Control + 1 – Block Headings

Jarvis 2000 D. S. L. Jarvis, 2000. [University of South Carolina Press, International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism: Defending the Discipline, p 171].

Yet, according to V. Spike Peterson, "male violence constitutes a 'global war against women," perpetrated with state complicity because of patriarchal relations that invariably see women suffer far more than men."' In Peterson's estimation, women suffer a heavier burden than do men, suffer more emotional stress and bear the burden of patriarchal state expenditures that benefit men at the expense of women. "Systematic violence," things like "sexual harassment, battery, rape, and torture," Peterson and Riinyan argue, "is the persistent price that women pay for the maintenance of large militaries,""' The implication, of course, is that men pay no price and enjoy freedom from violence when, in fact, we know that hazing rituals, physical and verbal abuse, torture, and mental torment are daily occurrences throughout the armies of the world and these stafilid almost exclusively by men. Human tights too suggest Peterson and Runyan, are compromised by militarization. "Amnesty International vividly documents examples of mili- tary and police forces around the world terrorizing, imprisoning, and even torturing women who seek information about family members who have 'disappeared' at the hands of government-sponsored death squads." What Peterson and Runyan forget to add, however, is that by Amnesty International's own estimation, the overwhelming number of political prisoners in the world who suffer cruel and inhumane treatment happen to be men; 172 International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism that those who "disappeared" under Argentina's military junta and Nicaragua's and El Salvador's U.S.-sponsored death squads in the 1980s were disproportionately male; and that torture of political prisoners by sheer weight of numbers thereibre concerns, disproportionately, the torture of male political prisoners." Even the traditional concerns of International Relations, war and conflict studies, are not spared from the biased framing of the gender variable. Cyn- thia Enloe, for instance, tells of the plight of women during the Bosnian war and how Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian men used rape as an instrument of terror. By implication, however, we are left to assume that men in the Bosn- ian conflict endured no terror, bnatalityordeprivations, but were simply the perpetrators of atrocities." Similarly, in discussing the Gulf War, Enioe is highly exclusive in dealing with gender, adequately narrating the plight of female migrant workers in Kuwait who suflëred atrocities like rape and tor- ture at the hands of Iraqi troops, but neglecting the "wider Iraqi process of detention, torture, execution, and forced removal,. of tens of thousands of Kuwaitis" that, "judging from the human-rights and media reports, [were] virtually all male.'"

AFF: Alternative Doesn’t Solve
The alternative reinscribes the sovereign territoriality of the approaches it criticizes – it policies everything outside its boundaries as “masculine”

Jarvis 2000 D. S. L. Jarvis, 2000. [University of South Carolina Press, International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism: Defending the Discipline, p 145].

