Feminist scholarship in international relations and the politics of disciplinary emotion

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 123-151

  Soreanu, Raluca ^a   Hudson, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Citation analysis; Creativity; Disciplinarity; Emotion; Feminism; Gender; Love; Marginality; Millennium; Randall Collins

Indexed keywords

EID: 50549086521     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829808093768     Document Type: Article

References (133)

1. An early version of this article was presented at the workshop Between Past and Future: Feminist Debates in IR, January 26, 2008, at the London School of Economics and Political Science. We would like to thank the participants of the workshop for their productive suggestions. The article has also benefited from the stimulating input of Christine Sylvester; and the constructive critical comments of the editorial team of Millennium.
2. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations (London: Pandora Press, 1989);
3. Spike V. Peterson, Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory (New York: Lynne Rienner, 1992);
4. J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
5. Jill Steans, 'Engaging from the Margins: Feminist Encounters with the Mainstream of International Relations', British Journal of Politics and International Relations 5, no. 3 (2003): 428-54;
6. J. Ann Tickner, 'You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and IR Theorists', International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 4 (1997): 611-32.
7. Cynthia Weber, 'IR: The Resurrection of New Frontiers of Incorporation', European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 4 (1999): 435-50;
8. Marysia Zalewski, 'Distracted Reflections on the Production, Narration, and Refusal of Feminist Knowledge in International Relations', in Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, Brooke Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 42-61;
9. Marysia Zalewski, 'Do We Understand Each Other Yet? Troubling Feminist Encounters with (in) International Relations', The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9, no. 2 (2007): 302-12.
10. Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne, 'The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology', Social Problems 32, no. 4 (1985): 301-16.
11. Ibid., 302.
12. One can certainly read the tenor of 1988, 1998 and 2008 London School of Economics' workshops dedicated to women/gender and IR as an expression of these concerns.
13. See Judith Squires and Jutta Weldes, 'Beyond Being Marginal: Gender and International Relations in Britain', British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9, no. 2 (2007): 185-203. Some feminists, such as Cynthia Enloe or Christine Sylvester, are not particularly concerned with the question of marginality.
14. Peter Wagner (with Heidrun Friese), 'Culture', in A History and Theory of the Social Sciences, ed. Peter Wagner (London: Sage Publications, 2001), 117.
15. Michèle Lamont, Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 179-80;
16. Neil J. Smelser, Problematics of Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
17. Randall Collins refers to culture as 'metaphor of the autonomously cultural points to distinctive regions, distinctive networks and zones of focal attention, within the social', See Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies. A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 8.
18. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983/1993);
19. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984/1988).
20. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977);
21. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
22. Margaret R. Somers, 'Where Is Sociology after the Historic Turn? Knowledge Cultures, Narrativity, and Historical Epistemologies', in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terrence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 63.
23. This concern is reflected in our discussion on Millennium as a subculture of dissidence.
24. Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies.
25. This hermeneutic deficit has been remarked by some of Randall Collins' critics. See Steve Fuller, 'In search of an Alternative Sociology of Philosohy', Philosophy of the Social Sciences 30 (2000): 246-57;
26. Douglas Goodman, 'What Collins's "The Sociology of Philosophies" Says about Sociological Theory', Sociological Theory 19, no. 1 (2001): 92-101;
27. Michèle Lamont, 'Three Questions for a Big Book: Collins's "The Sociology of Philosophies'", Sociological Theory 19, no. 1 (2001): 86-91;
28. Barbara Misztal, 'The Curious Historical Determinism of Randall Collins', Archives européennes de sociologie XLIV, no. 2 (2003): 247-69.
29. The only critic to refer to Randall Collins as a cultural sociologist is Lamont, 'Three Questions for a Big Book: Collins's "The Sociology of Philosophies'".
30. The sociology of fields of Pierre Bourdieu is the most notable example. See Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production.
31. The role of emotions in scientific practice has also been discussed by Jack Barbalet, 'Science and Emotions', in Sociology and Emotions, ed. Jack Barbalet (Oxford Blackwell, 2002), 132-50;
32. Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979);
33. Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Howard Fertig, 1970).
