FEMINISM
Feminism is a range of political movements, ideologies and social movements that share a
common goal: to define, establish and achieve political, economic, personal and social rights for
women. This includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in education and
employment. Feminist movements have campaigned and continue to campaign for women's
rights, including the right to vote, to hold public office, to work, to earn fair wages or equal pay,
to own property, to receive education, to enter contracts, to have equal rights within marriage,
and to have maternity leave. Feminists have also worked to promote
bodily autonomy and integrity and to protect women and girls from rape, sexual harassment,
and domestic violence.
Feminist campaigns are generally considered to be a main force behind major historical societal
changes for women's rights, particularly in the West, where they are near-universally credited
with achieving women's suffrage, gender neutrality in English, reproductive rights for women
(including access to contraceptives and abortion) and the right to enter into contracts and own
property. Although feminist advocacy is and has been mainly focused on women's rights, some
feminists, including bell hooks argue for the inclusion of men's liberation within its aims because
men are also harmed by traditional gender roles. Feminist theory, which emerged from feminist
movements, aims to understand the nature of gender inequality by examining women's social
roles and lived experience, it has developed theories in a variety of disciplines in order to
respond to issues concerning gender.
Numerous feminist movements and ideologies have developed over the years and represent
different viewpoints and aims. Some forms of feminism have been criticized for taking into
account only white, middle class, and educated perspectives. This criticism led to the creation of
ethnically specific or multicultural forms of feminism, including black
feminism and intersectional feminism.
Three different Feminist Theories
Feminist Theory in IR can be divided into three groups: liberal, critical and cultural or
essentialist.
1
Liberal Feminism
Liberal Feminism intends to empower women and give them an equal role in society, especially
in politics and at work. Its goal is to insure complete Gender Equality between men and women
without changing completely the way the society works or girl’s and boy’s socialization. The
French Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir can be seen as one of them. This theory was also one of
the first to be expressed in 18th-century Europe by the leading French feminist thinker Olympe
de Gourges and its British follower Wohlstencraft. This theory focus on gender equality at work
and in politics, promoting policies to insure parity in Parliament or in boards of directors. It has
extended the concept of “Glass ceiling” to gender issues. In IR, liberal feminists look at women
in international politics and international economics.
Critical Feminism
Following the Marxist-oriented critical school, Critical Feminists want to change the society and
focus on socialization. They showed not only that IR concepts are gender-biased and based on
male assumptions and representations but they show the way gender is central in IR. For
example, Christine Chin linked the Malaysian Modernity policies and the female domestic
labour that allowed men and women from upper-classes to invest in work and in developing the
country. Without this “woman force”, often Philippine immigrants, Malaysia couldn’t become
one of the so-called new Asian “tigers”.
Cultural or Essentialist Feminism
This theory isn’t really popular among scholars because it supposed partly, contrary to what its
name might mean, that women are superior to men and that the way females are socialized
should be extended to males. Women would be naturally and socially less aggressive than men.
As a result, women should be more able to bringing peace to the world and eliminating violent
male culture and socialization.
Feminist thought was applied to IR relatively late in comparison to other streams of the social
sciences. Theorists began to examine how gender affected international relations theory and
practice in the late 1980s, during the ‘third debate’ between positivists and post-positivists. Like
post-positivist critiques of conventional approaches to IR, feminist theorist contend that
2
paradigms like realism, neo-realism and liberal institutionalism, present a partial view rooted in
unacknowledged political assumptions that do not tell the whole story of international politics.
Conventional theories were censured for failing to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
sudden and peaceful end to the Cold War, and the diffuse security threats of the 1990s.
The feminist approach to IR is not a single unitary theory, but a distinct discourse made up of
many competing theories. For example, liberal feminists focus on securing equal rights and
access to education and the economy for women, while Marxist feminists seek to transform the
oppressive socio-economic structures of capitalist society. Alternatively, standpoint feminists
argue that women’s knowledge comes from a marginalized perspective that has the potential to
provide fuller insights into world politics than those from the core. Finally, post-modern
feminists reject claims that a theory can tell “one true story” about the human experience. Post-
modern feminists argue that there is no authentic women’s experience or standpoint that can be
used as a template for understanding the world, and chide liberal feminists for their adherence to
the Enlightenment project, their Western middle class bias, and their essentialist views of
women. Despite the fissiparous nature of feminism in the discipline, all feminist IR scholars are
united by a concern with gender: an ideological and socially constructed difference between men
and women, as opposed to the biological differences between the sexes. Gender both constitutes
and is constituted by inequalities in power relations and social structures, and has significant
implications for the respective experiences of men and women. In their different ways, feminists
aim to explain the role of gender in the theory and practice of international relations by locating
women in international politics, investigating how they are affected by structures and behavior in
the international system, and exploring ways of reconstructing IR theory in a gender neutral way.
