Men in the feminist gaze: What does this mean in IR?

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 107-122

  Carver, Terrell ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Constructivism; Feminism; Gender; International relations; Masculinity; Sexuality

Indexed keywords

EID: 50549094171     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829808093767     Document Type: Article

References (75)

1. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27,4 (1998)
2. 'Anniversary Special Issue: Gendering the International'; 17, 3 (1988) 'Special Issue: Women and International Relations'.
3. See, for example, Fred Halliday, 'Hidden from International Relations: Women and the International Arena', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17, 3 (1988): 420: 'There is, however, a more fundamental reason for the genderblindness of most of the study of international relations, namely an assumption of separation between the two spheres ... it is presumed that international relations as such are little if at all affected by issues pertaining to women ... [and] by neglecting the dimension of gender, international relations implicitly supports the thesis that international processes themselves are gender-neutral, i.e. are without effects on the position and role of women in society, and on the relative placings of women and men.'
4. And Sarah Brown, 'Feminism, International theory, and International Relations of Gender Inequality', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17, 3 (1988): 473: 'A feminist international relations that is genuinely emancipatory will take gender difference as its starting point but will not take it as given. Its proper object and purpose must be to explain how gender has been constructed and maintained in international relations and if and how it can be removed.'
5. Also Anne Marie Goetz, 'Feminism and the Limits of the Claim to Know: Contradictions in the Feminist Approach to Women in Development', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17, 3 (1988): 483: 'This reaction [by third world women] which rejects - or questions - the oppositional logic at the root of a schism between women and men arrives at a similar position to that of the deconstructive feminists who problematise the binary thinking dictating our "knowledge" of sex difference and the nature of gender identity in the West.'
6. See, for example, Ann Tickner, 'Hans Morgenthau's Principles of Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17,3 (1988): 437: 'A feminist perspective believes that objectivity, as it is culturally defined, is associated with masculinity. Therefore, supposedly "objective" laws of human nature are based on a partial masculine view of human nature.'
7. Also, Marysia Zalewski, 'Where is Woman in International Relations: "To Return as a Woman and Be Heard"', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, 4 (1998): 849: "This shows up [i.e. 'the ubiquitous theoretical return to woman'] even in work which explicitly speaks only of gender and/or men because discussions about gender necessarily means [sic] that a position for woman will be sought.'
8. See also Vivienne Jabri, '(Uni)form Instrumentalities and War's Abject', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 27,4 (1998): 901: 'We may speak of war as a "gendered" discourse, built upon the reification of a masculine subject which it comes to constitute. However, the subject of war cannot be so reduced ... for this subject can never be fully materialised.'
9. The first edition of The 'Man' Question in International Relations was itself published in 1998 (ed. Marysia Zalweski and Jane Parpart [Oxford and Boulder CO: Westview, 1998]).
10. See, for example, Fred Halliday, 'Gender and IR: Progress, Backlash, and Prospect', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 27, 4 (1998): 836: "The second new development is the impact on IR of the study of sexualities, of bothheterosexual and gay identities.'
11. However, there was at the time an explicit exception, at least in terms of setting up a problem: Simona Sharoni, 'Gendering Conflict and Peace in Israel/Palestine and the North of Ireland', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27,4 (1998): 1072: 'Moreover, the conflation of "gender" with "women", like that of "race" with "people of colour" and "sexuality" with "gays, lesbians and bisexuals", leaves masculinity, whiteness and heterosexuality unproblematised and, thus, treated as the norm.'
12. Sexuality does not feature as an explicit topic or 'lens' in the 1988 special issue of Millennium: Journal of International Studies; in the 1998 special issue it appears marginalized (notwithstanding the 'markers' quoted in footnote 4 above) as a 'Research Note' (and further distanced by its 'third world' setting);
13. Jeremy Seabrook, 'Men Who Have Sex with Men in India: A Research Note', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27,4 (1998): 1023-30.
14. For an overview, see Halliday, 'Hidden from International Relations', 419-28.
15. See Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations (London: Pandora, 1989;
16. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). Both Bananas, Beaches and Bases
17. and The 'Man' Question in International Relations are noted by Halliday in his 'Gender and IR: Progress, Backlash and Prospect', 834.
18. For further detail on these points, see Terrell Carver, 'International Relations', in International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities, ed. Michael Flood et al. (London: Routledge, 2007), 339-42.
19. See, for example, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990,10th anniversary edn, 1999);
20. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York and London: Routledge, 1993);
21. Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). While these works are obviously framed by a concern with gender and feminism, they do so from a philosophical perspective that is of general applicability, and it is with that - sometimes worked out in conjunction with the politics of sex, gender and sexuality - that I am concerned here.
22. For a fuller treatment, see Samuel A. Chambers and Terrell Carver, Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2008);
23. see also Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics (Oxford: Polity, 2007), where Butler's philosophical position is treated very similarly, though framed more by the context of her own work and interests, rather than by the more thematic concerns of Chambers and Carver.
24. This is not a new issue; see Tickner, 'Hans Morgenthau's Principles of Political Realism', 438: 'Adding a feminist perspective to the epistemology of international relations, however, is a stage through which we must pass if we are to begin to think about constructing an ungendered or human science of international politics which is sensitive to, but goes beyond, both masculine and feminine perspectives.'
25. For discussions concerning the projection of the gender binary onto the body as male and female (only), see Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000);
26. for robust analysis of the way that gender presupposes heteronormativity via sexed reproduction and defines sexual attraction and activity in terms of heterosexual gender difference, see Butler, Bodies that Matter, and Undoing Gender.
27. On gradation, see David T. Evans, Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities (London and New York: Routledge, 1993);
28. for a feminist approach to 'intersectionality', see Mary E. Hawksworth, Globalization and Feminist Activism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
29. See the discussion in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Gender and International Studies', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27,4 (1998): 809-24.
30. But one that departs radically from 'standpoint' feminism.
31. See also the comment in Brown, 'Feminism, International Theory, and International Relations of Gender Inequality', 472: 'The conception of a feminist critical theory of international relations is fundamentally a political act of commitment to understanding the world from the perspective of the socially subjugated'.
32. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 'Manifesto of the Communist Party', in Karl Marx: Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10.
33. See the argument and detail in Terrell Carver, The Postmodern Marx (Manchester and University Park PA: PSU Press, 1998), ch. 6,
34. and in 'Liberalism, Reason(ableness) and the Politicization of Truth: Marx's Critique and the Ironies of Marxism', Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 11, 2 (2008): 115-29.
35. The most extensive discussion is in Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Later Writings, 208-26.
36. See Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack (London: Verso, 1985).
37. Judith Grant, Fundamental Feminism: Contesting the Core Concepts of Feminist Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 161; see also 161-5,180-91;
38. see also the quotation from Tickner, 'Hans Morgenthau's Principles', in footnote 10 above.
39. See the discussion in Zalewski, 'Where is Woman in International Relations', 847-67.
40. See the comments in Jabri, '(Uni)form Instrumentalities and War's Abject', 885-902. Peterson and Runyon identified IR as the 'most masculinized' of the social sciences; V. Spike Peterson and Ann Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues, 2nd edn (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999), 48.
41. Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations and Gender Politics (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2001).
42. For a discussion of similar issues in relation to science, gender and IR, see Andrew Barry, 'Modest Witnesses: Donna Haraway, Science and InternationalRelations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, 4 (1998): 179-80.
43. See also the quotation from Sharoni, 'Gendering Conflict and Peace', in footnote 4 above.
44. These themes are reviewed in Jean Bethke Elshtain, 'The Problem with Peace', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17, 3 (1988): 441-9.
45. For an explication of this view of gender as binary but asymmetrical in this specific way, see Terrell Carver, '"Public Man" and the Critique of Masculinities', Political Theory 24, 4 (1996): 673-86;
46. and Men in Political Theory (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press and St Martin's, 2004), intro.
47. See Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).
48. See the philosophical meditation on this point in Linda M.G. Zerilli, 'Feminists Know Not What They Do: Judith Butler's Gender Trouble
49. and the Limits of Epistemology', in Judith Butler's Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, ed. Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers (London and New York: Routledge, 2008): 28-44.
50. Butler, Gender Trouble, 33-4.
51. See, however, the critical discussion in Carver and Chambers, Judith Butler and Political Theory, ch. 3.
52. See the detailed discussion in Carver and Chambers, Judith Butler and Political Theory, chs 1-2;
53. on 'reading' and the interpretive method, see Terrell Carver and Matti Hyvärinen (eds), Interpreting the Political: New Methodologies (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), intro.
