Feminism and International Relations

Conversations about the Past, Present and Future

J. Ann Tickner, Laura Sjoberg, J. Ann Tickner, Laura Sjoberg

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136724787
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Politics

Feminist International Relations scholarship in the United States recently celebrated its 20 th anniversary. Over those years, feminist researchers have made substantial progress concerning the question of how gender matters in global politics, global economics, and global culture. The progress has been noted both in the academic field of international relations and, increasingly, in the policy world.

Celebrating these achievements, this book constructs conversations about the history, present state of, and future of feminist International Relations as a field across subfields of IR, continents, and generations of scholars. Providing an overview and assessment of what it means to "gender" IR in the 21 st century, the volume has a unique format: it features a series of intellectual conversations, presenting cutting-edge research in the field, with provocative comments from senior scholars. It examines issues including global governance, the United Nations, war, peace, security, science, beauty, and human rights and addresses key questions including:

• What does viewing the diverse problems of global politics through gendered lenses look like in the 21 st Century?

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• How do feminisms accommodate differences in culture, race, and religion?

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• How do feminist theoretical and policy analyses fit together?

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These conversations about feminist IR are accessible to non-specialist audiences and will be of interest to students and scholars of Gender Studies, Feminist Politics and International Relations.

1 Introduction

International Relations Through Feminist Lenses

Laura Sjoberg and J. Ann Tickner

DOI: 10.4324/9780203816813-1

In 2010, women comprised only about 19 percent of the world's parliamentarians. This was true despite the increasing popularity of gender quotas (especially in newly drafted constitutions) and even though most states have no sex-exclusionary rules about running for political office.¹ There is surprisingly little difference between women's representation in the parliaments of some western, liberal democracies (after the 2008 election, only 18 percent of members of the United States Congress were women) and some Islamic states, understood to be conservative and backwards, especially on women's rights (such as the United Arab Emirates where women are 22.5 percent of their parliament, and Pakistan where women are 22.2 percent). Some of the “leaders” in women's representation (such as Sweden, Norway, and Denmark) are unsurprising, while others (such as Rwanda and Cuba) are puzzling to analysts who associate women's rights with modernity, progress, and western liberal values. Feminist analysis suggests that, while the formal exclusion of women from office still may occur in some cases, the relative lack of women in high political office is usually the result of disguised forms of exclusion. Gendered norms and assumptions define masculinity as the standard to which all office-holders must aspire, regardless of their biological sex.

Assumptions about gender shape a wide range of events in global politics. In 2003, the Iraqi military took its first group of United States prisoners of war, a supply battalion that had been involved in an accident in their Humvee when they were lost in the desert. Several of the American soldiers had been injured in the accident, and several more were injured or killed in the gunfire as the Americans attempted to resist capture. Of the five survivors, three had either bullet wounds or serious, bleeding wounds from the car accident. The Iraqi military imprisoned two of the injured U.S. soldiers, and two others who had been captured, and engaged in practices generally understood to be torture in terms of international law. The fifth, however, was taken to a hospital and treated, and the Iraqi military unsuccessfully tried to return her to the United States military. When, a few days later out of military necessity, they abandoned the hospital, the Iraqi military left that prisoner, Jessica Lynch, in the hospital with medical care. While we do not have a first-hand account of why the Iraqi military treated Jessica Lynch differently, feminist analysis suggests that the Iraqis had some understanding of the gender, race, and class dynamics that made young, blonde Jessica Lynch more valuable to the United States military than the three men and one African American single mother who were (mis)treated as “normal” prisoners of war (see Sjoberg 2007).

These examples suggest gender is mapped in global politics in complicated, surprising, and multilayered ways. They provide just two of literally hundreds of empirical puzzles that feminist researchers in International Relations (IR) have analyzed, theoretically and empirically, to look both for how gender matters and for the contingent, contextual ways in which it manifests itself in global politics.

This is because, in Cynthia Enloe's (2010) words, “making feminist sense” of global politics is a big task, which requires endless, careful research and thinking (not to mention rethinking) about people, parts of the world, and processes that are difficult to investigate because they fall outside the purview of what is traditionally understood as the proper research concerns of the discipline of IR. While IR studies issues such as the effect of regime types on states’ propensity for war, competitive power-balancing, and international trade and investment, feminist theorists have shown that understanding global politics relies as much on seeing the dynamics of marriages, of sexual relationships, of masculine expectations of men and feminine expectations of women, and of household-level political economies as it does on IR's “traditional” issues. Feminist scholars have argued, therefore, that it is not possible to separate making “feminist sense” of global politics from making sense of global politics more generally; in the relatively short history of the subfield, IR feminists have sought to ask where women and gender are in global politics and what such research reveals that was previously unseen.

