Reflecting Realities and Creating Utopias: Early Career Feminists (Un)Doing International Relations in Finland

Abstract

Despite rich feminist scholarship over the past thirty years aiming to ‘shake up’ the discipline of IR, the discipline is still considered to be male-dominated, sexist and misogynist. As such, the discipline could be considered to mirror the gender politics of the practice of international relations: diplomacy, foreign and security policy, and global political economy. Most of the scholarship unpacking this male-domination has emerged from the English-speaking world of IR, although international relations are studied and theorized at campuses all around the world. The discipline of IR was established in Finland in the 1960s and is currently taught at five universities. All of the permanent full professors have been and currently are men, while a slight majority of undergraduate and graduate students and approximately half of postgraduate students are women. Feminist IR has made occasional appearances on the curricula of most of the five universities since late 1990s with the first feminist IR PhD thesis defended in 2004. This event spurred on prominent feminist scholarship which has become globally acknowledged. Yet, maintaining a career as a feminist IR scholar is far from easy. The contemporary context of neoliberalisation, marketization and streamlining of universities seems to be particularly harsh on those scholars who challenge the mainstream. To explore this this piece draws from a collective memory process carried out by young feminist IR researchers in Finland and offers insights into the politics and analysis of power of the discipline from a feminist perspective. The collective collaging and critical memory work in this chapter produces documentation of ‘subjugated knowledges’ on IR in two ways: 1) collection of lived and embodied experiences of being a feminist scholar, and 2) envisioning feminist utopias for alternative visions of Feminist International Relations (FIR).