The fish and the turtle: Multiple worlds as method

Millennial Reflections on International Studies

Volumn , Issue , 2009, Pages 283-288

  Ling, L H M ^a  

^a INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL STUDIES   (Netherlands)

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EID: 21344463666     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (29)

1. Many thanks to Thanh-Dam Truong for recounting this folktale to me.
2. By realism, I refer to the classical tradition of Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger but also include its latest variant: neoliberal institutionalism.
3. Ann Tickner has characterized this condition of nonunderstanding between conventional and critical/feminist IR theorists as one of talking across whole worlds. Robert Keohane has taken this gap to mean the difference between problem-solving theory (which accepts the world as is) and critical theory (which seeks to change the world). As a counter to Tickner, he cited Hans Morgenthau as one realist who problem solved in order to change the world. But Tickner’s point, reinforced here, was that Morgenthau and other like-minded realists still believed in one world. Hence, whether he sought to change the world or not was irrelevant. Ultimately, Morgenthau subscribed to an authoritarian assumption about the world.
4. J. A. Tickner, “You Just Don’t Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and IR Theorists”, International Studies Quarterly 41 (1997): 611-32.
5. R. O. Keohane, “Beyond Dichotomy: Conversations between International Relations and Feminist Theory”, International Studies Quarterly 42 (1998): 193-98.
6. C. Weber, Faking It: U.S. Hegemony in a “Post-Phallic” Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
7. L. H. M. Ling, Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and the West (London: Palgrave, 2001).
8. This critique could be applied to Marxian feminism as well. But liberal feminism takes the brunt of this charge given its spread through neoliberal globalization in the world today. Well-known feminists like Susan Moller Okin and Martha Nussbaum, for example, have argued that only Western liberalism can “save” Third World women from their Third World traditions. Neither recognizes that there are elements of Third World traditions that may be as emancipatory as their own liberal one, nor that Western liberalism may be as incarcerating as some Third World traditions. S. M. Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Susan Moller Okin with Respondents, ed. J. Cohen, M. Howard, and M. C. Nussbaum (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 7-26
9. M. Nussbaum, Introduction and “Emotions and Women’s Capabilities”, in Women, Culture, and Development, ed. M. Nussbaum and J. Glover (Oxford, England: Clarendon, 1995), 1-15, 360-95.
10. This hegemonic subjectivity excludes even those descendants of white, heterosexual, North American/western Europeans in former colonial locations like Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America. Similarly, it exiles those from transitional societies in Russia and eastern Europe who may be categorized as racially “white” but considered “Third World” politically, economically, and culturally.
11. A. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (London: Basil Blackwell, 1984).
12. While we should not ignore the pain, confusion, and sheer tediousness of those caught “in between” or belonging to “neither-nor” worlds (see C. Moraga and G. Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back [New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983]), neither should we project a glorious “centeredness” for those who are not considered “ethnics,” “minorities,” or “Third World.” Such a presumption is not only self-defeating (“we are never centered”) but also inaccurate.
13. R. W. Connell has shown in his work on masculinities that even those who are supposedly the most centered in today’s world-heterosexual, white men-face similar dilemmas of dealing with a societally imposed identity that may conflict with or undermine their personal subjectivity.
14. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
15. S. Harding, Is Science Multicultural? (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
16. D. L. Blaney and I. Inayatullah, “Prelude to a Conversation of Cultures in International Society? Todorov and Nandy on the Possibility of Dialogue”, Alternatives 19 (1994): 23-51.
17. C. Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
18. K. Ferguson, The Man Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
19. Moraga, and Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back.
20. M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes (London: Routledge, 1992).
21. In this sense, the dialogue between Keohane (“Beyond Dichotomy: Conversations between International Relations and Feminist Theory”) and Tickner is a good beginning. Tickner, “You Just Don’t Understand”, 611-32.
22. Keohane’s continued attempt to reframe feminist IR into conventional positivist categories of hypothesis testing and question formation, despite avowals to the contrary, is but one example of this. Keohane, “Beyond Dichotomy”.
23. As Stuart Hall noted: “In this ‘post-colonial’ moment, these transverse, transnational, transcultural movements, which were always inscribed in the history of ‘colonisation,’ but carefully overwritten by more binary forms of narrativisation, have, of course, emerged in new forms to disrupt the settled relations of domination and resistance inscribed in other ways of living and telling these stories”.
24. S. Hall, “When was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit”, in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1996), 251.
25. For example, Robert Wright has posited that evolution favors systems that figure out ways of coexistence, rather than the old Darwinian model of survival of the fittest.
26. R. Wright, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
27. Trinh T. Minh-ha has described this as an attitude of learning through indirection: “One can only approach things indirectly. Because, in doing so, one not only goes toward the subject of one’s focus without killing it, but one also allows oneself to get acquainted with the envelope, that is, all the elements which surround, situate or simply relate to it”.
28. Trinh T. Minh-ha (in conversation with Annamaria Morelli), “The Undone Interval”, in Chambers and Curti, The Post-Colonial Question, 4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has offered another suggestion. It would apply to all “Selves” coping with their “Others”: “Rather than imagining that women automatically have something identifiable in common, why not say, humbly and practically, my first obligation in understanding solidarity is to learn her mother-tongue. You will see immediately what the differences are. You will also feel the solidarity every day as you make the attempt to learn the language in which the other woman learnt to recognize reality at her mother’s knee. This is preparation for the intimacy of cultural translation”.
29. Quoted in C. Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminisms: Women’s Diversity in a Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vi.