Feminist International Relations PDF

11 Feminism J. ANN TICKNER AND LAURA SJOBERG Introduction 205 Gender in IR 20...

11 Feminism J. ANN TICKNER AND LAURA SJOBERG Introduction 205 Gender in IR 206 Typology of IR feminist theories 208 Gender, security, and global politics 212 Case study 215 Conclusion 219 Reader’s Guide This chapter introduces feminist perspectives on international relations. It provides a typology of feminist International Relations (IR) theories, outlining their major ten- ets with illustrations from specific authors. Feminist theories of IR use gender as a socially constructed category of analysis when they analyse foreign policy, interna- tional political economy, and international security. This chapter focuses on feminist perspectives on international security. Feminist security research takes two major forms: theoretical reformulation and empirical evaluation. This chapter chronicles developments in feminist reanalyses and reformulations of security theory. It illus- trates feminist security theory by analysing the case of United Nations Security Council sanctions on Iraq following the First Gulf War. It concludes by discussing the contributions that feminist IR can make to the discipline of IR, specifically, and to the practice of international politics, more generally. Introduction Feminist theories entered the discipline of IR in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The beginnings of IR feminism are associated with a more general ferment in the field—often referred to as the ‘third debate’ (or sometimes as the ‘fourth debate’, see Chapter 1). Early IR feminists challenged the discipline to think about how its theories might be reformulated and how its understandings of global politics might be improved if attention were paid to women’s experiences. Feminists claimed that only by introducing gender analysis could the differential impact of the state system and the global economy on the lives of women and men be fully understood. IR feminists critically re-examined some of the key concepts in the field— concepts such as sovereignty, the state, and security. IR feminists have also sought to draw attention to women’s invisibility and gender subordina- tion in international politics and the global economy. Less than 10 per cent of the world’s heads of state are women. IR feminists ask why this is the case and how this might affect the structure and practice of global politics. More recently, ‘second generation’ IR feminist empirical case 206 J. ANN TICKNER AND LAURA SJOBERG studies have focused on hitherto understudied issues such as military prostitution, domestic service, diplomatic households, and home-based work, much of which is performed by women.1 Through these studies, feminists have sought to demonstrate how vital women are to states’ foreign policies and to the functioning of the global economy. Since most women speak from the margins of international politics, their lives offer us a perspective outside the state- centric focus of conventional Western international theories and broaden the empirical base upon which we build theories. Feminist scholars suggest that if we put on gendered lenses we get quite a different view of international politics (Peterson and Runyan 1999: 21). Feminists define gender as a set of socially constructed characteristics describing what men and women ought to be. Characteristics such as strength, rationality, independence, protector, and public are associated with masculinity while characteristics such as, weakness, emotionality, relational, protected, and private are associated with femininity. It is important to note that individual men and women may not embody all these characteristics—it is pos- sible for women to display masculine ones and vice versa. Rather, they are ideal types; the ideal masculine type (in the West—white and heterosexual) is sometimes referred to as ‘hege- monic masculinity’. These characteristics may vary over time and place but, importantly, they are relational, meaning they depend on each other for their meaning. They are also unequal. Men, women, and the states they live in generally assign more positive value to masculine characteristics than to feminine ones—at least in the public sphere. The foreign policies of states are often legitimated in terms of hegemonic masculine characteristics; a desirable for- eign policy is generally one which strives for power and autonomy and which protects its citizens from outside dangers. Appeals to these gender dualisms also organize social activity and divide necessary social activities between groups of humans; for example, since women are associated with the private sphere, it is seen as ‘natural’ for women to be caregivers while men’s association with the public space makes them ‘natural breadwinners’ (Harding 1986: 17–18). While feminists rightly question the naturalness of these dichotomized distinctions, they have consequences—for women, for men, and for global politics. In this we trace the history of the development of feminist IR. We outline a typology of IR feminist theories which build on, but go beyond, a variety of IR approaches, such as liberalism (Chapters 5 and 6), constructivism (Chapter 10), critical theory (Chapter 9), poststructuralism (Chapter 12), and postcolonialism (Chapter 13). We offer some reinterpretations of security as an illustration of how feminists are reformulating some of the key concepts in IR. We will illustrate our feminist analysis of security through an examination of United Nations eco- nomic sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s. We propose that feminist IR offers some insights into this case that other sanctions theories do not. We conclude by suggesting the contribu- tions of feminist IR to the discipline specifically and to global politics more generally. Gender in IR The ‘third debate’ of the late 1980s was a time when many scholars in the discipline began to debate its ways of knowing (Lapid 1989). Certain scholars began to question both the epistemological and ontological foundations of a field which, in the USA especially, had been dominated by positivist, rationalist, and materialist theories. Postpositivist scholarship, which includes critical theory, some forms of constructivism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism, questions positivists’ beliefs about the possibility of creating universal, objective knowledge.  FEMINISM 207 Featured book Cynthia Enloe (2010), Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the War in Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press). Cynthia Enloe’s Nimo’s War, Emma’s War provides an account of the war in Iraq through the life stories of eight women, four American and four Iraqi, as a creative and complicated way to see the war through gendered lenses. Enloe provides a window into the ways that war functions to militarize women’s lives, as well as the ways that the militarization of women’s lives is essential to the making and fighting of wars. Enloe traces the impacts of the war from Iraqi jails to American kitchens, and from American hospitals to Iraqi beauty parlours, showing that, despite narratives of ‘progress’ on women’s rights in Iraq and ‘success’ in gender-integrating the US military, gender oppression remains. Enloe argues that militaries and their civilian supporters rely on the existence and support of women, not only as people, but specifically as women, as well as on ideas about masculinity and femininity, and that the war in Iraq is no exception. In fact, she notes masculinization—the decrease of women’s presence and women’s influence—in key spheres of the war (including but not limited to the Iraqi economy, the Iraqi police forces, and the US military). She outlines a number of the roles that women are expected to fill in order to make war possible, roles that are as diverse as free care provision for wounded soldiers and prostitution as a means of supporting families. Enloe claims that these roles are linked by gender-based behavioural expectations essential for the inspiration for, and operation of, militarism