Control + 1 – Block Headings

IR is so deeply masculinized that its inherent gender hierarchies are often hidden

J. Ann Tickner, Prof of IR at USC, M.A. Yale and Ph.D Brandeis, ’92, “Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving International Security,” 8

Extending Scott's challenge to the field of international relations, we can immediately detect a similar set of hierarchical binary oppositions. But in spite of the seemingly obvious association of international politics with the masculine characteristics described above, the field of international relations is one of the last of the social sciences to be touched by gender analysis and feminist perspectives. 11 The reason for this, I believe, is not that the field is gender neutral, meaning that the introduction of gender is irrelevant to its subject matter as many scholars believe, but that it is so thoroughly masculinized that the workings of these hierarchical gender relations are hidden.
Links – Focus on the State
The state encourages certain methods used to silence the narratives of survivors, allowing communities and the women themselves to conceal and even erase their experiences from history

Bina D’Costa, PhD, Australian National University, Australia, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Otago, John Vincent fellow in the Department of International relations at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, taught in the Department of Women’s Studies and International Relations at ANU, 2006 [“Feminist Methodologies for International Relations” edited by Brooke A. Ackerly: Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, Maria Stern: Lecturer and Researcher at the Department of Peace and Development Research, Goteborg University, and Jacqui True: Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Auskland, New Zealand, 2006, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pg. 142-4 EmiW]

Since a major focus of my research was the construction of women's identity through political processes after 1971, I was interested in the successive regimes dealing with women's issues. An important question in this regard was “What sort of silence did they create through their policies, which included the reintegration of war criminals into the political ground?” As part of my analysis, I investigated three different types of silence and marginalization in the national narrative. The first type was created by successive governments' silencing of the survivors In the rehabilitation programs coordinated by the Awami League government, which was in power till 1975, women's agency was denied.² For example, the rehabilitation programs controlled the violated female body through forced abortions, maternity through war-baby adoption programs, and women's lives through various means including the “marry them off” campaign (Brownmiller 1975: 83) and their reinstatement in traditional jobs such as needlework, paddy-husking, am poultry-farming. The second type of silence is reinforced by the women themselves. The family and community pressures on the women made it hard for them to speak of their experiences. In a poor country like Bangladesh where women struggle for basic rights of food and shelter every day, there was no space or time to share their experiences publicly. Moreover, the stigma, shame, and humiliation associated with rape made it doubly hard for women to speak without being ostracized by their communities. They either internalized the cultural scripts of gender roles or chose silence as their negotiated survival strategy. By “negotiated survival” I mean the approach or strategy used by women to maneuver within their highly patriarchal families, communities, and states. That often meant prioritizing their community identity over their personal on and suppressing their memories of both wartime violence and post-conflict state-building, in which they had been stigmatized because c their gender role and the experience of sexual violence. Over the last three decades, the first and second kinds of silence hardened and created the third and most dangerous kind, which ha the power to erase women's experience from Bangladesh's history a together and to deny the possibility of seeking justice, reconciliation, c reparation. As stated before, along with the state and the women their selves, social workers, activists, and human rights groups who were assisting the women also played part in this silence.²⁴ Because the air was to cause the least pain and trauma for the women, emphasis was placed on concealing their stories. I am not denying or ignoring th serious stigma and isolation or the feeling of shame²⁵ and humiliation rape can create for survivors.²⁶ Scholars (Burgess 1995; Culbertson 1995; Muran and Digiuseppe 2000; Henseley 2002) have investigated the traumas related to rape, the psychotherapeutic needs of the rape victims (Draucker 1999; Harris 1998), and the consideration of cultural difference to assist the women (Low and Organista 2000; Hansen and Harkins 2002). Yet I suggest that the individual silencing of the first two kinds also creates a collective silence. Burying women's traumas thickens the silence and therefore contributes to the denial of justice. While publicly talking about rape might mean stigmatization for the victim, covering it under shrouds of silence might also mean not documenting, and therefore publicly denying, what happened to her or to women like her. The failure to address women's experiences on a case-by-case basis had the cumulative effect of downplaying the extent and severity of the rapes and sexual violence during 1971 war.
Links – Focus on the State
Focusing on the state reinforces the public-private dichotomy

Jill Steans March 1999, “The Private is Global: Feminist Politics and Global Political Economy,” New Political Economy, Vol. 4, Issue 1.

