Does 'Gender' Make the World Go Round?

Feminist Critiques of International Relations

Author(s): Adam Jones
Source: Review of International Studies, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 405-429
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Review of International Studies (1996), 22, 405 429 Copyright ? British International Studies Association

Does 'gender5 make the world go round?

Feminist critiques of international relations*

ADAM JONES

Introduction
In the last two decades, the classical tradition in international relations1 has come
under sustained attack on a number of fronts, and from a diverse range of critics.
Most recently, feminist thinkers, following in the footsteps of neo-Marxists and
critical theorists, have denounced IR as 'one of the most gender-blind, indeed
crudely patriarchal, of all the institutionalized forms of contemporary social and
political analysis'.2 Feminists have sought to subvert some of the most basic
elements of the classical paradigm: the assumption of the state as a given; con
ceptions of power and 'international security'; and the model of a rational human
individual standing apart from the realm of lived experience, manipulating it to
maximize his own self-interest. Denouncing standard epistemological assumptions
and theoretical approaches as inherently 'masculinist', feminists, particularly those
from the radical band of the spectrum, have advanced an alternative vision of inter
national relations: one that redefines power as 'mutual enablement' rather than
domination, and offers normative values of cooperation, care giving, and com
promise in place of patriarchal norms of competition, exploitation, and self
aggrandizement.
At the same time, critique has subsumed an historical-revisionist
the feminist
project. Independently of whether they seek to jettison existing theoretical frame
works, feminists, by definition, reclaim women as subjects of history, politics, and
international relations. The classical conception of IR, with its emphasis on the
state-as-(primary)-actor, and its fascination with the role of the statesman, is prone
to being, at the very least, reworked and supplemented in feminist schemata. The
revisionist project likewise does not spare alternative 'progressive' critiques such as
neo-Marxist or global-society theories. Hence, to take one example, dependency
theory's focus on the international division of labour is transformed, in feminist
scholarship, into an arguably more nuanced and holistic picture that analyzes the
division of labour along gender as well as class lines.
But I speak too glibly of 'feminist scholarship', 'the feminist critique'. In fact, few
schools of criticism are as diverse and diffuse as feminism, which even its adherents

*
The author is grateful to Kal Holsti for his encouragement and many insights.
1
I follow Holsti's use of the term 'classical tradition' to refer to the broad Realist and neo-Realist
paradigm: Holsti, The Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International Theory
(Winchester, MA, 1987).
2
R. B. J.Walker, 'Gender and Critique in the Theory of International Relations', in V. Spike Peterson
(ed.), Gendered States: Feminist (Re) Visions of International Relations Theory (Boulder, CO, &
London, 1992), p. 179.

405

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406 Adam Jones

will acknowledge as 'a fractured and heavily contested discourse' and 'a site of active
political struggle'.3 This diversity carries through to feminist critiques of IR. It
results from the varied philosophical orientations of modern feminism (liberal,
radical, socialist, and so on), and from the recently prominent post-positivist strand
of feminist criticism, which rejects many of the hallowed suppositions of rationalism
and positivism. Theoretical 'consistency', ideological cohesion, the detached
observer?all these are called into question by post-positivist feminists, as by post
positivists more generally.4
For the purposes of this discussion, though, three essential features of feminist
theories can be proposed. One has been mentioned: the focus on women as historical
and political actors. A second, and related, essential feature is an epistemological
foundation in the realm of women's experiences. A normative dimension is also
evident in nearly all feminist theorizing. Its essence is the contention that women and
the feminine constitute historically underprivileged, under-represented, and under
recognized social groups and 'standpoints'; and this should change in the direction of
greater equality. (One would want to allow here for post-positivist feminism that
questions, while perhaps not fully rejecting, the assigning of social-group status. This
school goes further than most in emphasizing the arbitrariness of gendered
femininity and masculinity.)
Thus defined and viewed, I contend that feminism's primary, and seminal, contri
bution to the study of international relations is its focus on the gender variable. In
Peterson's summary,

Feminist scholarship, both deconstructive and reconstructive, takes seriously the following
two insights: first, that gender is socially constructed, producing subjective identities through
which we see and know the world; and, second, that the world is pervasively shaped by
meanings. That is, we do not experience or "know" the world as abstract "humans"
gendered
but as embodied, gendered beings. As long as that is the case, accurate understanding of

agents?as knowable and as knowers?requires attention to the effects of our "gendered

states."5

If this stands as feminism's most important contribution, then it is incumbent on

me to explain why I believe feminist attempts to come to grips with the gender
variable remain limited, even radically constrained. This article seeks to provide an
overview of some major contributions and features of feminist IR thinking, with
particular attention to the problem of war and peace that has attracted adherents of
the classical approach more than any other. What I take to be the more resonant
contributions theory are given their due. But with no less 'presumptuous
of feminist
ness' than feminists have displayed in invading the hallowed halls of classicism, I
also 'homestead' in feminist theory, examining not only constructive contributions,
but also feminism's common missteps and blind spots. The modest contribution I
hope to make to the theorizing of the gender variable occupies the final section of
the article. I call for an expansion of the seminal 'discovery' of feminism?the

3
Ibid., p. 196.
4 use a wide variety of theories that have in common an
I the term 'post-positivist' to encompass
emphasis on the social construction of knowledge, history, gender. By these lights, 'all knowledge is
socially constructed and is grounded in the time, place, and social context of the investigator', as J.
Ann Tickner writes in Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global
Security (New York, 1992), p. 21.
5
V. Spike Peterson, 'Introduction', in Peterson (ed.), Gendered States, p. 9.

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 Does 'gender' make the world go round? 407

gender variable in international relations?by moving beyond feminism's standard

equation of gender, an inclusive designation, with womemfemininity; a narrower and
more restrictive one.6
This last, central point may be rendered more clearly by utilizing Sapiro's three
step conceptualization for the incorporation of a gender variable into social and
political analysis:

During the first phase of the development of feminist studies, gender may become a variable,
and women a topic of research, but the models, methods, language, and theories remain by
and intact. . .
large
In the second phase we learn more directly from women and their experiences, less
mediated by androcentrism. There is more attention to the gender-specific context of women's

lives, to their subjectivity, to the things they have done and thought and felt thatmost men
have been unaware of. . .
may
A third phase takes a shifted frame and looks beyond women. At this stage we criticize not

just particular theories or assumptions as they have been applied to women, they but as are
constructed and in any case . . .Our of the meaning of the political
apply very
understanding
as a result of what we learn through a shifted, focus . . .The is to
may change gendered point
take gender-informed stances, becoming reflexive in understanding the role that gender

(including that of the observer) plays.7

The feminist project is at least well advanced in the second stage as Sapiro defines
it. But the overall project still seems constrained by feminism's primary assumptions.
'Second-stage' feminism, as Sapiro makes plain, is grounded in the lived experiences
of women. It has so far displayed only small interest in expanding its purview to
permit a more broadly 'gender-informed' stance in international politics and the
social sciences more generally. 'Feminists', says Sara Ruddick inMaternal Thinking,
'are partisans of women.'8 And partisanship and scholarship do not always mix
easily.
Tosee this more clearly, though, we will need some understanding both of the
diversity of feminist IR and of the core concerns and methodologies that tend
strongly to animate it.

6
Hence the quotation marks around 'gender' in the title of this essay, which is drawn from the heading
to ch. 1 of Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International
Politics (London, 1989). On a personal note, readers of an earlier version of this article faulted me
for failing to situate myself properly in the discussion. Let me first situate myself as someone who
does not fully share the current obsession with self-situation. I am disturbed by assertions that one
can look little further than the tip of one's gender, race, class, or sexual orientation and, indeed, that
it is politically suspect and invasive to seek to do so. Beyond this, I have found that the demand to
divulge 'where I'm coming from' in analyzing feminist critiques often amounts to a test of loyalty-by
group-afnliation. This holds little appeal for someone who belongs to most of the 'wrong' groups
(male, white, Western, etc.). It also goes against the grain of my left-individualist political leanings.
Philosophically, if I am suspicious of perceived excesses in 'relational' thinking, my lifelong affection
for social anarchism (of the Giovanni Baldelli variety) does render me susceptible to the charms of
post-positivist
playfulness, insolence, and rebelliousness.
7
Virginia 'Gender Politics, Gendered
Sapiro, Politics: The State of the Field', inWilliam Crotty (ed.),
Political Science:
Looking to the Future, vol.1: The Theory and Practice of Political Science (Evanston,
IL, 1991), p. 166.
8
Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward A Politics of Peace (Boston, MA, 1989), p. 235.

