Feminism GenderWomen International Politics

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Feminism Gender/Women International Politics
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The work of feminism in IP

• Make womens lives better - internationally
• Ameliorate worst effects of gender
• Become entrenched in theory and practice (gender
  mainstreaming?)

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Fred Halliday (1998)

• Dates birth of feminist work on IP (in IR)
  1988.
• First claim - progress in what is taught and
  what is read and what we think of as relevant to
  the study of IP.
• Quantitative and thematic expansion
• second claim - difficult to study things that
  matter internationally now without thinking about
  gender - population, migration, refugees, the
  environment, religion, globalisation, sanctions
  (p.835).

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More positives

• Third claim - relates feminist work in IR to the
  broader social science context
• Many disciplines in western Universities have
  undergone changes over the last few decades
  very much related to real changes in the real
  world (like fall Berlin Wall)
• Fourth claim - broadening of the feminist agenda
  to look at not just women but gender

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Negatives for Halliday

• First negative - singles out NGOs and
  globalisation as making things worse for women
• Many NGOs and globalisation as making things
  worse for women.
• Globalisation IT hugely gendered (access)
• The Cairo population conference in 1994 showed
  that many states intervened to block pro-women
  policies the US itself has blocked funding for
  many family planning programmes world-wide.

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More negatives

• Popular culture as part of globalisation
  especially in the realm of music a popular
  tune (!) in the late 1990s being Smack my
  Bitch up (discuss)
• If the 1970s launched the Decade of Women, the
  1980s saw the onset of the Decade of
  Self-Indulgent Masculinity (841).
• Other bad things for women particularist
  ideologies
• -- Religious fundamentalism, genital
  mutilators, widow burners, dowry mutilations, the
  gendered dimension of civil and ethnic wars
  (rape/sexual violence)

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Still bad for women?

• We are facing a massive, world-wide ideological
  backlash that affects billions of women and the
  states that rule them (841).

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Missing link ?

• there is a danger of the social science
  study of gender losing engagement with the lived
  concerns of men and women outside the university,
  and with what was in my view correctly, the
  central concern of the 1988 Millennium
  Conference, the identification and critiquing of
  gendered structures in their international
  context (845) .

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Jill Steans (2003)

• Claims that positivism still dominates the study
  of international politics.
• Assumption the world can be understood
  objectively and we can use the tools of social
  science to find out the truth. (Which leads to
  all those discussions about finding the best
  theory).
• One thing this has meant for feminist work - is
  that the kinds of feminism which seem to be
  objective and positivist are seen as
  legitimate by the mainstream. (So a kind of
  wishy-washy feminism!)

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20 years on (from 1988)

• For Steans - things have not changed that much
• Now increasing threats to the feminism and IR
  project - she identifies 2 major threats.
• FEMINISATION
• Whether we should be studying women or gender or
  men.

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Feminisation

• This idea put forward by Robert Keohane and
  Francis Fukuyama
• Concern that if we get rid of gendered/patriarchal
  hierarchies especially within states would
  this not increase the possibility of being
  bullied by other states that had retained their
  manliness??? (Fahrenheit 9/11?)
• For example - if we get rid of the male
  protector/female protected model of gendered
  relationships is this not a cause for concern
  in a world of bad men (Hussein, Milosevices and
  other to come ???)

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More feminisation

• Similar arguments made about the feminisation of
  the military (Pin-Fat and Stern)
• Saddam Hussein and comments about US women
  soldiers soldiers in skirts
• How convincing is this fear of feminising?
  Especially to general publics hyped up about
  the war on terror?

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Women gender

• Concern with the focus of feminist work on women
  and even from those who express an interest in
  gender.
• This is an on-going debate in IR Adam Jones
  (1996) criticised feminists like Enloe and
  Tickner for pretending they are interested in
  gender when really their concern is women.
• For Jones feminists should be moving beyond women
  to gender but crucially they should also realise
  that men suffer massively in the world of
  International Politics and this should be paid
  more attention.
• Jones work has been taken up and is currently
  part of a body of work called neo-feminism.

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Neo-feminism

• One example is R. Charli Carpenters work (see
  Forum in International Studies Review, 2003)
  Carpenter claims that feminist approaches are
  substantively narrow as their emphasis is women
  again the implication that feminism is limited.
• Persistent idea that feminist work on women is
  simply about asking questions about women and
  this simply means or collecting facts about women
  as if these facts dont have the ability to
  destabilise what we think IR is or massively
  complicate how the wheels of the international
  political system works.

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Work of Feminism?

• Become entrenched in theory and practice
  (mainstream?
• Better womens lives - internationally
• Ameliorate worst effects of gender

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Entrenched in theory and practice?

• International Law (Practice?)
• CEDAW 1979
• http//www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/
• UNICEF 60 million missing women (1997)
• http//www.unicef.org/newsline/97pr28a.htm
• UNSCR 1325 (2000)
• http//www.peacewomen.org/un/sc/1325.html

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Entrenched in theory and practice?

• High Politics?
• IR Theory? (Halliday/Steans)
• Popular culture?

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Better womens lives?
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Ameliorate worst effects of gender?

• Men?
• Masculinity?
• Sexuality?
• Gender?

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Success/Failure?

• Not as simple as one or other
• Why expect success? Implies giving up power at
  centre
• Implies gender hierarchies are not beneficial to
  institutions
• Implies linear, progressivist idea
• Implies feminism does not reproduce gender