Critical research agendas of this type, however, are not found easily in International Relations. Critics of feminist perspectives run the risk of denouncement as either a misogynist malcontent or an androcentrie keeper of the gate. At work in much of this discourse is an unstated political correctness, where the historical marginalization of women bestows intellectual autonomy, excluding those outside the identity group from legitimate participation in its discourse. Only feminist women can do real, legitimate, feminist theory since, in the mantra of identity politics, discourse must emanate from a positional (personal) ontology. Those sensitive or sympathetic to the identity politics of particular groups are, of course, welcome to lend support and encouragement, but only on terms delineated by the groups themselves. In this way, they enjoy an uncontested sovereign hegemony over their own self-identification, insuring the group discourse is self-constituted and that its parameters, operative methodology, and standards of argument, appraisal, and evidentiary provisions are self-defined. Thus, for example, when Sylvester calls for a "homesteading" of International Relations she Feminist Revisions of International Relations does so "by [a] repetitive feminist insistence that we be included on our terms" (my emphasis). Rather than an invitation to engage in dialogue, this is an ultimatum that a sovereign intellectual space be provided and insulated from critics who question the merits of identity-based political discourse. Instead, Sylvester calls upon International Relations to "share space, respect, and trust in a re-formed endeavor," but one otherwise proscribed as committed to demonstrating not only "that the secure homes constructed by IR's many debaters are chimerical," but, as a consequence, to ending International Relations and remaking it along lines grounded in feminist postmodernism. Such stipulative provisions might be likened to a form of negotiated sovereign territoriality where, as pan of the settlement for the historically aggrieved, border incursions are to be allowed but may not be met with resistance or reciprocity. Demands for entry to the discipline are thus predicated on conditions that insure two sets of rules, cocooning postmodern feminist spaces from systematic analyses while "respecting" this discourse as it hastens about the project of deconstructing International Relations as a "male space." Sylvester's impassioned plea for tolerance and "emphatic cooperation" is thus confined to like-minded individuals, those who do not challenge feminist epistemologies but accept them as a necessary means of rein- venting the discipline as a discourse between postmodern identities-the most important of which is gender. 14 Intolerance or misogyny thus become the ironic epithets attached to those who question the wisdom of this reinvention or the merits of the return of identity in international theory." Most strategic of all, however, demands for entry to the discipline and calls for intellectual spaces betray a self-imposed, politically motivated marginality. After all, where are such calls issued from other than the discipline and the intellectual-and well established-spaces of feminist International Relations? Much like the strategies employed by male dissidents, then, feminist postmodernists too deflect as illegitimate any criticism that derives from skeptics whose vantage points are labeled privileged. And privilege is variously interpreted historically, especially along lines of race, color, and sex where the denotations white and male, to name but two, serve as inter- generational mediums to assess the injustices of past histories. White males, for example, become generic signifiers for historical oppression, indicating an ontologically privileged group by which the historical experiences of the "other" can then be reclaimed in the context of their related oppression, exploitation, and exclusion. Legitimacy, in this context, can then be claimed in terms of one's group identity and the extent to which International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism the history of that particular group has been "silenced." In this same way, self-identification or "self-situation" establishes one's credentials, allowing admittance to the group and legitimating the "authoritative" vantage point from which one speaks and writes. Thus, for example, Jan Jindy Pettman includes among the introductory pages to her most recent book, Wending Women, a section tided "A (personal) politics of location," in which her identity as a woman, a feminist, and an academic, makes apparent her particular (marginal) identities and group loyalties.96 Similarly, Christine Sylvester, in the introduction to her book, insists, "It is important to provide a context for one's work in the often-denied politics of the personal." Accordingly, self-declafadöiIrtiieals to the reader that she is a feminist, went to a Catholic girls school where she was schooled to "develop your brains and confess something called 'sins' to always male forever priests," and that these provide some pieces to her dynamic objectivity." Like territorial markers, self-identification permits entry to intellectual spaces whose sovereign authority is "policed" as much by marginal subjectivities as they allege of the oppressors who "police" the discourse of realism, or who are said to walk the corridors of the discipline insuring the replication of patriarchy, hierarchical agendas, and "malestream" theory. If Sylvester's version of feminist postmodernism is projected as tolerant, perspectivist, and encompassing of a multiplicity of approaches, in reality it is as selective, exclusionary, and dismissive of alternative perspectives as mainstream approaches are accused of being.
AFF: Alternative Doesn’t Solve
The feminist alternative inevitably results in the same practices it hopes to prevent, and fails to secure knowledge claims which could cause real change.

Maria Stern, researcher, department of peace and development research @ Gotberg University and Marysia Zalewski, director of centre for gender studies @ University of Aberdeen, 2009, “Feminist fatigue(s): reflections on feminism and familiar fables of militarization”

In this section we clarify what we mean by the problem of sex/gender and how it transpires in the context of feminist narratives within IR – which we will exemplify below with a recounting of a familiar feminist reading of militarisation. To re-iterate, the primary reason for investigating this is that we suspect part of the reason for the aura of disillusionment around feminism – especially as a critical theoretical resource – is connected to the sense that feminist stories repeat the very grammars that initially incited them as narratives in resistance. To explain; one might argue that there has been a normative feminist failure to adequately construct secure foundations for legitimate and authoritative knowledge claims upon which to garner effective and permanent gender change, particularly in regard to women. But for poststructural scholars this failure is not surprising as the emancipatory visions of feminism inevitably emerged as illusory given the attachments to foundationalist and positivistic understandings of subjects, power and agency. If, as poststructuralism has shown us, we cannot – through language – decide the meaning of woman, or of femininity, or of feminism, or produce foundational information about it or her;42 that subjects are ‘effects’ rather than ‘origins of institutional practices and discourses’;43 that power ‘produces subjects in effects’;44 or that authentic and authoritative agency are illusory – then the sure foundations for the knowledge that feminist scholars are conventionally required to produce – even hope to produce – are unattainable. Moreover, post-colonial feminisms have vividly shown how representations of ‘woman’ or ‘women’ which masquerade as ‘universal’ are, instead, universalising and inevitably produced through hierarchical and intersecting power relations.45 In sum; the poststructural suggestion is that feminist representations of women do not correspond to some underlying truth of what woman is or can be; rather feminism produces the subject of woman which it then subsequently comes to represent.46 The implications of this familiar conundrum are far-reaching as the demands of feminism in the context of the knowledge/political project of the gender industry are exposed as implicated in the re-production of the very power from which escape is sought. In short, feminism emerges as complicit in violent reproductions of subjects and knowledges/ practices. How does this recognisable puzzle (recognisable within feminist theory) play out in relation to the issues we are investigating in this article? As noted above, the broad example we choose to focus on to explain our claims is militarisation; partly chosen as both authors have participated in pedagogic, policy and published work in this generic area, and partly because this is an area in which the demand for operationalisable gender knowledge is ever-increasing. Our suggestion is that the increasing requirement47 for knowledge for the gender industry about gender and militarisation re-animates the sexgender paradox which persistently haunts attempts to translate what we know into useful knowledge for redressing (and preventing) conflict, or simply into hopeful scenarios for our students.
The feminist approach to IR is riddled with contradictions and makes current international relations theory appear unduly flawed.

