feminism

What are some areas where inequality continues, in terms of gender?

many areas of politics, including:

• political participation in governments and political decision making realms

• ownership of wealth and resources

  • access to human rights and justice

What are the goals of feminist IR

Highlight, understand, and address gendered inequality. To encourage recognition and better understanding of the role played by gendered politics and the way women and institutions work in it

In what two ways do feminists contribute to broader international relations analysis?

1. offering a broader set of issues to consider, including:

   1. Issues of gender based inequality

   2. issues that disproportionately impact women

   3. issues that have a different impact on men and women

2. By offering new ways of thinking about existing international relaitons concerns. some examples include:

   1. are dominant ways o thinking about states, power, cooperation, diplomacy and the use of force in international relations particularly masculine, and if so do they exclude other ways of thinking about global crisis and community?

   2. How do women uniquely respond to global events such as conflict, climate change, COVID or other humanitarian crisis in ways that shape recovery?

What are the four concerns of feminist international relations?

1. identifies experiences of gender inequality (such as the absence of women from elite decision-making forums, inequality in the distribution of wealth or the gender pay gap)

2. looks at global political issues that disproportionately affect women but have remained largely neglected by mainstream IR scholars (trafficking of women for sexual slavery, or feminisaiton of labour in low paid industries like textiles and clothing)

3. explores the way in which key issues affect women differently

4. How gender power relations (and dominant conceptualisations of masculinity and feminity) hape how political issues are understood and practiced

What is an example of gender inequality in globla politics

women are only almost 27% of parliaments worldwide, paid less than men making only 77% of mens wages, continuing to perform 2.5 times more unpaid work than men (caring, housework, and subsistence farming).

What do feminists argue is the cause of this discrimination?

Social

Cultural → laws about inheritance

legal → laws about settlement

What is an example of an issue that disproportionately affects women?

gender-based violence (including sexual violence)

feminists argue that violence against women is a specific strategy of war to achieve a range of political or military goals, including intelligence gathering, enforcing the compliance of a civilian community, as part of genocidal campaigns or as a psychological weapon. The UN notes that between 100,000 and 250,000 women were raped during the three months of the Rwanda genocide, and has been investigating the use of sexual violence by Russian armed forced by Ukraine. As a result of constant womens inquiry, prosecution of war rape as a crime against humanity and crime of genocide are now a real thing.

Why are feminists interested in why the same global challenges affect gender identities in different ways?

• Forced displacement, pandemics, climate change and financial crises will uniquely affect people based on their gender identity → their different levels of social, political and economic power, the intersecting inequalities they may face, including racism, ageism or other forms of discrimination and the social expectations of their behaviour.

• IE redirection of funds away from sexual health and reproductive services towards COVID responses.

• Child marriage due to insecurity brought about by COVID.

  • Also consider how men are affected because of over-representation in emergency services in Western countries.

Why are the skills, knowledge, experiences, and networks of different gender identities oftne essential to supporting post crisis recovery?

Despite their continued underrepresentation, research shows when women are meaningfully involved in formal peace processes after conflict, peace agreements are more likely to be signed and last longer.

What are the goals of feminist international relations theory?

1. to examine, expose and address the causes and consequences of gender inequality in global politics

2. to highlight and challenge the way international relations privelages certain masculine identities and ways of knowing

3. To render visible the roles and and experiences of women in international politics

4. To analyse how gender is socially constructed and the consequences this has for men and women in international politics

How have feminists challenged the way we think about IR?

1. One of the first goals: to highlight the masculine bias and core concepts of IR. They reflect and respect the experiences of certain men and certain masculine qualities - like quesitoning ‘rational man’ model of human nature does not speak for many men or women. Masculine bias that often promotes certain actors and experiences, like the USA and ideas of militarism. Thatcher as the ‘toughest man in the room’

How has Enloe challenged IR?

• Women play important roles → aside from popularly known stories of women as nurses and factory workers, feminists point out that in everyday lives, women were also agents and activists in war, in the international political economy and in the search for peace, security and reconciliation.

• Enloe argues that the lives of ‘ordinary women’ can provide useful insights into how IR operates.

  • A young woman in Indonesia may not appear as a major actor in the international relations, but an analysis of her life can reveal a lot about the workings of IR: the political economy, migration, globalisation, politics of labour and gender relations.

• Asking ‘where are the women’ offers a found of empirical knowledge which can be used to analyse and understand IR, advocating for change. In compiling this catalogue of womens’s experiences, feminists have needed to utilise many different kinds of methodologies.

  • To uncover many of these experiences, it has become necessary to mvoe away from more established reearch → drawing upon subjective knowledge like personal narratives

  • Using sources of knowledge from people who do not claim to be prominent decision makers but nonetheless contribute to global politics.

