Feminist International Relations

Marysia Zalewski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136692277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a contemporary intervention in the field of feminism/international relations. Partly inspired by Surrealism, the book is written in a series of vignettes and draws on a variety of approaches inviting readers in to inhabit the text. It is a politically engaged book, though one which does not direct readers in conventional ways, visiting global politics, the classroom, poetry, institutional violence, cartoons, feminist violence, films, violent white men, angry black women, blood and 'English' puddings. Working imaginatively with epistemology and methodology, and embedding theory throughout the text, the book can be considered part of the current genre of scholarship which attends to complexity, uncertainty, disruption, affect and the creative possibilities of randomness.

Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse will be of interest to students and scholars of International Politics, Gender and Feminist Studies, International Studies, Political Theory, Globalization Studies and further afield.

EXQUISITE CORPSE

Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward what looks to us like nothing:⁹

Alice Fulton

A poet's way of thinking suggests that ‘Exquisite Corpse’ is the most glamorous of dis/junctions, though an artist describes Exquisite Corpse as something dreamt up one night by some of the Surrealist ‘drunken boys’¹⁰ who came up with the phrase ‘the Exquisite Corpse will drink the new wine’.¹¹ ‘Cadavre exquis’¹² might be more popularly recognised as the children's game of consequences where one child writes or draws something at the top of a piece of paper, then folds it over so the next child can't see the preceding image/word, they then add their word/image and so on, hopefully ending up with – well for children – something ridiculously strange and funny.

We can think about Exquisite Corpse as helping us to imagine the production of a composite image through collective means, though more interestingly, I think, it offers a glimpse of the language of the unconscious invoking and working with Freudian concepts of the unconscious and the interpretation of dreams. Or more precisely, the way the unconscious, or symbol, has a grammar which persists even when logical content is disrupted. Exquisite Corpse is certainly not the preserve of male artists. Women, perhaps particularly women working with Surrealist ideas, also use the muse of cadavre exquis. The Femme Maison works of Louise Bourgeois, for example ‘recall the Surrealist Exquisite Corpse’.¹³ But my engagement with the idea and practice of Exquisite Corpse is not focused on artists’ use of it, or indeed their art per se. Nor do I directly engage Freudian analysis. Rather, I use the idea of Exquisite Corpse as a kind of methodological muse conjoined with a heterodox and allegorical deployment of a range of techniques drawn from critical theory. I hope to enact or performatively produce something of an Exquisite Corpse in this book, and invite readers to join in. The folds of the narrative, the tantalising links left by the trace of the previous mark(er) and the ensuing contingency of connections is richly methodological.

Yet what does it mean to work with (an) Exquisite Corpse, and how might readers join in? And how can this work within the academic endeavour? It's not appropriate simply to toy with artistic, imaginative and creative devices. And it's surely not right to think that imagination and creativity, things perhaps evoked by Exquisite Corpse, imply the collation of an unethically random collage of ‘things’. In international relations, borrowing from the jewels of artistic imaginations,¹⁴ or foraging through aesthetic treasures,¹⁵ or indeed deploying poetic license and form¹⁶ are not new (if not widespread). Though they perhaps become a new format to commodify, to write ‘state-of-the-art’ articles about, to demonstrate their ‘international relations-ness’, to create a new publishing niche or to augment citation indexes. All of which feels some distance from the epistemological and political promise of the lines of poetry that opened this vignette. Film, art and poetry might all be disciplinarily and methodologically graspable, but not nothing. It seems impossible; impossible to see or hold the shape and form of nothing.

Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward what looks to us like nothing:¹⁷

Alice Fulton

An ordinary man

. . . the average white guy, a mere image trace of an always incipient violence.¹⁸

Austria holds something of an enigmatic place in the European popular imagination, at least as far as that imagination is represented through the media. When the details of the case of an Austrian man named Josef Fritzl became known, predictable and unsurprising public and professional shock and horror ensued. Fritzl's actions highlighted the endlessly ordinary cruel possibilities of violence. And once again, we are face-to-face, or so it seems in our visually saturated mediated world, with one man.

Josef Fritzl was arrested on 26 April 2008, aged seventy-three, on suspicion of serious crimes against family members, and went on trial in Sankt Pölten, Austria on 16 March 2009. He was charged with incest, rape, coercion, false imprisonment, enslavement and the negligent homicide of a baby called Michael. Consequent to a four-day trial from which the public and the media were largely excluded, Fritzl was sentenced to life imprisonment. People were horrified. An ordinary man. His own daughter. Yet Fritzl had been convicted of ‘ordinary’ rape in 1967. Perhaps he is mad, he must be. No, he is deemed normal; and he surely kept his daughter Elisabeth and her children – his children/grandchildren – very secure at home.

In an interview for the international relations theory website Theory Talks,¹⁹ one of the questions I was asked was this:

You argue that . . . that destabilizing the subject of man might destabilize the whole field [of international relations]. I can already see some politicians and scholars thinking: ‘but is that a good idea?’ However, I'd like to ask how the masculinity of the field might be deconstructed and, more importantly, what kind of change that might bring to our approaches not only to international reality, but also to international theory.