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408 Adam Jones

Avenues of feminist critique

The critique of Realist discourse

Feminists are
hardly alone in criticizing the vocabulary and epistemological
underpinnings of the classical tradition. Indeed, Walker acknowledges 'the diffi
culty?and thus undesirability?of distinguishing sharply between feminist and
other forms of contemporary critical enquiry'.9 Some feminists draw from neo
Marxist scholarship a distrust of core Realist strategies, such as the presentation of
states as unitary actors?which Marxists see as concealing the contradictions in state
action, and skating over the difficulty of defining the state as such. From post
positivism, other feminists derive a distrust of the classical tradition's most basic
'opposed dualisms': between the unitary state and the international realm of states;
security and insecurity; war and peace; order and anarchy; and, most fundamentally,
discrete subject versus knowable (and assimilable) object.
What is distinctive about feminism's approach to this critical discourse is its focus
on the gender dimension of classical concepts and strategies. This also provides the
underpinning for feminist critiques of other schools that, while critical of Realist
thinking, do not incorporate a gender variable. Feminists see the classical tradition
as an offshoot of, and proselytizing device for, a political order that subordinates
and excludes women. Thus Tickner's critique of 'hegemonic masculinity' contends
that 'international politics is such a thoroughly masculinized sphere of activity that
women's voices are considered inauthentic . . . The values and that
assumptions
drive our contemporary international system are intrinsically related to concepts of
masculinity; privileging these values constrains the options available to states and
their policy-makers.'10
Prime among the values and assumptions is a 'ubiquitous androcentrism' which
posits men's lived experiences as human universals, resulting in 'a systemic bias of
codified knowledge and cultural ideologies'.11 Often a class variable is admitted to
the hegemonic arrangement: it is elite men that are seen as setting the terms of life
and discourse for all?women and non-elite males alike. But while men can be
denatured or physically annihilated within this discourse, their realm and experiences
are nonetheless privileged. It is fair to say that a very common motif, one that
almost deserves inclusion on a list of feminism's defining features, is of men as an
international ruling class, their internal squabbles secondary to the basic challenge of
women.
suppressing
The critique of 'masculinist' hegemony to be launched from two different
tends
founding assumptions within feminism. can be described
These as broadly
essentialist versus constructivist orientations, and a marked shift is evident from the
former to the latter as feminist critiques have grown in number and prominence.
Essentialist positions view the ascriptive traits of feminine and masculine as
reflecting primarily an innate, biologically grounded difference between the sexes.
For most essentialists, a key independent variable is the capacity to bear children.

9
Walker, 'Gender and Critique', p. 192.
10
Tickner, Gender in International Relations, pp. 4, 17.
11
Peterson, 'Introduction', p. 7.

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 Does 'gender' make the world go round? 409

This is held to orient women towards a nurturing/care-giving role, one deeply

attuned to natural processes and respectful toward the natural environment. Men,
on the other hand, lack the opportunities (and constraints) that childbearing
presents. Thus, they reject the 'grounding' it provides, and view the natural realm
instead as an arena for manipulation and exploitation. In the area of international
relations, essentialist perspectives usually translate to a linking of masculine traits
and global disharmony or conflict. I will consider these views in greater detail in
discussing feminist perspectives on IR's classical preoccupation, the problem of
peace and war.

Constructivist positions, by contrast, make no claims for the centrality of sex or

gender beyond the role that constructed gender values and identities play in deter
mining priorities and behaviour. For example, an analytical distinction is often
drawn between masculinity and men. The former gendering may not correspond to
the personality or preferences of most biological men; but as an ideology it rules
the roost, and exerts a profoundly denaturing and distorting influence in human
affairs.

When constructivist leanings combine with post-positivism, the result is a deep

suspicion even of the basic labels of sex and gender. Thus Christine Sylvester refers
to 'people called women', 'embodied women' as opposed to constructed femininity.
Gender identities, and the 'standpoints' they generate, are always dynamic, always in
flux. Sylvester and other post-positivist feminists are often alive to the threat a
'standpoint' perspective poses to essentialist positions and presumptions.
At a certain point, however, essentialist and constructivist positions tend to
converge?when feminists turn to a critique of the actually existing social and global
order. We have seen that a normative agenda drives most feminist theory: the
conviction that women and the feminine have always been oppressed and degraded
inmale-dominant human society. There is no feminist critic or theorist who does not
hope and seek to better women's lot, materially and existentially.
From this vantage point, IR classicists are often criticized for their social con
servatism, which many feminists see as a reflection of a deeper masculine fear of
woman-as-nature. Hence the Realist's positing of a chaotic 'feminine' international
environment, the 'state of nature', as the ordered, rational, 'masculine'
against
nation-state. Virtually without exception, feminist IR theorists strive to illuminate
and deconstruct this dichotomy. All acknowledge that the governing ideologies of
world affairs, and the designation of what is analytically primary versus what is
subsidiary, have been developed and perpetuated by men, or (with a nod to post
positivists) 'people called men'.
On what specific assumptions and underpinnings of Realism have recent feminist
critiques tended to centre? I will take these in turn, proceeding from Realism's
epistemological assumptions to some of the more policy-specific outgrowths of the
'Realist mindset'. Again, it is necessary to bear in mind that most of these critiques
do not originate with feminism, nor are they unique to it.What is distinctive about
the feminist orientation is the incorporation of the gender variable, and the explora
tion of its influence on women and (to a lesser extent) society as a whole.
Opposed dualisms: For the most recent wave of proponents of the so-called
reflexive turn in international relations, no epistemological issue is so central as the
positivist division of experience into discrete knower and objective known. One has
the sense that for post-positivists, scientific rationalism constitutes a kind of Original

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410 Adam Jones

Sin from which all other transgressions?domination, exploitation, subjugation,

even annihilation?follow more or less as a matter of course.12

It isworth pointing out the criticisms of Realism that seem to derive, in large part,
from the increasingly popular post-positivist feminist stance. Prime among these is
the depiction of Realism as inextricably bound up with a hierarchical world order.
This order is, in turn, predicated on the kind of subject/object distinctions that post
positivists reject. Realists depict themselves and their craft as adopting a dis
passionate, 'objective' critical stance, standing epistemologically outside the world of
international politics, though normatively committed to and engaged with it.13 Post
positivist feminists, instead, see Realism as constructed and bolstered by political
hierarchies that generate both rigid conceptual dichotomies and a set of Realpolitik
strategies founded on power and dominance. In these feminist eyes, then, the Realist
project is compromised from the start. Claims to scholarly autonomy and dis
passionate observation are untenable. To analyze the world in Realist terms is to
perpetuate an status quo.
unjust
The distinctively feminist dimension to this critique is a focus on the extent to
which Realist discourse perpetuates gender hierarchies
along with hierarchies of
class and state. Realism, and classical political theory in general, do not merely
establish binary oppositions. They privilege one element in the equation over the
other. What is male/masculine is standard, universal, the measure by which
everything other is judged. Many feminists thus isolate a masculinist (more than
simply elitist) core to Realism. This reinforces the subjugation of women or, at the
very least, sets the terms on which women will be admitted to social and political
'equality'.
If the most influential strands of feminism tend now toward a post-positivist
orientation, this is not to ignore the strong (and once dominant) strain of feminism
that concentrates its efforts on supplementing classical frameworks by incorporating
the gender variable. The liberal-feminist tradition tends to view existing structures as
masculinist by composition, but not necessarily by definition. It therefore seeks to
open up these structures?political, economic, academic?to female candidates and
contributions. From this viewpoint, epistemological orientations such as empiricism
are seen as innately human, even if their practical and especially public application
has ordinarily been a male preserve. Although, as noted, the prominence of this
liberal perspective has declined in recent years, there are signs that itmay be staging
a comeback as some of the more paradoxical or stifling aspects of post-positivism
become evident.
The Realist assumption of the state: 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

12 see V. Spike Peterson,

In this vein, 'Transgressing Boundaries: Theories of Knowledge, Gender and
International Relations', Millennium, 21:2 (1992). 'What critiques of positivism require is a shift from
oppositional to relational thinking. This insight is obscured by binary logic that precludes the
of understanding a critique of "A" as entailing other than "not-A." ...
possibility anything [In fact,]
contrasting but non-oppositional terms may be related along multiple dimensions and their non
binary structure permits more than two possibilities', p. 188.
13
By 'normative engagement' Imean Realism's traditional concern with the problem of peace and war.

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 Does 'gender' make the world go round? 411

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 per
petuation 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, relation to society, and substantive . . . the state is male in

forms, policies Formally,
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.'17

14
Tickner, Gender in International Relations, p. 42.
15
Ibid.
16
Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 163.
Note the strong echoes of post-positivist feminism's rejection of empiricism/objectivity, given a
feminist tinge through definition of 'this epistemological stance' as male at its roots. Radical feminism
and post-positivist feminism regularly overlap in this manner.
17
Ibid., p. 170.

