zalewski et al (2008) reflections on the past, prospects for the future in gender & ir theory

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DOI: 10.1177/0305829808093769 2008; 37; 153 Millennium - Journal of International Studies

Kimberly Hutchings and Fred Halliday Marysia Zalewski, Ann Tickner, Christine Sylvester, Margot Light, Vivienne Jabri,

in Gender and International RelationsRoundtable Discussion: Reflections on the Past, Prospects for the Future

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© 2008 The Author(s)

Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol.37 No.1, pp. 153–179

ISSN 0305-8298; DOI: 10.1177/0305829808093769


Roundtable Discussion: Refl ections on the Past, Prospects for the Future in Gender and International Relations

Panel Participants

Moderator: Kimberly Hutchings, London School of Economics; Marysia Zalewski, University of Aberdeen; Ann Tickner, University of Southern California; Christine Sylvester, Lancaster University; Margot Light, London School of Economics; Vivienne Jabri, Kings College London; Fred Halliday, London School of Economics and the Barcelona Institute of International Studies.

Questions from: Niamh Reilly, National University of Ireland; Laura McLeod, University of Sheffi eld; Soumita Basu, Aberystwyth University; Andrew Mickleburgh, Downe House School.

Kimberly Hutchings: I am delighted to welcome our roundtable spea-kers. We have Professor Vivienne Jabri from Kings College London, Professor Margot Light from the London School of Economics, Dr Marysia Zalewski from the University of Aberdeen, Professor Fred Halliday from the London School of Economics and the Barcelona Institute of International Studies, Professor Christine Sylvester from Lancaster University, and Professor Ann Tickner from the University of Southern California. So, many thanks to all six of them for agreeing to come and speak. We’re going to go in backwards alphabetical order. Each of the speakers has been asked to give their views on the rela-tion between past concerns and the contemporary and future agenda of feminist IR.

Marysia Zalewski: I’ll speak to the ‘question of feminism’ in my comments here – with my first point relating to my recollection of the 1988 conference on women and IR at the London School of Economics, which I attended as an undergraduate student. The main thing I remember about that conference is a comment made by a PhD student, which had a profound effect on me at that time. Though it then seemed an odd thing to be talking about in relation to international politics (even if at a



Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37 (1)

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conference ‘about’ women), she spoke about abortion. She proposed to the audience that if women were taken seriously (surely a consistently important feminist provocation), women would have total control of decisions to abort or not, and crucially there would be no constraint as to when a woman might terminate her pregnancy. She paused and looked at the audience for their reaction, and there was a certain discomfort. To be sure, abortion may have something to do with women and reproductive rights, but why make this particular statement and why make it here and now? She speculated about reactions from ‘the public’: ‘Oh, my God, you can’t do that! Women would be having abortions at 38/40 weeks!’ She claimed that there would be a rabid reaction to her proposition, one presumably fuelled by the conventional belief – a belief historically supported philosophically – that women cannot make fully rational, reasonable, acceptable decisions; but particularly in this case because this isn’t their decision to make at all…

Perhaps we can think of her proposition as momentarily performing a radical and feminist conceptual leap. Making radical conceptual leaps – or nudging/rupturing epistemological and political imaginations – is one of the things I think feminism can be extremely good at, even if these leaps are regularly misrecognized. I don’t think that the student’s concern was about ‘actual policy’, but to push/shock that particular audience to more fully perceive (or perceive at all) how women/the feminine/the feminized are placed and constrained, epistemologically/politically/ethically. She fleetingly exposed the depth of fear about women’s uncontrollability when unconstrained, and the easy, comfortable slide into distrust of things feminized; a point which certainly made me start to think differently about IR at that time and it is a point which I think still has contemporary resonance.

We might now read that student’s intervention as illustrative of feminist anxiety, a modernist inspired apprehension about the gendered containment of women’s agency and subject-hood. In the context of recent debates about feminist marginality (particularly ‘within’ the discipline of IR) the gendered landscape of anxiety has become something of a minefield. Giving voice to feminist/feminized anguish – which has such a different hue to masculinized anxieties – invites disciplinary circumvention of all traces of feminist unease. I want to return to these points in a moment when I speak about ‘feminist marginality and futures’ – I will also return to my opening story. I want to move now to discuss definitional practices around feminism. On this Roundtable, we are thinking about feminism in relation to its discursive production within the discipline of IR, so let me offer the following as a snapshot image of feminism ‘within’ IR, drawn from recent debates in the field.

Here’s the general picture: feminism ‘begins’ (is born), we ‘know’ by definition (literally) what it ‘is’: usually women, men, power, etc. And we have a sense of its mission, ‘emancipation’ for example, or to change the



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‘balance of gendered power’.1 This familiar image of feminism – at least how feminism is discursively imagined2 – has garnered some disciplinary currency in IR, which I suggest it achieves through a series of interconnected performative practices. One of these practices is the persistent tethering or wrenching ‘back’ to imagined inaugural commitments – for example, subjects and subjectivity very traditionally understood – regularly produc-ing feminism ‘in IR’ as unyieldingly holding on to essentialist views of woman/subjects, or ‘empowerment’ conventionally conceived, or being very simplistically to do with empowering women vis-a-vis men (Niamh’s paper this morning spoke to some of this).3 One consequence of this ret-rospective suturing is the conjuring of feminism as inevitably temporally constituted. Feminism emerges – birthed by women – ineluctably to move through stages/generations and, of course, to die. Mary Hawkesworth has written on similar themes recently,4 suggesting feminism is marked by a lifespan metaphor where demise is inevitable, there’s no where else to go. (‘Masculine birthing’ from Frankenstein’s ‘creation’, to ‘the bomb’, to IVF has surely always been alternatively marked by ‘immortality’.)

A further consequence of this nostalgic securing and the accompanying sense of time limitation around feminism is an emergent perception that all has not quite gone according to (the feminist) plan. What might this be? That feminism has failed in its normative ambitions and commitments? Or is it that IR – as a discipline – hasn’t changed enough, hasn’t been ‘gender mainstreamed’ enough, hasn’t been transformed enough? To be sure it may not be the task of feminism to liberate or empower women (even broadly understood), yet feminism has tended to be conceived in these terms.5 I would further suggest that this task of transformation has become something of a signature motif around feminism,6 perhaps

1. Judith Squires and Jutta Weldes, ‘Beyond Being Marginal: Gender and International Relations in Britain’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9, no. 2 (2007): 185–203. 2. See discussion in Clare Hemmings,‘Telling feminist stories’, Feminist Theory, 6 (2005): 115–139. 3. Paper presented at the workshop on 26 January, Niamh Reilly (National University of Ireland, Galway), ‘Commonalities, Differences; Past and Present Feminism and Gender Studies IR: Fundamentalisms and Feminist Resistance’. 4. Mary Hawkesworth, ‘The Semiotics of Premature Burial: Feminism in a Postfeminist Age’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 29, no. 4 (2004): 961–985. 5. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005); Hawkesworth, ‘The Semiotics’; Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True, ‘Studying the Struggles and Wishes of the Age: Feminist Theoretical Metho-dology and Feminist Theoretical Methods’, in Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True (eds.), Feminist Methodologies for International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2006). 6. But as Grosz suggests, if feminism’s mission really was to liberate women then something really has gone terribly wrong.




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particularly revealed in the context of debates around (feminist) marginality and (failed) revolution,7 issues which were intriguingly discussed this morning. Failure ‘to achieve’ (surely not?) and apparent anxiety at still being on the ‘edges of IR’ has conjured images of feminist despondency about ‘marginality’ and the prospect of a ‘gloomy future’.8

Constituted margins are indeed interesting places given their illustra-tions of liminal fragility. However, I do not think that asking whether feminism ‘is or isn’t’ on the ‘margins’, is a critically constructive way to think about feminism (or indeed IR). We might agree that feminism isn’t recognizably at the centre of the field of IR (especially given the self- proclaimed centre’s hetero-normative and pseudo- scientific fetishes); yet feminism simultaneously pervades the centre. As such, feminist critical analyses of ‘margins’ effectively expose myths and functions of centres and margins. Yet, feminist inquiry into perceptions/places of ‘margina-lity’ – however critically inspired – readily invites charges of melancholia and resentment; while other critical voices, more authoritatively associ-ated with masculinist methodologies, confidently suggest the need to ‘linger longer in anxiety’,9 a sentiment with which I concur.

