Seeing women, recognizing gender, recasting international relations

Abstract

514 International Organization their work, publishing it in peace studies and development quarterlies, which were a bit more receptive than the general international relations journals, and in the growing number of journals of women's studies. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s peace researchers and peace educators completed analyses on gender and war that had significant political impact on the increasingly influential women's peace movements and on the many women organizing within the armed forces, foreign service, and leading political parties around the world. 4 The study of women in development burgeoned as well. 5 Yet, neither strand of politically significant scholarship had visible impact on mainstream scholarship in international relations until 1988 when the London School of Economics journal, Millennium, published a special issue, "Women and International Relations." 6 That collection marked a turning point. Articles from the special issue and a follow-up discussion reappeared in 1991 as a book edited by Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland. 7 The British and North American International Studies Associations soon established gender studies research sections. The Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California and the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women held conferences that brought together feminists and more traditional international relations scholars and resulted in a volume edited by V. Spike Peterson. 8 Jean Elshtain and Shelia Tobias published a new compilation of feminist scholarship on war and peace. 9 The board of the British International Studies Association's prestigious Cambridge University Press series on international relations invited Elshtain to join them, and they contracted for Christine Sylvester's Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era. 10 The publication of Sylvester's book in 1994, on the heels of J. Ann Tickner's 1992 work, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, signaled the new centrality of gender in international relations theory. Pioneering empirical studies of women in the lower ranks of the U.S. military and the upper ranks of all U.S. foreign policymakers had already appeared. 11 These were joined by a transnationally focused collection of empirical studies, Women and Revolution in Africa, Asia, and the New World, edited by Mary Ann Tetreault. 12 Cynthia Enloe provided a lively introductory text with her Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations

Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory

“…While international security is the focus of this review, feminists continue to make important contributions in other IR issue areas, e.g., international political economy(Marchand and Runyan 2000) and international organization(Meyer and Prügl 1999). For overviews that trace the development of feminist IR theory, seeMurphy 1996;Tickner 2001;True 2001. …”

Women's International Thought and the New Professions, 1900–1940

“…Her emphasis upon interpersonal relations and group dynamics has much in common with scholarship that has emerged in the last fifteen years, and her insistence upon the reciprocal interactions of the organic whole as the unit of study anticipates work that takes a systemic approach to international relations. 55 Influenced by pragmatist thinkers such as John Dewey, she made a distinctive contribution with her notion that direct interpersonal relations and group processes offered the best way to deal with difference on both an individual and an international scale, and she elaborated these ideas to a new audience of business leaders whom she saw as engaged in working out the methods that would create international community. Yet with a few notable exceptions, Follett is curiously missing from standard histories of both international thought and international relations as a discipline.…”

Globalisation contested

“…The invisibility of the role of women in IR, IPE and Industrial Relations scholarship has, of course, been widely documented by feminist scholars (see Enloe, 1989;Marchand, 1996). However, the feminisation of work that has accompanied global restructuring makes it particularly important that we 'see women' as actors in global restructuring, and that we 'recognize gender' in terms of the webs of power at work within the process of change (Murphy, 1996;Marchand and Runyan, 2000: 225). At one level, then, this implies making womens' experiences and activities visible in our analyses: '$16 trillion of global output is invisible, $11 trillion produced by women' (United Nations Human Development Programme, 1995: 97).…”