The main implications of feminist critiques of existing scholarship in GPE is that the public/private divisions which underpin such conceptions of economic and political activity render invisible what Youngs describes as deep social relations of power.(n6) That is, personal, familial and domestic relations and social reproduction do not appear in public statistics, but they nonetheless constitute a world in which significant economic production and servicing takes place--a world characterised by particular forms of power relations.(n7) As Benhabib has argued, along with the development of commodity relations in capitalism, the socialisation of the economy, the decline of the subsistence household and the emergence of national and global markets, there has been a privatisation of the intimate sphere (the production of daily necessities, reproduction and care of the young, the old and the sick).(n8) Whitworth has lamented the failure of critical theorists to theorise gender, precisely because critical theory claims to understand social and political complexes as a whole rather than as separate parts.(n9) GPE neglects the degree to which states, for example, are involved in the social and political institutionalisation of gendered power differences by confirming and institutionalising the arrangements that distinguish the public from the private. Goetz argues that 'part of the definition of the state and the delimitation of the state's proper sphere involves the active codification and policing of the boundaries of the public and the private' which 'delineate gendered spheres of activity, where the paradigmatic subject of the public and economic arena is male and that of the private and domestic is female'.(n10) According to Goetz, states set the parameters for women's structurally unequal position in families and markets by condoning gender-differential terms in inheritance rights and legal adulthood, by tacitly condoning domestic and sexual violence, or by sanctioning differential wages for equal or comparable work.(n11) Feminists have challenged the conceptual boundary between the public and private realms and demanded that GPE scholars devote critical and sustained attention to the connections between the two realms. As Youngs notes, political and economic relations do not operate on either side of public and private, but across them.(n12)
We must escape the nation-state paradigm for an adequate critical framework

Jill Steans March 1999, “The Private is Global: Feminist Politics and Global Political Economy,” New Political Economy, Vol. 4, Issue 1.

The GPE conception of historically constituted structures and practices within which political and economic activity takes place is helpful to feminists.(n15) A feminist critical political economy requires a theoretical and conceptual framework which allows us to think about gender relations beyond the realm of the nation-state. Critical global political economy provides a sophisticated understanding of the driving force of globalisation--global capitalism. The phenomenon of globalisation has fostered a view of the state as a particular territorial and political space in which a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations, layer upon layer of different linkages, local to world-wide, exists.(n16) This is welcomed by many feminist scholars who are interested to identify 'global gender issues',(n17) and to map the global dimensions of feminist politics.(n18)
Links – Focus on the State
Focus on the state as the sole actor reinforces the patriarchal realist mindsets- guarantees insecurity for women

Adam Jones, political scientist at University of British Columbia, 1996 (“Does Gender Make the World go round?” Review of international studies vol 22, number 4, JSTOR)

The classical paradigm places primary emphasis on the world system as a level of analysis. But the constituent actors in the Realist scenario are states-accepted as givens, 'abstract unitary actors whose actions are explained through laws that can be universalized across time and place and whose internal characteristics are irrelevant to the operation of these laws'.14 Tickner contends that this image of state action is fundamentally 'antihumanist' in its reification of the state. But it is also masculinist in its privileging of traditionally male-oriented values: Behind this reification of state practices hide social institutions that are made and remade by individual actions. In reality, the neorealist depiction of the state as a unitary actor is grounded in the historical practices of the Western state system: neorealist characterizations of state behavior, in terms of self-help, autonomy, and power seeking, privilege characteristics associated with the Western construction of masculinity.15 It is clear why feminists tend to place such emphasis on the Realist state-as-actor formulation. No political phenomenon has been subjected to such radical scrutiny and criticism in the past twenty years as the state, its composition, and its perpetuation in the spheres of production and reproduction. Feminism, as noted, rose to prominence alongside other radical critiques of the 1960s and '70s. It is hardly surprising, then, that the enduring radical-feminist tradition, best exemplified by Catharine MacKinnon, has been most insistent on a re-evaluation of the state from a gender perspective. Radical feminism charges the domestic political order with negating the female/feminine and sharply constraining the role and political power of women. When a class analysis is integrated with the gender variable, as it usually is, we have a picture of the state as compromised and conflictive, predicated on the structured inequality of women and the poor (two categories that intersect to a greater or lesser degree in much feminist analysis, as in the real world). MacKinnon writes: The state is male in the feminist sense . . . The liberal state coercively and authoritatively constitutes the social order in the interest of men as a gender-through its legitimating norms, forms, relation to society, and substantive policies . . . Formally, the state is male in that objectivity is its norm ... It legitimates itself by reflecting its view of society, a society it helps make by so seeing it, and calling that view, and that relation, rationality. Since rationality is measured by point-of-viewlessness, what counts as reason is that which corresponds to the way things are.16 The analysis here stops at the boundaries of the nation-state, but the implications for feminists of an international system composed of such units are clear. So, too, is the important difference between such radical-feminist formulations and radical Marxist critiques of the state. While Marxism has spent much of the past two decades exploring the state's potential to act with 'relative autonomy' from dominant social classes, MacKinnon and other radical feminists reject outright the possibility of the state ever acting against dominant male/masculine interests. 'How ever autonomous of class the liberal state may appear, it is not autonomous of sex. Male power is systemic. Coercive, legitimated, and epistemic, it is the regime.'7 A number of important feminist voices have rejected the radical-feminist vision of the liberal state.18 But many, perhaps most, feminist IR theorists incorporate a good deal of the radical-feminist perspective in critiquing classical IR. This is particularly notable in critiques of classical conceptions of security, dealt with in more detail later. If the state is permeated to its foundations by gender bias, it cannot act in a neutral, disinterested, 'self-maximizing' manner to provide security for its citizens. In fact, its very existence is predicated on the structured insecurity of half its population.