Since mainstream IR theorists were not traditionally concerned with gender, the work of early IR
feminists sought to unveil the crucial yet unaccounted role of women in conventional spaces of
international politics, like the global economy, high politics and war. In her seminal work,
Cynthia Enloe (1989) focused on the everyday experiences of women as individuals,
demonstrating their importance to the continued running of the state system as plantation
workers, consumers, wives of diplomats and of soldiers, and prostitutes surrounding military
bases. She asserted that omitting women in theories left IR “with a political analysis that is
incomplete, even naive”. This is best seen via the example of women’s experiences of war: in
3
general, war intensifies economic inequalities between men and women and often forces women
into unpaid work, such as caring for the injured or sick when hospitals are over-crowded or
destroyed. Women are forced into the sex-trade for subsistence, sometimes being contracted
informally by military leaders around bases in order to sustain the morale of soldiers. Non-
combatants, meaning women and children, make up 90% of deaths in contemporary wars, and
systematic rape has been used as a weapon during wartime, as during the war in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, or currently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Seeing war through the eyes
of a woman can change the very nature of what constitutes the boundaries of IR, shifting the
focus from the causes and costs of inter-state war to the drastic consequences individuals suffer
due to militarization and oppression
Reconstructing IR – The State, Power and Security
Liberal feminists like Enloe are content to point out women’s roles and work towards their
inclusion in public life. However, post-positivist and standpoint feminists go further, asking how
gender biases and distortions have come to be accepted and unnoticed in the discipline,
challenging IR scholars to question the normative foundations of their theories. In order to
deconstruct these partialities, they examine the socially constructed language employed in
mainstream theories, particularly realism highlighting conventionally used dichotomies like
objectivity/subjectivity, culture/nature, public/private, and national/international. In these
groupings, the former represents the masculine value, which we subconsciously judge to be of
higher worth than the latter, feminine term. Employing this analysis to scrutinize key IR texts
provides remarkable insights into the gendered nature of language and knowledge employed by
traditional IR theory, allowing new definitions of well-thumbed concepts like the state, power
and security.
The arbitrary distinction between public and private life in Western political thought is decried
by feminists as the main culprit for the exclusion of women in international politics. In the minds
of influential philosophers like Aristotle, Hobbes and Locke, the term “citizen” referred to a man
working in the public realm who defends the state in times of war as a soldier. The distinction
acts to conceal the services of women as wives and mothers, work that is crucial to the continued
survival of the state, while simultaneously militarizing citizenship, constructing women as
helpless and in need of the protection of male citizens. Similarly, the state itself possesses a
4
blatantly masculine and patriarchal identity: Machiavelli’s Prince and Hobbes’ Leviathan
advance a paternal image of the state as a strong and autonomous entity that serves to protect the
people from the chaos and danger of the state of nature. Through this gender lens, the theme of
control comes to the fore in realist thought, as the “masculine” state comes into being so as to
subjugate “feminine” nature and hold power over anarchy. Such insights into the gendered nature
of the state have crucial implications for the way mainstream IR understands concepts like power
and security. Realism’s pre-occupation with control means that prescribes a type of power that
facilitates domination: power is A’s ability to get B to do what he would not otherwise do. In
general terms, this causes states to seek security through military might, using military power to
deter or coerce other states. However, feminists argue that this is a partial analysis informed
solely by a masculine perspective. Hannah Arendt, although not a professed feminist scholar
herself but much drawn on by feminists in IR theory, contends that power is the ability to act in
concert with others. This kind of thinking shows a distinction between “power over” and “power
with”, crafting a whole new perspective on power as a collaborative effort rather than an ability
to dominate. This view of power is particularly pertinent for addressing the challenges of the
twenty-first century when economic interdependence is crucial to stability, and security threats
like ecological degradation, international crime, and terrorist networks require more than military
power to be properly addressed.
Furthermore, feminist critiques of conventional conceptions of power and the identity of the state
lead to a re-evaluation of the meaning of security. Realists are occupied by the state security in
the international realm, subsequently overlooking security within state boundaries. Feminists
disagree with this arbitrary division of national/international, and focus instead on the individual.
Women’s experiences undermine the argument that the state is the best mechanism for ensuring
the safety of the individual and suggest that the state, as currently conceived and the militarism it
often inspires are actually reasons for some forms of insecurity. Unequal gender relations leave
women in a vulnerable and exploited position, dependent on men and the state for protection and
welfare. Arguments highlighting the negative impact of war on women, or the particular
economic hardships women experience, debunk the myth that the state provides adequate
security for civilians. Feminist discourse thus challenges mainstream understandings of security
and opens up a multifaceted definition of security that includes the diminution of all forms of
physical, structural and ecological violence.