There is a cyclicality to critical thinking, especially that which draws upon deconstruction (here, critical = feminism; deconstruction = feminist). This is not something marked by linearity. I think it is instructive to ponder – to linger longer – on the functions of, and perceptions about, or indeed per-formances of, marginality, especially in the context of the construction of authoritative knowledge and legitimate research and teaching practices. In this sense, the discipline of IR remains a significant site to investigate given its role in producing, reproducing and reinforcing particular kinds of knowl-edges inclusions and privileges.10 The need for critical investigation of knowl-edge-producing institutions has simply increased in the current context of the growing hegemony of neo- liberalism’s corporate, profit-driven agenda increasingly exemplified in the practices of the contemporary university.

My final point picks up on a question Terrell posed this morning.11 What would a feminist IR look like? This is a question I too have often

7. Jill Steans, ‘Engaging from the Margins: Feminist Encounters with the “Main-stream” of International Relations’, British Journal of Politics and International Rela-tions, 5, no. 3 (2003): 428–454; Squires and Weldes, ‘Beyond Being Marginal’. 8. See Maria Stern and Marysia Zalewski, ‘Feminist Fatigue(s): Reflections on Feminist Fables of Militarization’, Review of International Studies (forthcoming). 9. Karena Shaw and R.B.J Walker, ‘Situating Academic Practice: Pedagogy, Cri-tique and Responsibility’, in Millennium, 35, no. 1 (2006): 155–165. 10. Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations and Gender Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Hawkesworth, ‘The Semiotics’. Moreover, we should ponder whether a relatively small group of priv-ileged people’s experiences at expensive national and international conferences can usefully indicate the parameters of a field. 11. Paper presented at workshop on 26 January, Terrell Carver (University of Bristol), ‘Men in the Feminist Gaze: What Does this Mean in IR?’.




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asked, not to get an ‘answer’, but to gauge what kind of assumptions are made about what that question means and what kind of answer might be deemed credible, authoritative or useful. We surely already have feminist IR. Rephrase – we have always had ‘feminist IR’ if this refers to the many stories about matters international (which clearly includes the private and personal) told (or not told) by feminists; or through feminism; or through narratives which question gender/sex; or those that deconstruct sex/gender; or those that reconstitute gender/sex (which might include feminism). This is not necessarily to invoke the work that appears on some international politics readings lists in universities around the world – perhaps on that ‘week on gender’12 – the one toward the end, along with the other vaguely feminized ‘afterthoughts’ that perhaps do little to destabilize the field – but possibly consolidate it?

‘No time limit for abortion.’ Why? On what grounds? These aren’t the right questions – indeed there isn’t a ‘right’ question here. I think the political intervention made by that graduate student in 1988 was more of an act of trying to get her audience to ‘think otherwise’ about the concep-tual architectures that create our philosophical and political coherences. We spend so much time in academic institutions constructing coherent stories about subjects, issues and topics to impart them to our students and whatever other audiences we increasingly aspire to have hear us, we forget that coherence itself is a construction. We don’t learn, hear or even feel in coherent ways – yet this very idea of messiness perhaps exudes too much of a feminist gloss.

There is clearly much more feminist inspired work that will be done. Yet I don’t want to imply that any of this work has a linear quality. The idea of consistently, coherently and purposefully ‘moving forward’ (a New Labour, neo-management term surely) is deeply problematic. Our words and concepts repeatedly fail us.13 How could they not? But it is not easy to keep confronting this particularly in the context of invocations of feminized anxiety or of misrecognition of feminism’s work. So we construct more edifices – methodological, political, ethical – to shore up the fragile boundaries of knowledge, ones perhaps more satisfyingly masculine.

We should not dismiss the comment made by that graduate student in 1988 in the light of contemporary thinking; rather we might engage it to reconsider how words and concepts do not necessarily carry the same meanings forward ‘in time’. I suggest we keep paying serious attention to feminist stories as well as to the temporal and other stabilizations around

12. Christina Rowley and Laura Shepherd, ‘The Week on Gender: Feminists Teaching IR’. Unpublished paper presented at ‘The Space Between Us’ workshop at the University of Bristol, 2006 (Gendering International Relations BISA work-ing group). 13. Robyn Wiegman, ‘On Being in Time With Feminism’, Modern Languages Quarterly, 65, no. 1 (2004): 161.




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feminism to think about what this tells us about the constitution of the international and the political.

Ann Tickner: Twenty years ago, I had the privilege of spending the 1989 Lent term at the London School of Economics at which time Fred Halliday and Margot Light introduced the course, ‘Women and Inter-national Relations’, the first time such a course had been taught at the LSE. It is, therefore, a special pleasure to participate in this conference as we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the course, as well as the 1988 Millennium special issue. The course was structured around a number of guest speakers, the majority of whom were activists working for NGOs and policy research groups; only a few were teachers of IR. One of the goals of the seminar, and also of the Millennium special issue, was to try to find women in international relations. Not that they weren’t already there, as the seminar participants well knew, but they had certainly not been noticed by the discipline of International Relations. At that time, there was very little material on feminist IR that one could assign to stu-dents. The 1989 course relied quite heavily on a fairly extensive bibliogra-phy on women and development, and a more limited one on women and war, and women and the military. But there was practically no scholar-ship offering a gendered perspective on the discipline of IR. Most of the visitors in the seminar would not have identified themselves as IR people anyway.

In my week in the course, I focused my remarks on asking, and trying to answer, the question: why are there so few women in international policymaking and in the IR discipline? Having taught a variety of IR courses over the previous five years, I had come to realize that very few of the books I assigned were written by women. In the 1980s, the last decade of the Cold War and before I started writing and teaching about feminism, I became aware of how many of my women students were quite uncomfortable with, or unmotivated by, my IR survey course. In this course we spent quite a bit of time on national security issues, including nuclear strategy and, yes, I was guilty of enjoying a sense of linguistic power when I rolled off those nice sounding acronyms like ‘slick’ems’ (submarine-launched cruise missiles) and ‘glick’ems’ (ground-launched cruise missiles) about which Carol Cohn talks in her insightful work on the gendered language of nuclear strategy.14 Many of the women students would say, ‘I really don’t think this course is for me.’ Trying to figure out why extremely capable students felt so alienated from the material motivated me to start thinking about IR as gendered. The end of the 1980s was a hopeful time for new thinking about the discipline – the Cold War was ending and, not coincidentally, IR was becoming more open to critical perspectives. There was the optimistic sense that

14. Carol Cohn, ‘Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12, no. 4 (1987): 687–718.




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feminism was one of a number of new and exciting critical approaches that would enrich a field that had been so caught up with explaining the national security behaviour of the great powers. So, what has happened since?

There is now, of course, a large and wonderfully diverse literature on feminist IR that challenges disciplinary boundaries and adds new issues and new voices that have never been heard in the discipline before. It is the kind of material that excites students who hitherto may have felt alienated from the subject matter of the field. We have our own jour-nal, The International Feminist Journal of Politics. Many of the standard IR textbooks now include a chapter on feminism and publishers are recep-tive to our work. Both British International Studies Association (BISA) and the International Studies Association (ISA) have large thriving sec-tions devoted to feminist research and scholarship. And IR feminism is starting to be recognized as one of the approaches within the discipline. For example, one of the questions asked on a 2006 survey of university professors in the United States and Canada was, ‘Approximately what percentage of your introductory IR course do you devote to studying each international relations paradigm?’ Although 51–75% of US respon-dents said they only devoted 0.4% of the course to feminism, 6–10% said 32%.15 In a previous survey done in 2004, feminism had not even been listed as a possible paradigm choice.