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412 Adam Jones

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.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the feminist critique of the state?one that
extends far beyond the boundaries of radical feminism?is the project to reclaim the
private. The history of political theory from ancient Greece onwards centres, in the
minds of many feminists, on the progressive isolation and devaluation of the
'private' sphere (the household/?/fcos/domestic unit) where women have traditionally
held sway, and the corresponding inflation of the public, male-dominated realm.
Political thought has tended to define only the latter sphere as 'political', in the sense
of being shaped by active agents and competitive or conflictive power relations.
Feminists?as noted, this is a consensus position?reject the notion that the realm
where women's experiences are most commonly lived should be marginalized as an
analytical concern. Instead, as Susan Moller Okin and others have persuasively
argued, 'the personal is political, and the public/domestic dichotomy is a misleading
construct, which obscures the cyclical pattern of inequalities between men and
women'. Or, as Peterson and Runyan put it, with explicit reference to international
relations:

Politics itself has to be redefined in view of the wide range of political activities inwhich
women are highly involved . . .Politics is about differential access to resources?both material
and symbolic?and how such power relations and structures are created, sustained, and

reconfigured. According to the broader definition, politics operates at all levels, ranging from
the family and community to the state and the international sphere.19

The recognition of the importance and politicized nature of the domestic realm
does not automatically lead to a particular set of prescriptions for conducting
politics within or among states. Some feminists view women's traditional 'relegation'
to the home as itself a sign of subjugation. Many others contend that what is
required is a revaluation of the domestic sphere?for example, to break down the
distinction in political economy between productive and reproductive labour. A few
argue that the values and strategies of oikonomia ('economies', i.e., the management
of the household) can be a vital well-spring of political power for progressive ends,
when proclaimed and enacted publicly.
Whatever the prescriptive dimension, however, the reclamation of the private has
diverse implications for the methodology of the IR discipline. What if scholars of
international political standardly factored in women's contributions
economy in the
domestic/reproductive sphere? This would lead to a restructured vision of human
beings' most basic economic processes and interactions?the material foundation, in
international political economy, of the modern state system. Through the same lens,
a gendered international division of labour (including, for example, the role of

18 as an Agent
See, e.g., Mona Harrington, 'WTiat Exactly IsWrong with the Liberal State of Change?',
in Peterson (ed.), Gendered States.
19
V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues (Boulder, CO, 1993), p. 32.

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 Does 'gender' make the world go round? 413

domestic labourers) can be isolated and examined. The imperialist ambitions that
created the modern system of nation-states can be connected to a structuring of
gender relations that assigns men to public roles and invites them to test and
demonstrate their manhood by exploring and conquering other lands.20
Feminist explorations of the private sphere may now have driven home the need
to supplement the triumvirate of 'levels' guiding classical analyses of international
affairs. Alongside the atomized masculine individual of liberalism, the unitary state
of Realism, and the international system of Realism/neo-Marxism, a new avenue of
inquiry has been sketched. Its explanatory potential may be rich, for international
relations and political science more generally.
The rational-actor model: The concept of the rational, self-maximizing actor is
usually associated with liberal economic theory; but in key respects, it has been
adopted by Realism to depict unitary state action in the international system. In
particular, Realism posits a separate sphere of state activity, analytically distin
guishable from domestic society and, thanks to an anarchic international environ
ment, not subject to the rule-guided behaviour that directs and inhibits individuals
in society.
Feminist critiques of the rational-actor model tend to centre on the extent to
which the model is constituted by capitalist and patriarchal strategies: amoral profit
maximization, in the case of the first; a focus on the male-dominated public sphere,
in the second. Tickner argues that

individuals and states are constituted and . . .what counts as rational action is
socially
embodied within a particular society. Since rationality is associated with profit maximization
in capitalist societies, the accepted definition of rationality has been constructed out of
activities related to the public sphere of themarket and thus distinguished from the private
sphere of the household. Feminists argue that, since it is men who have primarily occupied
this public sphere, rationality as we understand it is tied to a masculine type of reasoning that
is abstract and conceptual. Many women, whose lived experiences have been more closely
bound to the private sphere of care giving and child rearing, would define rationality as
contextual and personal rather than as abstract.21

The critique here is similar to one that feminists and others often deploy against
epistemological 'objectivity', accusing it of abstracting the observer to a point of
callous detachment from the observed. The Realist world, in Jean Bethke Elshtain's
is one where 'no children are ever and ever dies . . .There are
words, born, nobody
states, and they are what is.'22 Again, the distinctive feminist contribution here is the
labelling of Western-style rationality as a peculiarly male/masculinist phenomenon,
reflecting and perpetuating patriarchal power.
An important supplementary element of the critique centres on the classical
tradition's vision of nature. This issue has assumed paramount significance with the
explosion of concern (again in tandem with the rise of feminism) over global
environmental degradation. The 'politics of defining "natural resources" as "there
for the taking"' with 'no permission required, no obligations incurred',23 is held to
be implicit in Realism's approach to power and resource distribution. Once again,
more ecologically-minded feminists differ from other 'green' discourses in identifying
20
A good example is Enloe's Bananas, Beaches and Bases.
21
Tickner, Gender in International Relations, p. 91.
22
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York, 1987), p. 91.
23
Peterson, 'Introduction', p. 14.

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414 Adam Jones

the exploiter's mentality as distinctly 'masculine'. A responsible, conservationist

attitude toward 'Mother Earth' is also regularly posited as feminine, by virtue of
women's innate and/or constructed leaning towards nurturing and care-giving roles.
Realist conceptions of power and security: The spirited discussion in feminist
literature of 'national security' draws its inspiration from the debate in peace studies
and dependency literature over peace, war, and violence. The dependista formulation
of 'structural'
violence24 has profoundly influenced the feminist claim that special,
gender-specific states of insecurity exist even?or especially??in states that are
'secure' by Realist standards.
A forceful treatment of this theme is Peterson's.25 Recapping some statistics of
female victimization the world over, Peterson presents the now familiar motif of a
global, male-initiated 'war against women'. However 'secure' it might be in the
international sphere, the state is complicit in the global phenomenon of violence
against women, acting directly 'through its selective sanctioning of non-state
violence' and indirectly 'through its promotion of masculinist, heterosexist, and
classist ideologies'. In the face of women's 'systemic insecurity', Peterson contends
that '"national security" is particularly and profoundly contradictory for women'.
She adds:

"Radically rethinking security" is one consequence of taking feminism seriously: this entails

asking what security can mean in the context of systems of hierarchy and
interlocking
domination and how gendered identities and ideologies (re)produce these structural
insecurities.26

And Tickner notes that 'thinking of security inmultidimensional terms allows us to

get away from [Realists'] prioritizing [of] military issues, issues that have been central
to the agenda of traditional international relations but that are the furthest removed
from women's experiences'.27
If the idea of national security is compromised by the unjust structures it acts to
buttress, so too is the entire range of classical conceptions of power. When feminists
analyze these conceptions, their argument generally takes one of two forms. They may
seek to illuminate the power relationships that standard commentary has overlooked;
or they may propose a radical redefinition of what actually constitutes 'power'.
The former approach is straightforward. With its close link to the binary demar
cation of public and private spheres that feminists have long assailed, it represents
one of the more intuitively valid feminist assertions. The argument runs as follows: a
focus on power exchanges among unitary states, or among elite men in the public
sphere, misses a wide range of power relationships that discriminate against women.
But while classical theories have devoted extensive attention to power, and down
played the role of ideological or cultural factors,

they have under-estimated the amount and varieties of power at work. It has taken power to

deprive women of land titles and leave them little choice but to sexually service soldiers and
banana workers. It has taken power to keep women out of their countries' corps
diplomatic

24 as 'the economic
'Structural violence' is defined by Tickner insecurity of individuals whose life
expectancy was reduced, not by the direct violence of war but by domestic and international
structuresof political and economic oppression'. Tickner, Gender in International Relations, p. 69.
25
V. Spike Peterson, 'Security and Sovereign States: What is at Stake in Taking Feminism Seriously?', in
Peterson (ed.), Gendered States, pp. 31-64.
26
Ibid., p. 32.
27
Tickner, Gender in International Relations, p. 23.

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 Does 'gender' make the world go round? 415

and out of the upper reaches of the World Bank. It has taken power to keep questions of

inequity between local men and women off the agendas of many nationalist movements in
industrialized as well as agrarian societies. It has taken power to construct popular culture?

films, advertisements, books, fairs, fashion?which reinforces, not subverts, global

hierarchies.28

Interestingly, this framework has also been used to examine power relations
among women themselves. Some attention has been devoted to women who hold
gender-structured positions of power?for example, as employers of domestic
servants.29 Feminists have pointed out the 'very real power relations that exist among
women, which determine how much money and time women can contribute to
movement politics (and movement theorizing)'.30 Opposition has been voiced to
Western feminists' eagerness to address a plight that is not directly theirs: that of
their 'underprivileged' sisters in the Third World. These rifts and dissensions can
only grow in the foreseeable future, as the surface ideological solidarities that tend to
prevail early in the life of progressive movements are undercut by differences latent
or emergent within them.
The second type of feminist project?the attempt to radically redefine power?is
more complex, and to my mind a good deal more problematic. For one thing, the
effort ismore prescriptive than descriptive. It seeks to delineate how power should be
viewed, rather than how power considerations (as ordinarily understood) apply in
spheres where their operation has often gone unnoticed. The attempt to redefine
power is usually associated with feminism's essentialist wing, which isolates
supposed differences in the way women versus men employ power. Women are said
to act in a 'shared rather than assertive' manner.31 Feminist attempts to 'con
ceptualize] power as mutual enablement rather than domination' seek to strip power
of its coercive dimension, as a means of 'feminizing' both the domestic and inter
national environment. This is the distinction drawn by Marilyn French {Beyond
Power), who for a of from In Rosemarie
argued separation 'power-over' 'power-to'.