in global politics. Through rich empirical analyses, Enloe argues that militarization is pervasive, and that it is important to see the war(s) in Iraq as fought through, on, and in the lives of ordinary people, who experience the fighting very differently depending on the biological sex category to which they belong. Whether it is in Nimo’s beauty parlour as politics is discussed or at Emma’s dining room table as her sons talk about joining the US military, Enloe ‘makes feminist sense of ’ the Iraq War by showing how it is fought constantly in everyday life. In so demonstrating, Enloe does not just ‘make feminist sense’ of the Iraq War, she makes sense of it. She demonstrates that the war cannot be accounted for without understanding not only the war’s place in history, but the war’s place in the history of gender relations, and the gender relations of history and war. Looking through the experiences of the women who lived the war, Enloe compellingly demon- strates war as commonplace, embodied, felt, and gendered. Rejecting rationalist methodologies and causal explanations, postpositivists advocate more interpretive, ideational, and sociological methods for understanding global politics. They ask in whose interests and for what purpose knowledge is constructed. For a more detailed account of the different kinds of theorizing in IR, see Chapter 1. Many feminists share this postpositivist commitment to examining the relationship between knowledge and power. They point out that most knowledge has been created by men and is about men.2 Although IR postpositivists have been as slow as positivists to intro- duce gender into their research, their epistemological critiques created space for feminist analyses in a way that other IR scholarship had not. Conventional IR relies on generalized rationalist explanations of asocial states’ behaviour in an anarchic international system. IR feminist theories focus on social relations, particularly gender relations; rather than anarchy, they see an international system constituted by socially constructed gender hierarchies which contribute to gender subordination. In order to reveal these gender hierarchies, feminists often begin their examinations of international relations at the micro-level—attempting to understand how the lives of individuals (especially marginalized individuals) affect and are affected by global politics. 208 J. ANN TICKNER AND LAURA SJOBERG IR feminist research can be divided into two complementary but distinct generations: first generation, which largely focused on theory formulation, and second generation, which approached empirical situations with ‘gendered lenses’. First-generation IR feminist theory was primarily concerned with bringing to light and critiquing the gendered foundations of IR theories and of the practices of international politics. Second-generation IR feminists have begun to develop their own research programmes—extending the boundaries of the disci- pline, investigating different issues, and listening to unfamiliar voices. These feminists use gender as a category of analysis in their studies of real-world events in global politics, incor- porating feminist conceptual critiques into their analyses of specific situations. They have studied the gendered nature of the global economy, foreign policy, and security by examining specific political and economic situations in concrete historical and geographic contexts. Typology of IR feminist theories As in IR more generally there are a wide variety of feminist theoretical perspectives. Many of them build on, but go beyond, some of the IR perspectives discussed in other chapters, such as liberalism, constructivism, critical theory, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. While they may disagree about the reasons, all of them are trying to understand women’s subordination. IR feminists share an interest in gender equality or what they prefer to call gender emancipation. But what feminists mean by gender emancipation varies greatly, as does their understanding of the appropriate paths to reach it. We will now briefly outline the assumptions and methodological preferences of some of these approaches and refer to some exemplary writings in each. We note that there is significant overlap between these perspectives and that our typology is somewhat of a simplification, but useful for analysis. Liberal feminism Liberal feminism calls attention to the subordinate position of women in global politics but remains committed to investigating the causes of this subordination within a positivist framework. Liberal feminism challenges the content but not the epistemological assumptions of conventional IR. Liberal feminists document various aspects of women’s subordination. For example, they have investigated the particular problems of refugee women, income inequalities between women and men, and human rights violations incurred dispropor- tionately by women such as trafficking and rape in war. They look for women in the institutions and practices of global politics and observe how their presence (or lack thereof) affects and is affected by international policy-making. They ask what a world with more women in positions of power might look like. Liberal feminists believe that women’s equality can be achieved by removing legal and other obstacles that have denied them the same rights and opportunities as men. Liberal feminists also use gender as an explanatory variable in foreign- policy analysis. Using social scientific methods, Mary Caprioli and Mark Boyer (2001) employ quantitative social science data and statistical measures to investigate a variant of the democratic peace hypothesis—namely, whether there is a relationship between domestic gender equality and states’ use of violence internationally. According to their measures of gender inequality, their  FEMINISM 209 results show that the severity of violence used by states in international crises decreases as domestic gender equality increases. Caprioli and Boyer are using gender as a variable to explain certain policies and policy results. Many postpositivist IR feminists are critical of liberal feminism. They see problems with measuring gender inequality using statistical indicators. Caprioli and Boyer (2001) use national indicators, such as numbers of women in parliament and years since women gained the vote, to measure gender equality. Postpositivist feminists claim that such measures are inadequate for understanding gender inequality, which is associated with gender role expectations that keep women out of positions of power; as we mentioned earlier, gender-laden divisions between public and private spheres consign women to certain socially accepted roles. Post- positivist feminists point out that gender inequalities continue to exist in societies that have long since achieved formal equality, so we must go deeper into our investigations of gender hierarchies if we are to explain these inequalities. All these feminists use gender (as we defined it earlier) as a category of analysis to help them understand these inequalities and their impli- cations for global politics. Critical feminism Critical feminism goes beyond liberal feminism’s use of gender as a variable. It explores the ideational and material manifestations of gendered identities and gendered power in global politics. Many critical feminists build upon, but go beyond the work of IR scholar Robert Cox. Cox (1986) portrays the world in terms of historical structures made up of three categories of reciprocal interacting forces: material conditions, ideas, and institutions. These forces interact at three different levels: production relations, the state–society complex, and historically defined world orders. While ideas are important in legitimating certain institutions, ideas are the product of human agents—therefore, there is always the possibility of change. Critical theory is committed to understanding the world in order to try to change it. Sandra Whitworth is a feminist critical theorist who builds on Cox’s framework. In her book, Feminism and International Relations (1994), she claims that understandings about gender depend only in part on real material conditions of women and men in particular circumstances. She suggests that gender is also constituted by the meaning given to that reality—ideas that men and women have about their relationships to one another. Her research examines the different ways gender was understood over time in the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and the International Labor Organization (ILO), and the effects that these changing understandings had on both institutions’ population policies at various times in their history. Christine Chin’s In Service and Servitude (1998) also uses a critical feminist approach to study female domestic workers. Chin examines the increasing prevalence of underpaid and often exploited foreign female domestic workers in Malaysia during the 1970s—a time when the state was modernizing the economy. She rejects a traditional economic explanation of wage differentials to explain the importation of Filipina and Indonesian female domestic labour because, in this case, economic theory does not account for state involvement or the social dynamics around the employment of foreign domestic workers. Adopting a critical approach, Chin argues that the Malaysian state supported the importation and employment of foreign female domestic workers, who were often working in conditions not much better 210 J. ANN TICKNER AND LAURA SJOBERG than slavery, as a part of a strategy to co-opt and win the support of middle-class families and decrease ethnic tensions. Her study shows that the Malaysian state, like other states, is not neutral, but an expression of class, race, and gender-based power which has won support by co-opting certain citizens while repressing others. Consistent with critical theory more gen- erally, Chin sees her study as emancipatory—to identify existing power relations with the intention of changing them. Feminist constructivism IR social constructivists called for rethinking the ways we see and understand international politics by adding a social layer to IR’s analyses. They emphasize the ideational rather than the material elements of global politics. Constructivist approaches range broadly—from positivist versions that treat ideas as causes to a postpositivist focus on language. All agree that international life is social and that agents and structures are co-constituted. They challenge realist assumptions about states as unitary actors; instead, they see states as the dynamic results of the social processes that constitute their existence. States and other international actors’ perceptions of their own and others’ identities shape their behaviour in global politics. Constructivist feminism focuses on the way that ideas about gender shape and are shaped by global politics. Elisabeth Prügl’s book, The Global Construction of Gender (1999), uses a linguistically based feminist constructivist perspective to analyse the treatment of home- based work in international negotiations and international law. Since most home-based workers are women, the debate about regulating this type of employment is an important one from a feminist perspective. Low wages and poor working conditions have often been justified on the grounds that home-based work is not ‘real work’ since it takes place in the private reproductive sphere of the household rather than the more valued public sphere of waged-based production. Prügl shows how ideas about womanhood and femininity con- tributed to the international community’s debates about institutionalizing these workers’ rights, a debate which finally culminated in the passage of the ILO’s Homework Convention in 1996 due, in large part, to the lobbying of a variety of women’s non-governmental organi- zations (NGOs). She sees gender as an institution that codifies power at every level of global politics, from the home to the state to the international system. She argues that gender poli- tics pervade world politics, creating a set of linguistically based rules about how states interact with each other and with their own citizens. Prügl and other constructivist feminists study the processes whereby ideas about gender influence global politics as well as the ways that glo- bal politics shape ideas about gender. Feminist poststructuralism Poststructuralists focus on meaning as it is codified in language. They claim that our understanding of reality is mediated through our use of language. They are particularly concerned with the relationship between knowledge and power; those who construct meaning and create knowledge thereby gain a great deal of power. Feminists point out that men have generally been seen as the knowers—what has counted as legitimate knowledge in  FEMINISM 211 the social sciences has generally been based on knowledge about men’s lives in the public sphere; women have been marginalized both as knowers and as the subjects of knowledge. Poststructuralist feminism is particularly concerned with the way dichotomized linguistic constructions, such as strong/weak, rational/emotional, and public/private, serve to empower the masculine over the feminine. In international relations constructions, such as civilized/ uncivilized, order/anarchy, and developed/underdeveloped, have been important in how we divide the world linguistically. Poststructuralists believe that these distinctions have real- world consequences. Dichotomous constructions such as these denote inferiority and even danger with respect to those on the outside—they are also gendered and have racial implica- tions. Feminist poststructuralists seek to expose and deconstruct these hierarchies—often through the analysis of texts and their meaning. They see gender as a complex social con- struction and they emphasize that the spoken meaning of gender is constantly evolving and changing with context. Deconstructing these hierarchies is necessary in order for us to see them and construct a less hierarchical vision of reality. Charlotte Hooper’s book Manly States (2001) is an example of poststructural textual analy- sis. One of her central questions is what role does international relations theory and practice play in shaping, defining, and legitimating masculinities. She claims that we cannot under- stand international relations unless we understand the implications of the fact that it is conducted mostly by men. She asks how international relations might discipline men as much as men shape international relations. Hooper sets about answering this question through an analysis of theories of masculinity together with a textual analysis of The Econo- mist, a prestigious British weekly newspaper that covers business and politics. She follows the practice of intertextuality—‘the process by which meanings are circulated between texts through the use of various visual and literary codes and conventions’ (Hooper 2001: 122). Through an examination of texts, graphs, photos, and advertising material, she concludes that The Economist is saturated with signifiers of hegemonic masculinities and that gendered messages are encoded in the newspaper regardless of the intentions of its publishers or authors. She aims to show that gender politics pervades world politics and that gender is a social construction that results from practices that connect arguments at all levels of politics and society including the international. More recently, Laura Shepherd’s Gender, Violence, and Security: Discourse as Practice (2008) investigates United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, passed in 2000 to address gender issues in conflict areas, from a feminist postructuralist point of view. Shepherd argues that the language of the resolution not only reflects reality, but is constitutive of it. She details the ways in which the Resolution’s discursive construction has influenced its implementation and, ultimately, determined its failure. For example, Shepherd points to the reification of gender-based expectations that women are peaceful/passive in the Resolution’s justifications for including women in peace processes, arguing that this still-gendered interpretation even in apparently gender-emancipatory international law can explain the United Nations’ con- tinued inability to adequately include women in their peace processes and/or transform these processes to be gender-aware. Shepherd’s discourse-theoretical analysis of Resolution 1325 concludes that a reconceptualization of gendered violence in conjunction with security is necessary to avoid replication of the partial and highly problematic understandings of their relationship in Resolution 1325 and (therefore) in its implementation. 