34. Collins borrows from Goffman's notion of 'interaction ritual' and places it in a Durkheimian frame of mind. See Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual (New York: Doubleday, 1967)
35. and Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Collier, 1912/1961).
36. Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies, 29.
37. Ibid.
38. Collins sees emotions not as disruptive outbursts, but as long-term phenomena. The level of emotional energy of an intellectual depends on the successful participation in interaction rituals, ranging from a high end of confidence and enthusiasm to a low end of negative self-feelings and lack of initiative. Ibid., 29.
39. Up to this point, we can discover in Collins a microsociology of ethnomethodological spirit (where individuals coalesce and love, even), and a rather under-articulated macrosociology, as structures seem just aggregates of microevents (where networks of intellectuals compete for the limited 'attention space').
40. Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies, 49.
41. Ibid., 52.
42. See Randall Collins, Sociological Insight: An Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
43. See also Randall Collins and J. Ben-David, 'Social Factors in the Origins of a New Science: The Case of Psychology', American Sociological Review 31, no. 4 (1966): 451-65.
44. Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies, 25.
45. Love is here understood as the most polarized form of intellectual solidarity, although it is not the only form of emotional-cognitive charge that citations can take. Arguably, precisely because of the deep conflictual nature of intellectual engagements, some citations can bear a negative polarity. Although we do not proceed to a qualitative citation analysis, the holistic treatment of our citation maps allows observing the zones of intense intellectual mobilization of our discipline, and the zones of disengagement, which are regarded as cases of love, or failure to love, respectively. For a qualitative analysis of a case of citing feminists while still failing to engage with their scholarship substantively, see Christine Sylvester, 'Anatomy of a Footnote', Security Dialogue 38, no. 4 (2007): 547-58.
46. Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies, 532.
47. Quentin Skinner, 'Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas', History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 45.
48. Of course, a Gadamerian perspective would be sceptical of the very possibility to put together an objective account of past intellectual traditions. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, translated by J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1960/1994).
49. See Paul DiMaggio, 'Culture and Cognition', Annual Review of Sociology 23, no. 1 (1997): 267. He refers to culture as a 'collection of stuff.
50. Steve Fuller, 'In Search of an Alternative Sociology ofPhilosophy'.
51. Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies.
52. Ibid., 15.
53. Ibid., 46.
54. Hence, we are not dealing with embodied enactments of the synthesis-fractionation sequence, but with scholars arguing for a specific idea that can be more or less radical, more or less subversive.
55. Ibid., 29.
56. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production.
57. Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World (London: Heinemann, 1974).
58. For a similar critique see Douglas Goodman, 'What Collins's "The Sociology of Philosophies" Says about Sociological Theory', 97.
59. In his later work, Collins differentiated between two types of emotion: low-intensity ones, aroused by polite and transient rituals; and enduring ones, which involve copresence, mutual awareness, a common focus, rythmic conversational and bodily synchronization, and even a sense of moral righteousness. See Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
60. See Michael J. Shapiro, 'Textualising Global Polities', in International/Intertextual Relations, eds James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro (New York: Lexington Books, 1989).
61. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production.
62. See Diana Hicks and Jonathan Potter, 'Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: A Reflexive Citation Analysis or Science Disciplines and Disciplining Science', Social Studies of Science 21, no. 3 (1991): 459-501. They point to the necessity of reflecting on whether we are actually dealing with a field or we are artificially assembling it.
63. Richard K. Ashley and R.B.J. Walker, 'Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereignty in International Studies', International Studies Quarterly 34, no. 3 (1990): 367-416.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.
67. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production.
68. Mark Hoffman, 'Critical Voices in a Mainstream Local: Millennium, the LSE Department of International Relations and Critical International Theory', in 75 Years: International Relations at the London School of Economics, Harry Bauer and Elisabetta Brighi (London: Millennium Publishing Group, 2003).
