Revision Lecture

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Revision Lecture

• GD4001

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4 main themes

• Confusion and explanation
• Where are the women?
• Gender
• Feminist work/scholarship

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Confusion and explanation

• Nothing escapes invention (Zillah Eisenstein)
• For an explanation/theory to be useful, a great
  deal of human dignity has to be left on the
  cutting room floor (Enloe)

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DOMINANT/HEGEMONIC EXPLANATIONS

• What issues are seen as relevant or significant
  to include?
• Gives rise to common-sense or comfort
  stories which fit into our usual ways of
  understanding the world

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Where are the women?

• Illustrates - protector/protected symbolized by
  clothing often a vulnerability attached to
  womens clothing flimsy dresses are starkly
  contrasted against the backdrop of militarized
  masculinized armour.
• Exposes security illusion - as clearly in this
  instance (and so many others) women (and
  children) are not protected at all
• Their security made constantly worse both in
  this specific instance also in more generic
  story of states creating borders and manipulating
  peoples identities within and outside those
  borders.

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Why ask where are the women?

• See men for the first time (get so blinded by
  what we see right in front of us important to
  look to the side at what you dont see
  (like in Fahrenheit 9/11)), at whats not being
  said, what cannot be said
• Makes us question why women seem so unimportant
  
• when they are so essential

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Women post September 11 2001

• What can you buy for 5p in Bangladesh?
• http//www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1969020,00.h
  tml

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Women

• So generally on the course - we asked a lot of
  questions about women Afghan women,
  diplomatic wives, Laura Bush, women soldiers,
  peace women, war against terrorism, warring
  women, activist women

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Gender

• Thinking about gender (simply defined asking
  questions about the workings of masculinity and
  femininity) allows us to think more deeply about
  how our knowledge of the world of IP is
  constructed.

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Gender

• Thinking about gender in my view not a
  replacement for asking (feminist) questions about
  women nor an advance on asking questions about
  women. Asking (feminist) questions about women
  involves theorizing or thinking about gender.

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Thinking Gender

• Thinking/theorizing about gender does - makes
  sense of our questions about women in IP (not
  simply adding women and stirring)
• Allows us to go much deeper into thinking about
  the construction of knowledge than other theories
  which dont think about gender are able to!
  (Reaches where other theories cannot!!)

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More thinking gender

• E.g. What use is an analysis of the military
  without thinking about gender? (As such the
  military is one of the central examples we looked
  at. And globalization).
• As such this is not an ISSUE led course as we
  can only start thinking about what issues might
  be important by thinking about how we construct
  knowledge of what is important in the first
  place. THERE ARE NO NATURAL STARTING PLACES

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And more gender

• Another example - how might we understand the
  role that sexual violence plays in war/conflict
  if we did not use gender to help us think about
  this. If we only used conventional
  understandings of male sexuality and dindt ask
  questions about the construction of masculinity
  for example - we would have a very poor analysis
  and a rather dangerous one I think
• Also important here is WHERE we look to find out
  things about IP

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And more

• The centre of the earth is the end of the world
  (Green Day)
• Shifting from the centre like IP generally
  looks at what Presidents, Generals, terrorist
  leaders, official documents say as they are
  deemed to be the MAIN picture but we tyr to
  look (also) at where most people look/live
  which is why we looked at real lives and
  popular culture e.g. films

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Feminist work/scholarship

• Is feminism the elephant in the room?
• Central issue here concerns the success/failure
  of feminism both with the study of IR and the
  real world of IP
• Has feminism made any difference?
• Could give examples which seem to show success
  women in Parliaments (though not that many)
  resolution 1325 of Security Council rape
  acknowledged as a war crime

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Nearly the End

• Continuing backlash against feminism both in
  the real world certainly at NGO and
  International organisation levels
• Concern about feminization of IR and IP

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The end

• What would a non-feminist gender studies of IP
  look like???
• A course like this can only ever be a small
  st-art