This book was compiled as feminist research in IR enters its third decade. Conferences in the late 1980s and one in 1990, together with a special issue of the journal Millennium titled “Women in International Relations,” published in 1988, are generally seen to have played a significant role in founding the sub-field, which has drawn inspiration from feminist work in women's studies, sociology, psychology, history, and the philosophy of science.² Feminist IR scholars applied feminist thinking in these disciplines, (as well as other new feminist theorizing), to the problems of interest to IR theorists, while at the same time, by demonstrating the relevance (and indeed necessity) of gender theorizing they tried to broaden the spectrum of problems IR finds interesting. Recently, as feminist IR “turned 20,” a number of events, panels, and discussions were held to celebrate and discuss the contributions that feminist IR has made to thinking about global politics more generally as well as the contributions that it could, as a research program, make in the future. As IR feminists reflect on the past 20 years, they are asking questions such as: What have we learned about how women are a part of global politics and how they impact global politics? What have we learned about gendered expectations about people, states, and organizations in the global political arena, and how are political processes dependent on these expectations?

One such event, the “Twenty Years of Feminist IR” conference held at the University of Southern California in April 2010, generated the chapters, comments, and discussions for this book.³ Hosted by the book's editors and Jane Jaquette, the conference asked veteran scholars in the field, as well as newer researchers, to reflect on these questions and their implications for the past, present, and future of feminist contributions to knowing, understanding, and “making sense” of global politics.⁴ The conference, and this edited volume, took the idea of “conversations” seriously, intentionally putting in conversation some of the founding voices in feminist theorizing in IR and some recent entrants into the field who have used, expanded on, employed, or critiqued their work.

The remainder of this introduction serves two purposes. First, it is a guide to the contents of the book for those generally familiar with the field, engaging those members of our readership in conversations about where feminist IR has been and where it is going. Second, it is an introduction to the field of feminist IR for those whose feminist curiosity about global politics is newer. It begins with a discussion of some of the terms and concepts that are critical to feminist IR and the contexts in which they emerged. It then introduces the concept of “conversations,” a concept that is important both for feminist IR generally and for this book specifically. The next section talks about some of the past conversations in feminist IR, particularly the founding moments of the subfield, which remain substantively important but can also be seen as inspiration for feminist thinking twenty years later. The final section fast forwards to the compilation of this book, exploring, through a discussion of the individual chapters, what feminist IR looks like today, and foreshadowing some of the concluding discussions at the conference about where the subfield is going and how we might better understand (gender and) global politics in the next two decades of feminist IR research.

Feminist International Relations

This book is about the conversations between, and contributions of, those who view international relations with a “feminist curiosity” or through “gendered lenses.” Most of the early feminists in IR were IR theorists, researchers, and policy practitioners before they were feminist theorists, researchers, and practitioners. Many of them attended graduate programs in political science where there were few women, read syllabi full of scholarly articles by mainly or only men, and experienced IR as a scholarly place often hostile to women and femininity.

These scholars began looking for gender, in the politics of IR as a discipline and in global politics more generally. To appreciate what this means, we begin with definitions of the terms “sex” and “gender,” and controversies around these definitions. Well into the twentieth century, sex and gender were understood to be synonymous: people were biologically male (and therefore masculine) or female (and therefore feminine); household roles, economic benefits, and social dynamics were structured around people's sex/gender. Feminist scholars (among others), however, suggested a distinction between “sex” and “gender” to address what had come to be understood as “essentialist” thinking about women and men based on biology, where how men and women were treated (and what was expected of them) was based on their sex. For these scholars, “sex” refers to biological maleness or femaleness whereas gender refers to the personality traits and conceptions of self that we expect people to have on the basis of their sex, where masculinities are associated with maleness and femininities with femaleness.⁵ Characteristics such as strength, rationality, independence, protector, and public life are associated with masculinity while characteristics such as, weakness, emotional, interdependence, the need for protection, and domesticity are associated with femininity. While men can be feminine, women can be masculine, and men and women can be hybrids of these traits, masculinity is expected of men, and femininity is expected of women. However, there is not just one, but a number of masculinities and femininities.

For example, a masculinity that was salient in early twenty-first century United States culture was “metro,” a word used to refer to heterosexual men who combined an interest in women and chivalry with modern, sophisticated traits often associated with gay men, like the ability to cook and the decision to dress fashionably. “Metro” was contrasted to “Rambo” or “macho” masculinities, which emphasized a rough-and-tumble sort of manliness that was more concerned with toughness than finesse.

Masculinities and femininities are not just differences; they are differences that have hierarchical power implications. Feminist theorists have talked about an ideal-typical masculinity sitting on top of the hierarchy of gender tropes, contrasted at the other end of the spectrum to a subordinated femininity that is a necessary “other” to the powerful, hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1995). Other, middling gender tropes like subordinated masculinities are placed in a hierarchy. While the content of the hegemonic masculinity varies across time, place, and culture, feminist political scientists, sociologists, historians, and anthropologists have observed that gender hierarchies shape social and political interactions in most societies. This means that we cannot think of just one “gendered” experience (much less just one men's experience or just one women's experience) because genders are lived and performed differently and in different contexts. Nonetheless, gendered power relations are salient in almost every area of social and political life.

