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Women, Culture, and International Relations, by Vivienne Jabri and Eleanor O’Gorman (eds.)
1. Locating Differences in Feminist International Relations
Feminist international relations (IR) has emerged in the past decade as a key critique within the discipline of international relations. The initial impetus of this critique was to challenge the fundamental bases of the discipline in highlighting the ways in which women were excluded from analyses of the state, international political economy, and international security. These traditional concerns were revealed to be male biased in resting upon Enlightenment tenets of the acting male subject in a state–centric world. Writers such as Cynthia Enloe helped to forge a feminist agenda that claimed the international as personal and questioned the primacy of the state as an international actor.
This first wave of feminist international relations has sought to reclaim women’s hidden voices. The focus of research and publications has been directed at deconstructing major discipline–defining texts and uncovering gender biases in the paradigmatic discourses that have dominated the field since its inception in 1919. This has served to unravel the negation of the role of women in global politics and the exclusion of specifically feminist contributions to the analysis of such central themes as war, economic inequality, human rights, and the state. The efforts of major feminist voices in the discipline have undoubtedly had an impact, both in terms of research and in the teaching of IR theory.
The rise of feminism in international relations has been central to the critical turn in the discipline. Part of this postpositivist challenge is to write the discipline beyond the conventional triad of IR theory, namely, realism, liberalism, and structuralism. In common with other reformers, feminists have sought to question the boundaries of the discipline in terms of understanding the international and in terms of problematizing the nature and effect of relations at the level of the international.
In place of the universalizing tendencies of a discourse built upon the Westphalian legacy, the critical turn has sought to move the intellectual project of our discipline so that the givens are no longer so, so that the certainties that naturalized the state and sovereignty are recognized for the reifications that they are rather than necessary conditions of ordered human interaction. Thus opening a space for interrogations of our knowledge claims, we begin to ask questions relating to who we are as subjects and how we relate to others in our societies and to those “outside.”
Just as the state as the primary location of the political is questioned, 1 so too the positionality of the self as citizen comes under scrutiny where the private comes into direct confrontation with the public—where that which constitutes agency is placed in the context of the structural continuities that surround and constitute the life–world of the individual. Issues relating to global inequality and distributive justice, human rights, cultural diversity, and democratic practice come to acquire a pivotal position in a critical and normative discourse that seeks not only understanding of the forces of differential constraint and enablement but also a form of transformation of the present order.
The objective of this book is to contribute to the expansion of the agenda of feminist international relations by considering the heterogeneity of women’s voices in the realm of world politics and the epistemological and ethical challenges this poses for feminist international relations. The book is concerned with developing a theoretical discourse that incorporates the combined notions of difference, culture, and subjectivity and their implications for how we conceive the agency of women and their transformative capacities. In seeking to theorize the multiple subjectivities of women and the plurality of their experiential locations, the chapters in the book draw upon major critical voices in philosophy, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, feminist ethics, and development studies. If we were to characterize the commonalities between the chapters, these would center on the question of subjectivity and its construction. Rather than pretending to include “other” voices, we engage with the question of how the theories we draw upon—from postcolonial discourses, Foucauldian genealogy, the ethic of care to Habermasian thought and Rortian pragmatism—contribute to the incorporation of difference within a discourse that seeks to transform practices of exclusion. The book is therefore theoretical in orientation and focuses on constructs of culture, the ontologies of “self” and “other,” gendered positionality, and difference.
The aim of this collection is to contribute to the feminist discourse in international relations by investigating the place of difference and its impact on developing a feminist approach to normative and epistemological questions in international relations. In addressing the question of difference, and specifically cultural difference, the book situates feminism within the critical agenda of the discipline and in so doing makes a significant contribution to normative concerns around questions of rights, identity, and the transformation of the public sphere.