5
Engaging with Feminist IR Theory
By focusing on the gender bias embedded in the way IR theorists consider concepts like the
state, power and security, feminist thought has the potential to transform the theory and practice
of international relations. In practical terms, liberal feminists have been particularly successful in
disseminating their arguments in favour of including women in politics, using popular advocacy
to get gender on the agenda. ‘Gender mainstreaming’ has become a well-known concept within
the United Nations, with some of the most symbolic advances in women’s rights emanating from
the Security Council in Resolution 1325 (2000) on Gender, Peace and Security and Resolution
1820 (2008) on the recognition of rape as a weapon of war. Liberal feminist figureheads, like US
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, have been instrumental in situating women in policy in the US,
and the UK government has identified the prevention of sexual violence in conflict as a main
foreign policy objective.
Despite their practical success, liberal feminists have been accused of having a simplistic attitude
to women’s empowerment, labeled as an “add women and stir” approach. They have also been
accused of imperialism, particularly in the context of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where
some post-positivist feminists contended that while these wars were couched in the language of
women’s rights and liberation, in reality this language was used to mask more conventional ends
of maintaining military power and guaranteeing Western economic interests in the Middle East.
However, in the realm of theory, conventional scholars in the discipline have been somewhat
reluctant to engage with feminist arguments. Firstly, there are scholars who dismiss feminist
theory, questioning whether feminists are even ‘doing’ international relations. Traditional IR has
developed around a self-contained, rationalist, research agenda, situating questions about states
and the state system as the central focus. Conversely, feminists employ an ethnographic
approach that underlines the importance of individual experiences and social relations rather than
state behavior and abstraction, thus concentrating on people, places, authorities and activities that
are outwit the scope of traditional IR. These epistemological differences mean that mainstream
theories are concerned with completely separate questions to feminist theorists, making it seem
as though feminist analysis is ill-fitted for the study of IR in the conventional sense.
Secondly, building upon the implications of these epistemological differences, there are scholars
who try to discipline feminists into contributing “properly” to what they see as an already given
6
research agenda. In 1989, Robert Keohane responded very positively to the critiques of feminist
standpoint theorists on power and interdependence, inviting an alliance between neo-liberal
institutionalism and feminist standpoint, while rejecting what he saw were less useful forms of
feminist theory, like feminist post-modernists.
Weber (1994) responded by disparaging his engagement, arguing that he was attempting to re-
impose boundaries on feminist thought by re-presenting feminist standpoint outwit the overall
context of feminist literature. She contended that feminist scholars visualize the whole of
feminist literature simultaneously, looking through gender lenses to view international relations
from several perspectives at once. As such, feminists have a tendency to query the idea of
“theory” itself because it creates arbitrary boundaries that force the discipline to ignore issues
that are not included in the snapshot of the world that is presented by that theory. From this
angle, Keohane is hijacking feminist ideas by removing parts of the literature he dislikes and
moulding those he agrees with to his own theories, thereby bringing feminists into line with
conventional IR theories. Keohane’s encounter with feminists underscores their manifest fear of
being co-opted, fundamentally resisting integration into larger bodies of thought within the IR
discipline. Sylvester (1999) identifies two further types of engagement with feminist IR theory.
A third group of theorists tip their hat to feminist theories in politically correct footnotes rather
than incorporating them into the main text. Finally, the fourth group of scholars actively engage
and incorporates feminist ideas into their writing, such as Brown (1994). Arguably, there exists a
fifth group of scholars, who accept gender as a constitutive of identity and an important variant
of analysis, and embed gender consciousness into their work without mentioning feminism in
particular. Sylvester suggests that feminist literature on gender could have helped develop
constructivist thought on identity.
In sum, the contribution of feminist IR theory to the discipline as a whole is difficult to assess. It
is clear that liberal feminists continue to make a substantial contribution to the practice of
international politics, affecting change in national and international policies. Similarly, it is
evident that feminist analysis can transform the way in which IR scholars understand central
concepts like the state, power and security, bringing theory closer to reality by refocusing our
interest in soft power, interdependence, individual human rights and women’s rights. However,
debates between liberal feminists, standpoint feminists and post-positivist feminists suggest that
7
there is an inherent tension between their desire to situate women’s voices on the international
scene and their goal of deconstructing gender altogether. Consequently, the feminist approach is
somewhat diffuse and difficult to pin down as it is not clear whether they want to completely
reconstruct the core of IR or reject the mainstream literature of the discipline and continue to
critique from the margins. Overall, however, this division works to keep feminist theory from
parodying mainstream literature, with post-modern feminists checking and balancing the
tendency in particular of standpoint feminists to claim to speak for all oppressed peoples.
