Different Communities / Different Realities / Different Encounters: A Reply to J. Ann Tickner

Abstract

In her article You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements Between Feminists and IR Theorists, Ann Tickner tries to understand and explain the misunderstandings or nonconversations between feminist and conventional IR scholars. She acknowledges that one of the motivations for her article stems from her own sometimes unsuccessful attempts to engage in substantive and meaningful conversations with mainstream IR scholars. I agree with Tickner that these troubled engagements indeed exist and that many feminist IR scholars, myself included, have encountered similar situations. I am, therefore, thankful to Ann Tickner that she is raising the issue in public and placing it on the agenda of the IR community. The importance of Tickner's article should not be underestimated. For one, she questions the silencing practices of the conventional IR community toward feminist scholarship. Moreover, she is not only trying to find a possible explanation for these misunderstandings, but is also looking for ways to break through these silences. Finally, her formulation of the problematic provides us with the opportunity to exchange views on the reasons why these troubled engagements are occurring. It is in this spirit of exchanging views and searching for explanations that I am writing a reaction to Ann Tickner's article. I will argue that her explanation based on an analogy of cross-cultural communication is intriguing, but is grounded in certain assumptions about the IR community which need to be revisited. When we do this, it appears that the encounters between feminist and other IR scholars are very complex and messy and that the analogy of cross-cultural communication provides only a partial explanation of a particular reality. This, in turn, forces us to search for alternative or additional explanations. In the remainder of this essay, I will discuss the assumptions behind Tickner's argument and offer some suggestions for a different view on the (multiple) factors affecting the acceptance of feminist scholarship within the IR community. For her explanation of the troubled engagements between feminist and conventional IR scholars, Tickner borrows Deborah Tannen's idea that everyday communications between women and men are leading, just like cross-cultural communications, to all sorts of misunderstandings. Tickner suggests that, analogous to the situation described by Tannen, feminists and conventional IR scholars operate within different realities and epistemologies which make their conversations subject to misunderstandings. She recognizes three such misunderstandings: [F]irst, misunderstandings about the meaning of gender as manifested in the more personal reactions; second, the different realities or ontologies that feminists and non-feminists see when they write about international politics, as evident in comments that feminist scholars are not engaging in the subject-matter of IR; third, the