212 J. ANN TICKNER AND LAURA SJOBERG Postcolonial feminism Many postcolonial writers are poststructuralists. Their particular concern is colonial relations of domination and subordination established under imperialism. They claim that these dominance relationships have persisted beyond the granting of independence to formerly colonized states and that they are built into the way the colonized are represented in Western knowledge. Arguing that the colonized must represent themselves, postcolonial scholars aim to ‘speak back’, a task made harder by the erasure of their history and culture. Like poststructuralist scholars more generally, postcolonial scholars argue that, in international relations, con- structions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ foster racial and cultural stereotypes that denote the other—in their case ex-colonial subjects—as inferior. Postcolonial feminism makes similar claims about the way Western feminists have con- structed knowledge about non-Western women. Just as feminists have criticized Western knowledge for its false assumptions about universality when, in reality, it is knowledge con- structed mainly from men’s lives, postcolonial feminists see false claims of universalism arising from knowledge which is based largely on the experiences of relatively privileged Western women. Chandra Mohanty (1988) critiques some Western feminists for treating women as a homogeneous category which does not acknowledge their differences depending on their cul- ture, social class, race, and geographical location. This ethnocentric universalism robs women of their historical and political agency. Postcolonial feminists, such as Mohanty, are concerned that Western feminists assume that all women have similar needs with respect to emancipation when, in fact, their realities are very different. Postcolonial feminists challenge Western por- trayals of Third World women as poor, undereducated, victimized, and lacking in agency. Recent work in postcolonial feminist IR, including that of Lily Ling and Anna Agathangelou,3 has analysed gender subordination as sitting at the intersection of gender, race, and culture, and blurring the boundaries between politics, political economy, and other relations of domi- nation/subordination. Recognizing this, they seek to redress these subordinations within their own cultural context, rather than through some universal understanding of women’s needs. Gender, security, and global politics In this section we focus on how the theoretical perspectives we have outlined and how the scholarship we have discussed contribute to our understanding of security and insecurity. Feminist definitions of security, explanations of insecurity, and suggestions as to how to improve security are very different from those of conventional IR. We begin this section by offering some feminist redefinitions of security and insecurity. Then we suggest some feminist reanalyses of security and outline some empirical evidence that feminists are using to formulate their reanalyses. Redefining security and its subjects Conventional IR scholars, notably realists, define security primarily in terms of the security of the state. A secure state is one that can protect its physical and moral boundaries against an ‘anarchic’ international system. Neorealists focus on the anarchic structure of  FEMINISM 213 the international system where there is no sovereign to regulate state behaviour. They portray states as unitary actors whose internal structures and policies are less important than this anarchic condition for explaining their security and insecurity. The power- seeking behaviour and military capabilities of states are seen as ways to increase their security; many security specialists believe that power-seeking in order to promote security explains much of the international behaviour of states. In the 1980s, certain IR scholars began to challenge these explanations and to articulate broader definitions of security. Noting that most wars since 1945 have been fuelled by ethnic and nationalist rivalries and have not been fought across international boundaries, they began to examine the interrelation of military threats with economic and environmental ones. Most of the world’s poorest states have active military conflicts within their boundaries. These conflicts contribute to high numbers of civilian casualties, to structural violence—the violence done to people when their basic needs are not met—and to environmental destruc- tion. Critical security scholars, as they are called, began to define security in terms of threats to human well-being and survival—security of the individual and their environment, as well as that of the state. Like critical security scholars, many IR feminists define security broadly in multidimen- sional and multilevel terms—as the diminution of all forms of violence, including physical, structural, and ecological. According to IR feminists, security threats include domestic violence, rape, poverty, gender subordination, and ecological destruction as well as war. Feminists not only broaden what security means but also who is guaranteed security. Most of their analyses of security start at the bottom, with the individual or the community, rather than with the state or the international system. IR feminists have demonstrated how the security of individuals is related to national and international politics and how international politics impacts the security of individuals even at the local level. Feminist research is demonstrating how those at the margins of states may actually be rendered more insecure by their state’s security policies. The Malaysian case, discussed ear- lier, demonstrates that the exploitation of foreign domestic servants, often thought of as a ‘private’ issue, was permitted by the Malaysian state in order to win support of its middle class thereby diminishing ethnic tensions—tensions that were causing threats to the security of the state. In Sex Among Allies (1997), a study of prostitution around US military bases in South Korea in the 1970s, Katharine Moon shows how prostitution became a matter of top-level US–Korean security politics. The cleaning up of prostitution camps, effected by imposing health standards and monitoring sex workers, was directly related to establishing a more hospitable environment for US troops at a time when the USA was pulling troops out of South Korea. Both these cases show how considerations of national security translated into insecurity for marginalized vulnerable women. Redefinitions of security and rethinking about the subjects of security prompt feminists to ask different questions, particularly about whose lives are being secured and whose are not. Challenging the myth of protection Our earlier definition of masculinity and femininity defined men as ‘protectors’ and women as ‘protected’.4 It is a widespread myth that men fight wars to protect ‘vulnerable people’ usually defined as women and children. Yet, women and children constitute a 214 J. ANN TICKNER AND LAURA SJOBERG majority of casualties in recent wars as civilian casualties have risen from about 10 per cent at the beginning of the twentieth century to almost 90 per cent by its close. In 1999 about 75 per cent of refugees were women and children, many of them fleeing from wars. Wars make it harder for women to fulfil their care-giving responsibilities; as mothers and family providers, women are particularly hurt by the economic consequences of wars. In Gender, Justice and the Wars in Iraq (2006), Laura