Tong's summary, 'Whereas power-to is constructive, power-over is destructive.

Power-to seeks to create and to further pleasure for everyone; power-over seeks to
destroy and spread pain.'32

Feminism and Realism: some concluding comments

I do not wish that all feminists view Realism and a feminist approach to
to suggest
IR as utterly incompatible. One element of the ongoing debate between liberal
feminists and their post-positivist counterparts is the occasional recognition that, as

28
Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, pp. 197-8.
29
Ibid., p. 194.
30
Anne Sisson Runyan and V. Spike Peterson, 'The Radical Future of Realism: Feminist Subversions of
IR Theory', Alternatives, 16:1 (1991), p. 85, paraphrasing Wilmette Brown.
31
Tickner, Gender in International Relations, p. 65, citing the work of David McClelland.
32
Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction (Boulder, CO, & San Francisco,
1989), p. 101. See also Peterson and Runyan, Global Gender Issues, pp. 79-80. It could be argued, of
course, that a similar emphasis on 'enabling' rather than 'dominating' power strategies is a hallmark
of institutional liberals like Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. See their Power and
Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston, MA, 1977).

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416 Adam Jones

with other 'patriarchal' paradigms or institutions, Realism may not be so deeply

compromised as to require jettisoning.
In her appraisal of Hans J.Morgenthau, for instance, Tickner criticizes Realism
as only 'a partial description of international polities', owing to its deeply embedded
masculinist bias.33 But partial descriptions are partial descriptions; they are not dead
wrong. Tickner attacks Morgenthau's paradigm on several grounds. But her main
concern is to offer a 'feminist reformulation' of certain Realist principles. In a similar
vein, the central problem may not be with objectivity as such, but with objectivity 'as
it is culturally defined . . . associated with The idea of the
[and] masculinity'.
'national interest' likewise needs to be rendered more 'multidimensional and
contextually contingent', but not necessarily abandoned. Tickner stresses: T am not
denying the validity of Morgenthau's work',34 just as Kathy Ferguson emphasizes
the importance of 'negotiating] respectfully with contentious others'.35
A similar approach is evident in Cynthia Enloe's Bananas, Beaches and Bases,
perhaps the best-known work of feminist IR criticism. Enloe attempts to sup
plement the classical framework by considering women's contributions and
experiences. But she does not devalue or reject the framework as such. Thus, Enloe
looks at international diplomacy, geostrategic military alliances (as symbolized by
military bases), international tourism, and First World-Third World economic
relations. The first two are hallmark concerns of the classical paradigm. The third
and fourth derive from neo-Marxist and IPE theories. In each case, Enloe presents
innovative avenues of inquiry, and an intriguing reworking of perspectives that have
grown stale. Her study of international diplomacy, for example, concentrates on the
role of diplomatic wives in structuring the 'informal relationships' that enable male
diplomats 'to accomplish their political tasks'.36 Women, she argues, are 'vital to
creating and maintaining trust between men in a hostile world';37 'negotiations
"man-to-man" are most likely to go smoothly if they can take place outside official
settings, in the "private" sphere of the home or at gatherings that include wives'.38
But Enloe does not seem to be proposing a revision of what constitutes 'the business
of international polities', however critical she may be of the way this business
operates, or of the (underacknowledged) supporting roles women play in the
business.
Scholars have always mined the past for insights and guidance. There is a
curiosity, a generosity of spirit, in much feminist writing that may facilitate a
provisional modus vivendi, though hardly an alliance, between Realist and feminist
scholarship. This would demand of the classical tradition that it acknowledge and
correct its blank spaces and biased formulations. Feminism, meanwhile, could glean
from Realism some sharp insights into the limited but significant veins of inter
national politics that the classical tradition has long mined, and not without success.

33
J. Ann Tickner, 'Hans Morgenthau's Principles of Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation',
Millennium 17:3 (1988), p. 431. Tickner's piece and other articles from this special issue of Millennium
were subsequently published in book form: Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland (eds.), Gender and
International Relations (Buckingham, 1991). They first came to my attention as journal articles,
however, and I have referenced them accordingly.
34
Ibid., pp. 437 (emphasis added), 438.
35
Ferguson, quoted in Sylvester, Feminist Theory, p. 3.
36
Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, p. 98.
37
Ibid., p. 123.
38
Ibid., p. 114.

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 Does 'gender' make the world go round? 417

Rather less of a cause for optimism is the hollow claim by some feminist IR
scholars that they are constructing a radically new theorizing of international rela
tions, and a research agenda to guide the project. In my view, it is the post-positivist
line of analysis that exhibits the widest disparity between stated ambition and
substantive contribution. Given this strand's recent prominence, it is worth
considering the claims of one of itsmajor exponents in some detail.
Christine Sylvester's 1994 work Feminist Theory and International Relations in a
Postmodern Era angrily rejects the notion that feminist theory ought to be playing
essentially a supplementary role. Criticizing Robert Keohane for proposing
something along these lines, Sylvester writes:

Explicit in this analysis is yet another support assignment for "women." We who are feminists
in the academy are urged to come out of our vague and homeless positions in IR in order to

provide something that themainsteam [sic] needs and cannot think through and provide
its own powers . . .There little sense that feminists
using of reflection is, in this admonition,
can set an agenda for ourselves and for IR and really no sense that we may want to interface

differently and rewrite-repaint-recook the field rather than join it.39

But the specifics of the 're-visioning', in Sylvester's formulation, seem meagre. 'It
would be refreshing to see a recreation of the Cuban Missile Crisis from the situated
standpoint of John McCone's wife', Sylvester writes, because she 'experienced, and
perhaps even influenced, the first round of the bureaucratic politics game'.40 This is
the sole concrete example of a feminist-influenced research agenda that Sylvester
advances in a chapter-long discussion of the 'second debate' in IR theory. Perhaps
such an inquiry would be refreshing, but there is frankly little to indicate that it
would be revelatory. And there is no evidence so far that investigations of this type
could lead to a radically new theorizing of IR. One would expect, instead, more in
the way of historical footnotes. Sylvester's more detailed attempts to 'move beyond
analysis by metaphor' and 'repaint the canvases of IR' similarly bog down in move
ments, settings, and phenomena?the Greenham Common women and Zimbabwean
agricultural cooperatives?which strike this writer as marginal, if that word still
retains its pejorative connotations.41

War, peace, and feminism

It is easy to see why the problem of peace and war has preoccupied so many feminist
critics of international relations. For one thing, this is the main concern of classical
IR theory. Feminist critiques of Realism, particularly Realist approaches to the
exercise of power and the bolstering of national security, naturally must attend to
the classical tradition's conceptualizations of conflict and prescriptions for peace.
Second, key strands of feminism draw on neo-Marxist approaches inmanifesting
a strong concern with social justice and human emancipation. Marxists have tradi
tionally given primacy to justice over peace: they defend the right of subjugated
39
Sylvester, Feminist Theory, p. 134; see also Robert Keohane, 'International Relations Theory:
Contributions of a Feminist Standpoint', Millennium, 18:2 (1989), pp. 245-54.
40
Sylvester, Feminist Theory, p. 121.
41
Ibid., pp. 167, 209. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines 'marginal' land as 'difficult to cultivate and
yielding little profit'.

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418 Adam Jones

populations to effect social change, by violent means if necessary. But peace is doubly
problematic for feminist approaches. It brings into play a diversity of debates over
the centrality of gender, in particular the link between masculinity and militarism.
Can women, or at least 'femininity', be equated with pacifism? Is this equation a
conceptual or merely a historical one? Put another way: can one establish 'a
straightforward equation in which women
equal peace and men equal war'?42 Or
does women's traditional removal
from the military sphere merely reflect their
historical subjugation and consignment to the private sphere? If women equal peace
and men war, then we are again looking at a project to feminize the political. But if
these associations are more constructed than innate, then the dichotomy (man-as
militarist, woman-as-care-giver) simply reflects stereotypical patterning of the kind
that has always inhibited the expression of women's full potential and personality.
The most common motif in feminist analyses of peace and war depicts mas
culinity as a transcendentally aggressive force in society and history. Women are
bystanders or victims of men's wars. Most feminist commentary, through to the
1980s, followed this framework. In particular, the extraordinary outburst of concern
over the nuclear threat in the 1970s and early '80s resulted in a spate of feminist
writings explicitly or implicitly founded on a critique of masculinist militarism. The
zenith of this genre came with the 1984 publication of Dr Helen Caldicott's Missile
Envy, which denounced the arms race in pop-Freudian terms.43 The underlying
philosophy is well exemplified by Barbara Zanotti's 1982 'Patriarchy: A State of
War'. Zanotti asked:

Why weren't we prepared for this??the imminence of nuclear holocaust; the final silencing of
the brutal extinction of the planet. . We
. have lived with violence so long. We have lived
life;
under the rule of the fathers so long. Violence and patriarchy: mirror images. An ethic of
destruction as normative. Diminished love of life, a numbing to real events as the final
We are not even prepared .
. . Wars are nothing short of rituals of
consequence. organized
killing presided over by men deemed "the best." The fact is?they are. They have absorbed in
the most complete way the violent character of their own ethos.