So, what are some of the directions feminist IR scholarship has been going in the last twenty years? Obviously they are multiple and exciting. We still are, and still should be, concerned about asking the question: ‘Where are the women?’ Feminist research has been successful in making women more visible. But IR feminism has also gone much deeper. Getting well beyond women and IR, and even beyond gender and IR, it has successfully demonstrated – not maybe as much as we would like in the discipline as a whole – that IR theory is gendered, both in the questions it chooses to ask, as well as how it goes about answering them. One of the most creative moves feminism has made is to challenge disciplinary boundaries and bring new issues and new voices into what we call IR. Rich empirical case studies – using methodologies not normally employed by IR scholars – have shed light on those on the margins whose lives are deeply impacted by global politics and economics. Feminists have successfully demonstrated how the lives of sex workers, domestic servants, home-based workers and those who work at unremunerated caring and reproductive labour, are intertwined with global politics and the global economy. They have also suggested that the security of states is sometimes dependent on rendering

15. Daniel Maliniak, Amy Oakes, Susan Peterson and Michael Tierney, The View from the Ivory Tower: TRIP Survey of International Relations Faculty in the United States and Canada (Williamsburg, VA: College of William and Mary, 2007).




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insecure the lives of certain, often marginalized, people and how the global capitalist economy could not function without unremunerated and under-remunerated labour, the majority of which is performed by women. IR feminists have also pointed to the inadequacies of social scientific methodologies for answering many of the questions they want to ask. For example, IR feminists are drawn to ethnographic fieldwork and linguistic text analysis, methodologies that are rarely used in social scientific IR. There is now an important emergent literature on feminist methodologies – much needed for our research students who must often go outside the discipline to seek the kind of methodological training necessary to do empirical feminist research.16

How do we assess all these positive developments and what the future holds for feminist IR? In spite of Christine Sylvester’s claim that we are getting beyond marginality, I do think that IR feminist approaches are still quite marginal in the United States. This may be less true in Europe where there is more openness to critical approaches more generally. In the United States, we do have plenty of spaces at professional meetings for feminist research and conversations, although I agree with Sylvester that the danger here is that we are all in our own camps and not speak-ing enough to each other.17 But, in the US, there are very few political science or International Relations departments at PhD- granting insti-tutions that include any faculty members who specialize in feminist approaches. PhD students still worry about whether making the deci-sion to pursue a feminist dissertation topic will endanger their chances of finding a teaching or research position in the academy. In fact, many young scholars from the US, whose research and teaching is based in feminist or other critical approaches, are going elsewhere – outside the US, either for graduate research or academic positions. This is a problem both for the continuation of feminist IR and for the exposure of IR students to feminist approaches at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. There is a perception in the US that the IR field more generally may actually be narrowing, at least in terms of its pre-ference for social scientific methodologies. While I very much respect feminist scholars who choose to situate themselves outside of what we conventionally define as IR – often in Women’s Studies departments or others that are more open to gendered perspectives – I do believe that some of us need to stay connected to IR, whatever that may mean. Many of my IR students who decide to take a course on feminist IR come away saying that it has changed how they view the world. Surely, this is worth our efforts! And the intergovernmental and NGO policy worlds are often looking for gender specialists. I do agree, however, that it is time to move beyond what I and others have termed ‘unproductive

16. See for example, Ackerly, Stern and True, eds., Feminist Methodologies. 17. Christine Sylvester, ‘Whither the International At the End of IR’, Millen-nium: Journal of International Studies, 35, no. 2 (2007): 551–573.




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conversations’ with the wider discipline. There is so much exciting feminist research about global issues being done and still needing to be done, that this is where our future efforts should lie whether or not we prefer to be located in the discipline that we call IR.

Christine Sylvester: What has changed from 1988 to 2008? I’d say mostly the field of International Relations. IR has been transformed: there is no real mainstream any longer, margins are disappearing, and no topic is forbidden to it. The field accommodates everything in a devolved and still evolving camp structure. Our numerous camps have their own heroes, prized texts, dedicated followers, and, increasingly, their own journals. This camp development in the field means that feminist IR can stop say-ing that it is on the margins. The so-called mainstream is on the margins and margins are ‘mainstream.’ Indeed, to insist on holding the margin in ‘the’ field is to get stuck in the past, addicted to locating IR some place other than where we are. I am a bit of IR, you are IR, we are all part of IR and no one is IR in its entirety.

IR’s transformation came in the wake of the third debate. When the field failed to predict the fall of a superpower, after studying polarity with great intensity for decades, IR was weakened. In came a variety of people, approaches, insistences, and agendas, full of pent up demands and all taking aim at the unworthy mainstream of IR. Feminism was one of several groups charging the gates; the post-structuralists were there, the postcolonial studies scholars, the sociologists came in, the English School staged a comeback, human security plunged on. The effect of these challenges was to move IR into much more democratic spaces for scholarship than most might have anticipated. We all have places in IR around some campfire now; and we can always build a new camp if we take exception to the ones already formed.

To be clear, there are people in the world – vast numbers – who are forced into margins or zones of bare life by states, social groups, economic practices, politics, and even by our academic privileges. I am not claiming that there are fewer margins in life and in international relations. How sad that there are so many! What I am saying is that feminists are not marginalized today in the academic field of IR. Feminist IR might be snubbed by other camps, but that’s the camp structure for you. We can ignore a camp, even denounce it if we wish, and it can do the same to us. Both, however, will likely survive and flourish in camp IR; since nothing is out of bounds and nothing can be tossed away or entirely discredited; there’s always some simpatico journal to send one’s work to or read. The camp phenomenon also exists irrespective of the kind of academic institution we work in, or the IR orientation held by our immediate or national colleagues. The field in its broadest outlines is what is structured into camps, and even scholars who might be tucked away in feminist-hostile departments can take solace in feminist camps




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that appear in the literature and that have formal recognition as ‘sections’ in IR’s professional organizations.

Viva the opening up of IR! At the same time, there are some down-sides to a basically praiseworthy broadening in the field. It is a transna-tional and interdisciplinary moment for IR, but one, oddly, that is not especially connective or intellectually generous. From my locations on the broad critical wings of the campground, I see sectarianism creeping in. Time was when scholars critical of mainstream IR formed alliances and worked across each other’s lines of inquiry. There was a sense of solidarity – not unity, not uniformity of thought or approach, but solida-rity across difference. That trend of the 1980s and early 1990s is largely over. We’re all in fiefdoms now, and it can be easy to go it alone rather than hook up with those we once worked alongside for field space. In some critical circles, I even detect a selective shunning of certain allied knowledges or aims, feminist knowledges in particular. Perhaps camps imagine that they got IR, or their part of it, right, in which case there would be little incentive to keep up with what even related camps are thinking, let alone bring in their ideas. Yet, insularity means that a camp can myopically claim a unique direction that another camp might have considered a while back. And all of us can miss elements of the interna-tional that our smoky campfires hide.

Feminist IR itself isn’t immune to these general tendencies. I’m keeping my eye on what looks to be a proto-nationalist identity line drawn between feminist IR and gender IR by some contributors to a special issue of the British Journal of Politics and IR on gender and international relations in Britain.18 Gender International Relations (GIR) advocates promise to broaden the various women’s questions in feminist IR into gender questions, which gets men and masculinities squarely into the gender picture and moves gender analysis away from the margins to the centre of IR. If margins aren’t there anymore in IR, though, we really shouldn’t reify them. And if men per se haven’t been studied in feminist IR, masculinity certainly has – for years. GIR questions the necessity of framing masculinity studies around effects on only women or gender relations that affect women. That sounds like a genuine disagreement within feminist IR to me, and disagreement is fine. Claiming GIR for Britain, however, tweaks a sectarian concern to pronounce an orthodoxy on those who might not quite agree with it in Britain, and do so through a move that relies on the territorial map of old-hat IR.