Sjoberg demonstrates that wom- en’s presumed status as innocent civilians makes wars harder, not easier, for them, by defining them as protected without regard for their actual safety. Since women’s immu- nity from war has been presumed, belligerents have often disregarded the degree to which war causes women to suffer disproportionately. Feminists have also drawn our attention to wartime rape; often rape is not just an ‘accident’ of war but, as in the case of the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, a deliberate military strategy. Instead of seeing military power as part of a state’s arsenal to defend against security threats from other states, feminists see that militaries are often threats to individuals’ (particularly women’s) security and competitors for scarce resources on which women may depend more than men. Looking at the effects of war through gendered lenses, we find that war is a cultural con- struction that depends on myths of protection. Such myths have been important in upholding the legitimacy of war. They also contribute to the delegitimation of peace which is often associated with feminine characteristics, such as weakness, concession, and idealism. Look- ing at these gendered constructions may deepen our understanding of the causes of war and allow us to see how certain ways of thinking about security have been legitimated while oth- ers have been silenced. Understanding economic insecurity Feminist analyses of military security have looked at the gendered impacts of war, particularly as they relate to the security of individuals. Feminist research on economic security highlights women’s particular economic vulnerabilities. While there are obviously enormous global differences in women’s socio-economic status, depending on race, class, and geographic location, women are disproportionately located at the bottom of the socio-economic scale in all societies. In order to explain this, feminists have drawn our attention to a gendered division of labour that had its origins in seventeenth-century Europe, where definitions of male and female were becoming polarized in ways that were suited to a growing division between work and home required by early capitalism. The notion of ‘housewife’ began to place women’s work in the private domestic sphere as opposed to the public world of production inhabited by men. Even though most women do work outside the home, the association of women with gendered roles, such as housewife, caregiver, and mother, came to be seen as ‘natural’. Consequently when women do enter the workforce, they are disproportionately represented in the caring professions or ‘light’ manufacturing industries, occupations that are chosen because of values that are often emphasized in female socialization. Women provide an optimal labour force for contemporary global capitalism because, since they are defined as housewives rather than workers, they can be paid lower wages on the assumption that  FEMINISM 215 their wages are supplemental to family income. Elisabeth Prügl’s (1999) study of home- based labour, discussed earlier, talks about the low remuneration of home-based work which is grounded in this assumption. Nevertheless, in actual fact, about one-third of all households are headed by women. Even when women do benefit from entry into the workforce, they continue to suffer from a double or even triple burden since women carry most of the responsibility for household labour and unpaid community work. Unremunerated labour plays a crucial role in the repro- duction of labour necessary for waged work, yet it has rarely been of concern to economic analysis. A narrow definition of work as work in the waged economy, one that is used in economic accounting, tends to render invisible many of the contributions that women make to the global economy. The disproportionate poverty of women cannot be explained by market conditions alone; gendered role expectations about the economic worth of women’s work and the kinds of tasks that women are expected to do contribute to their economic insecurity. Like critical security scholars, feminists have broadened their definitions and analyses of security. But they go further by showing how important gender as a category of analysis is to our understanding of security and insecurity. Using our gendered lenses we will now exam- ine in more detail the UN sanctions policy on Iraq during the 1990s, a case which supports this proposition. Case study: UN sanctions on Iraq In 1991, Iraq invaded and conquered Kuwait, claiming a right to Kuwaiti territory. The United Nations (UN) declared Iraq’s invasion illegal and ultimately used military force to eject Iraq from Kuwait. This conflict is known as the First Gulf War. At the end of the First Gulf War, UN Security Council Resolution 687 left Iraq under a strict import and export embargo. According to the Resolution, the embargo would remain in place until Iraq met a list of demands imposed by the Security Council. These demands related to Kuwaiti independence, Iraqi weapons, terrorism, and liability for the Gulf War.5 This sanctions regime, originally intended to last about a year, stretched over thirteen. It was marked by confusion, fits and starts, partial compliance, and ulterior motives. Iraq’s cooperation was inconsistent at best and Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, often openly defied the sanctions. Throughout the 1990s, Iraq remained under one of history’s longest and most strict economic sanctions regimes. In the mid-1990s, international popular opinion turned against the sanctions because of the tragic humanitarian consequences. Many states that favoured the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime became critical of the sanctions. A number of UN Security Council member states, including France and Russia, turned against the sanctions. Still, a Security Council vote to lift the sanctions was never taken because such a vote would have faced certain veto from the USA. The USA, but not the UN, insisted on regime change in Iraq as a condition for lifting sanctions. Meanwhile, pictures of malnour- ished children were publicized by activist organizations fighting the sanctions. The USA and the UN Security Council blamed Saddam Hussein for Iraq’s non-compliance, while the Iraqi government blamed the UN. The sanctions regime was a humanitarian disaster. The impacts of a thirteen-year near-total embargo on the Iraqi economy were extensive. Before the First Gulf War, Iraq had an (continued) 216 J. ANN TICKNER AND LAURA SJOBERG export-based economy, exporting oil. Iraq imported almost all of its food and other basic necessities. The Iraqi gross national product (GNP) fell by 50 per cent during the first year of sanctions, and declined to less than $500 in the following years. By 2000, Iraq was the third poorest country in the world. Economic decline caused a sharp decline in real wages and widespread unemployment. These adverse economic impacts caused most Iraqis serious material problems. Often, women had less secure jobs than men because their job tenure had been shorter and they were not seen as the primary income-earners for their families. Iraq had neither the money to buy, nor the means to produce, essential supplies; before the sanctions it had imported most of its food. With no income, a crippled infrastructure, and an international law against both imports and exports, Iraq had a difficult time acquiring food. The result was catastrophic malnutrition. Households rarely had enough food and women were often the last to eat. Iraqis also lacked clean water, baby milk, vitamins, healthcare supplies, and adequate electricity. The oil-for-food programme, which was implemented by the UN Security Council, allowed some needed supplies to enter Iraq by permitting limited oil exports. While the programme did result in some food entering Iraq, its provisions failed to provide for the restoration of Iraq’s oil infrastructure which had been badly damaged in the First Gulf War and had been dormant for most of the 1990s. As a result, the oil-for-food programme did