Critical Feminist International Relations in the Asia-Pacific

Abstract

In a review appearing on the back cover of Jindy Pettman’s 1996 book Worlding Women, Cynthia Enloe suggests that the value of the work is its brazen courage to ask simple questions about international relations. Worlding Women poses questions like, “What can a Filipina mail-order bride living in Sydney, Australia tell us about lofty theorizing in international politics?” The answer, Enloe replies, is “a lot.” Through Worlding Women, Jindy Pettman is one of the pioneers of the project “to make visible places and ways that women are in the world.”1 Like Enloe’s own work, and the work of many since, the straightforward, yet extraordinary value of critical feminist investigations into international relations demonstrates a curiosity regarding how international relations affects and is affected by gendered identities. To those outside the discipline of international relations (IR) this may seem a simple task, yet feminists working inside the discipline know that that is exactly what it is not. It is a testament to the foundationally unsettling nature of critical feminist IR that feminists have faced decades of difficulties in having questions of gender taken seriously. This is because such an enquiry encourages us to challenge the boundaries of the discipline of ‘international relations’ by exploring the totality of ‘global politics.’ While the discipline of international relations reserves its reference for the ‘high politics’ of statecraft in the international system, critical feminist IR scholars concern themselves with the breadth of global politics.