Gender, Race, and International Relations Study Notes

Sojourner Truth’s Legacy:
- On May $9$ , $1867$ , Sojourner Truth (born Isabella Baumfree, circa $1797$ ) addressed the American Equal Rights Association.
- She challenged the prevailing hierarchy by noting that while black men were gaining progress, black women remained marginalized in both abolitionist and suffrage movements.
- The Double Burden: She asserted her equal capacity for physical labor (plowing, planting, and gathering) compared to men, yet highlighted the systemic disparity where she was paid significantly less.
- Her activism serves as a foundational example of what would later be termed intersectionality—the crossroads of being both black and female in a white patriarchal society.
Historical Silences:
- Critical IR theory asks why voices like Truth’s have been historically scrubbed from the ‘official’ records of political science and international diplomacy.
- These absences are not accidental but are the result of exclusionary knowledge production that privileges the experiences of white, Western males.

The Myth of the Bodyless State:
- Traditional IR (Realism/Liberalism) often treats the state as a unitary, rational actor. This creates an illusion of "gender neutrality" when, in reality, the ‘rational actor’ is modeled after masculine ideals.
Definitions of Gender and Sex:
- Sex: Refers to biological characteristics, including anatomy, hormones, and chromosomal makeup ( $XX$ or $XY$ ). This includes male, female, and intersex individuals.
- Gender: A socially constructed performative identity (Judith Butler, $1990$ ). It is a system of meanings that dictates how individuals should act based on perceived sex.
- Socialization: Laura Shepherd ( $2010$ ) posits that gender is not something we are, but something we do through repeated social practices and cultural norms.
Hegemonic Masculinity:
- Developed by R.W. Connell, this refers to the dominant form of masculinity that justifies the subordination of women and other marginalized men.
- In IR, hegemonic masculinity translates to prioritizing military might, aggressive foreign policy, and competitive power politics over cooperation and human security.

Liberal Feminism

Focus: Legal equality, institutional reform, and the inclusion of women in high-level decision-making (e.g., UN Resolution $1325$ on Women, Peace, and Security).
Basis: Rejects biological determinism; argues that the barrier to equality is discriminatory laws and social exclusions.
Goal: "Add women and stir"—placing women in existing structures to achieve parity.

Standpoint Feminism

Focus: Privileging the perspective of the marginalized.
Core Idea: Because women occupy a subordinate position, they have a "double vision"—they understand both the dominant system and the reality of life outside of power (Harding, $1986$ ).
Application: Focuses on micro-level IR, such as the impact of war on refugee women rather than just macro-level interstate treaties.

Marxist and Socialist Feminism

Focus: The intersection of capitalism and patriarchy.
Exploitation: Views women’s domestic labor as the "hidden engine" of the global economy, providing unpaid or underpaid labor that sustains the workforce (the "Social Reproduction" theory).
Invisibility: Women often serve as the "reserve army of labor" in the global market, hired during booms and fired during busts.

Poststructuralist Feminism

Focus: Language, discourse, and deconstruction.
Technostrategic Language: Carol Cohn ( $1987$ ) studied defense intellectuals and found that gendered metaphors (e.g., "vertical erector launchers") were used to sanitize the reality of nuclear war, making it seem rational and manageable.
Power/Knowledge: Investigates how "knowledge" about security is produced through binaries like rational/irrational, strong/weak, and protector/protected.

Kimberl Crenshaw ( $1989$ ): Coined the term to describe how overlapping identities (race, class, gender, sexuality) create unique modes of discrimination.
- The Intersection Metaphor: Discrimination is like traffic in an intersection; it can come from multiple directions (racism and sexism) simultaneously, and a victim can be hit by both at once.
Grada Kilomba and the 'Face Mask':
- Uses the metaphor of the Escrava Anastacia—a slave forced to wear a metal mask to prevent her from speaking.
- This represents the colonial historical muting of black women’s experiences and the continued resistance of Western academia to "listen" to non-white narratives.
Audre Lorde’s Critique:
- Argued that the "master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house."
- Criticized white feminists for universalizing their experiences and ignoring how they might inadvertently benefit from or perpetuate racism.

The Global Care Chain:
- Neoliberal policies often lead to the "feminization of migration."
- Migrant women from the global South travel to the global North to perform domestic and care work (nannies, maids), often leaving their own children to be cared for by others in their home countries.
Structural Contraints:
- Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) by the IMF and World Bank often cut social services, shifting the burden of healthcare and childcare onto women, further devaluing their time and labor.

Chandra Mohanty: In "Under Western Eyes," she critiques Western feminists for depicting "Third World women" as a homogenous, monolithically oppressed group in need of saving.
Agency: Postcolonial feminists emphasize that women in the global South have distinct histories and forms of resistance that do not always align with Western liberal agendas.

Radical Transformation: bell hooks ( $1991$ ) argues that feminism must be more than an academic exercise; it must be a political commitment to ending sexist, racist, and classist oppression.
Inclusivity: True progress in IR requires a move away from universalizing theories toward an acknowledgment of the multiplicity of experiences across the globe.
Key Takeaway: International relations cannot be fully understood without analyzing how power is distributed along gendered and racialized lines, both historically and in contemporary globalization.