Gendering World Politics, J. Ann Tickner

Altını Çizdiğim Satırlar

Aug 01, 2022

The key concern for feminist theory is to explain women’s subordination, or the unjustified asymmetry between women’s and men’s social and economic positions, and to seek prescriptions for ending it. Susan Okin defines feminists as those who believe that women should not be disadvantaged by their sex; women should be recognized as having human dignity equal with men and the opportunity to live as freely chosen lives as men. However, feminists disagree on what they believe constitutes women’s subordination, as well as how to explain and overcome it. Feminist theories have been variously described as liberal, radical, socialist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and postmodern. Besides seeking better understanding of women’s subordination, most of these approaches see themselves as politically engaged in the practical tasks of improving women’s lives.

Liberal Feminism

Liberal feminists claim that discrimination deprives women of equal rights to pursue their rational self-interest; whereas men have been judged on their merits as individuals, women have tended to be judged as female or as a group. Liberal feminists believe that these impediments to women’s exercise of their full rational capacities can be eliminated by the removal of legal and other obstacles that have denied them the same rights and opportunities as men. When these legal barriers are removed, they claim, women can begin to move toward full equality. Unlike the classical liberal tradition, which argues for a minimal state, most liberal feminists believe that the state is the proper authority for enforcing women’s rights; although it may engage in discrimination in practice, the state is capable of becoming the neutral arbiter necessary to ensure women’s equality.

Liberal feminists claim, however, that existing knowledge, since it has generally not included knowledge about women, has been biased and not objective; nevertheless, they believe that this problem can be corrected by adding women to existing knowledge frameworks. Therefore, liberal empiricists claim, the problem of developing better knowledge lies not with the scientific method itself but with the biases in the ways in which our theories have been focused and developed.

Critics of liberal feminism claimed that the removal of legal barriers did not end the discrimination against women in either public or private life. Moreover, critics suggested that the liberal emphasis on individualism and rationality promoted masculine values, which privileged mind over body and individualism over relationships. Radical feminism, which emerged out of the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, claimed that what it referred to as women’s “oppression” was too deep to be eliminated by the removal of legal barriers; radicals believed that women’s oppression is the first, the deepest, and most widespread form of human oppression. Radicals claimed that women were oppressed because of patriarchy or a pervasive system of male dominance, rooted in the biological inequality between the sexes and in women’s reproductive roles, that assigns them to the household to take care of men and children.

Rejecting liberal empiricism, radical feminism questioned the possibility of objective knowledge and the separation of the knower from the known; claiming that dominant groups (certain men) will impose their own distorted view of reality, they argued for “women’s ways of knowing” that are arrived at through consciousness raising, a technique begun in the 1960s, that allowed women to understand the hitherto invisible depths of their own oppression.14 Whereas patriarchal thought is characterized by divisions and oppositions, women’s ways of knowing have tried to construct a worldview based on relationships and connections.

Contrary to Kohlberg, Gilligan claimed that women do not have a less-developed sense of justice than men; rather, because women have different views of self from men, they do not engage in formal reasoning, suited to universalistic conceptions of justice, but instead in relational, consequentialist reasoning.

As Sandra Harding has suggested, gendered social life is produced through three distinct processes: assigning dualistic gender metaphors to various perceived dichotomies; appealing to these gender dualisms to organize social activity; and dividing necessary social activities between different groups of humans. She refers to these three aspects of gender as gender symbolism, gender structure, and individual gender. Feminists define gender as a set of variable but socially and culturally constructed characteristics: those such as power, autonomy, rationality, activity, and public are stereotypically associated with masculinity; their opposites—weakness, dependence/connection, emotionality, passivity, and private—are associated with femininity.

Nancy Hartsock, one of the founders of standpoint feminism, has argued that material life structures set limits on an understanding of social relations so that reality will be perceived differently as material situations differ. Since women’s lives differ systematically and structurally from men’s, women can develop a particular vantage point on male supremacy.

