Feminism

Feminism

1. Personal is International

   • Marriage = Political (citizenship, diplomatic wives, solidifying tribal relations etc.)
   • What it means to be a 'respectable' woman or an 'honorable' man = shaped by colonizing policies, trade strategies and military doctrine - gender analysis is URGENT for most pressing problems to get fullest, most realistic understandings
   • looking @ frameworks & hierarchies that structure politics' social relations = key
   • Enloe
     • Where are the women? - focus on lived experiences will tell you where power really is
       • IPE
         • Carmen Miranda: domesticating bananas = interstate relations at the highest levels - opening up markets in US
         • Sex Tourism
         • gender dynamics of globalization
       • Diplomacy
         • Diplomatic wives, unpaid labor
           • 70s/80s - second wave of women's national and transnational movements - diplomatic wives revitalized orgs and demanded recognitions for contributions made to countries (jobs, pensions, salaries) = reveals how reliant gvts were on control of marriage in order to conduct operations
       • Militarized masculinities
         • Sylvester: rethinking security/insecurity (greenham, zimbabwe) - need more flexible understanding which included economic and family domains as well as interstate politics (theorizing = objective" rejected in favor of perspectival approach linking insight to standpoint/political agendas
           • 2008: UNSC 1325 - gender incorporated into all peacemaking and peace building - GWOT - overtly gendered discourses and gendered impact of asymmetric warfare
             • GWOT: Iraq ignored women = essential to cultural understanding that exacerbated insurgency
           • Tickner: thinking of security in multidimensional terms allows us to get away from prioritizing military issues
             • Tickner: Advocates integration of gender into conventional constructivist literature on norms and IDs in WP - power plays an important role, explaining gender differences are not natural is not enough
           • elshtain - evolution of feminist perspectives on pear and war - parallels growth of feminism as social movement - emphasis on DUAL responsibility of sexes for war - "women have no superior moral claim to being bearers of peace"
           • Women in military
     • Positivist feminism: can be studied vs. Butler/Sylvester (post modern)
     • Power = Gender (ability of A to coerce B to do something) but A has the capacity for power (carmen miranda = productive power)
       • Gender related to power as productivity ex. French nationalism, if France is male, where does that leave women? CONNECTS GENDER, POWER AND NATION
       • Tickner: attempt to redefine power - women act in 'shared rather than assertive manner' = mutual enablement rather than domination - power to vs. power over
     • Class: race as class, gender as class: comparative statement of women's inequalities = diverse experiences of social class (as well as race) can translate into often surprising differences in understandings of femininity, marital economics in relationships w/men and encounters w/state
     • Youngs: enloe's research = one of most comprehensive bodies of ontological revisionism of mainstream IR, especially in relation to core concerns
       • Gender/women = subsidiary to 'high politics' but can't be separated - no examination of FP w/o gendered workings of power underpinning it
       • IR looks @ power = failure to look @ gender in detailed account = only partial account of power largely surface of assumed reality rather than fully interrogated, predominantly male constructed relatiy
     • Where are the men? Competing mascuilnities
     • Criticisms: cultural essentialism, failure to show how michromecanisms translate to macro aspects of IP
       • Jones: enloe attempts to supplement classical framework but doesn't throw it out - framework must be expanded

2. Why do we have wars? Experience/perception. Education: men and women see world differently

   • Education = breeding competition, jealousy, possesiveness, social exclusion, privilege and the "arts of dominating rule, killing and money making"
   • Woolf: first gender study of war
     • Personal is Political
     • Yael Feldman: over last century turn to "constructivism" from essentialist/naturalist discourse = Woolf mother of onsturctivist gender theory = advocates gender (rather than innate/binary sexual difference - psychopolitical analysis, freud before his time, right to maintain (culturally acquired) difference but ALSO equality
     • Patriotism: Fascism at home and abroad: for the great part of history "our country has greater me as a slave"
       • Nationalism as a natrual element: not love of "england" but love of the world - for outsider england will follow (against patriotic displays)
       • against marxism - class = patriarchal idea (gender main division)

3. IR is Gendered

   • Gender = Constructed
     • Power = Gender
     • Butler: Gendering the Body, SDB - one is not born, but rather becomes a woman
   • World based on patriarchal assumptions
     • Hooper: Malestream IR
       • Hutchings -(88-89) Freminist IR demonstrates the gender bias in mainstream IRT and research (binary divisions) (morgenthau) - Feminist IR goals 1) demonstrate value of bringing women into analysis (challenge preconceptions 2) to deconstruct masculinist frameworks and work to transform academic and political practice
       • Hooper/campbell: IR is not only masculinist but PRODUCES masculinities - need to move towards a post-positivist analysis (limits of constructivism to 'reveal' identity construction because they restrict to the 'public and 'international' levels of analysis
     • Youngs: 3 Phenomenon for IR
       • state and market in theory and practice are gendered by masculinist assumptions/structures
       • Dom. concept. of pol/econ agency in male terms ignores women's realities & active contributions to political and economic life
       • Lack of attention to gender obscures interrelated social construction of male/female IDS

4. Feminism

   • Criticisms: Squires/Weldes: GIR has moved beyond 'being marginal' and focus of scholars should shift away from debates about status towards positive contributions to understanding the international that GIR continues to make - this is happening and is intellectually originally, theoretically rigorous and potentially significant Jones:Feminist IR focusing too much on marginalization? maybe move beyond to actually focusing on women's lived experiences (adam jones) - gender variable inquiry is limited, radically constrained (1996)
     • Criticism: Callahan: Scripting of 'gender' is like orientalism (feminizing the west as lazy and unproductive in the phillipines, burma, china, thailand'
       • Spivak -FIR put forward in 1988 volume = inadequate for cross-cultural understanding b/c clearly grounded on western intellectual tradition = can't understand other w/p cultural imperialism
     • Criticism: Butler - "there are advantages to remaining less than intelligible if intelligibility is understood as which is produched as a consequence of recognition according to some prevailing social norms (constructivism)
     • Marysia Zalewski - GIR -do we understand each other yet? by focusing on 'wound' of feminism, marginalized self further - expand IR not only with 'feminism' but gender questions on the whole - pursuing gender and IR from non-feminist perspectives manifest intractable power of conventional social norms
       • Doing feminism = undoing IR
       • Halley: better theorizing will result from feminist scholarship = positive future policymaking - fem aspiration to take in hand contidions that produce gender and then produce it differential y created high expectations for the transformational potential of feminist scholarship yet feminism inability to predict redial future = disappointment
     • Carpenter: gender = analytical category FIR as critical theory = concerned with emancipation EXPLICITLY NORMATIVE - to explain women's subordination and seek prescriptions for ending it
     • Hooper: Gender can't be 'grafted on' to mainstream IR - the possibility that not only Is IR masculinist but that it PRODUCES MASCULINITIES