Feminism, Feminist IR, and Difference
Understandings of difference have been at the heart of the feminist critique in IR. The first wave of feminist IR challenged the epistemological bases of international relations and revealed the systematic exclusion of women’s experiences as central to the established concerns of knowledge–creation in the discipline. These early works sought to deconstruct the gendered oppositions that excluded women from the core concepts of state, security, and the economy and to explore gender relations as power relations focused on the binary opposition between men and women and the relative values assigned to them. The main focus of difference was therefore on assumptions of masculinity and femininity in defining men and women as subjects of IR. The use of a gender lens exposed the methodological blind spots that created particular understandings of “men” and “women” in IR. V. Spike Peterson and Anne Runyan’s elaboration of the “presence/absence” dynamic of gender power relations exemplifies this lens:
Through a gender–sensitive lens, we can see how constructions of masculinity are not independent, but dependent upon, opposing constructions of femininity. In a sense, the presence of men depends on the absence of women. Because of this interdependence, a gender analysis of women’s lives and experiences does not simply “add something” about women but transforms what we know about men and the activities they undertake. 2
Situating the exclusion of gender within the context of the realist dominance of the discipline, Jill Steans highlights how “methodological individualism” has shaped the male–centered concepts and categories of international relations:
Gender has been denied salience as an issue in International Relations because the discipline has been seen as constituted by a system of states which relate to one another in a context of anarchy.... The invisibility or marginalisation of gender issues in the study of International Relations is a consequence of methodological individualism which begins with a high level of abstraction, taking the state to be the key actor. The realist conception of the state as actor has been built upon the supposedly unproblematic figure of “sovereign man.” 3
The epistemological consequence that arises from such ontological certainty is that “sovereign man is in some sense held to embody the ‘truth’ about international relations.” 4
Cynthia Enloe was a pioneer in unmasking the silent workings of women in the myriad structures of international relations. The factory worker, chamber maid, tourist, and consumer were faces that we could recognize and that we now claim as legitimate subjects of international relations. 5 In claiming the international as personal, such gender critiques succeeded in shattering fundamental tenets of western thought, primary among which were the constitutive dichotomies built upon the separation of the public from the private and mind from body. The exclusions operative within this discourse were shown to be so deeply embedded that a reconception of the personal as political disrupted the core features of international relations thought. The discipline was challenged to rethink conceptions of sovereignty, bounded territory, and state relations based variously on the distribution of capabilities or rule following within a “society” of states. Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland set the challenge of developing a feminist epistemology in IR to effect this deconstruction. “A feminist epistemology means most simply that gender becomes a prime element in understanding the theory and practice of international relations.” 6 What has emerged in the subsequent development of feminist international relations is a rich tapestry of works that reaffirm the continued contestation about meanings and representations of gender, feminism, “women,” and “woman.” The development of feminist epistemology has proved a contested exercise in the reworkings of gender power, identities, and the significance of other tropes of difference in defining social relations.
This development of feminist theory has not taken place in isolation but has drawn on wider debates in feminist social theory and tailored them to specific issues and deconstructions in international relations. Feminism as social movement and as theory emerged as a discourse of dissent. Its remit as social and political theory combines a critique of the present order with a desire to transform practices that inscribe woman as other. Its content is at the same time normative and political. As a normative discourse, it seeks to locate the moral and ethical implications of gendered social relations and the inclusions and exclusions that arise from the transformation of such relations. As a critical discourse, it seeks to relate a critique of knowledge with practical concerns around questions of equality, recognition, and freedom from oppressive social practices. The substantive content of such critique and the advocacy of a transformative discourse, however, immediately point to the troubled relationship that feminism has with the subject of “woman” and her agency. Since it emerged from a western context, feminism as a social movement and as theory has had to confront a critique from within its own constructed boundaries. In attempting to deal with the question of difference, feminism has historically varied its responses in terms of, on the one hand, a belief in the universal emancipation of women and, on the other hand, a wish to recognize the contingent daily lives of situated women. Whether we talk of a single universalism or a number of different universalisms, feminism as a primarily western discourse is daily confronted by images of both direct and structural violence perpetrated against women. These women are, however, differently located along axes of domination and therefore have differential access to rights and resources; and they have different security concerns and widely divergent capacities for dissent and transformation.
