Doo Uap, Doo Uap, Doo Uap

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J. Ann Tickner

We are socialized into believing that war and power politics are spheres of activity with which men have a special affinity and that their voiced in describing and prescribing for this world are therefore likely to be more authentic. The roles traditionally ascribed to women – in reproduction, in households, and even in the economy – are generally considered irrelevant to the traditional construction of the field. Ignoring women’s experiences contributes not only to their exclusion but also to a process of self-selection that results in an overwhelmingly male population both in the foreign policy world and in the academic field of international relations. (4-5)
… the marginalization of women in the arena of foreign policy-making through the kind of gender stereotyping suggests that international politics has always been a gendered activity in the modern state system. (5)
Since foreign and military policy-making has been largely conducted by men, the discipline that analyses these activities is bound to be primarily about men and masculinity. (5)
Socially constructed gender differences are based on socially sanctioned, unequal relationships between men and women that reinforce compliance with men’s stated superiority. (6)
While what it means to be a man or a woman varies across cultures and history, in most cultures gender differences signify relationships or inequality and the domination of women by men. (7)
… one could characterize most contemporary feminist scholarship in terms of the dual beliefs that gender difference has played an important and essential role in the structuring of social inequalities in much of human history and that the resulting differences in self-identification, human understandings, social status, and power relationships are unjustified. (7)
In political discourse, this becomes translated into stereotypical notions about those who inhabit the outside. Like women, foreigners are frequently portrayed as “the other”: nonwhites and tropical countries are often depicted as irrational, emotional, and unstable, characteristics that are also attributed to women. The construction of this discourse and the way in which we are taught to think about international politics closely parallel the way in which we are socialized into understanding gender differences. (9) – gender as ‘the other’
A more fundamental challenge to realism came from scholars influenced by the Marxist tradition. Motivated by a different agenda, one that emphasizes issues of equality and justice rather than issues of order and control, scholars using a variety of more radical approaches attempted to move the field away from its excessively Western focus toward a consideration of those marginalized areas of the world system that had been subject to Western colonization. (12-3)
While it is obvious that not all women are feminists, feminist theories are constructed out of the experiences of women in their many and varied circumstances, experiences that have generally been rendered invisible by most intellectual disciplines. (14)
Most contemporary feminist scholars claim that the sources of discrimination against women run much deeper than legal restraints: they are emeshed in the economic, cultural, and social structures of society and thus do not end when legal restraints are removed. Almost all feminist perspectives have been motivated by the common goal of attempting to describe and explain the sources of gender inequality, and hence women’s oppression, and to seek strategies to end them. (15)
Feminists claim that women are oppressed in a multiplicity of ways that depend on culture, class, and race as well as on gender. (15)
While Marxist feminists believe that capitalism is the source of women’s oppression, radical feminists claim that women are oppressed by the system of patriarchy that has existed under almost all modes of production. Patriarchy is institutionalized through legal and economic, as well as social and cultural institutions. (15)
Feminists in the psychoanalytic tradition look for the source of women’s oppression deep in the psyche, in gender relationships into which we are socialised from birth. (15)
Socialist feminists claim that women’s position in society is determined both by structures of production in the economy and by structures of reproduction in the household, structures that are reinforced by the early socialisation of children into gender roles. Women’s unequal status in all these structures must be eliminated for full equality to be achieved. (15-6)
Socialist feminism thus tries to understand the position of women in their multiple roles in order to find a single standpoint from which to explain their condition. Using standpoint in the sense that it has been used by Marxists, these theorists claim that those who are oppressed have a better understanding of the sources of their oppression than their oppressors. (16)
This notion of standpoint has been seriously criticized by postmodern feminists who argue that a unified representation of women across class, racial, and cultural lines is an impossibility. Just as feminists more generally have criticized existing knowledge that is grounded in the experiences of white Western males, postmodernists claim that feminists themselves are in danger of essentializing the meaning of woman when they draw exclusively on the experiences of white Western women. Postmodernists believe that a multiplicity of women’s voices must be heard lest feminism itself become one more hierarchical system of knowledge construction. (16)
Any attempt to construct feminist perspectives on international relations must take this concern of postmodernists seriously. (16)
The world of international politics is a masculine domain, how could feminist perspectives contribute anything new to its academic discourse? Many male scholars have already noted that, given our current technologies of destruction and the high degree of economic inequality and environmental degradation that now exists, we are desperately in need of changes in the way world politics is conducted. (17)
Feminist theories, which speak out of the various experiences of women – who are usually on the margins of society and interstate politics 0 can offer us some new insights on the behaviour of states and the need of individuals, particularly those one the peripheries of the international system. (18)
Feminist theories must go beyond injecting women’s experiences into different disciplines and attempt to challenge the core concepts of the disciplines themselves. Concepts central to international relations theory and practice, such as power, sovereignty, and security, have been framed in terms that we associate with masculinity. Drawing on feminist theories to examine and critique the meaning of these and other concepts fundamental to international politics could help us to reformulate these concepts in ways that might allow us to see new possibilities for solving our current insecurities. Suggesting that the personal is political, feminist scholars have brought to our attention distinctions between public and private in the domestic polity: examining these artificial boundary distinctions in the domestic polity could shed new light on international boundaries, such as those between anarchy and order, which are so fundamental to the conceptual framework of realist discourse. (18)
The construction of hierarchical binary oppositions has been central to theorizing about international relations. Distinctions between domestic and foreign, inside and outside, order and anarchy, and centre and periphery have served as important assumptions in theory construction and as organizing principles for the way we view the world. (19)
Feminists can bring to light gender hierarchies embedded in the theories and practices of world politics and allow us to see the extent to which all these systems of domination are interrelated. (19)
Thinking of security in multidimensional terms allows us to get away from prioritizing military issues, issues that have been central to the agenda of traditional international relations but that are the furthest removed from women’s experiences. (22-3)
If we were to include women’s experiences in our assumptions about the security-seeking behaviour of states, how would it change the way in which we think about national security? Given the sexual division of labour, men’s association with violence has been legitimated through war and the instruments of the state. Feminist perspectives must introduce the issue of domestic violence and analyse how the boundaries between public and private, domestic and international, political and economic, are permeable and interrelated. (23)
Like most contemporary feminists, Evelyn Fox Keller rejects this positivist view of science that imposes a coercive, hierarchical, and conformist pattern on scientific inquiry. Since most contemporary feminist scholars believe that knowledge is socially constructed, they are sceptical of finding an unmediated foundation for knowledge that realists claim is possible. Since they believe that it is language that transmits knowledge, many feminists suggest that the scholarly claims about the neutral uses of language and about objectivity must continually be questioned. (36)
When we consider security from the perspective of the individual, we find that new thinking is beginning to provide us with definitions of security that are less state-centred and less militaristic. (53)
Feminist reformulations of the meaning of security are needed to draw attention to the extent to which gender hierarchies themselves are a source of domination and thus an obstacle to a truly comprehensive definition of security. (53)
Third World women defined insecurity more broadly in terms of the structural violence associated with imperialism, militarism, racism, and sexism. Yet all agreed that security meant nothing if it was built on others’ insecurity. (54-4)
… contemporary new thinkers also include the elimination of structural violence in their definition of security. (55)