Part of my answer was this:

. . . masculinity is constantly being destabilized in the field; indeed, the persistent shoring up of masculinity(ies) defines the field in large part. To understand the depth of this, I insist we need to take gender seriously. Taking gender seriously changes how we think about what's real, what violence is, where power lies, what power is and about what's important. But what it means to take gender seriously is not well understood. For example, the UN pays a great deal of attention to rape and sexual violence in war and conflict. This certainly seems to be taking gender seriously. But we need to ask if legislation really changes anything. Perhaps not much; certainly nowhere near enough. Rape and sexual violence have so much to do with perceptions of what it means to be a ‘good’ soldier or a ‘good’ man, and what women of another country or social group represent in any given conflict . . . and indeed what counts as rape, or what counts as sex. The recent conviction of the Austrian man Josef Fritzl is interesting to consider in this context. He might be of major interest to international relations scholars engaged in research on violence, war and conflict. It was considered that Fritzl must be crazy – mad – insane. But provocatively, how might his acts of raping and imprisonment be linked to normal masculinity? Can his acts really be simply answered/dismissed though the (constructed) category of madness? Taking gender seriously might imply a reconstruction of the generic first-year undergraduate international relations course to focus on women, feminism and gender, and begin with the case study of Josef Fritzl. That might indeed be radical.

My proposition is serious: to frame the introductory theory course, the first-year international relations/IR101 with the ‘case’ of Josef Fritzl.

Sometimes the safe place won't help you.²⁰

Betraying boundaries

Because truths we don't suspect have a hard time

making themselves felt, as when thirteen species

of whiptail lizards composed entirely of females

stay undiscovered due to bias

against such things existing,

we have to meet the universe halfway.

Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward what

looks to us like nothing: faith is a cascade²¹

Alice Fulton

. . . feminism has always, to some extent and in some ways, been philosophical.²²

Boundaries simultaneously offer comfort while promising violation. A boundary comes to represent the edge at which safety is supposed to end, or supposed to begin. But already that's wrong, even in its ambiguity. There simply isn't a boundary, or it's never what it seems. Like the horizon in the final scenes of the film The Truman Show, the clouds and sky are, for Truman, devastatingly but joyously ruptured by the bow of his escape boat.²³ Or when we look very closely at what we think is a physical edge, it materialises as a series of blurry, merging lines.²⁴ Yet life is full of boundaries: in rooms, bordering countries, delineating emotions, demarcating knowledge, identifying people, marking difference. We are motivated to get to know where boundaries are in order to stop on either side, or the ‘right’ side, or at least we get to know where we are supposed to stop and stay, and where not to go.

In this book I work with, across and against boundaries around feminism, especially as constituted within the academic field of international relations.²⁵ Already in the previous sentence the signs (literal and semiotic) of ‘the boundary’ are tangible – feminism, academic field, international relations – it's hard to avoid them as they vie for their place. I began with the idea of writing a book on ‘Feminist International Relations’, trying to stay within a range of academic, disciplinary and methodological boundaries. I ended up writing a book which worked to betray all those boundaries.

Betrayal is an evocative word, it's an emotive word. It's a word that demands attention even in avoidance. It also feels uncomfortable, and it feels personal. Perhaps all of these things seem inappropriate in a text putatively intended for academic communities. But impropriety is important in feminism. Being improper, to be ‘unbecoming’, refusing the normative and material pleasures of collaboration – ‘women must tell lies if they are to succeed’,²⁶ – have been significant political/theoretical activities within feminism. The provocative betrayal of femininity exhibited by suffragists and by refusers of Reason, blatantly insisting on the irrelevant, these all emerge as indelicate betrayals of propriety.

Betrayal is not the preserve of feminist rupture. The inventive character of philosophies and practices unfaithful to Enlightenment desires – reason, truth, innocence – regularly enacts betrayal. Think here of the figure of the rhizome offered by Deleuze and Guattari, resisting, rearranging, disorienting orders of movement, ontology, thought and inviting the invention of connections which spread beyond the covers of the text.²⁷ Think also of Haraway's cyborg, flouting feminist order, flaunting feminine hybridity.²⁸ Though institutionalised vocabularies inhibit the possibilities of ‘thinking movement’,²⁹ I offer, if tangentially and perfidiously, ruptured rhizomatic readings in this book. Working in this way implies that we will not necessarily arrive at something conventionally graspable at the end. We may arrive at nothing, or at least that's how it might seem. It's how we decide to step through the dark that matters. And which way we can turn.

As soon as you enter thought, there it is . . . the dark.³⁰

Stepping through the dark

When stillness culminates, there is movement.³¹

In the work of writing, Hélène Cixous feels her way through the dark, though it is never just or only dark. And it's not that we simply ‘enter’ thought either; we are always in the strip-light, or ‘half-light’,³² or the ‘relentless brilliance’³³ of the already expressed, already written, already known, a range of critical theorists tell us this in so many wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Figure credits
• Prelude
• Exquisite Corpse
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index