International relations are inscribed with subjectivities of race and class as well as gender in shaping international agendas and the operation of power at the level of the international. Therefore, the question becomes how men and women—and women among themselves — are differentiated and placed in different situations of risk, powerlessness, power, and security at the international level. Such understandings can be forged only through an apprehension of the interconnectedness of the international with regional, national, local, and personal relations in producing what we claim as the international.
A second wave of feminists in the discipline are now turning to confront the tensions and opportunities posed by difference among “women” and within “woman” as subject. This development mirrors the crisis perceived in the wider field of feminist theory where controversy exists over the place of collective feminist action in a postmodern context of differentiated and multiple subjectivities. The fractures of universal feminism arose from the challenge to the western, white, heterosexual, and middle–class center of the women’s movement. Criticisms by “Third World” and “black” feminists prompted the exploration of differences within the movement. 7 The continued reflections on difference take place in a context where the impetus to act to transform gender power relations remains; poverty, war, and exploitation continue to claim their human costs.
There has emerged a caution against creating unreflexive categories of subjectivity that reinforce the separation of public/private and domestic/international. If women’s nonpolitical identities in traditional IR were the result of constructed stereotypes, then so too must men have been constructed in nonrepresentative ways. Indeed, Jean Elshtain’s early deconstructions of the “brave warrior” signaled such generalizations. Deconstructions of masculinity have consequently become a contested issue for feminist IR. 8 The sublimation of differences among women through the acceptance of a dichotomous gendered critique has also emerged, as in the continued development of a feminist critique in IR.
Jan Pettman and Christine Sylvester, taking very different approaches, have sought to redraw the territory of IR and place people and subjectivity at its center. Pettman, in ways similar to Enloe, offers us insights into the pluralities of difference that define, silence, and articulate women’s positions and experiences of the international, through reworkings of sites of the “international” such as war, international institution building, colonization/decolonization, and international political economy. 9 Pettman, like Enloe, uses a rich resource of case examples to reveal the hidden world of IR beyond the western center and the elite understandings of markets, states, and militaries. The personal and the international merge as she explores the daily impact of international politics on the lives of women living very different lives across the globe. Pettman talks of “worlding women” to take account of worlds beyond an ethnocentric western center. In this way, differences among women are seen to be as important as differences between women and men and are themselves drawn from understandings of race, culture, and class as much as gender.
Writings about women from beyond the discipline form part of Pettman’s project, which is explored in contexts of international trade and the conduct of war. Arguing that women’s experience of the international is radically different from that of men, Pettman at the same time looks to western and nonwestern sources to stress that women and men are positioned in multiple ways along highly complex intersections of power based on race, class, and sexuality. The challenge of placing relations between differently located people is not underestimated by Pettman. “Peopling IR is especially difficult, for traditionally IR takes states as its central unit. As IR makes states into international persons, most men and women are erased from its view.” 10 A shared theme within the normative and political work of feminist IR has been the inclusion of women as subjects; in this way it has challenged the discipline to take cognizance of relations between people (“women” and “men” ), between people and states, and between organizations and economies as the dynamic of international politics and society. The challenge is nothing less than the redefinition of the constituency of IR. If people and relations, rather than states and militaries, are the primary subjects of IR, then what are the ethics, politics, and prescriptions of knowledge in the discipline?
Sylvester’s normative treatise on feminist IR in a postmodern era also seeks to explore the “women” who are properly the inclusive concern of IR. She provides a devastating critique of the discipline’s “great debates” while exploring the implications of feminist epistemologies for how we reconceive the international as political space. Recognizing the place of difference in any critical feminist discourse, she advocates a theoretical approach of “postmodernist feminism” that allows for a deconstruction of gendered absences and assumptions in the knowledge claims of IR while still holding on to the meaningful and multiple subjectivities of women as “subjects” of IR. In defining such a position, Sylvester develops “empathetic cooperation” as a feminist method that challenges the parameters of the discipline through conversation with the established theories of IR and through a reaching out to those who have been evacuated from the space of the international.