Harding explores the question as to whether objectivity and socially situated knowledge is an impossible combination. She concludes that adopting a feminist standpoint actually strengthens standards of objectivity. While it requires acknowledging that all human beliefs are socially situated, it also requires critical evaluation to determine which social situations tend to generate the most objective claims. Susan Heckman avers that feminist standpoint is rooted in a concrete “reality” that is the opposite of the abstract, conceptual world inhabited by men, particularly elite men, and that in this reality lies the truth of the human condition.

For example, Nira Yuval-Davis has argued that the notion of patriarchy, so important to radical and socialist feminisms, is highly problematic. While it may be appropriate for specific historical periods and geographical regions, Yuval-Davis claims that it is much too crude an analytical instrument. In most societies, certain women have power over some men as well as over other women. This debate, which began in the late 1980s, has been strongly influenced by postcolonial, Third World, and postmodern feminisms. This is due both to the impact of black feminist critiques, which have introduced considerations of race and class, and to the influence of postmodernism that has called into question the possibility of systematic knowledge cumulation. These and other critics have argued that standpoint theories failed to recognize differences amongst women based on race, class, sexual preference, and geographical location. Standpoint has been faulted for basing its generalized knowledge claims on the experiences of white Western women. As Patricia Hill Collins tells us, African American women experience the world differently from those who are not black and female. Questioning liberal feminism’s focus on equality, black feminists remind us that black women would be unlikely to subscribe to the goal of equality with black men, who are themselves victims of oppression. Third World women have begun to question the term feminist because of its association with Western cultural imperialism.

Feminist postmodernism has criticized feminist standpoint for being overly committed to an essentialized view of women. Rather than grounding feminism in women’s experiences, postmodern feminism examines gender as a source of power and hierarchy in order to better understand how these hierarchies are socially constructed and maintained. Disputing liberals’ claim that there is a world out there waiting to be discovered, postmodernists reject the foundationalism of Enlightenment knowledge. For them reality is multiple and historically contingent; what has counted as knowledge has done so through its association with prevailing power structures.

A developing post-postmodern critique warns of the perils of tolerating cultural relativism; it also warns of the dangers of skepticism about all knowledge claims, for such skepticism could lead to an abandonment of the political project of reducing women’s subordination that has motivated feminism since its early beginnings.

Feminist Theories and IR

Besides the obviously problematic slide into distinctions such as good women/bad men, the association of women with maternal qualities and peacemaking has the effect of disempowering both women and peace and further delegitimating women’s voices in matters of international politics.

Epistemological debates of the magnitude of those in feminist theory did not begin in IR until the late 1980s. Even then, the challenge to conventional social-scientific methodologies to which IR, particularly in the United States, had been committed since the 1950s has not had the same significant impact on the discipline.

Most IR feminists firmly reject identification with either side of the first debate; even though IR scholars have frequently associated feminists with the idealist position, feminists see this association, like that between women and peace, as disempowering and likely to further reduce their being taken seriously. Just as Schmidt noted that defining the realist/idealist divide as a debate that delegitimized the idealist position, current attempts to associate feminists with idealism has a similar effect on delegitimizing feminist perspectives. Moreover, as feminists have pointed out, the construction of the realist/ idealist dichotomy is in itself implicitly gendered. In her assessment of the potential for finding a space in IR for feminist theory in the realist and liberal approaches of the interparadigm debate, Sandra Whitworth has suggested that, to incorporate gender, theories must satisfy three criteria: (1) they must allow for the possibility of talking about the social construction of meaning; (2) they must discuss historical variability; and (3) they must permit theorizing about power in ways that uncover hidden power relations.

Attempts to “bring women into IR” feed into the mistaken assumption that they are not there in the first place. As Cynthia Enloe tells us, women (as well as marginalized people more generally) are highly involved in world politics, but existing power structures, institutionalized in the split between the public and private spheres and what counts as “important,” keep them from being heard.

