danger, which makes women especially vulnerable to attack if they are seen as beyond protection, or out of control (Afshar, 1987).

‘In the history of political theory, sex and woman go together like man and the polis’ (Brown, 1987: 5). What has it meant to displace sex onto woman, and to see sex as not political? Men's disembodied political sphere and women's sexualised domestic one reflects the saturation of the female but not the male body with sex. Women are then constructed as needing disciplining; for female passions can ensnare or distract men, or set them up in competition with each other.

Adriana Cavarero (1992) critiques the forgetting, the radical erasure of the feminine and the domestic in the construction of politics and political theory, through the ‘universalization of masculinity’ in modern political thinking. The female and the domestic sphere in which she belongs ‘naturally’ is obscured, although the female labour and sexual services within it support and allow the male/public/political to function. A failure to ‘see’ women makes possible the transformation of ‘man’ into a supposedly neutral and universal being. This repression that excludes female difference can only allow female inclusion at the cost of homologising them—of making women become or be seen as being like men.

Through the work of many a male political theorist, the public/political of the individual citizen takes on the characteristics of the masculine, associating manhood with ruling. Independence is a quality of the political man, disconnected, impartial, unlike the private female, who is connected, dependent, nurturing, or—alternatively—unruly, sexual, disorderly. In either case, she needs to be under the protection/control of a man (to protect her—or to protect the polis/the man from her?). The relegation of women away from the public sphere facilitates the definition of the political as that where the female and femininity are absent, and constitutes the male citizen and masculine authority. This heritage informs IR's construction of states and international politics. ‘Men, states and wars were the bases of theory, not women’ (Grant, 1991: 21).

Women and the state

Feminists theorising the state and women's relations with it fre-quently focus on the welfare state in the west, the effects of transition to a market economy in Eastern Europe, and on women and development in ‘the third world’. Even within states, generalisations about women and the state are difficult.

‘The state’ is an abstraction that refers to a set of relations, practices and institutions. States are not monolithic, uniform or unitary. Each state consists of a variety of sites, institutions, operations and functions, ranging in western states, for example, through warfare, policing, welfare and state funding for community organisations. States try to maintain conditions for capital accumulation, and manage productive relations and the labour market. States also attempt to contain different groups’ claims in the face of political mobilisation, including claims by those who seek to escape from state power or to renegotiate their relations with the state.

Western liberal democratic states are interventionist states (Yeat-man, 1990). They are highly bureaucratised, with a huge information gathering capacity, and a reach that affects almost everyone in every aspect of life (Sassoon, 1987). They are male states, in terms of those who ‘man’ them, although, especially in the Scandinavian states, there are significant numbers of women in higher positions. The state is still largely masculinist, in its assumption of (elite) male interests and characteristics as the norm, though in some states there is now a feminist presence, often marginalised and contained. What the state does is heavily gendered. The state is ‘the main organiser of the power relations of gender’ (Connell, 1990: 520) through its legislation and policies, and the ways it is implicated in the construction of the public/private.

The impact of state action and inaction is gendered, affecting men as a group and women as a group differently. Even within any one state, it is very difficult to generalise ‘an entire range of relationships between groups of women in particular locations and a variety of state policies, agencies and processes’ (Randall, 1987: 14). But we can say that women as a group are more dependent on the state than men. Much of the provisioning that is directed at women as women or as mothers comes as a result of long decades of struggle. There is a very complex politics here, as women's organisations and feminists direct demands at the state, for more services or protection, while many are profoundly suspicious of the state and its implication in the reproduction of unequal gender relations.

Different feminists conceive of the state and of women's actual and potential relations with it differently. While the labels that emerged from experiences with western states are now often inadequate even in the west, we can identify tendencies or associations (Hurnm, 1992). Liberal or equality femininists seek to end state-directed or -sanctioned discrimination against women, and urge state action for women's equal rights. The state is dominated by men, but increasing women's access and power can alleviate gender inequalities. Socialist feminists see the state as propagating dominant class as well as gender interests, and often race and ethnic interests as well. They are therefore more ambivalent towards the state and the possibilities of using the state for feminist goals. While seeking state transformation, many also recognise the need to engage with the state in defence of women's practical gender interests now (Molyneux, 1985). Radical feminists who prioritise women's oppression and see the male state as part of that oppression are often hostile to any further intrusion of the state into women's lives; yet many also urge state action in defence of women's rights. Feminist commentators remark upon the ironies of appealing to a masculinist state for protection against the violence of individual men (Brown, 1992; Alvarez, 1990).

