Gender, History, and International Relations

AbstractThis chapter looks at the gendered and sexed disciplinary sociological and epistemological blind spots that make International Relations (IR) incomplete, skewed, and problematic approaches to (disciplinary and) global history possible. It shows that women have always been in IR and its histories, but until recently, obscured. It then argues that ‘solving’ the ‘problem’ is not as simple as ‘correcting’ the obscuring of women. Instead, the project of de-masculinizing histories is a transformative, rather than piecemeal, process, which requires rethinking the substances of the discipline, its politics, and its histories as well as historical and historicizing processes and methods. Such rethinking reveals that histories of the state and the histories of gender have always been intertwined and inseparable, even as many IR scholars separate out the concepts completely. The conclusion of this chapter looks that the various interruptions and revisions that gender analysis might make in thinking about and doing international histories.