Feminist Security Studies and Feminist International Political Economy: Considering Feminist Stories

Abstract

In reflecting upon the divergence of Feminist Political Economy (FPE) and Feminist Security Studies (FSS) one feels puzzled and perhaps even a little embarrassed. How could such a schism occur and be sustained for seemingly so long? This divergence certainly did not appear to characterize the founding of feminist International Relations (IR) when scholars such as Cynthia Enloe (1983, 1989) and Ann Tickner (1992) were attentive to both dimensions and carefully connected issues of gender to the global economy and to understandings of security and militarism. Moreover, to my mind, there is no immediate epistemological or ontological schism between FSS and FPE of the sort that has characterized other feminist divides. The security studies/International Political Economy (IPE) split seems to be more one of empirical focus that does not require a painstaking and perhaps ultimately futile attempt to suture the feminist IR body back together. Indeed, recent and highly illuminating work on the connections between gender violence and global and local political economies (Meger 2014; True 2012a) would suggest no reason why we should not simply press ahead with the task of reconnection and driving feminist IR forward to new and insightful places.

(Re)integrating Feminist Security Studies and Feminist Global Political Economy: Continuing the Conversation

“…From this perspective, the divide is a reflection of disciplinary power, which fosters a tendency to privilege mainstream research topics. At the same time, some of the contributions in this forum suggest that the divide (or the perception thereof) is equally a product of feminist “camp politics.” These essays follow up on Katherine Allison's (2015) reminder to reflect on our own positionality as feminist and IR scholars when constructing divides in our claims to overcome them.…”

Feminist Global Political Economy and Feminist Security Studies? The Politics of Delineating Subfields

“…International relations (IR) is certainly blessed with the birth of many new fields and subfields, and it is heavily pregnant with even more. While arguably never uniform (see Allison 2015), feminist IR has become an established field that embraces numerous areas of focus and a wide range of approaches, such as FGPE and FSS, that are creatively combined in specific research endeavors. That specialized areas of research offer scholars dynamic and rich “homes” for theoretical, methodological, and empirical development attests to the robustness of feminist IR.…”

Gendering (in)security: interrogating security logics within states of exception

“…4 Here it should be noted that the focus on the war/conflict nexus is arguably quite recent since the foundational works of FSS easily traversed the now stringent disciplinary boundaries showing, for example, how reproductive labour is essential for the construction of the production of the security state (Tickner 1997;Enloe 2000). Furthermore, as Katherine Allison shows discussions and debates of the link between economics, women's insecurity and emancipation were ubiquitous in feminist writing, especially in relation to the subject of socialism (Allison 2015). Nevertheless, for the majority of the 21st century FSS analyses of (in)security have focused on the nexus of war/conflict/militarisation.…”