Feminist International Relations

In brief

Feminist international relations began at the end of the 1980s with two disarmingly simple moves. Cynthia Enloe, in Bananas, Beaches and Bases (1989), asked one question of every part of the international system: where are the women? Not the women in cabinets and at summits, who are rare, but the ones the system runs on: the diplomat's wife, the woman stitching garments in an export zone, the sex worker outside a military base, the nanny who frees a professional woman to work. J. Ann Tickner, in Gender in International Relations (1992), pressed a second move. She took the discipline's founding concepts, security, the state, power as the rational pursuit of interest, and argued that they are not neutral tools. They are built from a narrow band of male experience, then presented as the whole of world politics. Together the two moves make a claim that is easy to state and hard to answer: international relations theory looks objective because it has hidden its own standpoint, and that standpoint is gendered.

The full treatment

The problem it answers

By the 1980s international relations had a dominant self-image. It was a science of states pursuing power and security in an anarchic system, and its objects, war, diplomacy, alliance, deterrence, were taken to be the serious, public business of the world. The discipline prided itself on realism about power. Feminist scholars noticed something the field had not asked about its own realism: it described a world with almost no women in it, and it treated that absence as natural rather than as a fact requiring explanation. If women are absent from the story of world politics, either they genuinely do nothing that matters internationally, or the story has been built to make what they do invisible. Feminist IR argues the second, and asks what the discipline would have to change to see it.

Enloe: where are the women?

Enloe's method is to follow the international system into the places theory ignores. A banana plantation is a node of global trade; it also depends on the unpaid domestic labor of workers' wives. A military base abroad is an instrument of national security; it also restructures the local economy around laundries, bars, and prostitution, and depends on wives at home who accept the deployments. Tourism is a major international industry that runs on gendered images and on the low-paid service labor of women. Diplomacy has long depended on the diplomatic wife, an unpaid worker who hosts, entertains, and smooths relations while being formally invisible.

The point is not that women are victims, though many are exploited. The point is analytic. These arrangements are not marginal to international politics; they are among its conditions. A state can project power abroad partly because a gendered division of labor at home supplies the unpaid and underpaid work that frees others for public life. Enloe's slogan, "the personal is international," extends the second wave feminist insight that the personal is political onto the world stage. If you leave the women out, Enloe argues, your account of how power actually operates is not simplified. It is wrong.

Tickner: the concepts are gendered

Where Enloe works from the ground up, Tickner works on the theory itself. Her central target is the political realism of Hans Morgenthau, whose Politics Among Nations (1948) taught the discipline that states pursue power defined as interest, that morality must yield to necessity, and that the statesman must be coldly rational. Tickner rereads Morgenthau's principles and finds them saturated with qualities a culture codes as masculine: autonomy, control, the suppression of emotion, the equation of strength with a readiness for violence. The "rational actor" is not a neutral abstraction. It is a particular ideal of manhood elevated into a theory of the state.

From this she reworks the field's core concepts. Security, in the mainstream, means the security of the state against external military threat. Tickner asks security for whom, and from what. For many women the greatest threats are not foreign armies but domestic violence, poverty, rape as a weapon of war, and the collapse of the structures of daily life. A concept of security that captures the state's borders but not these is not more rigorous; it is selective. The state itself, treated as a unitary rational agent, is reconceived as an institution that rests on and reproduces a gendered order, drawing a sharp line between a public sphere of politics and war and a private sphere of family and care, then treating only the first as political. Power as domination, "power over," is set beside other faces of power the tradition ignores, including the capacity to act with others.

The private sphere and the public gaze

The load-bearing distinction is between public and private. Mainstream IR inherits from liberal political thought a picture in which the public sphere is where politics happens and the private sphere of household and care is prepolitical, natural, off the map. Feminist theory had already challenged this inside the state with the slogan the personal is political. Feminist IR carries the challenge across borders. The private sphere is not outside world politics; it is where much of the labor that sustains states and economies is done, and it is precisely by defining that sphere as nonpolitical that theory makes women's contribution disappear. The invisibility is not an oversight to be corrected by adding a few female heads of state. It is produced by the categories themselves.

Distinctions that matter

Feminist IR is not one position. It is useful to keep three strands apart. Liberal feminist IR asks the discipline to count women and remove barriers to their participation: more women in foreign ministries and militaries, attention to women as an omitted variable. Standpoint feminist IR, the strand associated with Tickner and drawing on the philosopher Sandra Harding, argues that knowledge is always produced from a social location, and that beginning from women's lives yields a truer, less distorted picture of the world than the falsely universal view from the top. Poststructural and postcolonial feminist IR, associated with scholars such as Christine Sylvester and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, is wary of speaking of "women" at all as a single group, and studies how gender as a system of meaning is produced in the very language of world politics, insisting that Western feminists not universalize their own experience onto women of the global South.

