Gender in World Politics
Chapter – 15
Table of Contents
Introduction
- Feminist perspectives entered international relations at the end of the 1980s, coinciding with the end of the cold war.
- The cold war had dominated international relations for the previous forty years.
- After the cold war (1989-2000), there was relative peace between major powers, and new issues emerged on the international relations agenda.
- Economic relations gained more attention, with debates between proponents of economic globalization and those arguing it did not reduce world poverty.
- The meaning of security expanded to include human security alongside state security.
- More focus was placed on ethno-national conflicts and the high number of civilian casualties in these conflicts.
- International organizations, social movements, and non-state actors gained more attention in international relations.
- International politics is broader than just inter-state relations, as highlighted by the globalization theme.
- Feminists challenge the framing of international politics solely in terms of inter-state relations.
- Women have always been involved in international politics, often in non-governmental settings like social movements rather than inter-state policy-making.
- Women’s participation includes roles such as diplomats’ wives, nannies working abroad, and sex workers trafficked across borders.
- Women’s voices have rarely been heard in state power or military leadership.
- Women are deeply impacted by decisions made by state leaders, with 90% of casualties in today’s wars being civilians, the majority of whom are women and children.
- Women constitute the majority of the world’s poorest population.
- Economic policies, shaped in distant centres of power, affect the distribution of resources in local communities.
- A broader global framework is more suitable for investigating these issues.
- The essay will later explore how gender works in these global issues and introduce feminist theory and the definition of gender.
Feminist theories
- Feminism as an academic discipline grew out of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, aimed at achieving political, social, and economic equality for women.
- Feminists link knowledge construction to political practice, a process called emancipatory knowledge, aimed at producing knowledge that can improve women’s lives.
- The primary goal of feminist theory is to explain women’s subordination, which exists to varying degrees in all societies, and to find ways to end it.
- Feminists disagree on the causes of women’s subordination and how to overcome it.
- Different types of feminist theory provide various reasons for women’s subordination, including liberal, Marxist, socialist, post-colonial, and post-modern theories.
- Liberal feminists believe removing legal obstacles can overcome women’s subordination.
- Post-liberal approaches (Marxist, socialist, post-colonial, and post-modern) argue that deeply rooted patriarchy in societies cannot be overcome by legal remedies alone.
- Marxist and socialist feminists focus on the labour market, where paid work in the public sphere receives more rewards and prestige than unpaid household work, resulting in what is called a double burden for women.
- Post-colonial and post-modern feminists argue that women’s experiences of subordination differ based on class, race, and gender, and cannot be generalized.
- All post-liberal feminist theories emphasize gender as an important category of analysis.