Women, in this conception, are uniquely able to perceive the scale of masculine folly.
They are likewise well positioned to offer a set of distinctively feminine values to
halt the slide towards war:
Women know and feel the lies that maintain nuclear technology because we have been lied to
before. We are the victims of lies ... To end the state of war, to halt the
patriarchal
momentum toward death, passion for life must flourish. Women are the bearers of lifeloving
energy. Ours is the task of deepening that passion for life and separating from all that
threatens life, all that diminishes life; becoming who we are as women.44
42
Mary K. Burguieres, 'Feminist Approaches to Peace: Another Step for Peace Studies', Millennium,
19:1 (1990), p. 1.
43
Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War (New York, 1985), especially the
penultimate chapter, 'Etiology: Missile Envy and Other Psychopathology'. On the link between
masculinism and nuclear militarism, see also Carol Cohn, 'Sex and Death in the Rational World of
Defence Intellectuals', Signs, 12:4 (1987).
44
Both passages cited in Elshtain, Women and War, pp. 147-8 (emphasis added). On the link between
masculinism and militarism, see also Diana E. H. Russell's revealingly titled article, 'The Nuclear
Mentality: An Outgrowth of the Masculine Mentality', Atlantis, 12:2 (Spring 1987). She writes (at
p. 15): 'the very real threat to everyone's survival posed by nuclear war is not what makes it a feminist
issue. Nuclear war is a feminist issue because the threat of nuclear obliteration is a consequence of
the distorted values, psyches, and institutions that sexist arrangements have bred . . We . must face the
fact that at this point in history the nuclear mentality and the masculine mentality are one and the
same. To rid ourselves of one, we must rid ourselves of the other.'

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 Does 'gender' make the world go round? 419

This standard essentialist formulation was roundly challenged in 1987 with the
publication of Jean Bethke Elshtain's Women and War. Elshtain's treatise?part
autobiography, part revisionist cultural history, part feminist self-critique?appears
decisively to have recast the terms of debate among feminist analysts of peace and
war.

Examining the traditional image of women and war, Elshtain declared: 'There are
sanctimonies to deconstruct, amnesias to lift, stories to remember.'45 Among these,
she cited the inconvenient fact that pacifist women 'are greatly outnumbered by the
majority of their gender who do not enter into pacifist construals as a chosen
identification; indeed women in overwhelming numbers have supported their state's
wars in the modern West'.46 Elshtain's paradigmatic instance of female complicity in
'men's wars' is the outbreak of World War I, when the powerful suffragist movement
in Britain and North America rushed to throw its weight behind the Allied war
effort?roaming the streets distributing white feathers, symbols of cowardice, to
young men out of uniform.47 In a later work, Elshtain points to 'hundreds of hair
raising tales of bellicose mothers, wives, and girlfriends writing the combat soldier
and requesting the sacrifice of the enemy as a tribute, or gift, to her'.48
Elshtain's contention is that women and men alike have been constructed to play
roles in war: the Just Warrior versus the Beautiful Soul. She finds many of these
ancient stereotypes deeply embedded in modern feminist discourse. To counter the
trend, she offers a set of analytic devices useful in 'investigating whether Beautiful
Soul constructions are being shored up or displaced':

(1) Does the author define all women in opposition to all men? (2)Do the author's rhetorical
choices invite
self-congratulatory responses and lend themselves to sentimentalist reactions?
...
(3) Does the author open or foreclose space for debate and disagreement? (4) Does the
author compel us to think in the absence of certainty or ensure certainty at the cost of critical
reflection? (5) Do the author's formulations reassure, soothe, bring relief to, reinforce, reaffirm;
or do they disturb, unsettle, take apart, make ambiguousl (6) Is the author's voice didactic,

ironic, moralistic?49

Elshtain's work has encouraged the advent of a more self-critical, sceptical stance
in feminist analyses of peace and war. In particular, feminist commentary of the last
few years seems more preoccupied than previously with the archetypes Elshtain
isolates. Feminists increasingly have sought to ensure that these stereotypes are not
subtly manifested in their own thinking and writing. Thus Burguieres, in her over
view of 'Feminist Approaches to Peace', finds some feminist analyses contaminated
. . . unsubstantiated
by 'assertions by history or thoughtful analysis'.50 Her solution
is not to abandon the search for a feminist conceptualization of peace and war.
Indeed, she adheres to the notion that the 'much deeper roots' of militarism reside
'in gender relations'.51 But she rejects 'assertions such as "patriarchies are based on
militarism" or "women are peaceful, men violent'". Her vision of a feminist peace

45
Elshtain, Women and War, p. 164.
46
Ibid., p. 140.
47
Ibid., pp. 111-16.
48
Jean Bethke Elshtain, 'Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice', in Peterson (ed.), Gendered States, p. 145.
49
Elshtain, Women and War, p. 145.
50
Burguieres, 'Feminist Approaches', p. 15.
51
Ibid., p. 14.

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420 Adam Jones

project emphasizes the responsibility both men and women have to restrain the drive
to war: 'Women have no superior moral claim to being bearers of peace.'52
The evolution of feminist perspectives on peace and war?and one does sense a
cumulation, a gradual increase in the sensitivity and sophistication of the analysis?
parallels the growth of feminism as a social movement. I have stressed at various
points how inextricable is feminism's women-oriented 'standpoint' from its wider
normative-social project. A reflexive response, when one's contributions are systema
tically suppressed, is to proclaim not just the value but the superiority of one's
orientation and actions. If disempowerment can give rise to moral hubris of this
type, then the transformation in feminist thinking on peace and war may likewise
reflect the increased power of women worldwide, and the new prominence of
feminist formulations in academic and public debate. A more stable podium, it
appears, encourages a more nuanced and ironic analysis.

Towards an international politics of gender

I have suggested that the most important, and surely a lasting, contribution of
feminist critiques has been to add a gender dimension to analyses of international
relations. Few scholars will be able, in future, to analyze international divisions of
labour, or peace movements, or (pace Enloe) the activities of international diplo
mats, without attending to feminist perspectives on all these phenomena.
But feminists' success in exploring the gender variable remains, at this point,
mixed. And until feminist frameworks are expanded and to some extent reworked, it
is hard to see how a persuasive theory or account of the gendering of international
relations can be constructed.
Feminist attempts to incorporate a gender variable into IR analysis are con
strained by the basic feminist methodology and all feminists' normative commit
ments. A genuinely 'feminist approach' by definition 'must take women's lives as the
epistemological starting point'.53 And a defining element of feminist approaches, as
noted earlier, is a social project aimed at ameliorating women's structured lack of
privilege and emancipating them as a gender-class.
The result is a defacto equating of gender primarily with females/femininity. It is,
in its way, a new logocentrism, whereby (elite) male actions and (hegemonic) mas
culinity are drawn into the narrative mainly as independent variables explaining

52 treatments
Ibid., p. 8. One of the most sophisticated and extensive of this theme is Sara Ruddick's
Maternal Thinking (see n.8 above). Ruddick joins Elshtain in believing that 'War is exciting; women,
like men, are prey to the excitements of violence and community sacrifice it promises' (p. 154). In a
powerful passage, she writes: 'A pure maternal peacefulness does not exist; what does exist is far more
complicated: a deep unease with military endeavors not easily disentangled from patriotic and
maternal impulses to applaud, connect, and heal; a history of caring labor interwoven with the
romance of violence and the parochial self-righteousness on which militarism depends' (p. 156). The
link between 'mothering' and peace that she seeks to establish is contingent upon a non-gender
exclusive definition of the initial term in the equation (p. 40). This nimble move perhaps does not
fully answer the most common concern of her critics, which she addresses at p. 43.
53 in Peterson
Rebecca Grant, 'The Quagmire of Gender and International Security', (ed.), Gendered
States, p. 84. Emphasis in original. Cynthia Enloe also points out that 'feminists start from the
conditions of women's lives', in The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War
(Berkeley, CA, 1993), p. 65.