As Sylvester’s arguments suggest, an important feature of such cooperation is the need to engage in “mutual recognition,” not from unipolar subject positions but through the “insecuring embrace of mobile subjectivities.” However, an important feature of discourses of difference is power. How difference inscribes women’s experiences and voices, or silences them, is of tremendous import to the forging of feminist politics as the practice of resistance and dissent. The reclamation of voices and subjects “evacuated” from the territory of IR is the challenge posed by Sylvester in placing relations of difference at the center of a feminist critique of the discipline.
Of particular significance to such inclusiveness is Sylvester’s exploration of the term relations international, when she challenges the imagination of the discipline to go beyond the sterile boundaries of international relations as relations among states and institutions and beyond contested assumptions about the inherency of cooperation or anarchy as the bases of such relations. 11 What emerges from this critique is a sense in which gender, culture, difference, and emancipation pose a rich tapestry of possibilities for feminist international relations. If we focus on the “international” as a contested area of many actors, issues, and processes and recognize that it builds upon, rather than separately from, other levels of social and political being, we can then concern ourselves with the mapping of “relations.” Such a focus reveals that relations may be highly racialized and gendered, as well as being based on differential access to power resources. Furthermore, relations may be among peoples, states and peoples, states and organizations, and peoples and organizations. These relations are not exclusive, and indeed international relations is about the simultaneous living of such relations. It is not simply then about states in relation to each other or women in relation to the state, but the very essence of the international being is understood as relational.
These projects challenge the givens of international relations so that these can no longer be treated as gender–neutral discursive spaces but as highly contested issues that are steeped in relations of power. Despite wide differences in style and epistemological orientation, Sylvester and Pettman share the view that although women’s lived experience is multiply located, it is still subject to the gendered discursive and institutional practices that typify woman as “other.” Within feminist IR the fragmentation of subjectivity remains critical if we are not to replicate the oppressive categorizations and exclusions of the metanarrative. Put simply, we cannot aspire to a feminist metanarrative of history in aping the modernist discourses that have built the discipline of IR thus far. It is this realization that has created anxiety, not just within feminist IR but within wider areas of feminist theory as well.
Accusations of discursive colonialism have also prompted western feminists to be more reflexive about difference and its constructions in feminist theory and politics. Chandra Mohanty is critical of western feminism, which she sees as creating the homogenizing effects of a discursive colonialism by making assumptions about the inclusion of “third world women” and, in so doing, erasing the different experiences of such women. 12 Mohanty’s criticism highlights the need to recognize difference and the power relations that inscribe difference if we are not to perpetuate cultural stereotypes in understanding “others’” experiences. The trend of categorizing “third world women” in this way is described by Mohanty as the operation of power through a “process of discursive homogenization and systemization of the oppression of women in the third world.” 13 Mohanty’s concern of “discursive colonialism” is well placed. Geographical location, urbanization, poverty, education, class, caste, and sex all intermesh differently to define the struggles of a differentiated category of agents often subsumed as “Third World Women.” Some women will be better positioned than others to resist and survive. However, discursive colonialism is not only geographically bounded in representing “other” women of the “Third World,” but it also suppresses differences within the category of the “West.” The many struggles of women enacted through various sites of oppression and resistance differentially locate “women” in the “West.” Poverty, exclusion, racism, homophobia, and sexism, together and separately, map the places where difference is contested and mobilized. In deconstructing the monoliths of West/Third World, the “voices beyond” can find a place to speak and be listened to: young girls and women in rural areas of sub–Saharan Africa, exiles in the migrant farmworker camps of the United States, and homeless people on the streets of Britain.
