Gender and International Relations

Jill Steans

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745670126
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The third edition of Jill Steans' popular and highly respected text offers a comprehensive and up to date introduction to gender in international relations today. Its nine chapters have been fully revised and expanded to cover key issues, developments and debates in the field including:

• the state and citizenship
• gender, sexuality and human rights
• conflict, peace and security
• narratives and representational practices in international politics
• global political economy
• development and gender in global governance

Guiding students competently through complex theoretical and conceptual issues, the book is careful to ground its discussions in contemporary concerns, such as the War on Terror and its legacy, the 'securitisation' of human rights, the Arab Spring, the global financial crisis, contemporary challenges to global institutions, and ethical dilemmas that arise in negotiating gender issues and politics in a culturally diverse world. Each chapter features questions for reflection, seminar activities, further reading and web links to highlight key points and provide contemporary illustrations. A glossary of key terms is also included for easy reference. Gender and International Relations will be essential reading for students and scholars of gender, international relations, global politics and related courses.

CHAPTER 1

Gender in International Relations

Introduction

This is the first of two chapters that introduce the study of gender in international relations. Taken together, these two introductory chapters convey a flavour of the many ways in which one can think about gender and a number of different ways in which gender can inform the study of world politics. In the first instance, this chapter follows the logic of a ‘common-sense’ approach to gender. That is, the chapter focuses on how gender conceived as difference informs both the theory and practice of international relations. To aid understanding, concepts and theoretical discussions are grounded in substantive issues and concrete examples are supplied and elaborated. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the debate on the distinction between ‘bringing gender into’ problem-solving approaches in IR and feminist IR. Feminist IR is afforded in-depth attention in chapter 2.

Gender as Difference

In everyday usage, the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ are often used interchangeably. Indeed, one might say that the belief that gender differences are rooted in ‘natural’ or biological difference between men and women, and so are essential differences, is so prevalent that the proposition is still often simply accepted as uncontroversial. In other words, the relationship between sex and gender and the ‘reality’ of essential gender difference is imbued as ‘common-sense.’

That gender is very often conflated with sex and the meaning of gender regarded as self-evident can be demonstrated by pointing to how beliefs about gender often give rise to prejudices against groups and individuals who confound gender stereotypes. In consequence, pejorative terms come to be attached to people and types of behaviour that do not conform to this common-sense view of the relationship between biological sex differences and gender differences. Thus ‘masculine’ women might be derided for acting ‘butch’, empathetic men might be labelled ‘effeminate’, homosexuals characterized as ‘queer’ and so on. People who do not conform to widely held gender stereotypes might be castigated as odd, or deviant, or might even be represented as posing a threat or danger to mainstream society.

CONCEPT

Intersex

Upon hearing that a friend or relative has given birth to a baby, one of the first questions usually asked is: Is it a boy or a girl? Having established the biological sex of a child, it is also very common for friends and relatives then to buy gifts that are deemed appropriate given the gender of the newborn baby. Sex and gender stereotyping begins in the very first hours and days of life and continues thereafter.

For very many people, however, the question boy or girl? is not so easy to answer. It is estimated that in one in every 2,000 births, the sex of the child is indeterminate. Children born with a physiology or anatomy that differs from conventional notions of what constitutes a ‘normal’ male or female are referred to as intersex people.¹ The condition is actually relatively common: as common as the incidence of the birth of twins. It is estimated that, in a city the size of London or New York, there will be some 100,000 people who were born intersex.²

Socially and culturally determined ideas about what is ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ in regard to sex and gender create tremendous psychological and social problems for intersex people (and their parents and other family members) as they try to come to terms with ‘difference’. There remains considerable ignorance surrounding the condition in societies at large. It is common for intersex people to be put under pressure to undergo surgery or some other form of medical intervention, and such is the stigma surrounding intersex that people are often denied information about their condition at birth. Today, intersex is regarded as much as a social issue as a personal one. More support groups and services are available to intersex people and their families that not only offer advice and support to individuals, but also make efforts to educate better the population at large about intersex in order to address and remove the ignorance, prejudice and social stigmatization that intersex people encounter.

Throughout history, the claim has been made that women and men are fundamentally different from one another. Very often this notion of difference has been used to support the claim that women are inferior to men. Claims about women’s inferiority alert us to the deeper issues of power that are necessarily encountered when one begins to interrogate the meaning of gender. The Greek philosopher Aristotle held that the masculine was an active, creative force, while the feminine was passive.³ Those who defend Aristotle point out that he placed equal emphasis on women’s and men’s happiness, which he thought to be vital to a good society. Nevertheless, from Aristotle onwards, the history of Western philosophical, social and political thought has been characterized by a strong and recurring theme: women and men are different and this difference matters.

