Politics and Sexuality and Gender

Gender shapes how both men and women understand their experiences and actions regarding armed conflicts. A gender perspective in the context of conflict situations means to pay close attention to the special needs of women and girls during peace-building processes, including disarmament, demobilization, repatriation, resettlement, rehabilitation, reintegration to the social fabric in post-conflict reconstruction, as well as to take measures to support local women’s peace initiatives. In this light, the overall culture, both within the UN and its member states, needs to be addressed. This culture is still patriarchal and supportive of state militaries, and peacekeeping operations that are comprised of them, which are based on a hegemonic masculinity that depends on the trivialization of women and the exploitation and commodification of women’s bodies. The values, qualities, and qualifications for peace-keeping personnel, on the ground and in senior positions, have been framed and adopted through a patriarchal understanding of peace-keeping, peace-building, and peace-making which has defined security narrowly, has relied on state militaries and military experts to be peace enforcers and makers, has been disinterested in the relationship between conflict and social inequalities, has imposed new social inequalities and new violences in the name of peacekeeping, and has systematically excluded or marginalized women in peace-keeping, peace-building, and peacemaking processes. Although the recent advances, reflected in Security Council, other UN, and member state resolutions and mandates, of integrating gender concerns into these processes have made a positive difference in some operations, implementation of these is still marginal.

Much of what goes on in the production of a security state is the over-zealous articulation of the other, which has the effect of reinforcing the myth of an essentialized, unambiguous collective identity called the nation-state. Indeed, the focus on securing a state (or any group) often suggests the need to define more explicitly those who do not belong, suggesting, not only those who do, but where and how they belong and under what conditions. Feminists are concerned with how highly political gender identities often defined by masculinism are implicated in marking these inclusions and exclusions, but also how gender identities get produced through the very practices of the security state. Feminists in the early years critiqued the inadequacy of realist, state-centric notions of security and made arguments for more reformative security perspectives, including those of human security or other nonstate-centric approaches. At the same time, feminist research moved to examine more rigorously the processes of militarism, war, and other security practices of the state and its reliance on specific ideas about women and men, femininity and masculinity. Feminist contributions from the mid-1990s through the first decade of the millennium reveal much about the relationships between gender identities, militarism, and the state. By paying attention to gendered relationships of power, they expose the nuances in the co-constitution of gender identities and the security state.

Although the study of women and gender flourished at intersection of comparative politics (CP) and international relations (IR), mostly international political economy (IPE) and Development Studies, much of IR itself was resistant at its core. Explicitly feminist analysis challenged the core with several decades of research that instructors can incorporate into their classes. The incorporation/transformation challenge can be daunting, however, as publication outlets for research on women, gender, and feminism often remained separate from mainstream journals, with some promising exceptions. These separate tracks are now changing, but instructors still need to check multiple places to prepare for courses and identify good assignments. And although IR feminists seek interaction with the IR core, the core IR theorists are wedded to frameworks associated with realism, liberalism, Marxism, and others, or to positivist, quantitative methodologies that may rely on flawed and male-centric databases rather than grounded field research. A major challenge in the next 40 years involves growing the interactions among bordered subfields; analyzing the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, class, and nationality; and engaging with southern voices outside the US and Western-centric IR field. In this vein, the classroom is a major arena in which critical thinking, contestation, new research, and action agendas emerge.

Until recently, the role of women in nationalism and governance has received little scholarly attention, perhaps because men have historically exercised near exclusive control over nations and states. This is ironic because it is women who create the nation/state. The intersection between gender and nationalism can be broken down into three categories. The first category is women as biological reproducers of the nation. The second category includes women participating centrally in the ideological reproduction of the collectivity and as signifiers of ethnic/national differences. The third category involves the idea of gendered militaries and gendered wars. Women also affect the structure and power relations in the international arena as victims of various international crimes that have traditionally gone unnoticed because of the bias towards male dominance. One example is mass rape. National identity created through the construction of woman as nation allows women to be a target of war. The idea that women are symbols of national territory and identity makes targeting them a main tactic used by enemy groups. In the area of human rights, most conceptions stem from Western visions, which do not always mesh with local, tribal, or non-Western citizens. For women's rights truly to exist, human rights focus must change because it has been constructed with a male bias and understanding.