Individual feminists also find themselves taking up different positions in relation to the state at different times. This reflects the complexity of women's different relations with the state (Pettman, 1992a). States’ construction of women as mothers, for example, helps constitute women's unpaid work, an enormous subsidy to the state and to employers. States have long resisted any responsibility for women's security from male violence, and become complicit by not taking violence against women seriously. As well, it is often agents of the state, especially police and military, who are major abusers of women's rights. At the same time, state legislation and provision can make a profound difference to women's survival and choices.

Often, women are treated by the state in ways officially ungendered, as citizens or workers; and yet we know that women's experiences of citizenship and the labour market are radically different from men's. Women also organise and approach the state as claimants and as political activists, where they may or may not constitute themselves as women. They are often dependents of the state, as the vast majority of old-age pensioners or single supporting mothers, for example. Many women are also state workers—in a gendered division of labour—mainly in teaching, nursing, social work, or helping, service and clerical roles. They are rarely in positions of policy or power. Women's work compensates for states’ inadequate or inappropriate services, and makes invisible adjustments in the face of economic crises and cutbacks, in family and community care. Women also mediate between the state and other family members. The state depends for its survival on the labour of women, as obligatory unpaid service. ‘To eliminate this exploi-tation would be to bring the whole system into crisis’ (Cavarero, 1992: 44). No understanding of the state is possible without interrogating its own gender politics, and its gendered effects.

Or is this the western state? States differ radically from each other. There is now much material on states, and significant writings on the gender of states. While still preponderantly on western states, there are now numerous studies on, and often by, women in third-world states, and minority women in western states (Afshar, 1987; Parpart and Staudt, 1989; Charlton et al., 1989; Kandiyoti, 1991a; Moghadam, 1994a).

The shape and frame of women's relations with different states vary widely, although women everywhere are overwhelmingly responsible for reproductive, domestic and caring work, within a sexual division of labour that constructs certain kinds of work as women's work. All states are engaged in the construction of the public/private divide. Those with the capacity to do so intervene in the private, to regulate gender relations among other things. But the boundaries and the particular ideologies around the private vary, between states and within them over time.

The growth of the welfare state in the west and the provision of particular kinds of support to women, especially to mothers, has been characterised as a shift from private to public patriarchy. The state replaces individual men, though still with conditions for its ‘protection’, including, often, the surveillance of women's sexual relations. Women in the United Kingdom and the United States have been described as client-citizens (Jones, 1988: 25), in a dichotomy that sees men treated as workers and women as mothers, despite the large numbers of women who are both. In the Scandinavian countries, women are constructed more as citizen-workers, winning rights such as childcare and maternity leave as supports for this role. This rather different relationship between women and the state leads one writer to describe herself as a ‘state-friendly feminist in search of the women-friendly state and as part of the rather optimistic, pragmatic, social-democratic tradition of Scandinavian welfare state analysis’ (Hemes, 1988: 188; see also Siim, 1994).

Maxine Molyneux (1989), analysing socialist states before the fall, noted the ways in which their policies towards women were conditioned by international factors. States as diverse as those of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and Vietnam were officially committed to equality for women and men, and treated both primarily as workers. These policies reflected the prioritising of class oppression and also Soviet dominance in post-World War 2 Eastern Europe, leading to the imposition of a Soviet model. Talk of feminism and women's organisations from the late 1970s stemmed partly from transnational and international processes, including the rise of third-world and national-liberation feminists who were also socialists. Meetings of different women through the UN Decade for Women, prompting the collection of extensive information on women's lives, documented the double shift in socialist countries, too.

Dramatic changes in the organisation of state power and productive relations, and in some cases changing state borders in the wake of Soviet collapse, have had mixed results for women. In Poland, for example, the rise of Solidarity and the renewed influence of the Catholic Church have l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART 1 The Gendered Politics of Identities
• 1 Women, Gender and the State
• 2 Women, Colonisation and Racism
• 3 Women, Gender and Nationalism
• 4 Women in Postcolonial and Postmigration Political Identities
• PART 2 The Gendered Politics of Peace and War
• 5 Men, Masculinities and War
• 6 Women Making Peace
• 7 Women in the Wars
• PART 3 The International Sexual Division of Labour
• 8 Women and Gender in the International Political Economy
• 9 An International Political Economy of Sex
• Worlding women
• Bibliography
• Index