A Feminist Voyage through International Relations

Abstract

This book is a collection of some of J. Ann Tickner’s writings in feminist international relations (IR) over the past twenty-five years. The introduction describes the author’s own journey through the field. Part One contains pieces, mostly written in the 1990s, which introduce gender and women into the international relations discipline. It argues that, even though it is not commonly recognized, the IR discipline is gendered both with respect to its concepts and it modes of analysis. Part Two is a selection of Tickner’s articles that engage methodological debates in IR. Most IR feminist scholarship is based on very different ontologies and epistemologies from the discipline of IR, thus making acceptance of its methodological preferences difficult. This section analyzes the reasons for these difficulties and describes some possible ways to overcome them. Part Three consists of later writings and new directions. It examines the militarized masculinized discourses that were in evidence after the 9/11 attacks. It demonstrates how these gendered discourses were used to heighten mutual hostilities. The next chapter examines religious violence in more detail. It examines IR’s difficulties in fitting religious motivations into its rationalist framework and suggests that hermeneutic, reflexive methodologies may be more suited to studying religion. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial literatures, the final chapter retells IR’s historical narrative about its disciplinary origins in the seventeenth century, demonstrating how the discipline has ignored issues of race and imperialism.