69. Adam Charles Roberts, ed. Alfred Tennyson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
70. This second commitment is expressed in the editorial address of the second number of Millennium, by Jeffrey Golden and F. S. Northedge.
71. In fact, it reflected the field quite accurately, by focusing on the explorations of theoretical alternatives to realism. The only marked difference was the salience of 'current affairs' in the form of foreign policy analysis. See Mark Hoffman, 'Critical Voices in a Mainstream Local: Millennium, the LSE Department of International Relations and Critical International Theory', 149.
72. The 'turn' took the form of an exploration of ways to escape system explanation (here, the system of sovereign states under anarchy) and to engage with the problématiques of identity and subjectivity.
73. Pierre Bourdieu, The Science of Science and Reflexivity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 17.
74. Here, we are dealing with an 'experiment' in the format of the network involved in the creation of the journal as a cultural product: the professional hierarchy is turned on its head.
75. By the fact that we call it 'reproduction' or 'copy' we engage front-face with what Harold Bloom was referring to as 'anxiety of influence' or the 'horror of finding oneself to be only a copy or replica'. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press 1973), 27-9.
76. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1969), 125.
77. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), viii.
78. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 78-80.
79. Michael J. Shapiro, 'Metaphor in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences', CuItural Critique 2 Winter, (1985/1986): 191-214.
80. See Bachelard on poiesis, understood as 'creativity that comes from an act of reverberation, or putting language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity'. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), xxiii.
81. Richard Rorty, 'Pragmatism', International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 81 (2000): 819.
82. Ibid., 190-207.
83. We used HistCite to gather the citation data from the Web of Science of the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) and then produced the visual representation of the data using NetDraw.
84. In Figure 2, the Millennium articles are represented by triangles and identified by author.
85. In Figure 3, the Millennium articles are again represented by triangles, articles published in law and legal studies journals are represented by squares, and articles published in geography journals are represented by diamonds.
86. See section on Millennium for an explanation of this claim.
87. See Alexander Wendt, 'Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Polities', International Organization 46, no. 2 (1992): 391-425;
88. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
89. For overviews of the propositions of middle ground constructivism, see Emanuel Adler, 'Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Polities', European Journal of International Relations 3, no. 3 (1997): 319-63;
90. Emanuel Adler, 'Constructivism and International Relations', in Handbook of International Relations, eds Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse and Beth A. Simmons (London: Sage Publications, 2002), 95-118;
91. Ted Hopf, "The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory', International Security 23, no. 1 (1998): 171-200.
92. For a comment on the normalizing implications of Wendtian theorizing, see Friedrich Kratochwil, 'Constructing a New Orthodoxy? Wendt's Social Theory of International Politics and the Constructivist Challenge', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 1 (2000): 73-101.
93. Although it often represents a form of reification to talk in terms of the 'inner space' and the 'outer space' of the discipline, we practise this distinction here because we are not concerned so much with the matter of the boundaries of the discipline of IR: these boundaries are often fluid and debatable. However, our map clearly captures a space of debate that is beyond the subject matter of the field.
94. This is one of the corollaries of Collins' theory. See Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies, 446-50.
95. See Tickner, 'You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and IR Theorists';
96. Ann J. Tickner, 'What Is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations Methodological Questions', International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 1 (2005): 1-21;
97. Ann J. Tickner, 'Gendering a Discipline: Some Feminist Methodological Contributions to International Relations', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30, no. 4 (2005): 2173-88.
98. E.g. Zalewski, 'Distracted Reflections on the Production, Narration, and Refusal of Feminist Knowledge in International Relations'.
99. E.g. Christine Sylvester, 'Wither the International at the End of IR', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35, no. 3 (2007): 551-73.
100. E.g. Weber, 'IR: The Resurrection of New Frontiers of Incorporation'.
101. Bourdieu, The Science of Science and Reflexivity;
102. Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies.
103. Raluca Soreanu, 'Feminist Talk of Self and the Disciplinary Imaginary of IR: A Case of Creative Boundary-Work', paper presented at the 49th Annual International Studies Association Convention (San Francisco: 2008).
