Chapter 10: Feminism By J' Ann Tickner and Laura Sjoberg

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Chapter 10 FeminismBy J. Ann Tickner and Laura
Sjoberg
International Relations Theories Discipline and
Diversity
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Learning outcomes

• After this lecture you should be able to
• Understand the added value of gender analysis to
  IR
• Recognise the variations within feminist theory
• Appreciate the contribution of feminism to the
  study of security and insecurity particularly in
  the case of economic sanctions against Iraq

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Feminism

• Focuses on social relations, particularly gender
  relations rather than anarchy
• International system
  - constituted by socially constructed
  gender hierarchies
• - these contribute to gender
  subordination
• Knowledge
  - mostly created by men and is
  about men
• Analysis
  - micro-level
  
  
• - tend to share a postpositivist
  commitment

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Typology of Feminisms

• Gender relationships inhere in all IR
  scholarship
• Liberal feminism
• Critical feminism
• Constructivist feminism
• Poststructuralist feminism
• Postcolonial feminism

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Security and Insecurity

• Security Defined broadly in multidimensional and
  multilevel terms
• - Security of individuals is related to
  national and international politics
• Security threats include
• Those at the margins of states may be rendered
  more insecure by their states security policies
  

- domestic violence - rape - poverty
- gender subordination - ecological
destruction - war
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Myth of Protection

• Much of the legitimacy of war is based on the
  cultural construction that men fight wars to
  protect vulnerable people
• Yet, women and children constitute a majority of
  casualties in recent wars
• Feminists highlight
• Militaries are often threats to individuals
  (particularly womens) security and competitors
  for scarce resources on which women may depend
  more than men
• Wartime rape as a deliberate military strategy

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Economic Insecurity

• Women are disproportionately located at the
  bottom of the socioeconomic scale in all
  societies
• Disproportionate poverty cannot be explained by
  market conditions alone
• Gendered role expectations contribute to their
  economic insecurity
• economic worth of womens work
• kinds of tasks that women are expected to do

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Case Study Iraqi Sanctions

• Gendered lenses provide a different view of
  economic sanctions
• Sanctions disproportionately affect women
• Yet womens voices are excluded from decisions
  about these policies
• Sanctions have a gendered logic as a policy
  choice
• Sanctions are enacted by stronger actors in an
  attempt to force the weaker actor to submit to
  their will
• This results in confrontational policies,
  policies that often hurt those at the margins of
  international political life the most

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Case Study continued

• Post-colonial feminism
• Criticise assumption that the UN Security Council
  members somehow knew better than Iraq what was
  good for Iraqis
• Responsibility
• Draw attention to the construction of state
  borders as a way to separate self from other
  and distance ourselves from others suffering
• Highlight the global hierarchies that are thereby
  created

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Conclusion

• Gender
• not just about women but also about the way that
  international policies are framed, studied and
  implemented
• only through gender analysis can we understand
  the differential impact of the state and the
  global economy on the lives of women and men