The Personal is Not Political: At Least in the UK's Top Politics and IR Departments

Abstract

Through mapping the provision of teaching gender and sexuality studies on politics/political science and international relations (IR) programmes, this article asserts that the top-ranked politics and IR departments in the UK offer very little provision of such teaching. We argue that this lack of gender and, more so, sexuality teaching is highly problematic for the discipline. Moreover, we suggest that the lack of such provision is not reflective of staff research interests, potentially not reflective of the market (i.e. students), works against the trend of mainstreaming gender, and is problematic in the wider sense in that gender and sexuality are rendered invisible or as trivial matters. Overall, then, this article contends that curricula in politics and IR departments work to perpetuate the idea that the ‘personal is not political’, thereby defining the parameters of the discipline in both a narrow and inaccurate way.

Experiencing gender in UK political science: The results of a practitioner survey

“…Finally, in regards to teaching and curriculum design, there may be an even more obvious link between the descriptive under-representation of women and how the discipline acts for and substantively represents women. As one recent study finds, there is very little provision for the teaching of gender politics in UK political science (Foster et al, 2013). Since gendered constructions and norms are absolutely central to the everyday experiences of citizens and policy-makers, this omission arguably risks undermining the relevance of the discipline itself.…”

Rethinking Masculinity and Practices of Violence in Conflict Settings

“…It is now increasingly common for texts to both note the unequal character of gendered violence (it is predominantly men who do the killing and the maiming) and to stress the contingent and sometimes paradoxical status of this situation (women kill and maim too, and the content of 'man' and 'woman' varies significantly over time, space and context). Elite institutions still prove stubbornly resistant to teaching gender, feminism and sexuality within 'the international', despite introductory texts which increasingly offer such insights to the curious student (Foster, Kerr, Hopkins, Byrne and Åhäll 2012;Shepherd 2009). Certainly, feminist and gender scholars write often of multiplicity in masculinities, of constructions of gendered agency, and of representations of violence as themselves constitutive of gender (Coleman and Bassi 2011;Gentry 2012;Åhäll 2012;Shepherd 2006).…”

The unapologetic schoolmaster

“…But understanding the state of the discipline isn't the same thing as foregrounding its self-mythologies. We know the actual diversity and criticality of research interests is not well reflected in teaching (Foster et al 2012). Perhaps this is a generational difference, perhaps one founded on the privilege of never being made to always progress through the 'American Science' in any given argument.…”