Feminist perspective on IR

Feminist perspective on IR

1. Origins

   • Feminist perspectives entered the discipline of IR relatively late at the end of the 1980s
     • It is not coincidental that feminist perspectives entered the discipline at the same time as the end of the Cold War
   • IR have been seen as ‘gender neutral’, which means that they can no more be about women than they are about men
     • But high politics of war has privileged issues that grow out of men's experiences
   • This broad set more comprehensive definition of global politics offered an entry point for feminist approaches

2. Feminist beginnings

   • Much of the early work in feminist IR was generated by a series of conferences in the United States and the United Kingdom
   • Rethinking the ways in which we explain or understand world politics

3. Feminist theories

   • Liberal feminists: removal of legal obstacles can overcome women's subordination
     • But ‘second-wave’ feminisms, see deeply rooted structures of patriarchy that cannot be overcome by legal remedies alone
   • Psychoanalytic: traditions have looked for causes of women's subordination in socialization practices of early childhood
   • Radicals, Marxists and socialists: explanations in structures of patriarchy that ‘naturalize’ women's subordination
   • Feminist postmodernism:take into account a variety of structures of oppression associated with race and class as well as gender

4. Feminist questions

   • Security
   • Global economy
   • Development
   • Human Rights
   • Global governance
   • Democratization

5. Development

   • Development processes are embedded in power structures related to ethnicity, race and class as well as gender
   • Feminist IR more generally, have emphasized the importance of knowledge emanating from the South
     • It offers important new ways to critique scientific rationality and technological developmen

6. Global economy

   • Women are disproportionately located at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale in all societies
     • Women earn three quarters of men's earnings even though they work longer hours
       • Of the 1.3 billion people estimated to be in poverty, 70 per cent are women
   • Expectations about appropriate roles for women help to explain why women are represented in the caring professions
   • The notion of housewife began to place women's work in the private domestic sphere
     • Since they are defined as housewives rather than workers, they can be paid lower wages on the assumption that their wages are supplemental to their family's income
       • Paid domestic service is an arena where issues of colonialism, class and race are particularly acute

7. Internal security

   • States national security policies are often legitimated by appealing to ‘hegemonic’ masculine characteristics, such as power and self-help
     • Issues that can only be spoken of in emotional terms stereotypically associated with women
   • US army bases: Women are kidnapped and sold into prostitution; this system of militarized sexual relations has required explicit American policy-making
     • National security translated into social insecurity for these women
   • While liberal feminists support women's equal participation in the military
     • Radical feminists believe that women should reject fighting in men's wars
       • Because they claimed that women have a special affinity with peace

8. Peace

   • If women have been largely absent from the world's militaries, they have been well represented in a variety of peace movements
     • This reinforces gender hierarchies and false dichotomies that contribute to the devaluation of both women and peace
       • This allows men to remain in control and to continue to dominate the agenda of world politics
   • Women's voices are often seen as inauthentic and ‘idealistic’ in matters of defense and foreign policy-making
   • There is little evidence to suggest that men are naturally aggressive or that women are always peaceful
   • Mary Caprioli
     • States with a long history of female suffrage, a high percentage of women in parliaments, and relatively high economic and social status for women
       • Are more likely to settle disputes peacefully