Title: Introduction: International Relations through feminist lenses: Laura Sjoberg and J. Ann Tickner
Abstract: In 2010, women comprised only about 19 percent of the world’s parliamentarians. This was true despite the increasing popularity of gender quotas
(especially in newly drafted constitutions) and even though most states have
no sex-exclusionary rules about running for political office.1 There is surprisingly little difference between women’s representation in the parliaments of
some western, liberal democracies (after the 2008 election, only 18 percent of
members of the United States Congress were women) and some Islamic states,
understood to be conservative and backwards, especially on women’s rights
(such as the United Arab Emirates where women are 22.5 percent of their
parliament, and Pakistan where women are 22.2 percent). Some of the “leaders” in women’s representation (such as Sweden, Norway, and Denmark) are
unsurprising, while others (such as Rwanda and Cuba) are puzzling to analysts who associate women’s rights with modernity, progress, and western liberal values. Feminist analysis suggests that, while the formal exclusion of
women from office still may occur in some cases, the relative lack of women in
high political office is usually the result of disguised forms of exclusion.
Gendered norms and assumptions define masculinity as the standard to
which all office-holders must aspire, regardless of their biological sex.
Assumptions about gender shape a wide range of events in global politics.In 2003, the Iraqi military took its first group of United States prisoners of
war, a supply battalion that had been involved in an accident in their Humvee
when they were lost in the desert. Several of the American soldiers had been
injured in the accident, and several more were injured or killed in the gunfire
as the Americans attempted to resist capture. Of the five survivors, three had
either bullet wounds or serious, bleeding wounds from the car accident. The
Iraqi military imprisoned two of the injured U.S. soldiers, and two others who
had been captured, and engaged in practices generally understood to be torture in terms of international law. The fifth, however, was taken to a hospital
and treated, and the Iraqi military unsuccessfully tried to return her to the
United States military. When, a few days later out of military necessity, they
abandoned the hospital, the Iraqi military left that prisoner, Jessica Lynch, in
the hospital with medical care. While we do not have a first-hand account of
why the Iraqi military treated Jessica Lynch differently, feminist analysissuggests that the Iraqis had some understanding of the gender, race, and class
dynamics that made young, blonde Jessica Lynch more valuable to the United
States military than the three men and one African American single mother
who were (mis)treated as “normal” prisoners of war (see Sjoberg 2007).
These examples suggest gender is mapped in global politics in complicated,surprising, and multilayered ways. They provide just two of literally hundreds
of empirical puzzles that feminist researchers in International Relations (IR)
have analyzed, theoretically and empirically, to look both for how gender
matters and for the contingent, contextual ways in which it manifests itself in
global politics.
This is because, in Cynthia Enloe’s (2010) words, “making feminist sense”of global politics is a big task, which requires endless, careful research and
thinking (not to mention rethinking) about people, parts of the world, and
processes that are difficult to investigate because they fall outside the purview
of what is traditionally understood as the proper research concerns of the
discipline of IR. While IR studies issues such as the effect of regime types
on states’ propensity for war, competitive power-balancing, and international
trade and investment, feminist theorists have shown that understanding global
politics relies as much on seeing the dynamics of marriages, of sexual relationships, of masculine expectations of men and feminine expectations of
women, and of household-level political economies as it does on IR’s “traditional” issues. Feminist scholars have argued, therefore, that it is not possible
to separate making “feminist sense” of global politics from making sense of
global politics more generally; in the relatively short history of the subfield,
IR feminists have sought to ask where women and gender are in global politics
and what such research reveals that was previously unseen.
This book was compiled as feminist research in IR enters its third decade.Conferences in the late 1980s and one in 1990, together with a special issue of
the journal Millennium titled “Women in International Relations,” published
in 1988, are generally seen to have played a significant role in founding the subfield, which has drawn inspiration from feminist work in women’s studies,
sociology, psychology, history, and the philosophy of science.2 Feminist IR
scholars applied feminist thinking in these disciplines, (as well as other new
feminist theorizing), to the problems of interest to IR theorists, while at the
same time, by demonstrating the relevance (and indeed necessity) of gender
theorizing they tried to broaden the spectrum of problems IR finds interesting. Recently, as feminist IR “turned 20,” a number of events, panels, and
discussions were held to celebrate and discuss the contributions that feminist
IR has made to thinking about global politics more generally as well as the
contributions that it could, as a research program, make in the future. As IR
feminists reflect on the past 20 years, they are asking questions such as: What
have we learned about how women are a part of global politics and how they
impact global politics? What have we learned about gendered expectations
about people, states, and organizations in the global political arena, and how
are political processes dependent on these expectations?
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-07-03
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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