If “sex” is biological, and “gender” is social, “gender hierarchies” are socially constructed hierarchies based on gendered expectations of individuals, states, and other actors in global politics. Recently, feminist theorists have come to question whether the sex/gender dichotomy is as simple as it appears. These theorists suggest that the body is not something that we can ignore when thinking about how we come to read gender onto sex (in other words, genders do not just come out of thin air), and that bodies are not something that are just “out there” independent of social influence and construction. Anne Fausto-Sterling suggests that “we look at the body as a system that simultaneously produces and is produced by social meanings” and sex and gender as necessarily co-constituted (2005, 2).

IR feminists are increasingly taking this latter approach to gender. However, it is important to ask not just what we mean by “sex” and “gender” but also what we mean by feminism. Some people (erroneously) associate feminism with being anti-men, or even man-hating, and as advocacy for women at the expense of men in political and social life. This is not accurate generally, and not how it is used in feminist IR or in this book. Feminism consists of two interlinked phenomena. First, feminism was (and remains) a political movement interested primarily in women's rights and gender emancipation. Second, and distinctly if relatedly, feminism is a scholarly approach that looks through gender lenses to understand not only more about women and gender, but also how seeing women and gender helps us learn more about the world in general. Feminists have described their work as being “neither just about women, nor the addition of women to male-stream constructions” (Peterson 1992, 205). Instead, it is about what we see in global politics by looking at and for women and gender, and what those things tell us about how the world works.

So what does looking for women and gender in global politics tell us about how the world works? While we realize that an adequate answer to this question cannot be contained in one book, much less in its introduction, we will offer a few observations on some of the different ways that looking for sex and gender can help us to see global politics in new ways. We recognize that there are many feminist approaches to thinking about local and global politics and that some feminist thinkers have understood these feminisms as fundamentally in tension. Instead, we are drawn to John Hoffman's view that these differences should be seen “as one river with numerous currents rather than as a series of rivers flowing in different and even contradictory directions” (2001, 48). This view maintains a critical understanding of feminist theory and practice while remaining committed to an inclusive ethic of scholarship. In this spirit, we now provide a short introduction to various feminisms in IR.

While IR feminists share an interest in gender emancipation, as noted above, they often approach the journey towards emancipation differently. Liberal feminists believe that women's equality can be achieved by removing legal and other obstacles that have denied them the same rights as men; their primary interest is in integrating women into global politics at all levels. Liberal feminists in IR often use gender (and usually they mean “sex”) as an explanatory variable in security and foreign policy analysis, arguing that including women would be net beneficial to achieve policy goals (e.g., Caprioli and Boyer 2001). While the approach of integrating women into the governance and economic structures of the existing order is useful, some feminists see it as limited.

Many other IR feminisms question an approach that tries to provide women equal opportunities within the political, social, economic, educational, and professional structures created by men for men; they claim that it is not only inadequate to the task of ending gender subordination, but that it is misguided because it reifies masculine models of citizenship and political processes. These feminist theorists note that gender inequalities continue to exist, even in societies that have long since been committed to giving women the same opportunities as men; they also see deeper problems in the gendered structures and functions of global politics. Constructivist feminists focus on the ways that ideas about gender shape and are shaped by global politics, seeing gender subordination as the dynamic result of social processes and suggests that, therefore, changing norms about masculinity and femininity is essential to redressing it (e.g., Prügl 1999; Locher and Prügl 2001). Critical feminism explores the ideational and material manifestations of gendered identities and gendered power with an interest in changing the gendered (im) balance of global politics (e.g., Steans 1998). Poststructuralist feminism is particularly concerned with performative and linguistic constructions and manifestations of genders, asking how and why gender-based dichotomized linguistic constructions, such as strong/weak, rational/emotional, and public/ private, serve to empower masculinities and devalorize femininities (e.g., Hooper 2001; Shepherd 2008a). Postmodern feminisms critically interrogate the naturalness of the categories of “woman” and “gender,” and correspondingly, the ways that they map onto global politics, looking for creative and critical ways to deconstruct gender hierarchies (e.g., Sylvester 1994). Postcolonial feminists are particularly interested in critically interrogating the nature of relations of domination and subordination under imperialism, and imperialistic moves that can plague the relationship between western feminists and non-western women (e.g., Chowdhry and Nair 2002; Mohanty 2003). Postcolonial feminists look to understand and redress gender subordinations in particular cultural and sociopolitical contexts, rather than relying on some universal understanding of women's needs.⁶

There are other axes of difference that cut across these various feminist approaches to understanding global politics. One is the often-rehearsed debate in the field of IR between “positivists” and “postpositivists.” Positivist scholars believe in the existence of objective knowledge independent of the experiences of the knower; they generally rely on some version of the scientific method of hypothesis testing and data analysis to arrive at this objective knowledge. Postpositivist scholars reject the possibility that knowledge can be legitimate without recognizing t...