Masculinity(ies) is(are) important and should not be neglected. At the same time, we must guard against turning them into another ultimate or overarching phenomenon, as I think has happened to some initially use-ful concepts like militarization, capitalism, and rationality. Masculinities

18. Judith Squires and Jutta Weldes (eds) British Journal of Politics and Interna-tional Relations Special Issue on Gender and IR in Britain, 9, no. 2 (2007).




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can easily become linchpins for many dynamics and intersections, thereby imprisoning us with their pervasiveness and metamorphoses, their categories and tools. Masculinity seen everywhere in many dif-ferent forms, can loom encompassingly tricky in its maneuverings for survival. We end up following ‘it’, tracking its shape-shifts, noting weak points, and studying resistances that could not possibly tame such a made-big beast. Perhaps ‘masculinities’ is a new way to study ‘patriar-chy,’ rejuvenating and updating that big concept for a postmodern era of difference. And, equating Britain with GIR could be about School politics: within a European theatre of IR that likes to name university-identified schools of thought – the Aberystwyth School, the Copenhagen School, and the English School – maybe the University of Bristol’s admirable gen-der and IR programme is simply being pasted onto Britain at large.

Among multiple trends in feminist IR, including GIR, I have been learning much from recent research on women who use violence in international relations. That work, which I associate with Laura Sjoberg as well as Caren Gentry, explodes any lingering tendencies we might have to associate women with peace and masculinity with violence.19 It enables us to think unthinkable thoughts about the violence-laden choices, decisions, actions, and tools of agency that people called women ponder in various settings. Importantly, it lets us talk about powerful bad women instead of focusing so much on how (all?) women are dif-ferentially forced to conform to, and take as normal, masculine dis-courses of violence. I also appreciate the often unexpected and complex international relations that emerge when we provincialize IR, to extend a notion from Dipesh Chakrabarty, using postcolonial approaches.20

Here’s a different worry for me, though: who has run off with feminists’ tongues? We grasp power and influence within camp IR and even manage the impressive crossover that result in Ann Tickner being elected ISA president. Yet, we can go all silent and squirmy on public issues of the day rather than enter difficult tussles about religion, immigration, and law that affect many women. Can IR feminists reasonably support outspoken feminist women whose politics confound our categories of difference (as in the case of Hirsi Ali)?21 I might have read the wrong newspapers when Rowan Williams suggested bringing aspects of Shari’a law into the British legal system.22 Perhaps that is why I had difficulty

19. Laura Sjoberg and Caren E. Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Vio-lence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2007). 20. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference, 2nd Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 21. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a former Dutch MP, well known for her critique of Islam’s treatment of women. 22. This is a reference to the controversy stirred up by a speech given by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in February 2008, which dealt with the relation between religious and secular legal frameworks.




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finding editorials by feminists about the effects such a move could have on variously placed women. Surely this is a tailor-made topic for feminist discussion and argument, pro and con.

How and why we split into so many camps in disciplinary and ‘real world’ ways, is an interesting question. Even more interesting to me is this one: is a camp structure what we really want in the longrun? The academic generation coming of age now has not known anything other than camp/sectarian IR. They must think it the norm. Let us think again: who are we as feminists doing IR, and what is the nature of that exciting venture at this precise juncture in history? Perhaps we will find that we need to change ourselves a bit, even as we celebrate what we have well and truly achieved in post-third debate IR.

Margot Light: What I want to do is to reflect not so much on the subject matter, but on teaching the option ‘Women and IR’. The first thing I’d like to say is what a privilege it was being part of it. Apart from my own birth, it’s the only thing I’ve been part of that’s actually had anniversaries. One point that was very apparent to me right from the beginning was that there was something of a confusion between trying to decide whether this was an activist project or a theoretical project, and that was very apparent amongst the students as well. What was intriguing to me, and I think this was the first time I’d actually understood this, was that there can be a potential conflict between being an activist and being a theorist. Because if you’re an activist, you don’t always want to go where the logic of the theory takes you, and that can be a problem in the academic study of Women and IR.

The second thing I noticed, and I’d be interested to know whether this still happens, is that the students who took Women and IR were a kind of self-selected group, so that what one was doing was preaching to the converted; you were never actually spreading the message beyond to a wider audience. That was particularly apparent in the gender of the students who took the option – in all the time that I taught it at the London School of Economics, there were never more than one or two male students per year. Now, looking around me today, I would judge that the gender spread is slightly better, but I would guess that it is still noticeably predominantly women who study Gender and IR in the UK. I was struck by the difference when I went to teach in the United States, at Dartmouth College for a term. I offered Women and IR as a senior undergraduate course, and I was absolutely amazed to discover that most of the students who took it were male and not female. I was also horrified, however, because Dartmouth has this horrendous practice (I think) of parents attending the classes once a term. To have a group of dads sitting at the back of the room when I spoke about women’s unpaid labour was rather trying, to say the least.

Another thing that was very obvious to me then, and I’d be interested to hear from colleagues if this is still the case, was that Women and IR




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was definitely known as a ‘soft’ option and I never actually managed to establish whether students were actively advised against taking this soft option. I certainly know that when I became a graduate student at the LSE, my advisor did more than strongly advise; he virtually forbade me to go to anything – this was before the third debate; we were still in the throes of the second debate – that had any kind of behaviouralism attached to it. I was quite interested at the time to try to establish if students at the LSE were still getting that kind of advice, but I didn’t manage to find out.

The other thing that struck me then, and I think it became increasingly obvious to us over the years, was that our option tended to be a very popular choice for students doing a Masters in Gender Studies, obviously, but also students of Development Studies. This had a curious effect on the content of the course, because it seemed to me that as the years went on, we were teaching fewer students who knew IR theory, and that meant it was very difficult to raise the theoretical content or even to keep the level of the theoretical content of Women and IR as high as I would have liked.

The final point that I’d like to make – because I’m doing the five minute option here – is on the question of ‘mainstreaming’ or keeping Gender and IR as a ‘niche’ subject. At the time, I felt that mainstreaming was a great success, because mainstreaming actually dealt with most of these problems that I have mentioned here. Once we reached a stage where the main course on International Relations Theory included gender as one of its topics, once Foreign Policy Analysis had gender as one of its topics, once Conflict and Peace Studies had gender as one of its topics, I really thought that for the first time we were actually getting the subject more widely known among people who might otherwise never have had any appreciation of it.

Vivienne Jabri: We were asked to consider the relation between feminist IR in the past with contemporary and future concerns. It is tempting to provide a wholesale account of feminist activity in the discipline of IR, but no less a temptation is to consider future agendas for feminist research. I’ll opt for the second of the two challenges that Kimberly Hutchings put to us and focus on the future and where feminist contributions might lie in an IR field, which has already been somehow reconstituted, not simply through the ‘events’ of the world, so to speak, but through the influences of critical discourses, encompassing, as these have done, various renditions on Frankfurt School critical theory, feminism and poststructural thought. I start with the assumption that feminist IR, in simply bringing forth questions related to gendered subjectivity, has already contributed to the reconstitution of the discourses of IR, its theories and how the subject is taught. This does not mean that all who teach IR have taken feminism on board; rather that one element in our baseline of judgement, of courses taught, conferences, research on matters international, derives from feminist interventions already in place in IR.