Claiming that militarism, sexism, and racism are interconnected, most feminists would agree that the behaviour of individuals and the domestic policies of states cannot be separated from state’s behaviour in the international system. Feminists call attention to the particular vulnerabilities of women within states, vulnerabilities that grow out of hierarchical gender relations that are also interrelated with international politics. (56)
In militarized societies women are particularly vulnerable to rape, and evidence suggests that domestic violence is higher in military families or in families that include men with prior military service. Even though most public violence is committed by men against other men, it is more often women who feel threatened in public places. Jill Radford suggests that when women feel it is unsafe to go out alone, their equal access to job opportunities is limited. (56)
Feminist theories draw our attention to another anarchy/order distinction – the boundary between a public domestic space protected, at least theoretically, by the rule of law and the private space of the family where, in many cases, no such legal protection exists. In most states domestic violence is not considered a concern of the state, and even when it is, law enforcement officials are often unwilling to get involved. Domestic assaults on women, often seen as “victim precipitated,” are not taken as seriously as criminal assaults. (57)
Feminist perspectives on security would assume that violence, whether it be in the international, national, or family realm, is interconnected. Family violence must be seen in the context of wider power relations; it occurs within a gendered society in which male power dominates at all levels. If men are traditionally seen as protectors, an important aspect of this role is protecting women against certain men. (58)
Feminist perspectives on national security take us beyond realism’s statist representations. They allow us to see that the realist view of national security is constructed out of a masculinised discourse that, while it is only a partial view of reality, is taken as universal. Women’s definitions of security are multilevel and multidimensional. Women have defined security as the absence of violence whether it be military, economic, or sexual. (66)
Feminist perspective on national security demonstrates that there are equally plausible alternative ways of conceptualising security and prescribing for its realization. They also draw our attention to examining the world from perspectives not of elite decision-makers but of those who are outside positions of power yet can present an equally plausible representation of reality. (132)