THE PERSONAL IS INTERNATIONAL: Feminist epistemology and the case of international relations

Abstract

The three quotations given above are all by male theorists from within the discipline of international relations, reacting to the intervention of feminism into a subject area that has been even more male-dominated than most of the social sciences. The introduction of feminist concerns and feminist theories into international relations is of a very recent date. In Britain the arrival of a feminist input into international relations literature was first signalled as significant in a special edition of the journal Millennium in 1988, much of the material from which has been incorporated into a book, Gender and International Relations (see Grant and Newland 1991). By and large, the existing literature on feminism and international relations is in the form of articles rather than books, and dates from the mid-1980s.1 Nevertheless, it is already possible to see the implications of feminist contributions to debates in international relations, in terms of both the object of study and how that object is to be explained and understood. By insisting on the recognition of gender as both constituting and being constituted by international political and economic reality, feminist scholars necessarily raise questions about the validity of traditional conceptions of international political and economic reality which render gender invisible. More than this, however, feminist scholars raise questions about how the relationship of the knower to the object of knowledge has been traditionally understood within international relations research. This kind of questioning is not peculiar to feminist critics; within international relations similar questions are also being raised from a variety of other theoretical perspectives, most notably the two labelled ‘critical theory’ and ‘postmodernism’.2 Thus the feminist contribution to thinking about the science of international relations involves both an encounter with a fundamentally empiricist orthodoxy and with a complex debate between two other radical alternatives. At the same time, the feminist intervention is by no means monolithic and ref lects ongoing arguments within feminist epistemology itself. In this paper, I will be arguing that looking at international relations in the context of feminist epistemology, and looking at feminist epistemology in the context of international relations is a peculiarly fruitful exercise in pointing the way forward to new accounts of both knowledge and the international realm.