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So the interesting question relates, in my view, not so much to IR as a discipline and whether feminists have succeeded somehow in its transformation, but, rather, what feminist thought itself contributes to the present and the political concerns we have in the present. The lens, in other words, shifts back to feminism itself, and in particular to feminism as political theory. When conceived not simply as an empirical project that ‘brings women in’, but rather as a distinctly philosophical and political project, feminism must engage with the question of the distinctiveness of the ‘international’ on the one hand and the ‘political’ on the other. Such engagement is itself replete with a legacy of contestation within feminism as a body of theory. We might, for example, immediately distinguish between liberal feminism that takes ‘rational woman’ as subject, and Marxist inspired feminist thought that relates gendered subjectivity to class consciousness, which in turn might be distinguished from psychoanalytically informed poststructural feminism that seeks to problematize subjectivity as such and to locate understandings of subjectivity within the wider material and discursive conditions of social and political life. Once feminism is acknowledged as a discourse that is already imbricated with these influences, while being itself transformative of them, the agenda for reflection shifts towards feminism’s distinctive contributions to how we begin to think about politics and the distinctly ‘international’ location of politics. So, we might then begin to ask questions like: what is it that feminism can tell us about the sphere of the international as a distinct political space? What is it that feminism tells us about the sphere of the ‘political’, and the distinctiveness, in turn, of the sphere of the political?

I want to argue that the historical challenge of feminism and for feminism has been its questioning of the distinctiveness of both the international and the political. Feminism disrupts the taken for granted boundaries of political theory and it has done so in IR through its focus on lived experience. The abstractions of the international system, of the unproblematized state and of political agency come face to face with the actuality of life in all its fragmentations, differentiations and complexities. It is exactly this disruption of IR’s taken for granted categories that links feminist discourse to our icons of the past; namely Simone de Beauvoir and others, as well as other critical antecedents in the form of Marxist and post-Marxist political theory and continental philosophy.

However, in bringing lived experience to the fore and in problematiz-ing the boundaries of the international and the political, feminism is itself challenged by the specificity of questions that derive from the juridico-political distinctiveness of the international. This is a distinctiveness that is not so much taken for granted, as is the wont of orthodoxy, but rather one that has very direct and very immediate impact on the constitution of subjectivity (gendered or otherwise), on lived experience and the possibility of political agency. The boundaries, constructed as they are discursively and institutionally, that the ‘international’ suggests matter




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materially, discursively, and hence also in the constitution of subjectivity. How feminism contributes to the spatial and temporal articulation of the international is hence key, for this brings feminism itself face to face with its very own modern legacy, one that firmly locates it within and in rela-tion to the institutions of modernity, namely the state and a capitalist international political economy. Crucially, this modern legacy confers to feminism a particular notion of subjectivity, one that suggests a modern-izing, progressive notion of a here and an elsewhere, some notion of an emancipated subject to come. Even in its most poststructural rendition, feminism as political theory is only meaningful in the context of its mod-ern inheritance, contested though this inheritance is.

Then we have the notion of the ‘political’ and its distinctiveness. Feminism’s great contribution is its disruption of the boundary between the private and the public. However, once again feminism comes face to face with its own critique, for the question must always return to how feminism contributes to our thinking about politics, political community, the legitimacy or otherwise of political institutions, subjectivity and how it relates to political agency. It is perhaps too easy to problematize the temporal and spatial distinction between the private and the public, but the two locations are only meaningful in being mutually constitutive in their difference. The feminist movement has historically recognized this mutually constitutive difference, for any feminist intervention as practice seeks the relocation (in time and space) of the private into the public, and of the personal into the political.

So, if feminism in IR moves beyond merely thinking of itself as living on the ‘margins’, then it has to have some substantial sense of what it means to inhabit the terrain of the ‘international’ and what it means to be ‘political’. The modern international is exactly defined in terms, first, of the modern state and modern conceptions of sovereignty, a neoliberal international political economy and a distinctly modern subjectivity that is formed in and through these modern institutions and power relations. Feminism as a discourse and the institutional practices that it has come to inform is, in fact, far from being on the margins when thought of in our present context of late modernity. Feminism might, in fact, be thought of as being complicit in the institutions of modernity, their late modern transformations and the hegemonic practices that derive from these insti-tutions internationally. We need to think about these complicities and their implications for a discourse that defines itself as ‘critical’. Unravel-ling these complicities reveals differences within feminism that reflect the international politics of the present, defined as these are in terms, on the one hand, of the recognition of difference and the very modern conception of a self-determining political community (what I would argue is an internationalist political feminism) and, on the other, of a neo- conservative interventionist form of feminism that is complicit in hege-monic relations of power. It is important to recognize that neither of these




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forms of feminism is ‘on the margins’. They are, however, fundamentally different articulations of politics, and of international politics, specifically. What comes to be of interest to the first form of feminism is how gender, and sexualized subjectivity, is used as a technology of power, whether such use comes in the form of ‘gender awareness training’ in post-conflict state-building, in ‘gender mainstreaming’, or in the confined spaces of Abu-Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay. Of interest to a neo-conservative form of feminism is how gender might be utilized as a legitimizing practice for intervention, for the redesign of other societies, for the reinforcement of a neo-liberal order and so on.

Each of the above forms of feminist thought gives different answers to the question of what constitutes the international and the political. The contest is no longer one of feminism and the rest, but rather lies within feminism itself (some would argue that the contest has always been an internal one). While there has been much by way of an internal conversation within feminist political theory, such has not been the case in feminist IR. Two of the papers presented earlier during the day touch on, or implicitly suggest, a call for a rethinking of how such a conversation might take place in IR. One paper was devoted to African Feminism and was given by our colleague from Rutgers, and the other was given by Terrell Carver, and asked what an ‘alternative materialisation’ would look like. The former brings to our attention the question of how feminism is articulated in African politics, while the latter is, I think unintentionally on Terrell’s part, suggestive of the question of how gendered subjectivity finds expression in the contingencies of social and political life and how knowledge systems give form to such subjectivity.23

I want to suggest that an internationalist political feminism distinguishes itself from a universalizing, moralizing cosmopolitan discourse that seeks its remit as being in a pedagogical relation with societies outside the ‘West’. Each of these brings different conceptions of feminism as a distinctly modern project, each articulates a different relationship with difference itself, each ultimately defines and seeks a different materialization.

Fred Halliday: We need to link the development of feminist IR to the radical movements of 1968 and to second wave feminism. There are three things I want to deal with: why the 1980s? Where have we got to? And what’s my agenda now? In the 1980s, if you take a very simple model, then anything in IR, or in any of the social sciences, is a product of the dis-cipline itself, broader intellectual and academic currents, then the world as a whole. Let’s just start with the world as a whole. In the 1980s, you had

23. Papers presented at the workshop on 26 January: Fayth Ruffin (Rutgers University) ‘Twenty Years Later: Feminism and the Limits of the Claim to Know’; Terrell Carver, ‘Men in the Feminist Gaze’.




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already had, as has been mentioned, major contributions on the topic of women and development, very much arising out of Ester Boserup’s 1970 book, which was an absolutely key book that led to the UN’s decades for women.24 Second, you also had great interest in women’s rights and, in 1979, the international Convention for the Elimination of Discrimina-tion Against Women (CEDAW). There was also a very powerful, even if not formally organized, international women’s movement. Much of it, I’d like to remind people, coming from the United States. Within the social sciences IR was late, but we were influenced by feminist politics and by feminist work in other disciplines. If we think of history, there is Sheila Rowbotham’s great book Hidden from History, and that’s why I called my first article on women and international relations in the 1988 Millennium issue, ‘Hidden from International Relations’.25 There were also major developments in international law that later led to the international leg-islation on rape in war, and to major efforts in many parts of the world to counter violence against women at the state level, which have also prompted movements against all kinds of sexual and gender discrimina-tion, including anti-gay discrimination.