104. See Donna Haraway, 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective', in Feminism & Science, eds Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 81-101;
105. Nancy Hartsock, 'The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism', in The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays ed. Nancy Hartsock (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1998), 105-32.
106. A creative resolution to this tension is found in the shift from identitycentred theorising to experience-centred theorising, present, for instance, in Haraway, 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective'.
107. Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies.
108. Bourdieu, The Science of Science and Reflexivity;
109. Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies.
110. Michael C. Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
111. Blaise Cronin, 'Metatheorising Citation', Scientometrics 43, no. 1 (1998): 16.
112. Tony Becher, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Disciplines (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989).
113. Susan Leigh Star, 'The Sociology of the Invisible: The Primacy of Work in the Writings of Anselm Strauss', in Social Organization and Social Process: Essays in Honor of Anselm Strauss, ed. David Maines (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), 81-2.
114. Susan E. Cozzens, 'What Do Citations Count? The Rhetoric-First Model', Scientometrics 15, nos 5-6 (1989): 439.
115. This differentiation between a cognitive and a moral dimension of citation is visible in the Mertonian endorsement of citation analysis, expressed in the forward of Garfield's book. See Eugene Garfield, Citation Indexing: Its Theory and Application in Science, Technology, and Humanities (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979).
116. And for a different functionalist perspective centred on a gift mode of exchange see Warren O. Hagstrom, 'Gift Giving as an Organisational Principle in Science', in Science in Context: Readings in the Sociology of Science, eds Barry Barnes and David Edge (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1982).
117. Hicks and Potter, 'Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: A Reflexive Citation Analysis or Science Disciplines and Disciplining Science'.
118. Pierre Bourdieu, 'The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason', Social Science Information 14, no. 6 (1975): 19.
119. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 20.
120. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (London: Sage, 1979).
121. Bruno Latour, Science in Action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 37-38.
122. For building on actor-network theory, while still acknowledging the importance of quantification, see Michel Callon, John Law and Arie Rip, 'Qualitative Scientometrics', in Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology: Sociology of Science in the Real World, eds Michel Callon, John Law and Arie Rip (London: Macmillan, 1986).
123. For a comment on how actor network theory could be used to arrive at a theory of citation see also Terttu Luukkonen, 'Why Has Latour's Theory of Citations Been Ignored by the Bibliometric Community? Discussion of Sociological Interpretations of Citation Analysis', Scientometrics 38, no. 1 (1997): 27-37.
124. Precisely because we are in the field/market frame, the observation of individual strategies and trajectories amounts to discerning the rules of the social realm we are observing, because the field/market and the actors operating on it do not exist independently of each other.
125. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production.
126. See Bourdieu on the persona of Flaubert. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production;
127. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992/1996).
128. A decision to do away with citation analysis could follow from a radical critique of it, emerging from literary theorists and poststructuralists. For them, citation analysis becomes nothing more but a quantophrenic degeneration that obscures the meaningful absences rather than offering a recording of meaningful presences. For Barthes, 'each text is suspended in a network of all others, from which it derives its intellegibility'. Defining citation as reference, containing name, date and the description of publication is problematic, since citations are often untraceable or latent, and they cannot be accessed by looking at footnotes and reference lists.
129. See Roland Barthes, S/Z (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974). Also, Derrida argues for a deep rewriting of the entire field of signification, according to 'something like a law of undecidable contamination' between intentional acts/events and the 'parasitical' citations or repetitions, which are impossible to trace back to their origin, and which cannot be discerned from intentional acts.
130. See Jacques Derrida, 'Signature Event Context', in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
131. This extends further than occasional co-authorship, if we think about the 'biographical couples'. Such a biographic couple in IR is represented by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye.
132. Michel Foucault, 'What Is an Author?', in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin Books, 1984): 118-19.
133. For a comment on Gender in International Relations (GIR), as different from Feminist International Relations (FIR), see Squires and Weldes, 'Beyond Being Marginal: Gender and International Relations in Britain'.