Feminist Scholarship in International Relations and the Politics of Disciplinary Emotion

Abstract

The article engages with the relationship between feminist scholarship and the discipline of International Relations. Taking a step back from the recurrent concerns with marginality and those with the absent feminist revolution in IR, we recast the problem of the complicated ménage between feminism and the field of IR as a case of a failure to love. Drawing on the sociology of thinking of Randall Collins and his theory of interaction ritual chains, we read the logic of practice in intellectual fields as one rooted in emotion. In this framework, we theorize citation practices as bearing the trace of intellectuals' emotion-loaded coalitions of the mind. The article maps out the intellectual coalitions in IR with respect to the feminist question by reconstructing the citation networks emerging from the special issue of Millennium, published in 1988 on 'Women in IR'. The maps we put together are read as snapshots of the emotional economy of IR, allowing further reflection about the status of feminist scholarship in IR, about intellectual creativity and about change and stasis in our discipline. We conclude that it is IR which is in trouble, not feminists, with regard to creative potential. Feminists are not marginal in or to IR; instead they are part of a ring of creativity connecting the emotional energies of different disciplinary fields.