I think in IR itself there was much resistance to feminist work. IR thought of itself as gender neutral. Nevertheless, there were bits of work being done. There was work being done on women and development; there was massive women’s participation in anti-war and anti-nuclear movements, such as Greenham Common. People like Jean Elshtain were writing about this, Mary Kaldor as well.26 Much of this is what is currently disparaged, not by me, as liberal feminism or as universalist. Also, we should not forget the role of communism and radical and revolutionary movements in promoting women’s rights. Just to take you back, I’ve got two images here from that time. This is a poster from Afghanistan in the communist period; it’s from the organization of democratic leaders of Afghanistan. This is not the Afghanistan of the Taliban or what you normally see today. This is an emancipated woman and an emancipated man struggling against feudalism, against reaction. This is very much the communist image of the time. The other picture is one that became famous; it’s actually a picture from a guerrilla war in 1970, a picture of a woman

24. Ester Boserup, Women’s Role in Economic Development (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1970). 25. Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden From History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against it (London: Pluto Press, 1973). Fred Halliday, ‘Hidden from International Relations: Women and the International Arena’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 17, no. 3 (1988): 419–428. 26. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987); Jean Bethke Elshtain, ‘The Problem with Peace’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 17, no. 3 (1988): 441–449. Mary Kaldor, ‘The Revolutions of 1989’, in George A. Lopez and Nancy J. Myers, Peace and Security: The Next Generation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).




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fighter. But again, in a country where now everybody’s wearing the veil or the hejab and talking about identity politics and all that stuff, here was a pretty clear universalist message. There was a song – and I think this is a unique feature of the revolutions of South Arabia – about the popular alliance that said: ‘long live the workers, long live the peasants, long live the fishermen, long live the Bedouins and the nomads’, and then it said ‘we must liberate women, we must give arms to the women’. I’ve never known another revolution that actually took this position, and it’s a long way from where we are now.

So much for the 1980s. I agree with those who say we’ve made prog-ress, in particular in international law and women’s human rights. I think also the fact that there are now prominent politicians in world politics who arise out of that period, Mary Robinson who was President of my country being one example, Michelle Bachelet of Chile being another. I recently met for the first time Shirin Ebadi from Iran, for whom I have a great admiration.27 But I’ll also say something that most of you won’t like, the best work being done now in gender and IR is being done by people like Martha Nussbaum, serious work linking universalist political theory and rights to issues of concrete development, combining a high level of theory with activist involvement. For me, if you want to put someone on a reading list to really focus these issues it would be someone like Martha Nussbaum or Amartya Sen, who have taken, whatever you want to call it, the liberal, quantitative, universalist agenda, and they’ve done very serious work on it.28At the same time, things have gone backwards. Our colleagues have been polite about this, but IR is in a mess, let’s face it! IR, as Christine said, is in its silos, it’s in its camps. The realists have come back, red in tooth and claw, responding to the world as it is, but I also have to say, against what most of you believe, that I do think the post-modernist trend has been a disaster for IR and women’s rights as well. Here I am with Martha Nussbaum in her excellent article on Judith Butler, which I’m now going to quote.29 Nussbaum argues that in the old days feminist scholars engaged in ‘concrete projects, like reform

27. Mary Robinson, formerly President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; Michelle Bachelet, President of Chile; Shirin Ebadi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her efforts to promote democracy and human rights. 28. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, The Quality of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 29. The article quoted from here is ‘The Professor of Parody’ by Martha Nussbaum, The New Republic, 22 February 1999. Nussbaum’s critique of Judith Butler’s work provoked a storm of responses, some sympathetic and some crit-ical, which reflected deep divisions in the US academy and beyond about the intellectual and political credentials of poststructuralist argument. For a rather different feminist reading than the one offered by Fred Halliday see, Ratna Kapur, ‘Imperial Parody’, Feminist Theory 2, no. 1 (2001): 79–88.




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of rape law; winning attention and legal redress for the problems of domestic violence and sexual harassment; improving women’s economic opportunities, working conditions, and education; winning pregnancy benefits for female workers’, etc. And then she says ‘in the United States, however, things have been changing. One observes a new, disquieting trend. It is not only that feminist theory pays relatively little attention to the struggles of women outside the United States. Something more insid-ious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American acad-emy’, and I would add in the prominent debates of feminism and IR. ‘It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of con-nections with the real situation of real women. Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness’, this from a leading political theorist. An excellent article in the New Republic from about 10 years ago, and I would associate myself with it.

I would repeat the challenge, or if you like the falsifiable proposition, which I coined in 1988, which is my main contribution to the field. It’s very simple, that there’s no area of international relations, inter-state relations, or transnational relations that does not have a gender dimension. Not espionage, not nuclear war, not development, not globalization, not terrorism, all of these have a gender dimension. In today’s world I would focus on three things in particular. First of all the issue of rights, if we ditch rights we’re lost. Rights are the last grand narrative and if we get into the netherworld of relativism and identity politics then we are sunk. Second, globalization, a lot of people are doing work on the economic and ideological effects of globalization. There are some negative trends in globalization, internet pornography is one, trafficking women is another, the expansion of global sexism. And finally, the war on terror: 9/11 and the war on terror has provoked a massive and reactionary re-masculinization of public space and the use of violence and terror to subordinate women, that’s the agenda on both sides, and we should focus on it.

Laura McLeod: I’ve got a question. There were several things that jumped out at me about what everyone said; one was the question of teaching. I taught a second-year introduction to international relations seminar, and we had our ‘week on gender’. At the end of that seminar I asked my students, how has the way I’ve taught you this term so far been feminist? That was met with complete silence. And then they said, ‘it was really nice to have a woman teaching us international relations’. The fact that even bright, intelligent sec-ond-year undergraduates still think that feminism is about women simply being present in the classroom is astonishing. Maybe you could comment on that? Then there is the question of why we’re even choosing to celebrate




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1988? Why not 1987 when Elshtain published Women and War? Why not 1989, when Cynthia Enloe published Bananas, Beaches and Bases?30

Anonymous Question: My question comes out of a number of people’s comments. What sort of feminism in IR? What sort of rights in IR? I think there are some very different and conflicting ideas here. It’s to take up Vivienne Jabri’s point about Cosmopolitan Feminism and its complicity in the hegemonic discourses of IR, and Marysia Zalewski’s point about abortion rights, highlighted in 1988. Abortion rights were about the sovereignty of the body, the right of the woman to determine what she wants to do, instead of the state or authorized professionals. On the other hand, two decades on we have Kimberly Hutchings’ point about the invasion of Afghanistan in the name of women. If you look at that, you have an assumption of a right of intervention. Rights, essentially, of the great powers to intervene in weak states. If we look at what’s happened in rights, we’ve shifted away from rights as non-interference, where the great powers cannot interfere with the rights of the weak (the autonomy championed by feminism being analogous to decolonization arguments of the third world against the great powers). Now we have a situation where, in international feminist legal scholarship in particular, rights of non-interference are transformed to legitimize great powers intervening in weak states. One needs to look critically at the feminist legacy. I would argue that the road to Basra was through Catherine MacKinnon.31

Fred Halliday: I just spent two days with Shirin Ebadi, the noble prize-winning liberal lawyer. She’s absolutely against any American attack on Iran, but she’s in favour of universal rights. She did talk at length about the long history of women’s struggles in Iran, which is neither colonial nor imperial, but has a long history of struggle over 100 years in which gender issues were absolutely central. She is not in favour of intervention, in fact, she’s dead set against it, but she’s absolutely clear and uncompromising on universal principles, and I admire her very much for it.

Marysia Zalewski: Why not 1987 or 1989? On the one hand, the choice of date is arbitrary; but arbitrariness has a philosophy and politics of its own. It could have been many different years, but this anniversary gives us a forum to take the time to think about issues that seem important. And remember we are celebrating ‘British’ gender and IR, so relating our discussion to the 1988 conference at the LSE is important. Your question reminds me of a ‘dilemma’ facing members of the Feminist Theory and

30. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of Interna-tional Politics (London: Pandora, 1989). 31. See Catherine A. Mackinnon, ‘Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace’, in Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (eds) On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, 1993 (New York: Basic Books, 1993).