Alastair J.H. Murray, prof politics @ University of Wales Swansea, 1997, Reconstructing Realism, p. 192

Whilst Tickner's feminism presents an interesting revisioning of international relations, it ultimately suffers from the problem that, in order to sustain any of its claims, most of all the notion that a distinctively feminist epistemology is actually necessary, it must establish the existence of a gender bias in international relations theory which simply does not exist, and the existence of an 'alternative' feminist position on international affairs which is simply a fiction. Consequently, in order to salvage her very raison d'etre, Tickner is forced to engage in some imaginative rewriting of international relations theory. First, in order to lay the basis for the claim that an alternative perspective is actually necessary, conventional theory is stripped of its positive elements, and an easily discredited caricature, centred on realism, erected in its place. Second, in order to conjure up a reason for this alternative perspective to be a feminist one, the positive elements which have been removed from conventional theory are then claimed as the exclusive preserve of such perspectives. Yet, however imaginative this 'revisioning' of international relations theory, its inevitable result is a critique which is so riddled with contradictions that it proves unsustainable, and an alternative epistemology which, based upon this flawed critique, collapses in the face of the revelation of its inadequacy.
AFF: Alternative Doesn’t Solve
Fem theory fails to fully resolve the conflict between sex and gender – which is a perpetual conundrum that dooms alt solvency.

Maria Stern, researcher, department of peace and development research @ Gotberg University and Marysia Zalewski, director of centre for gender studies @ University of Aberdeen, 2009, “Feminist fatigue(s): reflections on feminism and familiar fables of militarization”

In familiar feminist fables of gender and militarization, gender conventionally materializes as if it were real (in a foundational sense) yet our critical feminist theorizing tells us it is a construction. We ‘know’ that when we speak woman, we re-constitute her, we construct and delimit her through our stories about her; a paradox indeed. If an apparent move is made toward gender (usually there is an assumption that this is different from, more advanced than, or more inclusive than feminist theorizations of woman) then gender metamorphoses into masculinity or femininity, or on the relations between the two in order to show how they act on, impact, influence or provide roles for the sexed body. ‘Opening’ the feminist agenda to include ‘men’ and ‘masculinity’ does not alter this dynamic. Masculinity tends also to become a (gender) ‘thing’ which we have learned, understood, imported, conveyed, tried to change; more inflections of paradox. ‘Gender’ becomes reduced to either ‘women’, ‘men’, or ‘femininity’, ‘masculinity’; and crucially we lose sight of the productive power involved – productive of the paradox mentioned above, as well as other related paradoxes such as perpetrator victim, 54 security-insecurity,55 and even war-peace.56 We suggest that being attendant to how the ‘move’ from sex to gender and the ‘move’ from a focus on ‘women’ and ‘men’ to looking at constructions of masculinity and femininity and the hierarchical relations between the two may not be as large a step away from feminism parsimoniously defined as is usually imagined. Indeed it is perhaps not a step ‘forward’ at all, as we shall illustrate. This side-step invokes the specter of anxiety as it raises questions about the possibility of responsible feminist political interventions, given the paradox with which we grapple. Importantly however, we suggest the sexgender paradox or aporia can never be successfully resolved; ‘an aporia is not a contradiction which can be brought into the dialectic, smoothed over and resolved into the unity of the concept, but an untotalisable problem at the heart of the concept, disrupting its trajectory, emptying out its fullness, opening out its closure.’57 As such we see the production of sexgender as irresolvable – as a perpetual conundrum. We return to this point in our conclusion. To reiterate: through the following critical reading of a familiar feminist fable of militarisation58 we illustrate the logic which produces the paradox of feminism that demands (but ultimately belies) resolution. We explore how feminist narratives are not able to fulfil their supposed transformative promise since attempts to transgress the discursive frameworks in which they are framed are haunted; thus ensuring the failure of feminist stories. Failure, in this sense, is judged in feminism’s (in)ability to resolve its inherent contradiction.
AFF: Alternative Doesn’t Spill Over
Alt can’t spillover- Transnational movement proves

Brooke A. Ackerly, Associatie Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, 2008, “Universal Human Rights in A World of Difference,” p. 162-63

