A Research Agenda on Feminist Texts and the Gendered Constitution of International Politics in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Abstract

This article starts from two interventions made at the 2008 Millennium Roundtable Discussion on Gender and International Relations: Vivienne Jabri’s suggestion that feminist IR might benefit from a closer engagement with the constitution of ‘the international’ and ‘the political’ in feminist texts and Christine Sylvester’s call for incorporating ‘difficult feminisms’ that challenge dominant understandings of which political and analytical perspective should be adopted. In response, this article lays out a more concrete research agenda focused on feminist texts that takes an empirically open view of what ‘feminism’ is and which incorporates factual genres and disciplines beyond political science and philosophy. To provide an example of a reading of ‘the international’ and ‘the political’ in a (difficult) feminist text, I turn to Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a non-fiction genre-hybrid tome of almost 1200 pages published in 1941. Known to an IR audience mainly through its alleged impact on the Bosnian War, I draw upon works in literary theory and women’s studies to bring out West’s gendered vision of international politics, giving particular attention to her constitution of the relationship between national, international and women’s security. The analysis is divided into four parts which examine the gendering and embodying of empires, the politics of art and aesthetics, sacrifice and submission, and the feminist politics of writing.