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Gender Section at the ISA some years ago in relation to ‘Eminent Scholar Panels’. These panels are a tradition at ISA – a tradition with perhaps something of a masculinist veneer? Did the FTGS section want to join in with this? There are reasons why feminist scholars might not want to reproduce this traditional academic activity – ‘more patting each other on the back’, or ‘rewarding privilege twice (or more) over’ – but I think the view was that FTGS also needed to acknowledge important or significant contributions, and, at the same time, why shouldn’t feminists indulge in this and have another excuse for a party!

There are unsurprisingly many contradictory things coming up in the discussion here both from the panel and from the audience. The second question is very interesting. My brief response is that the point about abortion may appear to be simply about rights, but I don’t think this is the significant thing to draw from it. It perhaps can only be heard in the context of rights in a contemporary setting. I think the comment about abortion made by that student in 1988 was about something else. But your last point is intriguing and provocative and has credibility – but why Catherine MacKinnon instead of any number of ‘rights-arguing’ men? Are women’s ‘crimes’ (whether physical, epistemological or political) ‘worse’ than men’s?

Vivienne Jabri: I used the term ‘complicity’ in an article I published in the journal Alternatives (2004), which was part of a series of papers that Kimberly brought together on the subject of feminist ethics.32 My point there and now is that particular forms of feminism – Jean Elshtain is an example – have been complicit in their support of hegemonic wars, and in taking up, very simplistically, the discourses of the Bush Administration.33 So, there are feminist voices who have sustained and supported a neo-conservative agenda (Edward Said referred to Elshtain as a ‘conservative feminist’, and I would agree with him). Any ideology has differences within it, and feminism is no exception. We’ve been rather incapable of acknowledging these very real ideological differences within feminist IR. However, these differences are beginning to come to the fore in a context which some have referred to as ‘dark times’, a context where violations of rights are not just happening in other people’s societies but here at our doorstep. Just in reference to Fred’s comments, Judith Butler cannot simply be reduced to talking about ‘identity politics’ and neglecting the question of rights. One of the most powerful texts recently published on the violation of rights and specifically on Guantánamo Bay is Butler’s Precarious Life.34 In writing about these matters, her concern is to highlight,

32. Vivienne Jabri, ‘Feminist Ethics and Hegemonic Global Politics’, Alternatives 29, no. 3 (2004): 265–284. 33. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003). 34. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).




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following Foucault, the point that law is used as a technology of control. If we can’t critique practices like Guantánamo from a feminist angle, then feminism can no longer consider itself a critical discourse. Feminism historically is a political project, let’s not forget that, and historically feminism as theory and practice has had a great deal to say about issues of war and peace. Perhaps we should relive the debates that took place at the turn of the 20th century, when feminists were exactly debating the question of how women relate to war, how political subjectivity might be understood in the context of an opposition to war. These are issues that have profound relevance for us in the present.

Niamh Reilly: I just want to make a couple of comments about international law and feminist engagement with international law. It’s really important to understand that law is a site of contestation and that there are multiple ways of approaching and engaging with it. Catherine MacKinnon’s involvement in debates around interventions in Kosovo has been raised a few times in discussions today as an example of ‘Feminism’ colluding with the oppressive power of international law and western hegemony in global politics. It is important to distinguish between instances of individual high profile US academics pressing for particular kinds of legal interventions and other very different examples where western-based feminist legal scholars have engaged with international law, in close reciprocal collaboration with broad-based social movements. Scholars and advocates such as Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, Rhonda Copelon and Rebecca Cook are all examples of feminist legal scholars who have worked closely with bottom-up women’s movements in various efforts to reclaim the discourse of international law as a space to empower women.35 The Tokyo Women’s Tribunal on Sexual Slavery is a particularly good example of decentring both the western and male biases of international law in the pursuit of gender justice.36 The point is that international law (like all law) is a site of contestation and that there are ‘good’ ways and ‘bad’ ways of engaging with it. Regardless of what radical deconstructive analyses might suggest, human rights claims remain the language of movements of resistance and social movements everywhere.

As scholars of feminist international relations, it is important to theo-rize women’s movements’ engagement with rights and international law

35. Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin, The Boundaries of Interna-tional Law: A Feminist Analysis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Rebecca J. Cook, ‘Women’s International Human Rights Law: The Way Forward’ and Rhonda Copelon, ‘Intimate Terror: Understanding Domestic Violence as Tor-ture’, both in Rebecca J. Cook (ed.) Human Rights of Women: National and Interna-tional Perspectives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 36. Christine Chinkin, ‘Women’s International Tribunal on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery’, American Journal of International Law 95, no. 2 (2001): 335–341.




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from global South as well as global North perspectives, and understand the relationship between scholarship around those rights and enabling, supporting, working with, and, if possible, being part of transforma-tive uses of the law. While we should not jettison human rights, there-fore, equally, we must continually challenge and reject western-centric approaches whereby the presumption is that human rights violations only occur ‘in other countries’ – largely in the so-called developing world – and that western states are by definition top-down guardians of human rights. Such an understanding of human rights in global politics is never going to work – it is at odds with human rights principles and broad-based transformative movements that invoke human rights. Instead, human rights must be understood primarily in terms of movements for rights that specify and demand the conditions necessary to implement those rights in particular contexts. The realization of human rights in this sense can never be achieved through imposition by powerful states on other states. Realizing human rights in any context demands the partici-pation of those whose rights are to be protected. From this perspective, we need to theorize how transnational feminist networks work towards this end and what the role of scholarly (feminist IR) interventions might be in these processes.

Soumita Basu: This is about contradictions within feminist scholarship. My question is addressed to the entire panel. How do you personally respond to feminist arguments that you feel you fundamentally disagree with at that point in time?

Andrew Mickleburgh: I’d be interested in the panel’s comments on two questions. The first is, I’ve been surprised by the number of times during the workshop when it seemed to me that we might have been using the words gender and feminism interchangeably, and in another forum this could be quite a problem. One of the questions it raises in my mind is how often in our discussions are we using the word gender relations when the agenda is actually feminist action? Second, a comment about gender mainstreaming: I had the privilege of teaching throughout the 1990s in Uganda, where gender mainstreaming was a very important part of our university. We were instructed by the government to pursue a programme of gender mainstreaming. We decided as a university community that we would not go down the route of having gender topics within the various faculties, university-wide. We were very clear that gender mainstreaming in Uganda meant changing a way of thinking and a way of teaching, and I wonder where we stand on that in British institutions?

Ann Tickner: I think the issue about how we deal with differences among feminists is an interesting one. So far we have all been rather nice to each other, at least in print – maybe too much so. IR scholars spend quite a bit




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of time knocking down those who disagree with them. Maybe this goes with the territory of international politics. The fact that we’ve been nice to each other may be a constructive way of building comprehensive knowl-edge from very different perspectives rather than the paradigm wars in which IR tends to engage. Your question has intrigued me because I have sometimes thought that we’re too kind to each other but perhaps we’re engaged in a constructive intellectual project, which I rather like the sound of.

Christine Sylvester: I like to think that everyone who contributes to a field is doing so in good faith. That isn’t always the case, but then politics is the realm of power and disagreement. If we didn’t have both we wouldn’t have political institutions. I try to assign contrasting viewpoints to students so they can see scholars disagreeing. I also tend to read the ‘enemy’s’ writings – you know, the neoconservatives like Francis Fukuyama, the essentialists like Martha Nussbaum, the old realists, the neorealists. Often my students and I get confused when we do this or find the experience of reading outside the approved box an uncomfortable one. When we stick within the box, though, it can be downright difficult to find contrasting feminist IR positions to read. There’s considerable conformity and predictability in some areas of our scholarship. I hope we learn to engage each other critically, and seek to expand our horizons of feminist IR, in ways that work, but that are not necessarily the ways that other groups would charge at one another.