From the seventeenth century onwards, the emergence of capitalism in Western states gave rise to a body of liberal political thought. In the eighteenth century, an emerging middle class began to demand that state power be circumscribed in regard to the ‘private realm’ of the family and the market. This increasingly influential class of people also demanded political and legal rights and political representation. Such claims were couched in the language of rationalism: rights claims were rooted in what liberals argued to be the universal human capacity for rational thought which meant that people were able to determine their own best interests and stake a claim to a share in political power. In practice, however, the state granted rights to only a narrow group of people – white, middle-class and upper-class men who, as property owners, were recognized as holding a stake in the political community; others were excluded. Women, along with men from specific social groups – working-class men and, in some cases, men from ethnic minority groups – were denied access to political power, legal personality and citizenship and excluded from public life (denied the right to vote or seek public office).⁴ Moreover, this ‘universal’ capacity for rational thought was, in practice, only ever applied to men – rationality was deemed to be a masculine characteristic. The justification for excluding women from public and political life and the subjugation of women to male authority was that women were not ‘rational’ beings, but rather ‘irrational’, driven by their emotions. Therefore, women were unable to make autonomous choices and look out for their own interests – in other words, women were in need of protection.

In The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State,⁵ Friedrich Engels famously argued that this period marked the emergence of a particular family form – the privatized family – and also the historical subjugation of women. Engels argued that, with the emergence of modern capitalism, women came to be seen as the private property, or possessions, of men. Engels’ seminal work was the first of many texts that have subsequently critiqued the public/private divide as central in understanding the subordination of women. Feminist thinkers would later go further in arguing that gendered constructions of rationality as a masculine capacity and irrationality as a feminine characteristic have similarly served to justify female subjection to male power and authority.

Gender essentialism (see box below) has then served, historically, as the basis for discrimination against women. The seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke, for example, claimed that women (along with children) were inferior to men and that woman’s ‘irrationality’ meant that she was unfit to participate in public life.⁶ Therefore, even though Locke is regarded as a liberal, his argument served as a strong justification for patriarchy (the dominance and/or rule of men over women). This is not to say that the construction of women (and certain classes of men) went wholly unchallenged. For example, the Venetian-born medieval author Christine de Pizan (1364–1430) is frequently identified as a forerunner of modern feminism. Similar figures have been uncovered in non-Western societies. For example, the medieval Islamic philosopher Ibn ͨArabī (born Damascus, 1165) was an early proponent of women’s rights. However, these detractors notwithstanding, it was not until the late eighteenth century and the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)⁷ that an identifiable body of thought championing women’s equality emerged in the Western world.

In championing the principle of equality between women and men, early campaigners for women’s rights (early ‘feminists’) adopted a strategy of challenging dominant, patriarchal notions of ‘women’s nature’ and essential sexual difference. Mary Wollstonecraft argued that perceived sex differences were not natural, but rather the consequence of discrimination. Historically women had been confined to the home and to the domestic service of their husbands and children and so had been afforded few opportunities to exercise their intellectual faculties or develop skills other than those deemed necessary for the performance of their domestic duties.

It is important to notice, however, that Wollstonecraft championed women’s rights on the grounds that women were like men – they were rational beings. This notion of the rational human subject as the norm continues to serve as the foundation of liberal (human) rights claims. There has subsequently been a great deal of discussion in feminist jurisprudence on the implications of taking a historically specific and inherently gendered and class-biased construction of human nature and human subjectivity (‘rational man’) as the ‘norm’ or universal characteristic of people as a whole.

Even as early prototypes of what we would now recognize as the feminist movement rose to prominence in the West in the nineteenth / early twentieth centuries, claims continued to be made in the name of women’s difference. Pioneering groups like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, an early example of what we would now call an NGO, based their demands for equal rights for women not on the notion that women were like men, but on the idea that women were different from men – more compassionate, naturally peaceful and morally superior. This moral superiority was evidenced, they argued, in women’s participation in the temperance movement of the same period.

Figure 1 Members of the Women in Black peace movement stand in silent vigil on the Arcata Plaza, California, in 2005

CONCEPT

Gender essentialism

‘Essentialism’ is a term employed in academia to denote a belief that certain characteristics possessed by individuals and/or social groups, such as gender or race or sexuality, even nationality, are fixed. That is to say that core facets of the person and pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Content
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Gender in International Relations
• 2: Feminist International Relations
• 3: States, Nations and Citizenship
• 4: Gender, Sexuality and Human Rights
• 5: Conflict, Peace and Violence
• 6: Security and Peacekeeping
• 7: Telling Stories
• 8: Global Political Economy
• 9: Global Governance
• 10: Transnational Feminist Politics
• Conclusion
• Glossary of Key Terms and Concepts
• Notes
• Extended Reading
• Index