Observing silence is a resource intensive research method. Two graduate students and I went looking for women’s activism and “silence” at the World Social Forum and Feminist Dialogues. We hypothesized that we would find women both visible and silent in the full range of social movements. This hypothesis was born out, strikingly, within the transnational women’s movement. For example, in 2004 at a workshop on Overcoming Gender-Based Violence in the Private Sphere, Lyndi Hewitt observed an audience member propose using the human rights discourse to politicize the issue of violence against women. The woman was apparently unaware that this has been a common rhetorical and political strategy in many parts of the world and in transnational feminist discourse for well-over a decade.485 By hearing her speak, we were able to observe another form of silence: that transnational feminist activism was not reaching all women activists, nor even all feminist activists. Despite the United Nations conferences of the 1990s, despite global efforts of activist and donors, many activists continue to work in isolation from global dialogue. Through participating in WSF 2004, this audience member was joining the global dialogue. By exhibiting that she had not been part of that dialogue until that panel, she also told of those who continue to be outside of global feminist dialogues. This means that the empirical basis of an immanent universal theory will always be incomplete. The epistemological assumptions of this project anticipate as much. They anticipate that the theory will have a dynamic quality at the empirical level. However, by further reflecting on the experience of those marginalized through the political processes of rights activism we can see that for the analytical process we need methodological tools for hearing the silences of the women like the woman who spoke up at the workshop Overcoming Gender-Based Violence in the Private Sphere. We need analytical methods that can give us more confidence than a simple confidence in our mere abilities to imagine “others.” Fortunately, this reflection, while demanding is not resource intensive. The possibility of learning about silences and absences by drawing on our analytical tools privileges those with the luxury of time and a cup of tea to think. But it is not nearly as resource intensive as the transnational travel that constituted a significant aspect of the empirical methods described in the preceding chapter.
Can’t solve for the whole world – feminization only possible in the West

J. Ann Tickner (professor of international relations at USC) 2001, Gendering World Politics. Pp. 60.

An example of the negative consequences of associating women with peace is Francis Fukuyama's discussion of the biological roots of human aggression and its association with war. Fukuyama claims that women are more peaceful than men-a fact that, he believes, for the most part is biologically determined. Therefore, a world run by women would be a more peaceful world. However, Fukuyama claims that only in the West is the realization of what he calls a "feminized" world likely; since areas outside the West will continue to be run by younger aggressive men, Western men, who can stand up to threats posed by dangers from outside, must remain in charge, particularly in the area of international politics.79 Besides its implications for reinforcing a disturbing North/South split, this argument is deeply conservative; given the dangers of an aggressive world, women must be kept in their place and out of international politics. The leap from aggressive men to aggressive states is also problematic. There is little evidence to suggest that men are "naturally" aggressive and women are "naturally" peaceful; as bell hooks reminds us, black women are very likely to feel strongly that white women have been quite violent and militaristic in their support of racism. 81 Traditional concepts of masculinity and femininity that sustain war require an exercise of power: they are not inevitable."
Alt doesn’t solve other instances of gendered politics- androcentrism and racism prove

Linda Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College/CUNY Graduate Center, 1988, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” PK

Recently, I heard an attack on the phrase "woman of color" by a woman, dark-skinned herself, who was arguing that the use of this phrase simply reinforces the significance of that which should have no significance-skin color. To a large extent I agreed with this woman's argument: we must develop the means to address the wrongs done to us without reinvoking the basis of those wrongs. Likewise, women who have been eternally construed must seek a means of articulating a feminism that does not continue construing us in any set way. At the same time, I believe we must avoid buying into the neuter, universal "generic human" thesis that covers the West's racism and androcentrism with a blindfold. We cannot re- solve this predicament by ignoring one half of it or by attempting to embrace it. The solution lies, rather, in formulating a new theory within the process of reinterpreting our position, and reconstructing our political identity, as women
AFF: Alternative Doesn’t Solve Conflict
Turn - reducing gender inequality encourages democracies to wage war on non-democracies.

Robert O. Keohane, prof government @ Harvard and international affairs @ Princeton, 1998, Beyond Dichotomy: Conversations Between International Relations and Feminist Theory, p. 197

Since we know that intentionality and consequences are not tightly linked in international relations, we should not assume that the consequences in international relations of more egalitarian practices within some societies will necessarily be benign. Supposing that increased gender equality leads to less aggression, we might well expect that countries with relatively less hierarchical internal structures would not fight each other. But their relationships with states with more inegalitarian gender relationships would need to be investigated. Perhaps states with less gender hierarchy could resolve conflict more easily; but it is also possible that they would be more easily bullied, or would become more moralistic, leading eventually to more serious crises and perhaps warfare. To continue with the democracy analogy, democracies are quite warlike toward nondemocracies, although they are disinclined to fight other democracies.