Fred Halliday: One of the things I find very offensive is when people say we are in a post-feminist age, as if the agenda of the 1960s and 1970s has been achieved. In that sense, I am faithful to the agenda of the 1960s and 1970s because we are a long way from achieving it. If you take just four transnational and international issues: 1) equal pay, basically still 40% difference within European countries. 2) Sexism and language, why isn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger being hounded by feminists for talking about girlie men and all the other stuff? We seem to not see it as a political issue. 3) Pornography and the debate, which is a perfectly legitimate and complex one, about where does sensuality and eroticism end and pornography begin? We can all agree that the films shown in hotels around the world are inhuman and demonic, corrupting and virtually violence against women. Yet, is this issue present in the US presidential campaign? Are people protesting about it? Hardly at all. 4) The issue of domestic labour, the old issue that the Marxists went on about. It’s gotten worse under globalization, because people work longer hours, they travel more; I worry about the effects on younger people, all this 24/7 culture and people travelling all the time. Those are four old-fashioned issues, equal pay, language, pornography and domestic labour, which I think are absolutely essential to equality. In that sense, we need the reassertion of feminism.




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Marysia Zalewski: My initial response is to say that I hold varying feminist positions which might be differentially labelled: (possibly) liberal, radi-cal, queer, post-structural. I think I am all of those and probably more besides. Perhaps some days I am more one than the other. Your question is not a simple one. There are, of course, disagreements between feminists and certainly politics is partly about disagreement, but there is also a (dis-ciplinary) politics to disagreement. In the discipline of International Rela-tions when disagreements materialize within feminism, it’s interesting how they get played out, how they are seized, what they are taken to mean and what function they serve. Take the proposition that feminism is an atrophying part of the ‘gender debate’ – Christine also spoke about this. This odd idea potentially paves a comfortable route through which to dismiss feminism – one based on parsimonious formations of femi-nism and simplistic understandings of the character of disagreements between different branches of feminism and the supposed different order of analyses labelled ‘gender’. The methodological norm in a discipline like IR (not exclusive to IR) is to construct intellectual, political, onto-logical, epistemological boundaries (camps?) and then battle manfully for the hegemonic position (not ‘campish’ enough perhaps?). Intellectual ‘skirmishes’ among ‘womenfeminists’ tend to be apprehended through somewhat different prisms.

I missed the second half of your question I’m sorry, though I think you also asked about the difference between gender and feminism com-menting on a ‘slippage’ between gender and feminism. Again this raises the question of definitional practices; why is there such a desire to defini-tively separate out feminism from gender – or gender from feminism? What is at stake here? This is not to say that there are not differences, or that there isn’t a debate to be had – but rather to problematize the poli-tics of this demand. On a related point, I’d like to question the idea that feminism is about ‘action’ – is this meant to be dismissive? Are we not ‘active’ in academia? Is the classroom not a site of action? Does analyzing gender imply a pedagogy (and politics) of inertia?

On gender mainstreaming; what are ‘gender topics’? Justice? The Law? Politics? Epistemology? Really, what is a ‘gender topic’? ‘Just’ about women perhaps – or (worse?) ‘women’s issues’ – the latter always seems to have something of a ‘gynaecological’ ring to it! Gender mainstreaming puzzles me, as gender is surely always/already mainstreamed in institu-tions (very broadly conceived) maybe just not in the way we would like it to be (although this too is problematic).

Margot Light: Just on the question of gender mainstreaming, I think that it is gender topics, and I don’t think there’s been the slightest thought given to how you might actually do things differently in a more funda-mental way. If there has, then it’s a kind of evolutionary change that may be happening within universities over the long haul. But I must say that




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my experience of university politics is that if you want the women to get on, then you teach them to behave like men and then they have a slightly better chance of getting on.

Vivienne Jabri: How is feminism being played out, out there? The question came up in relation to Marysia’s intervention, about whether women matter in feminism. An example of feminism in action, so to speak, is the Women Reclaim the Night march that takes place annually. This year’s march was apparently very successful. I suppose this example raises the question of how our theoretical discourses around feminist thought relate to the activities of feminists out there struggling with lived experience, the activism of women as political agents, how women as such express their agency, and how women as such are subjectivized. If feminism is not about women, however the subjectivity of being ‘woman’ is articulated, then what is it about?

Marysia Zalewski: Of course it’s about women, but it doesn’t – can’t – remain statically about women simplistically understood. Of course, it’s about women. This doesn’t imply…

Vivienne Jabri: Women in a multiplicity of expressions?

Marysia Zalewski: Surely yes – a multiplicity of expressions. But are we speaking here of bodily multiplicities? Women as fleshly, corporeal, thinking, breathing, feeling, humans of innumerable different hues? Woman as multiplicity? Yes, I think feminism is about all of this. But being ‘about women’ is something that gets so readily interpreted in parsimonious, sterile and stringent ways, which means that the possibilities of feminism can get lost in some ways. Feminism is surely about women, but what that means can be so radically differently interpreted, conservatively as well as otherwise.

There is a politics to how we hear women (not just the fleshly voices – but how we hear the word itself). There is a politics to how we hear feminism – a temporal, othered, raced, classed and methodological politics. Feminism itself seems to have ‘become’ the essentialist body of woman that we thought we had discarded. There is a psychology to how we hear women, feminism, gender. How many times have those of us who have taught on these ‘kinds of issues’ – even to students who self-select – found out that students think we spend too much time on women or gender, and can’t we get back to the ‘real’ issues? What psychological/political work is in action there? (Recall the comment earlier from Laura about ‘nice to have a woman teaching us’.) What conceptual and other tools are available to us (students/scholars) to see, hear, think, understand? Where do we look? What do we see? What can we see? What do we still not ‘notice’? The kind of critical work




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animated by these kinds of questions is not marked by progressive linearity – forwards or backwards.

Women as political agents? This is surely not to reduce or delimit the ‘political’ and ‘agency’ or ‘action’ as things/practices that (only) happen ‘out there’? As I mentioned earlier: aren’t our classrooms sites of political action? (Even if fleetingly.) Isn’t the discipline of IR an active site of political exclusion and exception? (To be sure feminism is not exempt from disciplinary practices either, although I do retain an intellectual curiosity about the politically interventionist possibilities of feminism given its metamorphosing capacities.) But we surely need to trouble the idea of ‘theory as abstraction’. Do we really want to bestow ownership of theory to academics/intellectuals?

I want to make one final point. We have convened this series of workshops (LSE being the first) to mark/celebrate 20 years of scholarship on ‘British’ ‘Gender and International Relations’.37 ‘British scholars’ or those educated in ‘British institutions’ (if indeed this is what ‘British’ ‘Gender’ and ‘IR’ implies) have produced, and are currently producing, path-breaking scholarship in this field – the excellent work of two recently successful doctoral students come to mind – Laura Shepherd38 and Robin Redhead.39 But I think we have scarcely begun to interrogate what is distinctive (or not) about ‘British’ ‘Gender and IR’. Discussions consequent to this workshop might take up the opportunity to interrogate this. Is it simply enough to work comfortably within a familiar hegemonic US frame?

37. The subsequent 2008 conferences will be as follows: ‘Violence, Bodies, Selves’ (University of Manchester, 23 May 2008); ‘Gender, Governance and Power’ (University of Birmingham, 4 July 2008); ‘Ending International Feminist Futures?’ (University of Aberdeen, 24–25 October, 2008). 38. Laura Shepherd, Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice (London: Zed Press, 2008) 39. Robin Redhead, ‘Reading the Visual: Gender, Human Rights and Interna-tional Relations’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Manchester, 2007.



zalewski et al (2008) reflections on the past, prospects for the future in gender & ir theory

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