• Utilising the ‘bottom up’ strategy has enabled feminists to scrutinise the everyday lives of individuals to explore the patterns and practices of international relations, rather than describing international relations through a grand narrative that analyses the actions and behaviours of whole nation-states in a geopolitcal context. This enables an intersectional analysis, where people’s overlapping identities (like age, gender, race and sexuality) can be taken into consideration.

Why are acocunts of gender, gender identities and gendered social relations considered politically charged and contested?

• most feminists argue that gender is a socially constructed concept

• it is a construction that uses discourse (our social language) and narratives (the stories we tell about global politics) to dichotomise identities, behaviours, responsibilities and expectations in society as being masculine or feminine.

What does it usually mean when people argue societies continue to be gendered?

• Individuals are socially expected to adopt the gendered roles of masculinity and femininity respectively and behave in ways that are supposedly appropriate to these roles.

• Men are the members of parliament while women are their supportive wives → gender is not a biological imperative, but a social expectation.

• When a man or woman steps out of their traditionally defined gendered identity, they appear peculiar or are thought to lack credibility or trustworthiness.

  • EG: hilary clinton’s 2016 campaign to become the first president of the USA. There is a gender double bind in the election campaigns, and double standards that she faced. If she appeared too feminine, she would not be considered tough enough, but too tough and she would be not a ‘real woman’. Donald Trump said she ‘did not have the look’ nor the ‘stamina’. Clinton had greater experience, Trump had no public service experience and his masculinity implied he was a ‘natural leader’. Feminist scholars like Tolentino 2016 argue that as a woman, Clinton would not be given the same amount of credibility as Trump given his 2005 sexual assault claims.

For feminists, it is not simply the case that there is a difference between the social constructions of masculinity and femininity. Instead, they argue that

There is an unequal relationship between masculinity and femininity (and their connotations). It sees femininity as politically, economically and socially devalued

Femininists also focus on gendered institutions, which means

That they are interested in how certain institutions (like the military) are masculinised, while some like childcare and early childhood education, are feminised. This means institutions respond to gendered values and gendered identities.

Feminists argue for example military bans on women lasted so long because the military as an institution valued the qualities of heterosexual and hegemonic masculinity.

What is liberal feminism based on

liberal ideas of equality between men and women

• sex based discrimination deprives women of equal rights and the right to pursue their economic, political and social self interest. they argue that this can be eliminated by removal of legal and other obstacles that have denied them the same giths and opportunities.

  • Accused of representing ‘white women’, and claiming to know the ‘real world’ it claims to know the world as it is, and are keen to see women to take roles in the world, not necessarily changing the nature, only changing roles and opportunities.

What does marxist feminism argue

The liberation of women can be achieved by dismantling capitalism and oppressive class relationsW

What does black feminism do

It examines the relationship between gender and race based discrimination

What does cultural and maternal feminism argue

women’s peaceful natures can contribute to politics of global peace

What does postcolonial feminism seek to do

Examine the intersection of different forms of oppression facing women in colonial and postcolonial societies that are often neglected by western based feminism

What does critical feminism seek to do

ask fundamental questions about gender identities and gendered nature of the international system, exploring the possibilities of emancipation for women

• critical and post modern feminists investigate what a ‘woman’ is. they explore the difference between women, and being a ‘woman is subjective. Not every woman’s experience is the same, and may think different issues for different women → prostitution liberating? religious clothing oppression?

• they claim social constructions of gender pervade not just individuals, but institutions, knowledge and political discource. Feminisms attempt to challenge women’s disadvantage through the critique of the gendered nature of broader political structures.

What does ecofeminism suggest

The values of patriarchy and capitalism have created an artifical division between humans and nature, which can be remedied through the feminine instinct for nature.

What does feminist IR add?

• offers a broader series of issues, and a guide of how to identify, analyse and address areas of gender based discrimination.

• its bottom up approach brings the lives of ordinary people into focus and works towards understanding IR not as an abstract practice but as something that affects, and is affected by, the lives of people and the ways they relate to each other and the world around them.

key to feminist belief is that gender is not just a material, but a

relation of power

what is gender as a system of regulation

gender as a system of regulation, or ‘rules’, conditions how we think of sex. That means that sex as a category is constructed through the ideas that we have about gender – including the idea that gender is meaningfully binary.

As Butler explains:

Consider the medical interpellation which … shifts an infant from an ‘it’ to a ‘she’ or a ‘he’ and in that naming, the girl is ‘girled’ …. But that ‘girling’ of the girl does not end there; on the contrary, that founding interpellation is reiterated by various authorities and throughout various intervals of time to reenforce or contest this naturalized effect.

What is the idea of gender as both a verb and a noun?