54. Though I wonder how many IR 'constructivists' have really studied Butler's careful discussion of both the 'moment of recurrent exasperation' to which the 'radical constructivist' is prone, and the inherent circularities that defeat the 'moderate critic'; Bodies that Matter, 10-11.
55. See the explication of this view in Michael Shapiro, 'Metaphor in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Culture. & Critique 2 (1985-86): 191-214;
56. see also Butler, Bodies that Matter, 10-11: 'the linguistic capacity to refer to sexed bodies [or indeed any 'known' - TC] is not denied, but the very meaning of "referentiality" is altered. In philosophical terms, the constative claim is always to some degree performative.'
57. Butler, Gender Trouble (original 1990 intro.), xxix: 'What other foundational categories of identity - the binary of sex, gender, and the body - can be shown as productions that create the effect of the natural, the original, and the inevitable?'
58. Male generative acts are generally and conveniently (for men) undertheorized, much as in the old adage, 'Pregnancy is a fact; paternity is an opinion', though various reproductive and genetic technologies, gendered perspectives and political movements are disrupting the 'biological' and social stabilities that supposedly arise from 'the body' and/or 'nature'.
59. See the discussion of this view in Terrell Carver, Gender is Not a Synonym for Women (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996), 8-9.
60. Butler, Gender Trouble, 1999, 10.
61. For simmlar use of Butler's view see Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, 'Gender Trouble at Abu Ghraib?', in Judith Butler's Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, ed. Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 204-20.
62. Butler, Gender Trouble, 1999, 33.
63. Butler, Undoing Gender, 198.
64. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 15.
65. Or perhaps this can be put less provocatively: 'Truth telling is not the same as reconstructing facts according to the reigning "common sense".' Mark D. Jordan, 'God's Body', in Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body, ed. Gerard Loughlin (Maiden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 281.
66. See this overarching argument in Hooper, Manly States.
67. See Brown, 'Feminism, International Theory', 470: 'The danger in attempts to reconcile international relations and feminism is twofold. Most immediately, the danger lies in the uncritical acceptance by feminists of objects, methods and concepts which presuppose the subordination of women. More abstrusely, it lies in the uncritical acceptance of the very possibility of "gender equality".'
68. See Kathleen Newland, 'From Transnational Relationships to International Relations: Women in Development and the International Decade of Women', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17, 3 (1988): 515: 'The feminist analysis of women's subordination set in motion by Simone de Beauvoir and others, which laid the basis for worldwide solidarity among women as it bared the common origin of their dilemmas, has gone out of fashion. A coalition of women (and some men) has survived ... A confrontational approach to men is not required; what is needed is a clear sense of women's practical and strategic needs ... Women within their own societies are, in many cases, doing so.'
69. For a discussion of the slippage between the supposed existence of 'biological' binaries and statistical 'evidence' that is supposed to secure them as such, see R.W. Connell, Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 40-52;
70. for a detailed discussion of the physiological and other biological forms of 'evidence' relating to sex as a concept and binary sexing as a practice, see Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body.
71. Goetz, 'Feminism and the Limit of the Claim to Know', 489: 'With neither sexuality nor social identity given exclusively in or through the body, the deconstruction of the concept "women", and of the oppositional logic from which it is constructed, problematises the very possibility of that female identity which is romanticised in the cultural feminist perspective.'
72. As Zalewski argues in 'Where is Woman in International Relations', 863-4: 'despite the deconstructive intent of expanding the possibilities of the category of woman, the persistent legacy of dualistic understandings common in western epistemological practices (within which the practices of International Relations fall) can result in essentialising woman as a marginalised presence of questionable worth ... I use Judith Butler's point here to argue that it seems incongruous to expect a fruitful outcome (for feminists) from a debate between feminists and mainstream International Relations theorists if the debate is structured around representations of woman as derivative, marginal and intellectually suspect.'
73. Again, as Zalewski argues contra Adam Jones in 'Where is Woman in International Relations', 856, n. 46: 'There is a difference between placing man at the centre of the gender debate in order to re-assert his traditional position and placing the subject of man at the centre precisely to question the assumption of his "traditional place".' See also Terrell Carver, Molly Cochran and Judith Squires, 'Gendering Jones', Review of International Studies 24, 2 (1998): 283-97;
74. and Terrell Carver (ed.), 'Gender and International Relations' ('The Forum'), International Studies Review 5, 2 (2003): 287-302, esp. the contributions by Carver and Zalewski.
75. See Tarak Barkawi, Globalization and War (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).