IR2501

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IR2501

• Gender and International Relations 2

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3 different approaches to studying gender in IR

• Cynthia Enloe
• Where are the women?
• What work are masculinity and femininity doing?
• J. Ann Tickner
• How gender biased is the discipline of IR?
• How can we convince the mainstream of the
  significance of gender/feminism?
• Carol Cohn
• How does gender work in language?
• What cant we say/think/conceptualise and does
  gender have anything to do with this?

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Cynthia EnloeFor an explanation/theory to be
useful, a great deal of human dignity has to be
left on the cutting room floor

• When we ask where are the women? in relation to
  International Politics Enloe says that we often
  see men for the first time as we scarcely
  notice (or care) that governments looks like
  mens clubs (see G8 summit photos next 2 slides)
  - often get blinded by what we see right in
  front of us
• Seeing men for the first time makes us question
  why women seem so unimportant in the realm of
  international politics
• Especially when women are so essential in keeping
  the wheels of the in international system moving
• It takes an awful lot of power to make some
  things seem trivial or unimportant (never believe
  anyone who tells you things are just natural or
  obvious see next Enloe quote on next slide)

4
G8 Summit Gleneagles 2005

• No individual or social group finds itself on
  the margins of any web of relationships a
  football league, an industry, an empire, a
  military alliance, a state without some other
  individual or group having accumulated enough
  power to create the center somewhere else
  (Enloe, Curious Feminist, p.19).

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G8 Summit Russia 2006
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What women do in IP? (not just in obvious
foreign policy or heads of govt roles)

• Diplomatic wives/loyal politicians wives
  hundreds of years of unpaid labour of diplomatic
  wives smoothing and oiling the wheels of
  diplomacy (see chapter 5 in Bananas, Beaches and
  Bases) clearly some changes in the 21st century
  but still a politician/world leader needs a
  wife and preferably a traditional one like
  Laura Bush more on her in a moment
• Militarization the gendered idea/ideal of the
  protector/protected has been crucial to keeping
  the ideology of militarization going defending
  the country one of the reason having women in
  combat roles is so strongly resisted

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Military women

• Women have always serviced military bases it
  is regularly official military policy to have a
  supply of prostitutes Japanese/Korean comfort
  women in the second world war. Hundreds of
  thousands of women and girls abducted and forced
  into prostitution to service Japanese soldiers.
  
• In the early 1990s this was finally acknowledged
  by the Japanese government but it has still to
  formally apologise or offer compensation (and is
  backtracking on admitting it)
• So women are consistently involved in many ways
  in the workings of international politics but
  in ways that are largely ignored/dismissed/trivial
  ised
• But lets look at conventional understandings of
  what counts in or as international politics

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How women are affected differently in IP

• Security (whose?)
• Billions spent on the arms race and nuclear
  technologies (see latest attempt at a star wars
  idea Missile shield plan in Poland)
• http//www.spacewar.com/reports/United_States_Pola
  nd_Hold_Missile_Shield_Talks_999.html- does
  any of that really make anyone feel safe? In
  regard to women - women are more likely to be
  attacked by a man they know (not a nuclear
  missile)
• Most common cause of death internationally? -
  Poverty (disease)
• Human Rights (whose?)
• 60 million females world-wide have died or not
  been allowed to be born because of a world-wide
  preference for boy children (malnutrition,
  infanticide, aborting female fetuses)
• The world of international relations is much
  more complex and multi-layered than we imagine
  without thinking about women and gender- we fail
  to see this adequately think or the current war
  on terror

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Women/Gender and the War on Terror

• Major use of the rhetoric of womens rights in
  Afghanistan to justify the invasion both by
  George W. Bush but also through his wife the
  first lady
• Laura Bush fight the cause for Afghani women
  (Zillah Eisenstein Against Empire p. 157)
• Racialized and sexualised abuse in Abu Ghraib
  using sex/gender to add humiliation to the
  physical abuse.
• Also the publication of the photos of Lynddie
  England a woman being involved in this abuse.
  
• Bushs own masculinized western film rhetoric
  in response to the attacks on the World Trace
  Center in 2001 see Fahrenheit 9/11
  Using/selling gender
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?v_y8I37BMOQc

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Women gender IP. 3 points

• Women are integrally involved in oiling the
  wheels and practices of international politics -
  but often in unseen/invisible ways. What gets
  categorised as trivial?
• Women are affected differently by conventionally
  understood international political practices
  but if we put women at the centre we would get a
  very different picture of what is important to
  look at in IP.
• Gender is constantly invoked and used in the
  practices and theories of international politics
  but what are the consequences of using these
  ideas about masculinity and femininity? Tickner
  on Morgenthau ..