not meet the basic needs of Iraqi citizens. It was not until certain members of the international community began to trade with Iraq in the late 1990s despite the sanctions that the worst humani- tarian impacts dissipated. These deprivations had severe medical impacts. Finding adequate prenatal care was next to impossible for Iraqi women; even if their children were born healthy, the lack of vitamins and baby milk meant that child mortality skyrocketed. The cancer rate rose by 400 per cent. It is estimated that the sanctions lead to the deaths of about 1 million Iraqis, half of them children and another 30 per cent women (Mueller and Mueller 1999). In a country that had previously possessed a world-class medical system, curable diseases and starvation were the leading causes of death. The educational systems also plummeted. Crime rates and prostitution rose while culture, the arts, and religious activity decreased. Joy Gordon (1999) claimed that sanctions sent Iraq back to the stone age. Some IR analyses of sanctions Following the success of limited sanctions on South Africa in the 1980s which contributed to the ending of Apartheid, economic sanctions were seen as a powerful but humane tool. IR analyses of the effectiveness of sanctions are informed by a variety of theoretical perspectives. Realists view sanctions as a way of raising the cost of non-compliance for the country on which sanctions are imposed until it becomes unacceptable (Baldwin 1985). Liberals explain sanctions as a way of depriving the target country of the means to commit a violation of international norms (Martin 1992). In other words, sanctions take away the resources an errant state would use to defy international will. Constructivists argue that sanctions are a socializing phenomenon, communicating a message of disapproval through the combination of negative consequences and international shame (Crawford and Klotz 1999). Scholars who focus on language see sanctions as discourse—as tools of argumentation which allow actors to demonstrate the importance of their point to other actors reticent to agree (Morgan and Schwebach 1997). Within each of these schools of thought, there are disagreements about which (if any) sanctions have worked, and how frequently they should be used. A feminist theory of sanctions draws from all these perspectives but goes beyond them, using gender as a category of analysis.  FEMINISM 217 Feminists interpret sanctions on Iraq Economic sanctions do not appear to be a security issue in the narrow sense: they are not fought with guns on a battlefield, or with bombs on airplanes. The UN Security Council did not declare war on Iraq and the sanctions on Iraq did not look like a conventional war. However, as we mentioned earlier, IR feminists who study war pay attention to all forms of violence, physical and structural, and to what is happening on the ground—to individuals and communities. From this perspective, economic sanctions on Iraq not only looked like a war; they looked like a war on Iraq’s most vulnerable citizens. As we have shown, the UN Security Council’s sanctions regime deprived most Iraqi citizens of their basic everyday needs. The aim of the sanctions was to stir up popular discontent against the Iraqi government and its policies. In other words, sanctions tried to hurt civilians so they would change their government. The civilians who were hurt the most were not the rich and powerful or the decision- makers, since they had the ability to buy food and supplies on the black market. Instead, it was Iraq’s most vulnerable population that suffered most— low-income people, women, children, and the elderly. Economic sanctions against Iraq constituted both physical and structural violence. Physical violence was incurred though frequent bombings intended to communicate UN member states’ unhappiness with Iraq’s non-compliance. Structural violence was incurred through the destruction of the economic infrastructure and the lack of nutrition and medical care that had supported Iraq’s poorest citizens. By these measures feminists would conclude that economic sanctions constitute war. This being the case, we will now suggest some research questions that feminists might ask and what we might learn from their analyses. A liberal feminist study of sanctions might ask how many women participated in the sanctions decision-making process; they might also measure the varying effects of sanctions on individuals, focusing on gender differences. From this they might conclude that, while few women were involved in constructing and implementing the sanctions policy, women suffered more than their male counterparts, both through direct deprivation and through the effects of sanctions on their homes, families, and jobs. Feminists from all postpositivist theoretical perspectives would introduce gender as a category of analysis and investigate the role that gender played in the politics of the sanctions regime. They might investigate how both the Iraqi government and the advocates of the sanctions regime used gender as a public relations argument against their opponents. The United States characterized Iraq as a state that failed to fulfil its protector role on account of its willingness to starve its women and children in order to develop weapons. Iraq characterized its sanctioners as cruel for killing women and children to punish the government. Feminists might investigate the political appropriation of gender categories by both sides of the conflict. IR feminists emphasize the gendered social hierarchy in global politics that fosters an atmosphere of coercive competition by valuing traits associated with masculinity (bravery, strength, and dominance) over traits associated with femininity (compromise, compassion, and weakness). Feminists might investigate the gendered discourses of competitive masculinity that each side of the sanctions war used to legitimize their actions and delegitimate the enemy’s; such discourses are often manifested in times of inter-state conflict. Specifically, they might point to instances where US CIA Director George Tenet talked about penetrating Saddam Hussein’s ‘inner sanctum’, where US President George H. W. Bush talked about protecting Iraqi women as a justification for sanctions and war, and where Saddam Hussein countered with the threat of showing the US what a ‘real man’ he was. It is often the case, particularly in times of conflict, that we personify enemy states in gendered (continued) 218 J. ANN TICKNER AND LAURA SJOBERG ways, referring to them by their leaders’ names. This hides the negative impacts of war on the lives of individuals—individuals who may not be responsible for the conflict in the first place. Feminists might also explore the punitive relationship between the UN Security Council and Iraq as an example of a hegemonic masculinity feminizing a weaker enemy. Towards a feminist theory of sanctions We suggest three major insights that feminists contribute to the study of sanctions. First, feminists look for where the women are in sanctions regimes. They see that women are disproportionately affected by comprehensive sanctions. Women and children are the most likely to be malnourished. When women are malnourished, every stage of the child-bearing process becomes more difficult. Pre-natal and infant health care is often the first facet of the healthcare system to suffer when a sanctioned economy begins to decline. Women lose their jobs and are charged with running households deprived of basic goods. An international policy of economic deprivation is felt most heavily at the level of individual households. While women suffer disproportionately from sanctions regimes, very few women are present in the decision-making process. When the sanctions on Iraq were enacted, there were no female heads of UN Security Council member states. Feminists see the sanctions regime on Iraq as an example of the systematic exclusion of women’s voices from decisions about international policies that disproportionately affect them. State and inter-state security policy can cause women’s (and other