Normative Theory

Normative theory began to gain attention in the 1980s. Although it had been an important influence on the early discipline, it was subsequently submerged under realism’s portrayal of amoral states and positivism’s quest for the separation of facts and values. Addressing itself to the morality, or immorality, of war, as well as some of the issues that emerged on the international relations agenda in the 1970s, such as economic development, inequality, and distributive justice, normative theory evaluates the moral dimensions of world politics. Since women own a very small share of the world’s wealth and are frequently discriminated against in the articulation of human rights and through cultural practices, theories of justice are an important issue in feminist theory, although one usually addressed by feminist political philosophers, rather than IR feminists. Western theories of universal justice, built on an abstract concept of rationalism, have generally been constructed out of a definition of human nature that excludes or diminishes women. Feminists assert that the universalism they defend is defined by identifying the experience of a special group (elite men) as paradigmatic of human beings as a whole.

Historical Sociology

Historical sociology examines the ways in which societies develop through history. Rather than taking the state as given and unproblematic, as neorealists and neoliberals do, this tradition tries to understand how certain states have developed, looking at both internal and external factors. Peterson and Runyan argue that it is not possible to understand power relations without understanding the absence of women from elite decision-making positions in states, as well as the gendered constructions of public and private that support these exclusions.

Critical Theory

Critical theory played a central role in motivating the third debate. Critical theory comes out of Marxism as well as Hegelian and Kantian Enlightenment traditions. Like historical sociologists, critical theorists examine the historical development of society with the intent of understanding various forms of domination in order to overcome them. Critical theory views the prevailing order of social and political relations as a historical production that must be explained. In order to explain injustice, it is necessary to understand the world as it is. In this sense, critical theory accepts the realist description of world politics, but it seeks to change it. Critical theorist Robert Cox uses a hermeneutic approach that conceives of social structures as having an intersubjective existence; however, making the claim that structures are socially constructed does not deny that they have real concrete effects: humans act as if the structures are real. Feminists claim that gender structures are socially constructed, historically variable, and upheld through power relations that legitimize them. Like critical theorists, most feminists would claim an emancipatory interest in seeking to overcome these structures of domination. Since feminist theorists believe that the world is characterized by socially constructed gender hierarchies that are detrimental to women, and since they are committed to finding ways to eliminate these hierarchies, they are unlikely to take such an epistemological stance. In contrast, Cox claims that critical theory does not take institutions and social/power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing.

Postmodernism

According to Chris Brown, critical theory and postmodernism are ambiguous terms. He suggests that postmodern theorists are also critical theorists, in the broad sense of the term, since they, too, challenge the existing order. Like critical theorists, they, too, see a crisis in Western thought, and they share a suspicion of rationality and science. Postmodernists, however, are more willing to abandon the Enlightenment project; therefore, they criticize the foundationalism of critical theory. It is particularly hard to categorize postmodern theory; indeed, postmodernists reject any notion of a unified approach, and attempts to define it are contentious issues even among its adherents. Although feminist theory has had an uneasy relationship with postmodernism (discussed earlier), IR feminists and postmodern IR share many assumptions.

According to Sylvester, “postmodern feminism is emerging as a position of negotiation between standpoint feminism, with its conviction that real women exist and lean toward practical-moral imperatives, and feminist postmodernist skepticisms.”97 Sylvester advocates a position that recognizes many local standpoints and identities and suggests an empathetic conversational politics. Like critical theory, postmodernism claims that knowledge is produced in certain people’s interests. Postmodernism believes that the positivist separation between knowledge and values, knowledge and reality, and knowledge and power must be questioned. In international relations, this requires an investigation of the way some issues are framed as “serious” or “real,” such as national security, while others are seen as unimportant or subjects for another discipline—an issue of great importance for IR feminists, as discussed above. Postmodernists, like critical theorists and feminists, aver that knowledge is shaped by and constructed in the service of existing power relations. Thus they are skeptical of positivist claims about the neutrality of facts and objectivity.

SON.

bahsetmiş miydim?

Discussion about this post