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J. Ann Tickner

• Rather than discussing strategies for bringing
  more women into the international relations
  discipline I shall seek answers to my questions
  by bringing to light what I believe to be the
  masculinist underpinnings of the field (1992
  xi).
• Her 2 main questions
• How gender biased or masculinist - is the
  discipline of IR?
• How can we convince the mainstream of the
  significance of scholarship on gender and
  feminism?
• She engages the discipline of IR in a big way
  (not like Enloe)
• Started (in 1991 Grant Newland) by looking at
  Hans Morgenthaus 6 principles of political
  realism to show how BIASED they were based on
  typically male lives casting out or trashing
  anything associated with femininity/women
• http//www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/tickner13.html

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Hans Morgenthau 6 principles

• Morgenthaus 6 principles of political realism
  (see Lecture 3)
• Politics governed by objective laws
• Interest defined in terms of power - stresses
  the rational, objective and unemotional aspects
  of this
• Nature of power can change but (self) interest
  remains consistent
• Universal moral principles do not govern state
  behaviour
• No universally agreed set of moral principles -
  power is about control of man over man (state
  over state )
• Politics and political man must be
  removed/abstracted from other aspects of human
  nature this is an autonomous zone, In other
  words politics is a separate sphere of human
  activity

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Tickners feminist reformulation

• Objectivity is culturally defined AND it is
  associated with masculinity - so objectivity is
  ALWAYS partial
• National interest is multi-dimensional so not
  one set of interests can (or should) define it
• Power as domination and control privileges
  masculinity
• All political action has moral significance
  cannot/should not separate them
• Perhaps look for common moral elements ?
• Feminists deny the autonomy of the political
  realm building boundaries around a narrowly
  defined political realm defines political in a
  way that excluded the concerns and contributions
  of women.
• THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL
• So Tickner critiques the foundations of the
  discipline and attempts to get the discipline
  to understand

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Carol Cohn Sex and Death in the Rational
World of Defense Intellectuals Wars, Wimps and
Women Talking Gender and Thinking War

• Her questions
• How does gender work in language?
• What cant we say and does gender have anything
  to do with that?
• She has spent a lot of time working with military
  officials in the US.
• Primarily she is interested in how gender works
  at the level of language/discourse directs
  attention away from gendered individuals to
  gendered discourses (stories)
• Her definition of gender discourse not only
  about words or language but about a system of
  meanings, of ways of thinking, images and words
  that shape how we experience understand gender
  as a central organizing discourse of culture,
  politics and society. (Page 228)
• Gender can work as a PRE-EMPTIVE DETERRENT to
  thought
• Read from page 230 from Wars, Wimps and Women
• This well illustrates the HIERARCHY involved in
  and around gender

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Criticisms of feminist/gender work in IR

• Mainstream (whats it got to do with real IR?
  and isnt it just about women issues only?)
  OR Not scientific enough (Robert Keohane)
• Womens movements/activists (feminism has got too
  academic/theoretical Halliday thinks this a
  bit too 1998 Millennium article)
• Poststructuralists (they have a problem with
  identity politics which feminism is seen as a
  part of)
• Though perhaps still on the margins? But is there
  a difference between IR as an academic discipline
  and the real world?
• Fred Halliday in 1998 saw some change in the
  disciplinary study of IR the discipline but not
  so much in real world
• Jill Steans in 2003 still sees feminism and
  gender on the margins of the discipline
• Currently new wave of critique the
  neo-feminists who want to study gender without
  feminism - the neo-feminists - too much about
  feminism do gender without feminism? (Adam
  Jones, Charli Carpenter).
• BUT - currently still a lot being written on
  feminism/gender and IR, and a lot more on
  masculinity and popular culture (e.g. films G.I.
  Jane, Forrest Gump, Fahrenheit 9/11, Independence
  Day, The Day After Tomorrow, Team America, Dr
  Strangelove Or how I stopped worrying and began
  to love the bomb

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World Trade Center trailer

• http//www.youtube.com/watch?v_y8I37BMOQc
• What use is made of masculinity and femininity in
  this film?