Pettman also refers to the project of decolonizing feminism. A key task she identifies is the recognition of the power inscribed in “whiteness.” The ethnic constructions of power that leave white unreflected contain the assumptions of power and difference that underpin the distancing, denigration, and silencing of the “other.” The political understanding of the construct “white” is now being understood in its unspoken nonracialized assumptions of self. The white self is viewed as the norm, whereas nonwhite “others” are seen to have “race” and “ethnicity.” 14 We can speak of an organizational culture of states and international organizations that replicates this. The western cultural bias of international relations is problematic, with an assumed core political identity around the sovereign state or around organizational actors who know the rules of the game. We can also see the international as ignoring the cultural subjectivity of “self” in presuming major western states as the core of international power; “culture” is then exoticized to refer to those other countries beyond the center.
Within feminist international relations, the decolonization of feminism thus demands recognition of the ways in which “we” are implicated in reproducing oppressions through particular representations of “others” we claim to see as equal and seek to support through emancipatory ideas and practices. Shifting from feminist standpoint to multiple feminist standpoints finds meaningful expression through the acknowledgment that highlighting unequal relations of power, even in a field of multiple subjectivities for women and men, will involve points of conflict as well as cooperation. Confronting the uncomfortable “truths” that sometimes we (qua women in particular subject positions) can act to oppress as well as emancipate is a necessary part of building a political dialogue of difference. The activity of writing about women, gender, and change is a political act requiring writers to reflect on the effects of their representations of women. The challenge posed is to elucidate difference in a way that holds on to the importance of power and resistance.
Embracing difference to affect more inclusive theories and politics of a globalized international space should not erase the workings of power that highlight the tensions of equality and difference in feminist epistemology. Mutual recognition among subjects does not imply equality between subjects. Multiple subjectivities give meaning to mobile relations that are inscribed with power. Embracing difference, therefore, involves understanding the relative power struggles that take place within the self and intersubjectively through the meanings given to particular subject positions. The location of struggle comes to be recognized as a significant material condition that differentiates those engaged in the struggle against racism in the West from those elsewhere engaged in confrontations against both local and global structures of domination and control.
Women, Culture, and International Relations
The title of any text immediately points to assumptions contained therein. The use of women rather than gender or feminism highlights the difficulties that have emerged within feminist IR in representing “woman” as subject and “women” as a category of subjects with shared experiences of discrimination and emancipation. The focus on women marks the return to normative questions concerning women’s subjectivity and moral and political agency. What this volume of essays demonstrates is that the understanding of “women” as situated political agents is extended through explorations of cultural difference in the forging of women’s many subjectivities as “women.” Through a variety of locales of difference, the richness, diversity, and struggle of identity for women in forging subjectivity is revealed.
The term culture may be considered brave by some who see the contestations of identity politics, racial and ethnic categories, and definitions of culture as rendering it in crisis even to the anthropologists! However, the theme of culture in this collection of essays highlights the ways in which assumptions of sameness and difference remain in the worldview of international relations, particularly in the understandings of what Seyla Benhabib refers to as the “generalized other,” set against the western norm of “self.” 15 Culture is also taken on proactively to underscore the contexts and cultures of “creative subjectivity” featured in the chapters. This “creative subjectivity” refers to the experience of difference in the claiming and rejection of preinscribed subject positions.
From the title, readers should also be warned of what to expect from “international relations.” Our starting point is not the system of states, the straw man to burn; rather, it is situated in the more recent critical turn in the discipline. All the essays engage with “critical” theories and seek to demonstrate their usefulness to the normative development of feminist international relations.
Women, Culture, and International Relations seeks to consolidate and extend the normative reach of feminist IR through a series of theoretical dialogues that explore the workings of gender subjectivities through discourses of culture and difference. To do so, the essays in this collection draw upon the works of critical social and political theorists such as Seyla Benhabib, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Nancy Fraser, Richard Rorty, and Gayatry Spivak to introduce and elaborate the problem that difference poses for international relations theory within the specific context of gender and cultural diversity.