Links – Crises
Women disappear from view during times of crisis

Jan Jindy Pettman, Director of Centre for Women’s Studies at Australian National University, Spring 2004, pg. 85

This article seeks to understand feminist international relations theory through the lenses of 911 and the war on terror. In times of national crisis and international violence, women and gender often disappear from view. Feminists, including IR feminist experts, are rarely asked to comment on large-scale organized violence. At first glance, 'hard' masculinity and militarism appear to be unlikely sites for feminist examination, however, feminists do have a lot to say about these forms of international politics. This article aims to demonstrate how gender is an essential component of the relations and reactions reviewed in the readings of 9/11 and the war on terror.
Links – Security
Defining security as a binary between war and peace naturalizes structural and ecological violence

J. Ann Tickner (professor of international relations at USC) 2001, Gendering World Politics. Pp. 61-62.

Feminists are suspicious of statist ontologies that define security in zero-sum terms associated with binary distinctions between anarchy and order; they are also aware of the dangers of identities that, in their quest for unifying language and theory can’t be separated from practice. Symbols that can themselves be a source of conflict, mask social relations of inequality and insecurity. Many feminists, therefore, like certain critical-security scholars, define security broadly in multidimensional and multilevel terms-as the diminution of all forms of violence, including physical, structural, and ecological Since women have been marginal to the power structures of most states, and since feminist perspectives on security take human security as their central concern, most of these definitions start at the bottom, with the individual or community rather than the state or the international system. According to Christine Sylvester, security is elusive and partial and involves struggle and contention; it is a process, rather than an ideal in which women must act as agents in the provision of their own security.89 It is important to emphasize that women must be (and are) involved in providing for their own security; notions of security that rely on protection reinforce gender hierarchies that, in turn, diminish women's (and certain men's) real security. Speaking from the margins, feminists are sensitive to the various ways in which social hierarchies manifest themselves across societies and history. Striving for an emancipatory type of security involves exposing these different social hierarchies, understanding how they construct and are constructed by the international order, and working to denaturalize and dismantle them.
Security studies exclude women’s voices

J. Ann Tickner (professor of international relations at USC) 2001, Gendering World Politics. Pp. 36-37.

Security specialists in universities and research institutions played an important role in designing U.S. security policy during the Cold War. For this reason their work was aimed at policymakers and military experts, an audience that traditionally included very few women and one that has not been particularly concerned with the kind of security issues important to many women. While national security has been a privileged category both in the discipline of international relations and in international "high" politics, the term woman is antithetical to our stereotypical image of a national-security specialist. Women have rarely been security providers in the conventional sense of the term, as soldiers or policymakers; in the U.S. Department of Defense in August 1999, women occupied only 14.6 percent of all officer ranks and only 5 percent of the top four positions in these ranks.' It is only recently that women have begun to enter the IR security field in significant numbers.3 Yet women have been writing about security from a variety of perspectives for a long time; their voices, however have rarely been heard. For these reasons, feminist perspectives on security are quite different from those of conventional security studies. To the mainstream, they often appear to be outside traditional disciplinary boundaries.
Security studies preclude ethical discourse