individuals’) insecurity. The second insight feminists have is a criticism of the gendered logic of the policy choice. Sanctions are put in place by the stronger actors in an attempt to force the weaker actor to submit to their will. They are coercive in nature—comply, or you starve. Feminists criticize the adversarial nature of international politics because it valorizes masculine values, such as pride, victory, and force, over feminine ones, such as compromise, compassion, and coexistence—values that are often seen as signs of weakness by most states and many of their citizens, women and men alike. This results in confrontational policies; policies that often hurt those at the margins of international political life the most. Postcolonial feminists would add a criticism of the assumption that the UN Security Council members somehow knew better than Iraq what was good for Iraqis. It is often the case that powerful people, many of whom are men, claim to know what is best for subordinate people (and often for women). IR feminists critique the gendered logic and gendered impacts of sanctions. The third insight that IR feminists have to offer a theory of sanctions is a critical re-examination of the question of responsibility. Feminists not only look for the problems with hierarchical gender relationships in global politics, they also look for solutions. Feminists explore sanctions as both an empirical phenomenon and a gendered phenomenon. Having seen the tragic humanitarian consequences of the sanctions regime, they might ask why no one was fixing them. The Iraqi govern- ment used people’s suffering to advance its political position at the expense of its most vulnerable citizens. Saddam Hussein showed no flexibility which could have saved lives. Whether or not the international community truly believed that the goal of sanctions was worth the catastrophic loss of life in Iraq or whether anyone weighed the consequences directly, many governments in the international arena were willing to let people die. Feminists draw our attention to the construction of state borders as a way to separate ‘self ’ from ‘other’ and distance ourselves from the suffering of others. Feminists encourage states and their citizens to reflect on the false perception of separateness and the global hierarchies that are thereby created. Deconstructing these hierarchies might lead people to care for, rather than compete with, those others outside state boundaries. Feminists would conclude that economic sanctions are not isolated areas of conflict within an otherwise peaceful system. Acts of coercion, physical or economic, put in place by both sides to win international competitions are not only violent, but part of a system that is condoning violence, both physical and structural. The sanctions regime on Iraq contributed to the perpetuation of a violent international system in which the most vulnerable people are rarely  FEMINISM 219 secure. The feminist insights from the study of economic sanctions as war in international relations are not only valuable for their contribution to IR’s theories of sanctions, but also for their generaliz- ability to IR’s crucial questions, such as what constitutes foreign policy, what counts as war, and how war affects people. Conclusion We believe that feminist IR has contributed substantially to our understanding of global politics over the last twenty years. Feminists have restored women’s visibility, investigated gendered constructions of international concepts and policies, and questioned the naturalness of the gendered categories that shape and are shaped by global politics. First-generation feminist IR scholars have offered theoretical reformulations while second-generation scholars have applied these theoretical reformulations to concrete situations in global politics. We have provided a brief overview of a number of different IR feminist theories, including liberal, critical, constructivist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial. While we realize it may be an over-simplification, we created this typology to illustrate one of the major goals of femi- nist IR—to demonstrate that gender relationships inhere in all IR scholarship. Gender relationships are everywhere in global politics; whenever they are not recognized, the silence is loud. IR feminists suggest that all scholars and practitioners of international politics should ask gender questions and be more aware of the gendered implications of global politics. Scholars should ask to what extent their theories are constructed mainly by men and from the lives of men. Practitioners should ask how their policies impact women and whether a lack of women’s voices influences their policy choices. Recognizing gender and other hierar- chies of power and their implications for the lives of both women and men, allows us to begin to de-gender global politics—from inside the United Nations to inside the home. In this chapter, we focused on feminist interpretations of security. Security is so important to states that sometimes they pursue sanctions and wars and cause structural violence in the name of preserving or enhancing security. However, in preserving state security members of the international community may violate the security of their own and others’ most marginal citizens, notably, women, children, the elderly, the poor, and the sick. IR feminists study secu- rity at the individual and the community level; they notice the differential impacts of security policies on women and marginalized people more generally and interrogate the gendered nature of concepts such as war, security, and the state. The insights they produce reveal some new causes of insecurity at the global level, including gender subordination. Gender subordination is visible at every level in the Iraq sanctions case. Individual women were disproportionately impacted by the sanctions; gendered states exploited that disparate impact by engaging in gendered discourses of masculine competition. From the policy logic to the effects, sanctions on Iraq were an example of a gendered international security policy. We have laid out a few paths feminists have used in reformulating IR’s understandings of sanctions in order to make women and gender relationships visible and thereby suggest some new ways to enhance security. We hope that these suggestions offer IR scholars of all perspectives some new insights into the feminist claim that gender is not just about women but also about the way that international policies are framed, studied, and implemented. 220 J. ANN TICKNER AND LAURA SJOBERG Questions 1. More than half the world’s labour comes in the form of the unpaid, home-based labour of women. If this type of labour were remunerated, labour costs in the global economy would triple. How does women’s free labour affect the global economy? 2. Does it make any difference to states’ foreign policies that a vast majority of policy-makers are men? Does it matter to the content of IR scholarship that most of its leading scholars are men? 3. Cynthia Enloe, a prominent IR feminist, has claimed that ‘the personal is international and the international is personal’ (1990: 195). What does she mean by this? 4. Sanctions against Iraq were a case of extreme humanitarian suffering and political intransigence, but other sanctions have been more successful. Do gendered lenses have anything to say about economic coercion more generally? If so, what? 5. What about the men? How does gender affect men’s experiences in everyday life? In global politics? 6. Once we realize that gender plays a pervasive role in global social and political interactions, we begin to ask what we can do about it. Could global politics be de-gendered? 7. One of the major claims that feminists in IR make is that individual lives are global politics. How might your trip to the grocery store, choice of television programming, or choice of internet sites be global politics? 