The concepts of gender, space, and place have significant social and political implications for the kind of world that people inhabit and the kinds of lives we can lead. That there has been a transformation in thinking about these concepts is indicated in references today to pluralized (and polymorphic) spaces, to the waxing, and waning of distinctions between space and place, and to the idea that gender, space, and place are something produced rather than simply lived in, or ventured into. These subtle shifts hint at a complex history of ideas about what constitutes gender, space, and/or place and how we might understand the connections and disjunctures between and among them. The theoretical roots of space act as the starting point for discussion, since these have a longer historical record than work which also explicitly includes gender. Western conceptions of space have drawn primarily from early Greek philosophers and mathematicians, and these conceptions indicate an early distinction between a philosophy of space and a pre-scientific notion of space. From here, the development of feminist methods has become essential for revealing how spatial thinking informs ideas about gender. These methods include deconstructing canons, asking the profoundly spatial question of “Where are the women?” and “ungendering” space. These methodological strategies reveal the extent to which the central concerns of feminism today have spatial and place-based dimensions.

Competing narratives exist in feminist scholarship about the successes and challenges of women’s activism in a globalized world. Some scholars view globalization as merely another form of imperialism, whereby a particular tradition—white, Eurocentric, and Western—has sought to establish itself as the only legitimate tradition; (re)colonization of the Third World; and/or the continuation of “a process of corporate global economic, ideological, and cultural marginalization across nation-states.” On the other hand, proponents of globalization see opportunity in “the proliferation of transnational spaces for political engagement” and promise in “the related surge in the number and impact of social movements and nongovernmental organizations. Feminist involvement in global governance can be understood by appreciating the context and origins of the chosen for advancing feminist interests in governance, which have changed over time. First wave feminism, describing a long period of feminist activity during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, developed vibrant networks seeking to develop strong coalitions, generate broad public consensus, and improve the status of women in society. Second wave feminist concerns dominated the many international conferences of the 1990s, influencing the dominant agenda, the problems identified and discussed, the advocacy tactics employed, and the controversies generated. Third wave feminism focused more on consciousness raising and coalition building across causes and identities.

Feminist scholarship has contributed to the conceptual development of globalization by including more than merely the expansion and integration of global markets. Feminist perspectives on globalization are necessarily interdisciplinary; their definitions and what they bring to discussions of globalization are naturally shaped by differing disciplinary commitments. In the fields of International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE), feminists offer four major contributions to globalization scholarship: they bring into relief the experiences and agency of women and other marginalized subjects within processes of globalization; they highlight the gendered aspects of the processes of globalization; they offer critical insights into non-gender-sensitive globalization discourses and scholarship; they propose new ways of conceiving of globalization and its effects that make visible women, women’s agency, and gendered power relations. The feminist literature on globalization, however, is extensively interdisciplinary in nature rather than monolithic or unified. The very definition of key concepts such as globalization, gender, and feminism are not static within the literature. On the contrary, the understanding of these terms and the evolution of their conceptual meanings are central to the development of the literature on globalization through feminist perspectives. There are at least four areas of feminist scholarship on globalization that are in the early stages of development and deserve further attention: the intersection between men/masculinities and globalization; the effects of globalization on women privileged by race, class, and/or nation; the gendered aspects of the globalization of media and signs; and the need for feminists to continue undertaking empirical research.

Writings on women workers in the global economy have generally taken as their starting point the rise in female employment in industries in the light manufacturing for export sector. Another issue covered by the literature on gender and labor is migration, where the racialized as well as gendered nature of employment is thrown into sharp focus. Migration has been a major concern in much of the recent feminist literature on gender and employment is because one of the most significant features of contemporary processes of migration has been the feminization of these flows. But given the ways in which women workers both in export sector factories and as migrant domestic workers are subject to harsh workplace practices, social stigmatization, and systems of intense workplace control, the possibilities for resistance and change for some of these groups of workers are considered as well. Three intersecting literatures that focus on the topic of resistance to regimes of labor control in a variety of different workplaces (including the household) are discussed: first, those that focus on “everyday” forms of resistance; second, those that look more at resistance as an organized political strategy taking the form of trade union activism or involving nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); and third is a literature that considers the possibilities and limitations of a wider politics of resistance offered by things like corporate codes of conduct and corporate social responsibility.