J. Ann Tickner (professor of international relations at USC) 2001, Gendering World Politics. Pp. 44-45.

Walt's defense of the social-scientific foundations of security studies (mentioned earlier) and his dismissal of other approaches have drawn sharp criticism from critical-security scholars. The ethnocentricism of his review and his description of a field that appears closely allied with U.S. security interests call into question his claim about the field's ability to "rise above the political" and raises the issue of whose interest security is serving. Edward Kolodziej has claimed that Walt's philosophically restrictive notion of the social sciences confines the security scholar to testing propositions largely specified by policymakers; it is they who decide what is real and relevant." Kolodziej goes on to say that Walt's definition of science bars any possibility of an ethical or moral discourse; even the normative concerns of classical realists are deemphasized in order to put the realist perspective on scientific foundations. Challenging Walt's view of the history of the field as a gradual evolution toward an objective, scientific discipline that ultimately yields a form of knowledge beyond time and history, Keith Krause and Michael Williams have claimed that Walt has created an epistemic hierarchy that allows conventional security studies to set itself up as the authoritative judge of alternative claims;" this leads to a dismissal of alternative epistemologies in terms of their not being "scientific."
Links - Security
Logic of securitisation is fundamentally flawed

J. Ann Tickner (professor of international relations at USC) 2001, Gendering World Politics. Pp. 63-64.

Feminists have generally rejected rationalist models when seeking to understand states' security-seeking behavior. They believe that the claim to universality and objectivity made by these models is problematic since it is based on male models of human behavior. Such a search for universalistic laws may miss the ways in which gender hierarchies manifest themselves in a variety of ways across time and culture. Claiming that theory cannot be separate from practice, feminists have investigated strategic language and foreign-policy discourse to see how they shape, legitimate, and constrain certain policy options. Starting at the microlevel and listening to the experiences of women, feminists base their understanding of security on situated knowledge, rather than knowledge that is decontextualized and universalized. Speaking from the experiences of those on the margins of national security, feminists are sensitive to the various ways in which social hierarchies are variably constructed. Striving for security involves exposing these different social hierarchies, understanding how they construct and are constructed by the international order, and working to denaturalize and dismantle them. Gender and other social hierarchies have effects, not only on issues of national security but also on the workings of the global economy and the uneven distribution of economic rewards that, in return, also affect human security. These issues are taken up in chapter 3.
Understanding security requires the feminine – global politics necessitates a reflection of methodological bases for the women marginalized by international power relations

Maria Stern, PhD, Goteborg University, Sweden, lecturer and research fellow in the Department of Peace and Development Studies at the University of Goteborg, Sweden. She teaches at the Department of Gender Studies at the University of Goteborg, currently directing a research project “Gender in the Armed Forces: Militarism and Peace-building in Congo-Kinshasa and Mozambique, 2006 [“Feminist Methodologies for International Relations” edited by Brooke A. Ackerly: Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, Maria Stern: Lecturer and Researcher at the Department of Peace and Development Research, Goteborg University, and Jacqui True: Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Auskland, New Zealand, 2006, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pg. 176-8 EmiW]

The field of IR – and indeed everyday global politics – is understandably preoccupied with security, or perceived threats to security. This…instead of exercising its official protector role, the Army posed the main direct threat to the Guatemalan population, especially to the Mayan pueblo and Mayan women.
AT: Human Security
To fundamentally change the reduction of a human to a biological being, it is not enough to separate it from strategic thought. Only the alt will solve.

Lauren Wilcox, Political Theory Colloquium, 12-11-2009, http://www.polisci.umn.edu/centers/theory/schedule.html

While such projects attempt to ‘humanize’ war (to varying degrees of success), the ‘human’ that they show is an injured body, a corpse, a body defined by its relationship to physiological harm or death. This kind of attempt to re-value bodies in opposition to strategic thought does not fundamentally challenge the reduction of the human to biological being, and thus erases the sociality of the body as it lives or dies. These strains of feminist theorizing provide us with useful insight about international relations, but all are complicit with culture/nature dualism in that they reproduce the distinction between social practices of meaning making and corporeality. Pointing out the denial of bodies underlying strategic thought add bodies back into International Relations, but the body that is denied is a material, flesh and blood, body that can only be killed or left to live. The body is still constituted as the opposite of abstract, strategic rationales. In order to theorize bodies in International Relations, we need a richer account of bodies as material and socially produced. Counting and naming is not enough: as Judith Butler reminds us, the representation of the injured or killed body is not enough for us to incorporate such persons as fully human in our ethical awareness; the representation of bodies fails to ‘capture’ the fully human (Butler 2004, 142-147). We need a fuller account of human bodies in their sociality and materiality to begin to account for bodies in their complex relationship to violence. This piece attempts to build an account of the production of bodies in practices of precision warfare that take us beyond the culture/nature dualism in our conception of embodiment.

Links – Borders/Boundaries