Feminist Theories of International Relations

Abstract

The publication of the special issue of the journal Millennium on Women and International Relations (Vol. 17, no. 3, 1988) and the appearance of the pathbreaking book Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Enloe 1989, cited under Textbooks) marked the beginnings of the project to gender international relations (IR). There has subsequently been a substantial growth in research and scholarship, which bears testimony to the dynamism of the field. Indeed, the growth and vibrancy of feminist scholarship in IR was evidenced by the establishment of a specialist journal, International Feminist Journal of Politics, in 1999. Although there is a distinctive body of feminist literature with a recognizable international relations disciplinary focus, feminists often draw on scholarship from across a range of academic disciplines. For this reason, the indicative literature included in this bibliography includes some texts written by feminists working in other fields of study such as sociology, geography, and international law. Similarly, many feminist IR texts are useful to students studying global gender issues and global gender politics in other disciplinary contexts. Feminist IR embraces a range of approaches, which, in distinctive ways, interrogate gender as a site of power and social regulation. Feminist analyses interrogate how identities are constructed and reproduced, and how power relations and social and cultural norms, specifically heteronormative and patriarch norms, are constructed and maintained in varied contexts pertinent to international relations. In short, feminists study the difference gender makes in international relations. Often this entails embracing a normative commitment to progressive gender politics and, therefore, feminists are interested in tracking the trajectory of political and social developments that further, or conversely, impede, this project. The intellectual origins of feminist IR are rooted in distinctive traditions of feminist theory. Some strands of feminist scholarship also draw from critical work on gender identities and sexualities, including queer theory. However, feminist IR must also be seen as integral to the “critical” and “cultural” turns in IR in the 1980s; specifically, feminist IR emerged in the wake of the intellectual and political space opened up by the “fourth debate” (positivist-post-positivist debate) in IR. As such, feminists share with constructivists and critical theorists broadly conceived concern with ethical issues of exclusion and hierarchy; issues inherent in boundary-marking processes, notably the making of states and nations; and practices of “othering.”