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Introduction
This essay will begin by briefly outlining feminist approaches to IR and how
gender relates to the study of international politics. It will then consider how
feminist approaches seek to reconstruct IR theory in a more gender-neutral
way, examining how the feminist theorists gender lens can be useful for reexamining fundamental concepts in IR such as the state, power and security.
Finally, this essay will examine how mainstream IR theorists have engaged
with feminists and how feminists have responded.
This essay will conclude by arguing that feminist IR theory has made a
This is best seen via the example of womens experiences of war: in general,
war intensifies economic inequalities between men and women and often
forces women into unpaid work, such as caring for the injured or sick when
hospitals are over-crowded or destroyed (Chew, 2008, 76-77). Women are
forced into the sex-trade for subsistence, sometimes being contracted
informally by military leaders around bases in order to sustain the morale of
soldiers (Enloe, 1989, 81-92; Chew, 2008, 76-77). Non-combatants, meaning
women and children, make up 90% of deaths in contemporary wars, and
systematic rape has been used as a weapon during wartime, as during the
war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or currently in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo (Chew, 2008, 75). Seeing war through the eyes of a woman can
change the very nature of what constitutes the boundaries of IR, shifting the
focus from the causes and costs of inter-state war to the drastic
consequences individuals suffer due to militarisation and oppression (Tickner,
1997, 625; Steans, 1998, 102).
Liberal feminists like Enloe are content to point out womens roles and work
towards their inclusion in public life. However, post-positivist and standpoint
feminists go further, asking how gender biases and distortions have come to
be accepted and unnoticed in the discipline, challenging IR scholars to
question the normative foundations of their theories (Tickner, 1997, 619;
Sylvester, 1999, 267). In order to deconstruct these partialities, they examine
the socially constructed language employed in mainstream theories,
particularly realism, highlighting conventionally used dichotomies like
objectivity/subjectivity, culture/nature, public/private, and
national/international (Steans, 1998, 57; Tickner, 1988, 431). In these
groupings, the former represents the masculine value, which we
subconsciously judge to be of higher worth than the latter, feminine term
(Tickner, 1988, 432). Employing this analysis to scrutinise key IR texts
provides remarkable insights into the gendered nature of language and
knowledge employed by traditional IR theory, allowing new definitions of wellthumbed concepts like the state, power and security.
The arbitrary distinction between public and private life in Western political
thought is decried by feminists as the main culprit for the exclusion of women
in international politics. In the minds of influential philosophers like Aristotle,
Hobbes and Locke, the term citizen referred to a man working in the public
realm who defends the state in times of war as a soldier (Pettman, 2002, 7).
The distinction acts to conceal the services of women as wives and mothers,
work that is crucial to the continued survival of the state, while
simultaneously militarising citizenship, constructing women as helpless and
in need of the protection of male citizens (Pettman, 2002, 11; Tickner, 2008,
268). Similarly, the state itself possesses a blatantly masculine and
patriarchal identity: Machiavellis Prince and Hobbes Leviathan advance a
paternal image of the state as a strong and autonomous entity that serves to
protect the people from the chaos and danger of the state of nature (Steans,
1998, 47). Through this gender lens, the theme of control comes to the fore
in realist thought, as the masculine state comes into being so as to
subjugate feminine nature and hold power over anarchy (Tickner, 1988,
432).
Such insights into the gendered nature of the state have crucial implications
for the way mainstream IR understands concepts like power and security.
Realisms preoccupation with control means that prescribes a type of power
Despite their practical success, liberal feminists have been accused of having
a simplistic attitude to womens empowerment, labelled as an add women
and stir approach (Steans, 1998, 161). They have also been accused of
imperialism, particularly in the context of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
where some post-positivist feminists contended that while these wars were
couched in the language of womens rights and liberation, in reality this
language was used to mask more conventional ends of maintaining military
power and guaranteeing Western economic interests in the Middle East
(Chew, 2008, 80-81; Ruby, 2002, 149; Craft, 2002, 152).
differences, there are scholars who try to discipline feminists into contributing
properly to what they see as an already given research agenda (Sylvester,
1999, 255). In 1989, Robert Keohane responded very positively to the
critiques of feminist standpoint theorists on power and interdependence,
inviting an alliance between neoliberal institutionalism and feminist
standpoint, while rejecting what he saw were less useful forms of feminist
theory, like feminist post-modernists.
Conclusion
However, debates between liberal feminists, standpoint feminists and postpositivist feminists suggest that there is an inherent tension between their
desire to situate womens voices on the international scene and their goal of
deconstructing gender altogether (Sylvester, 1999, 268). Consequently, the
feminist approach is somewhat diffuse and difficult to pin down as it is not
clear whether they want to completely reconstruct the core of IR or reject the
mainstream literature of the discipline and continue to critique from the
margins. Overall, however, this division works to keep feminist theory from
parodying mainstream literature, with post-modern feminists checking and
balancing the tendency in particular of standpoint feminists to claim to speak
for all oppressed peoples.