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 Does 'gender' make the world go round? 421

'gender' oppression. Even those works that have adopted the most inclusive
approach to gender, such as Peterson and Runyan's Global Gender Issues, betray this
Peterson and Runyan do that 'our attention to . . .
leaning. acknowledge gender
tends to underplay the considerable differences among men and among women', and
note that 'it is not only females but males as well who suffer from rigid gender
roles'.54 For the most part in their analysis, though, 'gender issues' are presented as
coequal with women's issues. The plight of embodied women is front and centre
throughout, while the attention paid to the male/masculine realm amounts to little
more than lip-service.
Very occasionally, one comes across a work?I think of Elshtain's Women and
War?that explores the ambiguities of gender construction, and the diversity of
women and men's lived experiences, in a balanced manner. But work that is more
easily slotted into the category of IR critique tends to display a disconcerting
fuzziness when it comes to analyzing the life situations of women and men alike.
Take Enloe's Bananas, Beaches and Bases, which is more adept than most at
examining the impact of gender on embodied women and men. Enloe points to the
'differences in the politics of masculinity between countries?and between ethnic
groups in the same country'.55 Later, she argues:

Frequently the reason behind government officials?usually men?trying to control women

has been their need to optimize the control of men: men as migrant workers, soldiers,
diplomats, intelligence operatives, overseas plantation and factory managers, men as
bankers.56

All but the first two of these categories, however, refer to patterns of gender that
favour some men by guiding them into positions of material and political privilege?
positions that by their nature exclude the vast majority of men, with whatever
versions of constructed masculinity they bear. (Even Enloe's category of 'soldier' is
ambiguous, given military hierarchy.) Thus, as in most feminist commentary, 'the
politics of masculinity' for Enloe centres on how male privilege is established and how
it is usedto perpetuate the subordination of women. Attention to the large mass of
ordinary men in international society is not absent in Enloe's work (as it is in most
feminist writing); but it seems disconcertingly permeated by the male-as-power
broker stereotype.
For further evidence of this failing, take Enloe's depiction of the role of women in
providing mistress-style support for male plantation workers in Central America:

having young male workers without wives and children has advantages: the men are in their

physical prime, they are

likely to view life as an adventure and be willing to tolerate harsh

working and living conditions.57

No evidence is offered as to how many males working sixteen-hour shifts in the

cane fields actually 'view life as an adventure', nor about what structural conditions
might induce them to 'tolerate [their] harsh working and living conditions'. Else
where, Enloe discusses a horrific fire at a dormitory for women seamsters in Korea,
and comments: '[Korea's] making it as a "world class" player has come with a

54
Peterson and Runyan, Global Gender Issues, pp. 13, 21.
55
Enloe,Bananas, Beaches and Bases, p. 13.
56
Ibid., p. 200.
57
Ibid., p. 137.

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422 Adam Jones

gendered price tag.'58 The implication is that the gendering of the international
division of labour forces women disproportionately to shoulder the burden of
physical risk and unsafe working conditions. No evidence is presented that this is the
case. Dependable statistics might be difficult to find, but it is at least possible that the
First World pattern of overwhelming male victimization in this area is transferred,
no doubt inmore muted form, to the developing world.59
A methodology predicated on illuminating women's experiences is useful, and it
may be justified in isolation if this redresses a traditional focus on the role of men.
But I think it is fair to say that the gender dimension of many of these phenomena,
and others sketched below, has never received systematic attention in the literature of
IR or, for that matter, comparative politics. There would seem to be grounds for a
more far-reaching application of core feminist methodologies, one that would isolate
the gender variable but not leap so readily to the tacit equation of gender issues with
women's issues.

To buttress these
contentions, consider Mary Ann Tetrault's analysis of the
'private' sphere, which I have suggested may deserve consideration as a new 'level of
analysis' for IR theorists. Tetrault writes that 'the bourgeois family also contributed
to personal autonomy for men'. How the standard patterns of subordinate wage
labour for all but a narrow elite of Western males might promote 'autonomy' for an
entire gender is not explained. She adds: 'The pattern of increased male autonomy
and independence from family obligations continues,' as though wage-labour,
ordinarily aimed at earning a wage to support a family, constituted 'independence
from family obligations'. Finally, 'the burdens of failure are carried primarily by the
family, and often disproportionately by the mother'. How often? Disproportionately
often? The answer is quite possibly yes, but Tetrault's claims are only asserted, never
effectively argued.60 (In a similar vein, note Tickner's comment that 'women have
entered the military primarily in the lower ranks', meant to point out the extent to
which the upper realms remain masculinized. But how else does one enter the
military, except at the lower levels?61)
The question of personal security as an integral component of 'national' security
also appears to deserve much more balanced evaluation. Tickner's call for 'attention
. . . to gender issues [and] to women's particular needs with respect to security'62

58
Ibid., p. 169.
59 In
Canada between 1972 and 1981, men accounted for 97.4 per cent of deaths on the job (at a time
when women constituted over 40 per cent of the full-time workforce); and men suffer nearly four
times as many 'time-loss injuries' as women. See Employment Injuries and Occupational Illnesses
1972-1981 (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1984), p. 10; Statistics Canada, Work Injuries
1986-1988, p. 13.
60
Tetrault in Peterson (ed.), Gendered States, p. 108. Peterson and Runyan likewise note that, as a result
of the migration of US transnational corporations to maquiladora zones inMexico, 'Between 1979
and 1983, 35 percent of the workers who lost their jobs because of plant closings in the United States
were women' (Global Gender Issues, p. 101). This means that 65 per cent, a substantial majority, were
men, but this fact is present only by implication. It is never explored, nor offered as grounds for
. . .
normative concern or protest. Elsewhere Peterson and Runyan point a finger at 'men [who] are
flooding into the informal economy, usurping some of the income generating activities women,
particularly as heads of households, have traditionally turned to in an effort to feed themselves and
their children' (p. 104). Would the authors view the massive movement worldwide in the other
direction?that is, women moving into traditionally male-dominated occupational spheres?as a
cause for worry, sl 'usurping' of 'the income generating activities [men], particularly as heads of
households, have traditionally turned to'?
61
Tickner, Gender in International Relations, p. 43.
62
Ibid., p. 53.

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 Does 'gender' make the world go round? 423

resurrects the too-typical equation of gender issues with women's particular needs.
How particular are those needs? The question is evaded in Tickner's formulation:

Feminists call attention to the particular vulnerabilities of women within states, vulnerabilities
that grow out of hierarchical gender relations that are also interrelated with international
... In militarized societies women are particularly vulnerable to rape, and evidence
politics
suggests that domestic violence is higher inmilitary families or in families that include men
with prior military service. Even though most public violence is committed by men against
other men, it is more often women who feel threatened in public places.63

The phrase 'particular vulnerabilities' suggests not just an analytically separable

category, but a disproportionate degree of vulnerability. This is then conflated with
. . . feel threatened'?even
perceived vulnerability ('women though men are more
often the real-life victims of public violence). Tickner's strategy explicitly sub
ordinates the patterns of actual vulnerability, which arguably would be more
important in arriving at a normatively grounded reading of gendered security.
The self-imposed limitations on most too, in
feminist IR discourse are apparent,
Christine Sylvester's assertion that 'states and their regimes people connect with
called women only to ensure, tacitly at least, that the benefits of regime participation
will flow from "women" to "men" and not ever the other way round'.64 This is an
image of hegemonic gender-class that is impervious to nuance or paradox. It is a
striking bit of absolutist phrasing from one of the field's leading post-positivist
theorists, who elsewhere, rhetorically at least, emphasizes flexibility and empathy.65
And it leads, or ought to lead, to some hard questions. If masculine privilege is so
all-pervasive and absolute, we must ask (in a developed-world context at least) why it
is that men live substantially shorter lives than women, kill themselves at rates vastly
higher than women, absorb close to 100 per cent of the fatal casualties of society's
productive labour, and direct the majority of their violence against 'their own' ranks.
All these features appear to be anomalous if not unique in the history of ruling
classes the world over. They surely deserve more sustained, non-dogmatic attention
than Sylvester, along with every feminist theorist I have encountered, grants them.66
'It is not valid and reliable', as Sylvester herself reminds us, 'to build generalizable
models ... on a partial base.'67 If the feminist approach to gendered 'security' is to
be taken seriously, as it deserves to be, these powerfully gendered phenomena
deserve closer investigation than feminist commentary so far has been able or willing
to provide.

As a contribution to the basic project called for here?that is,more balanced and
fertile theories of the gender variable's operation in international relations?I
conclude by suggesting a range of phenomena and issue areas that ought to be
63
Ibid., p. 56.
64
Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations, p. 179. Emphasis added.
65
Likewise, despite her postmodernist commitments, Sylvester readily draws upon highly mechanistic
and rationalist?'masculinist'??images and metaphors. Hence her references to 'tools of self
evaluation'; 'Our toolboxes of knowledge at our sides, we keep up the effort to unravel the fences. . .'
Feminist Theory and International Relations, pp. 65, 168.
66
Sylvester's attempt to set masculine privilege against feminine underprivilege similarly leads her into a
glaring logical fallacy: '[Alexander] George neglects to tell us that the decision maker is assumed
unproblematically to be and, in fact, usually is a "man," which means that "non-decision-makers" are
unproblematically "not-men" (Feminist Theory and International Relations, p. 118, emphasis added).
Of course, itmeans nothing of the sort, but it neatly elides the fact that most 'men' are not 'decision
makers'.
67
Ibid., p. 119.