8. The debate about whether or not women should get the vote was a contentious one in most countries. Do women have something different from men to say about global politics? If so, what? 9. Many scholars who work on the humanitarian consequences of war talk about the effect of war on innocent women and children. How might women experience war differently from men? 10. Since feminist insights stretch across different perspectives on IR, this chapter raises the issue as to whether feminism belongs in one chapter of a book about IR theories. How might gendered lenses see the cases in other chapters? 11. Following the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, a number of scholars and activists argued that the international laws of war should include a prohibition against genocidal rape. What might a feminist perspective on IR contribute to the discussion of the problem of wartime rape? 12. In his 2002 State of the Union Address to the US Congress, President George W. Bush claimed that ‘brutality against women is always and everywhere wrong’, implying that brutality against women might justify war. Would a feminist perspective on IR agree? Further reading Introductions to feminist IR Peterson, V. S. and Runyan, A. S. (2009), Global Gender Issues. 3rd edn (Boulder, CO: Westview). Peterson and Runyan introduce and apply ‘gendered lenses’ to global politics. Tickner, J. A. (2001), Gendering World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press). The author of the first singly-authored book in feminist IR lays out a foundation for feminist IR in the twenty- first century.  FEMINISM 221 Feminist security theory Enloe, C. (2000), Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press). Enloe finds the relationship between gender and security in political phenomena as different as a military base and a Chiquita banana, and weaves a framework for feminist security theories from these observations. Feminist political economy Marchand, M. H. and Runyan, A. S. (2010) (eds.), Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites, and Resistances. 2nd edn. (London and New York: Routledge). This book addresses genderings in the global economy, going beyond the narrow limits of conven- tional approaches to globalization to reveal the complexities of global restructuring based on economic and social disparities. Second generation feminist IR empirical studies Chin, C. (1998), In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian ‘Mo- dernity’ Project (New York: Columbia University Press). Chin uses gendered lenses to show that the very private phenomena of home-based labour interacts with international relations in important, gendered ways. Moon, K. H. S. (1997), Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.–Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press). Moon demonstrates that international security policy takes place at the level of regulating individual women’s lives in Korean prostitution camps. Prügl, E. (1999), The Global Construction of Gender: Home-Based Work in the Political Economy of the 20th Century (New York: Columbia University Press). Prügl examines the social, political, and economic dynamics of home-based work in the twentieth century from a feminist constructivist perspective. Robinson, F. (1999), Globalising Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory and International Relations (Oxford: Westview). Robinson derives an ethic of care from feminist theories and applies her theoretical insights to the empirical study of care for health and welfare around the world. True, J. (2003), Gender, Globalization, and Post- socialism: The Czech Republic after Communism (New York: Columbia University Press). True applies the insights of feminist theories of international political economy and international security to post- socialist Eastern Europe. Important websites Council of Women World Leaders. www.womenworldleaders.org WomanSTATS Project. www.womanstats.org UN Division for the Advancement of Women. www.un.org/womenwatch/daw Women in International Security. wiis.georgetown.edu MADRE, an international women’s human rights organization. www.madre.org Global Fund for Women. www.globalfundforwomen.org 222 J. ANN TICKNER AND LAURA SJOBERG Notes 1. Jacqui True (2003) made the distinction that first-generation feminist work in IR was theory-building, whereas second-generation work does empirical research investigating the implications of those theories for global politics (see Moon 1997; Prügl 1999). Second-generation feminist research challenges early criticisms of feminist IR’s inability to deal with empirical political situations. 2. Harding (1986) points out that the problem with purported ‘objective’ knowledge is that only a small percentage of voices are represented in the production of that knowledge. Specifically, most knowledge is produced by white, Western men, while the voices most often excluded from the knowledge production process are those of women and minorities. 3. See, for example, Empire and Insecurity in World Politics: Seductions of Neoliberalism (2009). 4. Jean Elshtain explains that the just war tradition produces a narrative of heroic, masculine soldiers ( just warriors) protecting innocent, female civilians (beautiful souls), justifying violence for women while neglecting violence against women (1992). 5. See United Nations Security Council Resolution 687; S/RES/687, 1991. Resolution 687 included demands that Iraq recognize and respect Kuwait’s independence; allow a demilitarized zone between Iraq and Kuwait; surrender all nuclear, biological, chemical, and long-range weapons, weapons research, and weapons-related material; accept liability for the First Gulf War in its entirety; return all Kuwaiti possessions stolen during occupation; repatriate all Kuwaiti prisoners of war; and renounce terrorist activities as legitimate politics. Visit the Online Resource Centre that accompanies this book for lots of interesting addi- tional material. www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/orc/dunne3e/  12 Poststructuralism DAVID CAMPBELL 1 Introduction 223 The interdisciplinary context of poststructuralism 227 The reaction of IR to poststructuralism 229 The critical attitude of poststructuralism 231 Understanding discourse 234 Discourses of world politics 236 Case study 239 Conclusion 243 Reader’s Guide The way the discipline of International Relations (IR) ‘maps’ the world shows the importance of representation, the relationship of power and knowledge, and the politics of identity to the production and understanding of global politics. Post- structuralism directly engages these issues even though it is not a new paradigm or theory of IR. It is, rather, a critical attitude or ethos that explores the assumptions that make certain ways of being, acting, and knowing possible. This chapter details how and why poststructuralism engaged IR from the 1980s onwards. It explores the interdisciplinary context of social and political theory from which poststructural- ism emerged, and examines the misconceptions evident in the reception this approach received from mainstream theorists. The chapter details what the critical attitude of poststructuralism means for social and political inquiry. Focusing on the work of Michel Foucault, it shows the importance of discourse, identity, subjectivity, and power to this approach, and discusses the methodological features employed by poststructuralists in their readings of, and interventions in, international politics. The chapter concludes with a case study of images of humanitarian crises that illus- trates the poststructural approach. Introduction Interpretation, mapping, and meta-theory Every way of understanding international politics depends upon abstraction, representation, and interpretation. That is because ‘the world’ does not present itself to us in the form of ready-made categories or theories. Whenever we write or speak of ‘the realm of anarchy’, the ‘end of the Cold War’, ‘gendered relations of power’, ‘globalization’, ‘humanitarian intervention’, or ‘finance capital’, we are engaging in representation. Even the most ‘objective’ theory that claims to offer a perfect resemblance of things does not escape the need for interpretation (Bleiker 2001).