Feminism in international relations

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Feminism theory of international relations is a broad term given to works of those scholars who have sought to bring a concern with gender into the academic study of international politics.

In terms of international relations (IR) theory it is important to understand that feminism is derived from the school of thought known as reflectionism. One of the most influential works in feminist IR is Cynthia Enloe's Bananas, Beaches and Bases (Pandora Press 1990). This text sought to chart the many different roles that women play in international politics - as plantation sector workers, diplomatic wives, sex workers on military bases etc. The important point of this work was to emphasize how when we look at international politics from the perspective of women we are forced to reconsider what we think international politics is 'all about'. However, it would be a mistake to think that feminist IR was solely a matter of identifying how many groups of women are positioned in the international political system. From its inception, feminist IR has always shown a strong concern with thinking about men and, in particular, masculinities. Indeed, many IR feminists argue that the discipline is inherently masculine in nature. For example, in her article "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals" Signs (1988), Carol Cohn identified how a highly masculinised culture within the defense establishment contributed to the divorcing of war from human emotion.

What is evident, therefore, is that a feminist IR involves looking at how international politics effects and is affected by both men and women and also at how the core concepts that are employed within the discipline of IR (e.g. war, security, etc.) are themselves throughly gendered. It should also be noted that feminist IR has not only concerned itself with the traditional focus of IR on states, wars, diplomacy and security - feminist IR scholars have also emphasized the importance of looking at how gender shapes the current global political economy. In this sense, there is no clear cut division between feminists working in IR and those working in the area of International Political Economy (IPE).

Feminist IR emerged largely from the late 1980s onwards. The end of the Cold War and the re-evaluation of traditional IR theory during the 1990s opened up a space for gendering International Relations. Because feminist IR is linked broadly to the critical project in IR, by and large most feminist scholarship has sought to problematise the politics of knowledge construction within the discipline - often by adopting methodologies of deconstructivism associated with postmodernism/poststructuralism. It should be noted however, that the growing influence of feminist and women-centric approaches within the international policy communities (for example at the World Bank and the United Nations) is more reflective of the liberal feminist emphasis on equality of opportunity for women.

[edit] References

Carol Cohn, Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals, Signs, (1988)
Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Paperback), University of California Press 2004, ISBN 0520243811
Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases (Pandora Press 1990)
Vivienne Jabri, Eleanor O'Gorman, Lynne Rienner, Women, Culture, and International Relations (Critical Perspectives on World Politics). Publishers Inc, US, 1999, ISBN 155587701X