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 424 Adam Jones

explored. My suggestions are feminist-grounded in that they seek to apply a core

feminist methodology?isolation of the gender dimension of an issue or pheno
menon. But they move beyond presently existing feminist approaches by directing
the analytical beam equally towards the gender that is, so far by definition, under
represented in feminist commentary.
By itself, this survey is no less partial than most feminist gender-mappings. But it
is a necessary first step towards synthesis: a blending of gendered perspectives that
will allow the gender variable and its operations to be examined in more multi
dimensional terms. There is, of course, no space here to enter into detailed dis
cussion of each phenomenon and issue. I buttress certain points with case-studies
and statistical data, but the sketch appeals as much to intuition and common sense.
This closing discussion builds itself around issue-areas and phenomena that could
help generate real-world research agendas. I think the limited space available is best
devoted to concrete matters, as opposed to more abstract investigations into the
construction of gender, the continuum of gender identities, and so on. Attention to
real-world issues allows the theorist of gender and IR to benefit from an important
underpinning of feminist critiques: their normative concern for, and engagement
with, the embodied subjects of the analysis. We need more narratives, more details,
more case-studies
that help humanize the research subjects and assist the reader in
understanding how gender shapes their destinies, or their plight.
Let us begin by briefly recapping several themes and issue-areas that have been
touched on only in passing. Few would deny (though relatively few feminist IR
theorists have adequately explored) the manner in which military 'service' is gender
structured. A number of issues related to war and military service warrant closer
examination. Among them are: the issue and practice of conscription; prisoners of
war; under-age troops; 'civil defence patrols' in societies riven by civil war; mutiny
and desertion; and post-battle trauma. Feminist writings on international relations
to this point have devoted only limited and partial attention to the masculine
gendering of these phenomena. This is inevitable so long as analysis is limited to
'military and industrial practices that impoverish and/or endanger the lives of
women and their families'.68 That may be enough for a narrowly feminist perspective;
it is not sufficient for an overarching theorizing of gender.
Consider, in this context, the most recent book by Cynthia Enloe, The Morning
After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War, which explores the militarization
of masculinity with greater analytical range than any feminist IR commentary since
Elshtain's Women and War. Enloe devotes a substantial section of her work to an
examination of 'The Gendered Gulf?that is, the gender dimension of the Gulf
War and its aftermath. She writes movingly of the plight of Asian female domestic
servants in Kuwait during and after the war; of rape and other abuses of Kuwaiti
women by Iraqi soldiers, and of US women soldiers by their own officers.
But there is a gender gulf in Enloe's reading of the gendered Gulf. Her normative
commitment to unveiling 'the conditions of women's lives'69 ignores other aspects of
the gendering process in the Gulf War that, by any strictly quantitative measure, far
outweigh the female-grounded examples she settles on. Where, for example, is
mention of arguably the most explicitly gender-selective policy decision of the entire

68
Peterson and Runyan, Global Gender Issues, p. 151, emphasis added.
69
Enloe, Morning After, p. 65.

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 Does 'gender' make the world go round? 425

Gulf War? I refer to Saddam Hussein's decision on 28 August 1990 to release all
women and children among those hostages seized on 17 August, together with
selected men, while retaining 'about 8,000 men . . . hundreds
[of them] in their 50's
and 60's, and some . . . ill'. (So the New York Times reported, under an un
intentionally comic headline: 'Who Can Leave Iraq? A Matter of Randomness and
Ethnicity'.70)
Likewise, the real-world of the refugee flow, one of the largest in
gendering
history, that the Gulf War
produced never impinges on Enloe's analysis. In many
cases, migrant workers accounted for most of the exodus. Enloe is amply aware of
the role of female migrant labour in Kuwait, the domestic servants from the
Philippines and elsewhere. Is this the only, or the most significant, gendering of
migrant labour in the Gulf,
and the refugee flow that attached to it? One million
Yemenis, 700,000 Egyptians, and 250,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from the
region during the war, along with 350,000 Asians. Many of this last group were from
Pakistan, where, in some impoverished regions, 'two out of every three poor
households . . . has workers in the Middle East'. These are
[sic] exclusively male
workers, as Shahid Burki's research makes clear.71 Indeed, one would expect men to
make up a majority or an overwhelming majority of the migrant workers who
flocked to work
in the Gulf's oil economy, regional construction industry, and
professional infrastructure. But a fuller exploration of the migrant-refugee issue
would not necessarily turn up information relevant to a feminist, like Enloe, whose
primary preoccupation is with the experiences of embodied women rather than
gendered women and men alike.72
The gendering of the large-scale atrocities committed by Saddam's forces in
Kuwait also receives only selective attention in Enloe's work. She touches on the
plight of Kuwaiti and foreign women abused by Iraqi troops, but the wider Iraqi
process of detention, torture, execution, and forced removal (probably for execution)
of tens of thousands of Kuwaitis?again, judging from human-rights and media

70 New
York Times, 22 October 1990, p. A10. Dilip Hiro also notes, again without apparent irony, that
'It was only after Saddam Hussein had . . . extended the [hostage] exemption to all women and
children among the Western and Japanese hostages . . . that the consequences of Iraq's action
malign
were considerably reduced.' Hiro, Desert Shield to Desert Storm: The Second Gulf War
(Hammersmith, 1992), p. 158. Most of the male hostages were held for another three months, until
Saddam's decision on 6 December 1990 to release them.
71
Shahid Javed Burki, 'International Migration: Implications for Labor Exporting Countries', The
Middle East Journal, 38:4 (Autumn 1984), p. 668. The overall refugee figures are drawn from Judith
Miller, 'Legacy of a Crisis: 5Million Refugees', The Gazette (Montreal) (from New York Times), 6
July 1991, p. B6. The examples I cite are those apparently related to migrant labour patterns, where
one can expect an uneven gendering of refugee flow; the Kurdish influx to Turkey and Iran, on the
other hand, would likely be differently gendered. Gender patterning among migrant communities also
shifts according to whether or not dependants join the worker in the field, but one study found that
Jordanian migrant workers, for example, were 'male (over 95 per cent)' as of 1984. Charles B. Keely
and Bassam Saket, 'Jordanian Migrant Workers in the Arab Region: A Case Study of Consequences
for Labor Supplying Countries', The Middle East Journal, 38:4 (Autumn 1984), p. 689.
72
In fairness, a fuller exploration of the larger issue of refugees would have to acknowledge that 'the
majority of all refugees worldwide?not just labour refugees?are women. Interestingly, the majority
of all refugee-claimants worldwide are men. Men are more likely to come forward with refugee claims
because they can more regularly "demonstrate" persecution; that is, the types of persecution men face
are easier to document within a legal discourse . . .This is not to
suggest that the persecutions faced
by male refugee-claimants are in any way trivial or unimportant, but rather that it is equally
important that legal systems often do not recognize, are unable to "see," the particular persecutions
faced by women.' I am grateful for these comments by a reader of an earlier version of this article.

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426 Adam Jones

reports, virtually all male?is passed over. Likewise, the Iraqi regime's postwar
assault against the Shia ?marsh Arabs' in southern Iraq seems to have been highly
gender-specific. The troops are arresting all males over 15 and taking them to
Radwaniyeh [prison camp]', according to a Middle East Watch researcher. They're
never seen again,' and thousands are estimated to have died, often after horrific
torture.73
We have noted that feminist explorations of the 'private' sphere and 'security'
issues have prompted a concern with society-level issues of gendered violence and
conflict. Certain types of violence, though, notably murder and suicide, deserve
different gender-sensitive investigation. For example, in the country with by far the
highest homicide rate in the world, Colombia, 88.2 per cent of victims are male.
Patterns of murder and suicide elsewhere also appear to be disproportionately
weighted against males.74 The more amorphous issue of health and life expectancy
might also be examined under this rubric. It would be central, for instance, to any
understanding of the gendered social impact of political transition processes. Can
any generalizations be drawn from the calamitous decline in male life expectancy in
the former Soviet Union? Why has it occurred in the midst of political trans
formations that have ordinarily been viewed as disproportionately harming
women?75

Patterns of political violence also need to be explored for the light they might shed
on how 'security' is gendered at the societal level. Preliminary investigation suggests
that political violence by state agencies is predominantly, even overwhelmingly,

73
'Iraqis Slaughter Hundreds of Shiites at Camp, Exiles Say', Associated Press dispatch in The Globe
and Mail (Toronto), 22 February 1994. The campaign against the southern Shias was, of course, only
the continuation of a long-standing campaign, the most brutal manifestations of which came in the
immediate aftermath of the Iraqi eviction from Kuwait: 'Those [Shia civilians] who remained in the
south were at the mercy of advancing government troops, who went through neighborhoods,
summarily executing hundreds of young men and rounding up thousands of others.' Middle East
Watch, Endless Torment: The 1991 Uprising in Iraq and Its Aftermath (New York, June 1992), pp.
31-2. The brutal suppression of rebellious Iraqi Kurds in 1988 similarly contained a blatant gender
dimension. Middle East Watch reported instances of 'men and boys among the captured villagers
. . all of the remaining men and older boys disappeared
[who] were executed on the spot. Virtually at
the hands of security agents; the whereabouts of many tens of thousands of Kurdish males who
disappeared in the hands of Iraqi government forces is unknown', though the organization believes
that 'most, if not all, those who disappeared . . .were murdered
by Iraqi security forces'. Middle East
Watch/Physicians for Human Rights, The Anfal Campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan: The Destruction of
Koreme (New York, Jan. 1993).
74 75 muertes 75 Deaths Daily]', El Pa?s (Cali), 18 July
'Colombia violenta: diarias [Violent Colombia:
1994. The World Health Organization apparently utilizes older figures which place Colombia further
down the list, but which also explore the gendering of suicide. 'Men in St. Lucia had the highest
homicide rate worldwide, with 22.6 men killed for every 100,000 on the Caribbean island. Ecuador
and Puerto Rico followed, with 21.8 men killed per 100,000. For women, the highest homicide rate
was in the Seychelles islands, with 5.5 women slain per 100,000. Worldwide, the highest suicide rates
were in Hungary, where men committed suicide at the rate of 48.4 per 100,000 and women at a rate
of 14.6.' WHO statistics quoted in 'Injury Main Cause of Death among Young, Report Says',
Associated Press dispatch in The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 7 April 1993, p. A7.
75 see Geoffrey
On the decline inmale life expectancy, York, 'Health Crisis Growing in Russia', The
Globe and Mail (Toronto), 1 September 1994, p. Al. A typical Russian man now can expect to die at
59, more than a decade earlier than men inWestern countries. Just two years ago, male life
expectancy was 62. The latest decline has plunged life expectancy in Russia to levels comparable to
those in India and Egypt.' Enloe's Morning After ably examines the Eastern European
transformations in chs. 1 and 8, but men remain peripheral to the analysis. Hence, the Soviet army,
guilty of staggering abuses against male conscript troops, is described as 'an inhumane machine
devouring the sons of mothers' (p. 13, emphasis added). It is the concerns and actions of the mothers
that are the focus in this analysis of 'sexual politics at the end of the Cold War'.