In addition, the epistemological differences between post-positivist feminists and mainstream
positivist theorists mean that theoretical discussions between the two are fraught with
complications. Each is troubled by the other’s attempt to broaden or narrow the boundaries of the
discipline. Arguably, both discourses suffer from the same hubris; both are intent on gate-
keeping for their own respective literature in their own particular ways. Feminists discomfort
with co-option and the need for their theories to be employed in full is equaled by mainstream IR
theorists controlling approach to the feminist research agenda. The result is a shaky relationship
in which neither fully understands the other nor wants to get very much closer. Nonetheless,
feminist literature makes a very substantial contribution to IR as a whole. Feminist theory as a
whole demonstrates the underlying normative biases embedded in the very foundations of
conventional IR theory. They also make evident the ways in which mainstream theories are
lacking: to be unable to account for half the population of the world is an almost unbelievable
oversight. These deep-seated partialities are once known, difficult to brush aside. In this sense,
feminist theory provides a rich analytical tool that will continue to make insightful and
transformative contributions to the International Relations discipline.
Feminism: Some General Points of Criticism...
Most criticisms of Feminist perspectives have stemmed from Feminists themselves (this is
sometimes referred to as an "internal critique" (that is, one that comes from various writers
working within the same broad perspective). The following points refer to this kind of internal
critique...
1. Liberal Feminism….Liberal Feminists have focused their attention upon "equality of
opportunity" between males and females. They have largely ignored the study of social structural
8
factors that other Feminists see as a basic cause of inequality in Capitalist societies (for example,
patriarchy and the inequalities created by Capitalist forms of economic production). Liberal
Feminists have been criticised (and variously derided as "bourgeois / middle-class" Feminists)
for their failure to understand that in any society that is fundamentally unequal in its economic
and social structure "equality of opportunity" is a fairly meaningless concept. In a society divided
along class lines and driven by economic exploitation, women - like working class men - are at a
fundamental economic disadvantage...
2. Radical Feminism…. There is no real evidence that women constitute a "sex class", since it is
clear that, apart from a common biology, women may have no real shared interests "as a class
apart from men". It is difficult to see, for example, what "common interests" are shared by upper
class and working class women - aside from the fact that they are women. The experiences and
life chances of upper class females are significantly different to those of working class females
(where the position of the former may be closer to that of men than to their working class
counterparts). The primary importance attached to patriarchy downgrades the importance of
concepts like social class and ethnicity. For Marxist Feminists, patriarchy itself stems from the
way in which women are generally exploited economically. To view women as a "sex class"
whose basic interest involves emancipation from men would leave unresolved the problem of
economic exploitation. Radical Feminism tends to overlook the fact that the general position of
women in society has changed over time and this can only be explained in terms of wider
economic and political changes in society. Socialist Feminists do not see women as a "sex class",
nor do they see all men as "the class enemy". Not all male / female relationships are
characterized by oppression and exploitation, for example. Technological "solutions" to female
exploitation are also viewed with suspicion (since control over development and exploitation of
technology has traditional been a male preserve), as is the idea that a matriarchal society is
somehow superior and preferable to a patriarchal society. Radical Feminists over-emphasize
factors that separate women from men (their biology in particular - over-stating the significance
of biological differences - and also unsubstantiated / uncritical assumptions about male and
female psychology).
3. Marxist Feminism… Marxist Feminists tend to be criticized for placing too much emphasis
upon class relations in the economic sphere (women considered as part of the working class, for
9
example) and not paying enough attention to female experiences outside the labour market
(within the family / domestic sphere, for example). Given that the revolutionary overthrow of
Capitalism does not seem very likely to occur, this "solution" to female exploitation tends not to
be seen as a particularly useful one to pursue. Radical Feminists have been critical of the
emphasis placed upon Capitalist forms of exploitation. The main argument here is that
patriarchal forms of exploitation have existed in all known societies, not just Capitalist ones. In
addition, they argue that patriarchy predates Capitalism which makes it a more significant
explanation of female exploitation and oppression.
4. Socialist Feminism…. This form of Feminism underplays the significance of Capitalist forms
of exploitation. Socialist Feminism is criticized for being neither revolutionary nor radical
enough to create lasting solutions to the problem of female economic and social exploitation.
The study is broadly based on following books and only meant for reading
purpose
Andrew Heywood, Global Politics, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Andrew Heywood, Political Theory, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Andrew Heywoods, Ideologies, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
John Baylis, Steve Smith, Patricia Owens, The globalisation of world
politics, Oxford University Press, London, 2011.
Joshua S. Goldstein, Internationa Relations, Pearson Publications, 2007.
10