The overall critique of this book is situated against the “generalized other” that is found throughout international relations theory in its ethnocentric assumptions of the western center as “self.” This generalized notion of otherness was challenged by the gendered critique of the first wave of feminism that revealed the construction of woman as “other” within the binary opposition of male/female understandings of international relations. However, this important critique still contained assumptions of sameness within the categories of “women” and “men.” More recent feminist contestations have called for a more nuanced sense of these binary categories by developing a conception of political space as being multiply located within discursive settings that intersect local as well as global power relations. These power relations are inscribed by difference arising from subjectivities beyond gender, such as race, class, and sexuality.
The explorations of subjectivity collected in this volume extend this gradual shift in the core concerns of international relations away from the inviolability of state sovereignty toward a clearer focus on the relations among people and between people and states and people and organizations. In so doing, this collection also extends the dialogue about difference within feminist IR by elaborating upon feminist postcolonial and poststructural critiques that recast IR subjectivities in a number of locations: ethics, art, exile, knowledge creation, revolution, development policy, and postcolonial reclamations of the subaltern. In its own way, each chapter challenges the notion of a transcendental category of woman while exploring the question of subjectivity, as well as the ethical and political implications of different theoretical discourses. Our goal is to advocate a meaningful engagement with difference to effect a more inclusive approach to building theory and researching the international.
This volume’s focus on difference is important because the multitudinous workings of difference—the ways in which subjectivities are conceived, challenged, and transformed—affect all aspects of international relations: from the questions we ask, to the theories of understanding we construct, to the people and agendas we claim to represent. Exploration of difference requires the deconstruction of self/other understandings of cultural difference and reveals the contradictory processes of subject creation by collapsing binary oppositions, cutting across the self/other, us/them, West/Third World categories of subjectivity. The essays collected here challenge the ethnocentric tendencies of western IR by asking how the “other” constructs him/herself. In so doing, they reveal that the categories of “self” and “other” are not separate or pure categories of being but are implicated in the discursive strategies of subjects in the form of resisting, claiming, denying, and complying with subject positions. More specifically these critiques offer particular insights into the production of “otherness,” namely, the understandings of power and difference in self/other constructions and in self–understandings; how discourses of difference can emerge to oppress as well as to resist; and strategies to reclaim subjectivity through voice, agency, and representation.
The theme of representation is an important one: It underlines the need for feminist researchers and analysts to be conscious of their epistemological and methodological assumptions when developing theories and practices of dissent. Epistemological claims and methodological approaches affect the representations of “women” and “woman” as moral and political agents and are themselves sites of power and difference. Interpreting and representing the experiences of “others” and defining means of change, resistance, or escape are intricately bound up in the context of knowledge creation and the self who writes. The essays demonstrate that the building of critical knowledge through understandings of difference is not simply a concern of mapping out the self/other axis. To settle here is to leave the power–inscribed epistemic context in place. By problematizing the understanding of how the self and other are created (across different locales), these essays reject the axis of external knower–liberator and internal unconscious–native and so invite a rethinking of political strategies of dissent and transformation. The question is no longer who emancipates whom, as in earlier feminist liberation projects, but becomes one of how women and men, and women among themselves, are differentiated and placed in different situations of risk, power, and security and how that positionality sets the limits and opportunities for agency.
Kimberly Hutchings is specifically concerned with Benhabib’s attempt to synthesize the universalism of critical theory with recognition of the “concrete other” as a basis for moral and political theorizing. What we see in Hutchings’s chapter is Benhabib’s use of insights from both Carol Gilligan’s feminist “ethic of care” and Hannah Arendt’s account of judgment to temper the abstractions of Habermasian discourse ethics. Hutchings argues that Benhabib’s theory still runs into difficulties when confronted by issues of normative judgment that transcend deep cultural divisions. This is because the concrete other is able to take part in meaningful dialogue only if she or he already shares some of the presuppositions common to liberal political culture. The result is that the dialogue that grounds moral and political judgment and action in Benhabib’s work is exclusive rather than inclusive. This poses particular difficulties for feminists dealing with normative questions in an international context. The question is raised as to whether there can be feminist dialogue across the boundaries of states and cultures without the prior exclusion of some participants. In direct challenge to universalist discourses on emancipation, Hutchings ultimately asks, Is a genuine universalism possible in international feminist normative theory?