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 Does 'gender' make the world go round? All

directed against males rather than females. To cite three examples from the author's
own area of primary interest: a survey commissioned by the revolutionary
Sandinista government after the 1979 revolution in Nicaragua found that 93.4 per
cent of those killed in the insurrection were male, a 'predominance . . .
[that] is
impressive', according to Carlos Vilas.76 Marysa Navarro's study of state terror in
Argentina during the era of the Dirty War found that 70 per cent of those killed or
'disappeared' were male.77 A recent report on state terrorism (along with guerrilla
and death-squad violence) in the Colombian banana-growing region of Urab?
explicitly notes the combatants' readiness to 'wage their escalating war by killing
male civilians instead of each other'. '[A]n estimated 677 men . . .have been killed so
far this year', mostly unarmed banana workers; 'In this macho society, women are
protected and only the men are murdered, leaving about a thousand widows in the
region,' according to Church estimates.78
Sub-categories of state violence would include: torture; gender-selective punitive
action (for instance, the rounding up by state authorities of young males, deemed
suspicious or potentially subversive as a group); and state violence against street
children, in Brazil and elsewhere, along with the phenomenon of child and adult
homelessness itself.79 One wonders, for instance, whether Christine Sylvester would
employ the metaphor of 'homelessness' (as a desirable and 'creative' post-positivist
standpoint) quite so readily, were the real-life phenomenon gendered to the com
parative detriment of women. 'Homelessness of all types is frightening to con
template from a perspective of privilege'?indeed.80
It is possible that incarceration and imprisonment should also be examined as
sub-components of state violence. Intuition and casual observation suggest that the
vast majority of the world's incarcerated are male. This is a reality that I, for one,
have found difficult to reconcile with the radical-feminist interpretation of legal
systems as instruments of 'male' hegemony, unless the fissures in patriarchy are
made central to our understanding of it and our normative engagement with it. As
with military conscription, one would need to be attuned to the societal 'ripple

76
Carlos M. Vilas, The Sandinista Revolution: National Liberation and Social Transformation in Central
America (New York, 1986), p. 108. The survey was conducted to determine state compensation for
victims' families.
77
Marysa Navarro, 'The Personal Is Political', in Susan Eckstein (ed.), Power and Popular Protest: Latin
American Social Movements (Berkeley, CA, & Los Angeles, 1989), pp. 245-6.
78
Ken Dermota, 'Workers Caught in Clutches of Fatal Conflict', The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 21
September 1995. Emphasis added.
79 are males, mostly
In the USA, up to 80 per cent of the homeless single men. This pattern might well
be evident in other societies, particularly given the tendency to view males as more able to take care
of themselves and thus more prone to be cast onto the street when family resources are scarce or non
existent. Peter Marin, 'WTiyAre the Homeless Mainly Single Men?', The Nation, 8 July 1991.
80
Apart from this quoted statement in Feminist Theory and International Relations (p. 214), Sylvester's
only concession to the real-life phenomenon is a reference (p. 61) to 'the very real and painful
condition of bag-lady homelessness, so common in the world's urban centers' (emphasis added); she
provides a footnote directing readers to 'a discussion of how "women" become homeless in this way
and how bag-ladies are perceived by others' (p. 231, n.12).

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428 Adam Jones

effects' of prolonged incarceration, and to the epidemic of sexual violence against

males that often seems to accompany it.81
Attention could usefully be devoted to another subset of political violence:
intertribal and inter-ethnic conflict, the explicitly violent component of which often
seems to break down along gender lines. The systematic mass rape, mostly of
Bosnian and Croatian women, in the Balkans war has become a feminist cause
c?l?bre (it is explored in detail in Enloe's The Morning After); but this is only the
most fragmentary reading of the gendering of this conflict?a deficiency I have
explored, and sought to redress, in detail elsewhere.82 For another instance of the
normally overlooked gendering of ethnic violence, take the report by Indian feminist
Madhu Kishwar on the 1984 anti-Sikh rioting in New Delhi following the
assassination of Indira Gandhi:

The nature of the attacks confirm that there was a deliberate plan to kill as many Sikh men as

possible, hence
nothing was left to chance. That
explains also
why in almost all cases, after

hitting or stabbing, the victims were doused with kerosene or petrol and burnt, so as to leave
no possibility of their surviving. Between October 31 and November 4, more than 2,500 men
were murdered in different parts of Delhi, according to several careful unofficial estimates.
There have been very few cases of women being killed except when they got trapped in houses
which were set on fire. Almost all the women interviewed described how men and young boys
were special targets. They were dragged out of the houses, attacked withstones and rods, and
set on fire . . When
. women tried to protect the men of their families, they were given a few
blows and forcibly separated from the men. Even when they clung to the men, trying to save

them, they were ever attacked the way men were. I have not yet heard of a case of a
hardly
woman being assaulted and then burnt to death by the mob.83

This, one of the bloodiest gender-specific and gender-selective massacres in our

century, has passed unnoticed in feminist narratives of societal security, to my
knowledge.
Finally, in the sphere of international political economy, one might examine more
closely the gendering of child labour and child slavery; the operations of the
informal or black market, along with the international traffic in narcotics; and in
particular the range of physical hazards associated with labour in both productive
and reproductive spheres. As mentioned earlier, patterns of international migratory
labour also seem to be highly gender-structured?but only the female component
has received sustained gender-sensitive analysis.

81 see her Towards A Feminist

The most prominent feminist legal theorist is Catharine MacKinnon;
Theory of the State, esp. chs. 12-13. On sexual assault in prisons, see Stephen Donaldson, 'The Rape
Crisis Behind Bars', New York Times, 29 December 1993, p. A13. Donaldson, who was gang-raped in
prison in 1973, notes that 'The catastrophic experience of sexual violence usually extends beyond a
single incident, often becoming a daily assault. Psychologists and rape counselors believe that the
pent-up rage caused by these assaults can cause victims, especially if they don't receive psychological
treatment, to erupt in violence once they return to their communities. Some will become rapists,
seeking to "regain their manhood" through the same violent means by which they believe it was lost.'
Donaldson makes 'a conservative estimate' of 290,000 males 'sexually assaulted behind bars every
year [in the United States]. By comparison, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that there are
135,000 rapes of women a year nationwide, though many groups believe the number is higher.'
82
Adam Jones, 'Gender and Ethnic Conflict in ex-Yugoslavia', Ethnic and Racial Studies, 17:1 (1994),
pp.115-34. This article devotes extended attention to the gender-specific and gender-selective war
experiences of women and men alike, including the mass rapes of Bosnian and Croatian women.
83
Madhu Kishwar, 'Delhi: Gangster Rule', in Patwant Singh and Harji Malik (eds.), Punjab: The Fatal
Miscalculation (New Delhi, 1985), pp. 171-8. My thanks to Hamish Telford for bringing this source
to my attention.

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 Does 'gender' make the world go round? 429

It could be argued that the above list, tentative and scattered as it is, needlessly
draws in phenomena that have no obvious relationship to international relations. But
surely the contributions of feminists and other critics of the classical paradigm
render us more cautious of drawing neat distinctions between, say, the security one
has or feels in daily life and the 'security' or 'stability' of the state or the inter
national 'order'. A rigid division of analytical levels may be useful or necessary in
the context of a given project, but it can also mask important commonalities and
connections.
I have tried here to shed some light on subjects, patterns, and issue-areas that have
'fallen through the gaps' of feminist IR analysis. I hope the contribution, though
preliminary, is constructive. It reflects my conviction that, regardless of whether the
gender variable, even inclusively approached, 'make[s] the world go round', its
potential explanatory power is considerable. Feminist readings of IR, with their
wealth of new perspectives and analytical insights, have laid an indispensable found
ation for future evaluations of the gender variable. Foundational or not, though,
these same critiques are far from constituting an adequate account or even an
inclusive framing of gender and IR. The wider task?theorizing and narrating the
international politics of gender?remains.

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