One further distinction guards against a common misreading. Feminist IR is about gender, not only about women. Gender here is a structure of meaning, a set of oppositions (rational and emotional, public and private, protector and protected) that organizes thought before any particular man or woman appears. This is why Carol Cohn's Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals (1987) is a founding text. Studying nuclear strategists, almost all men, Cohn found their language shot through with gendered and sexual imagery, and found that the "rational" idiom of the field made it nearly impossible to voice certain human realities of nuclear war. The critique lands even where no woman is present.

Lineage

Feminist IR descends from the wider feminist thought of the twentieth century, above all the second wave and its insistence that the personal is political and that the sexual division of labor is a political fact. Its philosophical anchor is Simone de Beauvoir's claim that woman is made, not born, that the feminine is constructed as the "other" of a masculine norm treated as universal. Within philosophy of knowledge it draws on feminist standpoint theory as developed by Sandra Harding and Nancy Hartsock, and within ethics it is a cousin of care ethics, which likewise recovers a domain of moral life the dominant theories ignored.

Its arrival in the discipline is usually dated to a 1988 conference at the London School of Economics and the resulting 1988 special issue of the journal Millennium. Enloe (born 1938) and Tickner (born 1937) then gave it its founding books in 1989 and 1992. As a mode of critique it belongs to the same reflectivist turn in IR as constructivism, which also treats the international as socially constructed rather than given, though feminist IR insists that gender is the construction the field most stubbornly refuses to see.

The strongest case for it

The core empirical claim is hard to deny once stated: women are absent from mainstream accounts of world politics, and no one had asked why. Enloe's achievement is to show that the absence is not because women do nothing internationally but because the discipline drew its boundaries to exclude what they do. Follow the supply chains, the bases, the tourist economies, the diplomatic households, and the international system is revealed to run on gendered labor that the standard model cannot even name. That is a genuine discovery, not a complaint.

The theoretical claim is equally sharp. A field that prides itself on hard-headed realism ought to be uncomfortable when shown that its central figure, the rational power-seeking actor, matches a cultural ideal of masculinity so closely. Tickner does not merely assert bias; she rereads the canonical texts and shows the coding at work. Redefining security from the standpoint of those whose daily survival is most at risk has proven fruitful: the concept of human security, now used across the United Nations system, and the sustained attention to conflict-related sexual violence, formalized in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000, both track the ground feminist IR opened. Whatever one thinks of the deeper epistemology, the field it criticized was demonstrably incomplete, and the correction has produced knowledge the old frame could not.

The strongest case against it

The most consequential objection came from inside the reformist wing of the discipline. Robert Keohane, a leading neoliberal theorist, welcomed feminist standpoint work in a 1989 essay but urged feminists to convert their insights into testable hypotheses and causal variables that mainstream social science could evaluate. Tickner's reply, in her 1997 essay You Just Don't Understand, was that this "welcome" was a demand to accept the very positivist rules feminists reject, that reducing gender to one more independent variable strips it of its point, which is to question the framework, not to be absorbed into it. The exchange became the discipline's most famous methodological standoff, and it cuts both ways: critics charge that a research program which declines to state falsifiable claims cannot be adjudicated and risks insulating itself from refutation, while feminists reply that the demand for falsifiability is itself the parochial standard they are contesting.

A second objection comes from within feminism. Postcolonial critics, Chandra Talpade Mohanty most influentially, warn that Western feminist IR can reproduce the imperial gesture it condemns, speaking for a homogenized "third world woman" cast always as victim, and thereby erasing the agency and difference of the women it claims to recover. If the field universalizes a Western account of gender, it commits, on a new axis, exactly the error it charges realism with.

A third objection is that of the traditional realist. Kenneth Waltz's structural realism holds that the causes of war and the behavior of states lie at the level of the international system's structure, its anarchy and distribution of power, not at the level of individuals or their psychology. On this view, showing that statesmen think in masculine terms says nothing about why states behave as they do, because structure would compel similar behavior from leaders of any gender or temperament. Whether a more feminized elite would produce a more peaceful world is, at best, an open empirical question, and one the theory has not settled.

Where it stands now

Feminist IR is now an established subfield with its own journals, notably the International Feminist Journal of Politics founded in 1999, its own recognized scholars (Laura Sjoberg, Christine Sylvester, V. Spike Peterson, Charlotte Hooper), and a foothold in the mainstream through the study of gender and armed conflict, the Women, Peace and Security agenda built on Resolution 1325, and the analysis of masculinities in militaries and foreign policy. It has not been absorbed into the positivist mainstream, and by its own lights it should not want to be. Its central figures remain in print and in course syllabuses, and its founding question keeps its edge: any account of world politics that cannot say where the women are, or why its own concepts look the way they do, has not yet earned the objectivity it claims. Whether that critique reorganizes the discipline or remains its standing conscience is still, three decades on, unsettled.

Test yourself

Picture the last major international event you followed: a war, a summit, a trade dispute. Now ask Enloe's question. Which women made it possible, and where were they, the ones who were not on the stage? If you find you have to work to bring them into focus, ask what in your own picture of world politics was keeping them out.