Chapter 10

Feminism

• Feminist theories entered the discipline of International Relations (IR) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Feminists claimed that only by introducing gender analysis could the differential impact of the state system and the global economy on the lives of women and men be fully understood.

• Many feminists have a postpositivist commitment to examining the relationship between knowledge and power. They point out that most knowledge has been created by men and is about men.

• IR feminist theories focus on social relations, particularly gender relations; rather than anarchy, they see an international system constituted by socially constructed gender hierarchies which contribute to gender subordination.

• IR feminists often begin their examinations of international relations at the micro-level – attempting to understand how individuals’ lives (especially marginalized individuals) affect and are affected by global politics.

• Gender relationships inhere in all IR scholarship resulting in a wide variety of feminist theoretical perspectives. IR feminists share an interest in gender equality or what they prefer to call gender emancipation. But what feminists mean by gender emancipation varies greatly, as does their understanding of the appropriate paths to reach it.

• Liberal feminism calls attention to the subordinate position of women in global politics but remains committed to investigating the causes of this subordination within a positivist framework. Liberal feminists believe that women’s equality can be achieved by removing legal and other obstacles that have denied them the same rights and opportunities as men.

• Critical feminism explores the ideational and material manifestations of gendered identities and gendered power in global politics. They take an emancipatory approach and are committed to trying to understand the world in order to try to change it. As Sandra Whitworth (1994) suggests gender is constituted not just by material conditions but also by the meaning given to that reality – ideas that men and women have about their relationships to one another.

• Constructivist feminism focuses on the way ideas about gender influence global politics as well as the ways that global politics shape ideas about gender. From a linguistically based feminist constructivist perspective Elisabeth Prugl (1999) argues that gender politics pervade world politics, creating a set of linguistically-based rules about how states interact with each other and with their own citizens.

• Poststructuralist feminism is concerned with the relationship between knowledge and power; those who construct meaning and create knowledge thereby gain a great deal of power. They also seek to expose and deconstruct the hierarchies found in dichotomized linguistic constructions such as civilized/uncivilized, order/anarchy, and developed/underdeveloped, often through the analysis of texts and their meaning.

• Postcolonial feminism has focused on the way western feminists have constructed knowledge about non-western women. They seek to redress subordinations within their own cultural context, rather than through some universal understanding of women’s needs.

• Feminists have demonstrated how important gender as a category of analysis is to our understanding of security and insecurity.

• Many IR feminists define security broadly in multidimensional and multilevel terms – as the diminution of all forms of violence, including physical, structural, and ecological. According to IR feminists, security threats include domestic violence, rape, poverty, gender subordination, and ecological destruction as well as war.

• IR feminists have also broadened who is guaranteed security and started much of their analysis with the individual or the community. They have demonstrated how the security of individuals is related to national and international politics and how international politics impacts the security of individuals even at the local level. Those at the margins of states may actually be rendered more insecure by their state’s security policies.

• It is thought that much of the legitimacy of war is based on the cultural construction that men fight wars to protect ‘vulnerable people’ usually defined as women and children. Yet, women and children constitute a majority of casualties in recent wars.

• Instead of seeing military power as part of a state’s arsenal to defend against security threats from other states, feminists see that militaries are often threats to individuals’ (particularly women’s) security and competitors for scarce resources on which women may depend more than men.

• Feminists have also drawn our attention to wartime rape as a deliberate military strategy, as in the case of the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

• Economic Insecurity – women are disproportionately located at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale in all societies. Women’s disproportionate poverty cannot be explained by market conditions alone; gendered role expectations about the economic worth of women’s work and the kinds of tasks that women are expected to do contribute to their economic insecurity.

• Case study. The feminist notion of security is employed to add to our understanding of the use of sanctions in Iraq resulting in three major insights.

• Case Study continued. Feminists see the sanctions regime on Iraq as an example of the systematic exclusion of women’s voices from decisions about international policies that disproportionately affect them. State and inter-state security policy can cause women’s (and other individuals’) insecurity.

• Case Study continued. Feminists have critiqued the gendered logic of sanctions as a policy choice. Sanctions are enacted by stronger actors in an attempt to force the weaker actor to submit to their will. This results in confrontational policies, policies that often hurt those at the margins of international political life the most. Post-colonial feminists would add a criticism of the assumption that the UN Security Council members somehow knew better than Iraq what was good for Iraqis.

• Case Study continued. Feminists also offer a critical re-examination of the question of responsibility in terms of sanctions. Feminists draw attention to the construction of state borders as a way to separate ‘self’ from ‘other’ and distance ourselves from others’ suffering. Feminists encourage states and their citizens to reflect on the false perception of separateness and the global hierarchies that are thereby created.

• Gender is not just about women but also about the way that international policies are framed, studied and implemented.

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Oxford University Press, Online Resource Centre, Chapter 10.

Chapter 10

Feminism