IRTD - Chapter 11: Feminism §

(F) Day of the week: Monday Class: IS310 Created Time: May 17, 2021 1:57 PM Database: Class Notes Database Date: May 17, 2021 1:57 PM Days Till Date: Passed Last Edited Time: October 14, 2021 9:26 PM Type: Reading Notes

• Feminist theories of IR use gender as a socially constructed category of analysis when they analyze foreign policy, international political economy, and international security.
• Feminist security research takes two major forms: theoretical reformulation and empirical evaluation.

1. Introduction §

• Feminist theories entered the discipline of IR in the late 1980s and early 1990s (often referred to as third debate or fourth debate)

Early IR Feminists §

• Early IR feminists: how its theories might be reformulated and how its understanding of global politics might be improved if attention were paid to women’s experiences.
• Feminists claimed that the differential impact of the state system and the global economy on the lives of women and men could be fully understood only when introducing gender analysis
• IR feminists critically re-examined some of the key concepts such as sovereignty, the state, and security.
• IR feminists have also sought to draw attention to women’s invisibility and gender subordination in international politics and the global economy.

Second generation IR feminist §

• Second generation IR feminist: feminist have sought to demonstrate how vital women are to states’ foreign policies and to the functioning of the global economy. Women’s lives offer us a perspective outside the state-centric focus

Feminists’ definition of gender §

• Feminists define gender as a set of socially constructed characteristics describing what men and women ought to be.

  • Masculinity: strength, rationality, independence, protector, and public. These aka hegemonic masculine characteristics.
  • Femininity: weakness, emotionality, rational, protected, and private

• Men, women, and the states they live in generally assign more positive value to masculine characteristics than to feminine ones.

• These gender dualism also organize and divide social activities between groups of humans

  Example:

  • Women associate with private sphere → caregivers
  • Men associate with public space → natural breadwinners

2. Gender in IR §

Third debate in the The Four Great Debates in IR §

• The third debate: scholars began to question the epistemological and ontological foundations of a field (positivist, rationalist, and materialist theories)

  Example:

  • Postpositivist scholarship questions positivist’s beliefs
  • Postpositivist rejects rationalist methodologies and causal explanation

• Postpositivist advocate more interpretive, ideational, and sociological methods for understanding global politics

• Many feminist share this postpositivist commitment to examine the relationship between knowledge and power

  • Feminist point out that most knowledge has been created by men and is about men

Conventional IR vs IR feminist §

• Conventional IR relies on generalized rationalist explanation of asocial states’ behavior in an anarchic international system
• IR feminist theories focus on social relations (gender relations). Rather than anarchy, they see an international system constituted by socially constructed gender hierarchies
  • In order to reveal gender hierarchies, feminists often begin their examinations of international relations at the micro-level-how lives of individual affect and are affected by global politics

IR Feminist Research §

• IR feminist research can be divided into two complementary but distinct generations:
  • First generation: focused on theory formulation
    • bringing to light and critiquing the gendered foundations of IR theories and of the practice of international politics
  • Second generation: approached empirical situation with gendered lenses
    • begun to develop their own research programs
    • use gender as a category of analysis

3. Typology of IR Feminist theories §

Many of these feminist theories build on, but go beyond some of the IR perspective such as liberalism, constructivism, critical theory, poststructuralism and post colonialism.

Liberal feminism - Liberalism §

Liberal feminism calls attention to the subordinate position of women in global politics but remains committed to investigating the causes of this within a positivist framework.

• Assumptions: Liberal feminists believe that women’s equality can be achieved by removing legal and other obstacles that have denied them the same rights and opportunities as men.
• Methodological preferences: Liberal feminists use gender as an explanatory variable in foreign-policy analysis
• Exemplary writings: Mary Caprioli and Mark Boyer use statistical indicator to investigate whether there is a relationship between domestic gender equality and states’ use of violence internationally
  • Result: Violence decrease as domestic gender equality increase
  • Critique from postpositivist: There is problem with measuring gender inequality using statistical indicators, must go deeper than this.

Critical feminism - Critical Theory §

• Assumptions: Ideas are the product of human agents. Therefore, there is possibility of change. Critical theory is committed to understanding the world in order to try to change it.
• Methodological preferences: Goes beyond liberal feminism’s use of gender as a variable. It explores the ideational and material manifestations of gendered identities and gendered power in global politics
• Exemplary writings:
  • Sandra Whitworth: Feminism and International Relations - Examines he different ways gender was understood over time
  • Christine Chin’s: In Service and Servitude - examines the increasing prevalence of underpaid and often exploited foreign female domestic workers in Malaysia during 1970

Feminist constructivism - Constructivism §

• Assumptions: Ideas about gender shape and are shaped by global politics
• Methodological preferences: ideas about womanhood and femininity
• Exemplary writings:
  • Elisabeth Prugl: The Global Construction of Gender - analyze the treatment of homebased work in international negotiation and international law.

Feminist poststructuralism - Post-Structuralism §

• Assumptions: Poststructuralist feminism is particularly concerned with the way dichotomized linguistic constructions, such as strong/weak, rational/emotional, and public/private, serve to empower the masculine over the feminine. They believed that these distinctions have real world consequences
• Methodological preferences: Feminist poststructuralists seek to expose and deconstruct these hierarchies—often through the analysis of texts and their meaning.
• Exemplary writings:
  • Charlotte Hooper: Manly States - what role does international relations theory and practice play in shaping, defining, and legitimating masculinities
  • Laura Shepherd: Gender, Violence, and Security

Postcolonial feminism - Post-Colonialism §

• Assumptions: Postcolonial feminists see false claims of universalism arising from knowledge which is based largely on the experiences of relatively privileged Western women.
• Methodological preferences: Culture, social class, race and geographical location
• Exemplary writings:
  • Chandra Mohanty: criticize some Western feminists for treating women as a homogeneous category
  • Lily Ling and Annathangelou: seek to redress these subordinations within their own cultural context, rather than through some universal understanding of women’s needs