This means we can conceive of gender not only as a noun (as an identity category) and a verb (a way to look at the world, as in the phrase ‘gendering global politics’) but also a logic, which is produced by and productive of the ways in which we understand and perform global politics. The crucial insight of this book is that these assumptions about bodies are intrinsically, inherently related to the study and practices of global politics, because global politics is studied and practiced by gendered bodies. -Laura Shepherd

What is an example of norms being weaponised by women

In 2020, then-President Donald Trump dispatched federal officers to break up Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests across the USA. In Portland, Oregon and other locations, community organisations and individuals mobilised to defend the protestors. One organised form of defence was the ‘Wall of Moms’: a group of women who assembled to create a human barricade between the BLM protestors and the police forces. The ‘Wall of Moms’ was mobilised in one area of Portland by a woman called Bev Barnum, who posted an expression of support for the BLM movement on Facebook and encouraged her friends to join her in a physical demonstration of solidarity. Barnum deliberately appealed to gender norms in her expression of support, writing ‘We moms are often underestimated. But we’re stronger than we’re given credit for. … Let’s make it clear that we will protect protesters without the use of violence’ (quoted in McGreal 2020). When the ‘Wall of Moms’ congregated, they chanted ‘Feds stay clear, moms are here’, deliberately deploying motherhood as a political identity and drawing on the associations among gender, maternality, pacifism and protection as a means of legitimating their actions.

What is an example of women entering the military spehre

The women at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the UK during the early 1980s campaigned for the removal of US nuclear weapons from the Greenham Common military base drawing on symbols and practices of motherhood. Although these were local social movements, both attracted the attention of and, in the case of the former, support from the international community. (Besides, problematising the divide between politics designated international and that designated domestic or ‘everyday’ is an important analytical contribution of feminist scholarship in IR.) From Greenham, the opinion that ‘women-only actions offered a more complete guarantee of nonviolence’ (Liddington 1989, 235) echoes the statements made five years previously by women in Argentina: ‘We endure the pushing, insults, attacks by the army …. But the men, they never would have stood such things without reacting’ (Mariá Adela Antokoletz cited in Arditti 1999, 35).

What is an example of how female bodies are utilised and commodified to make change

Instead, they used their weapons of protest – their bodies, and specifically their female bodies – in a carefully articulated statement of female agency. Initially the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo organised their protests in socially sanctioned ‘women’s spaces’, ‘using feminine/maternal public parks and tea houses as places to make plans and exchange information’ (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996, 157). Taking their protest to the steps of the government buildings in the Plaza de Mayo altered the social and spatial impact of the movement. By associating themselves with the Plaza de Mayo, which is deeply significant in Argentine history and politics, the Mothers achieved recognition and a public space for their political protest. This, however, is not the same thing as saying that the Mothers ‘moved in’ to that public space; the Plaza de Mayo was occupied by the Mothers just once a week. In contrast, the Peace Camp at Greenham Common was a permanent fixture. The women involved in the camp inhabited an altogether more liminal space. They had left their fixed houses for tenuous settlements on common land; the mothers at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp did ‘move in’ to that public space, both with and without their children by their sides, in a confrontational bid to challenge notions of home and security in the shadows cast by missile silos.

What does Cohn say about say about masculinity and military?

This article remains one of the most significant accounts of the effect of gender, gendered language and bodily images on the study and practices of global politics. Cohn also draws our attention to the complex intersections of race, gender and class, referring to ‘white men in ties discussing missile size’ (Cohn 1987, 683) in a typically snappy turn of phrase.

hen the first fusion device was tested in the United States of America in 1952, the telegram reporting its success to authorities – describing an explosion about a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 – read ‘It’s a boy!’ (Easlea 1983, 130; see also Cohn 1987, 701).1 Admittedly, that was back in the 1950s; surely we can expect to see contemporary defence experts refusing to deploy the gendered metaphors employed by their ancestors? On the contrary, Cohn reports that defence intellectuals continue to construct their language, which Cohn names ‘techno-strategic discourse’, using a gendered framework. Cohn witnessed a country without tested nuclear capacity being referred to as a nuclear ‘virgin’ (Cohn 1987, 687). Similarly, phrases such as ‘more bang for the buck’, ‘the Russians are a little harder than we are’ and the assertion that ‘you’re not going to take the nicest missile you have and put it in a crummy hole’ all contribute to the ongoing masculinisation of nuclear weapons technology (Cohn 1987, 683–684).

What is an example of women being marginalised in the military line? IE discussion,

At one point, we re-modelled a particular attack, … and found that instead of there being 36 million immediate fatalities, there would only be 30 million. And everybody was sitting around nodding, saying, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great, only 30 million’, when all of a sudden, I heard what we were saying. And I blurted out, ‘Wait, I’ve just heard how we’re talking – Only 30 million! Only 30 million human beings killed instantly?’ Silence fell upon the room. Nobody said a word. They didn’t even look at me. It was awful. I felt like a woman.

(quoted in Cohn and Ruddick 2004, 416–417)

What is an example of contemporary masculinised discourse?

I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!’, was motivated by ‘their need for the world to believe that they are manly men’ (2018), demonstrating the continued importance of gender analysis to understanding nuclear politics.