Gender and International Relations

Gender analysis offers a distinct perspective on international relations in provoking a new set of questions. Early feminist international relations (IR) theorists joined other critical approaches to the field in interrogating the traditional conceptual terrain of IR scholarship in the 1980s, including states and sovereignty, national security, war, economic development and trade, globalization. Feminist scholarship represented an integral element of the critical foment of the “fourth debate” and its examination of international relations through a post-positivist lens. Scholars who focused on questions of gender and international relations brought a common commitment to understanding how social relations of masculinity and femininity, of gender identities and sexualities, of gender difference, are implicated in international politics. What “work” does gender do in international relations? Gender analysis provides a counterpoint to mainstream (or “malestream”) IR by asking two separate but closely interrelated questions: where are the women? how do gendered power relations undergird and shape the substance of international politics? These questions have led to a broad and diverse body of feminist IR scholarship that offers a reformulation of traditional IR topics as well as a new range of research subjects previously regarded as outside the scope of IR. One of the early tasks of feminist IR scholars was the establishment of a body of research on women, a necessary corrective to a field focused almost exclusively on the experiences of men and masculinist/male-dominated institutions and practices. This work helped to make a case for hegemonic masculinity. In addition, these scholars have demonstrated that investigation of gender as a means of social differentiation linked to power hierarchies in international relations reveals a more complex and varied conceptual and empirical terrain. From the early interventions when “adding women” represented a radical move in international relations scholarship, an interdisciplinary and extensive body of work now addresses analyses of gender and sexualities in international relations across subject areas, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks. Gender analyses include not only feminist theory, but also queer theory and a recent emphasis on masculinities and IR.