In seeking to place the question of difference within the domain of normative discourses in international relations, Vivienne Jabri moves the terms of the debate beyond the dualism of the feminist ethic of care and the ethic of justice. In exploring the notion of difference through a problematization of subjectivity, Jabri argues for an ethical position that takes account of the multiple sites and styles of responsibility within the present globalized context. The chapter articulates a position, therefore, that centers on questions of self–constitution and self–transformation as the formative moments of a late modern subjectivity that is responsive to its constitutive other. Specifically drawing on the works of Homi Bhabha, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, Jabri questions originary conceptions of identity and subjectivity, suggesting in place of such certainties the view that ethical subjectivity is an elaboration of strategies of self that come to constitute a form of aesthetic ethics.
That feminist discourse may be conceptualized as a linguistic tool, giving voice to the previously silenced, brings to the forefront of concern questions relating to how we conceive of the silenced subject, how we name her, and how she names us. Feminism’s tensions emerge here as we relate a politics of representation with a view that such representation negates alterity, silencing the already silenced. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a foremost feminist and postcolonial theorist, whose works have made a highly significant contribution to poststructuralist perspectives and how these may be related to thought on the international division of labor, race, feminism, and the condition of postcoloniality. Nalini Persram addresses the concerns of this highly complex thinker, bringing to international relations a theorist whose works are rarely used in the discipline and yet are of tremendous value to our conceptions of race, class, identity, and subjectivity and how these relate to the global condition. Persram’s chapter is of specific value to this collection in that it addresses Spivak’s concern with the intersection of feminism, difference, and the global international division of labor. Interested specifically with the figure of the subaltern woman and engaging with Spivak’s claim that representations of the “other,” in their failure to grasp the heterogeneities that exist therein, constitute a form of “epistemic violence,” Persram concentrates on Spivak’s reaction to the Subaltern Studies group and its remit to recover the lost subjectivity of the subaltern.
Eleanor O’Gorman addresses the question of women’s agency in the context of revolutionary struggle and examines the emergence of subjectivity through gendered forms of local resistance. Women’s participation in revolutionary struggles has provided a powerful emancipatory appeal for feminist efforts to transform the public/international space. O’Gorman questions the inevitability of such a transformative potential through an exploration of difference, subjectivity, and resistance as these emerge within the context of women’s experiences of revolution. Using Foucault’s elaborations on power and resistance, O’Gorman argues against the universalist assumptions that an emancipatory political project may hold. She suggests instead that Foucault’s thought on resistance provides a challenge to the fixity of revolutionary subjectivity and opens a space for addressing the ambiguities involved in giving women a revolutionary voice that is inclusive of their daily struggles in living through violent conflict. The epistemological question that emerges relates to how we construct knowledge claims of the local and the degree to which we remain in dialogue with situated understandings.
Sarah White evaluates the subjectivity of women in the discourses of difference inscribed in both colonial and development policy contexts. She explores the influence of feminism on development thinking and policy, suggesting that initial concerns centered on the concern to overcome the “invisibility” of women by highlighting the role of women in the well–being of households and communities. White suggests that these early endeavors concentrated on a small number of issue areas—namely, domestic labor, divisions within households, and distinctions between access and control of resources—with the implication that the lives of women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were dissected and repackaged to enable “their” inclusion in “our” programs. In critically evaluating the impact of feminism on development theory and policy, White points to gender and development as a site of conflict between metropolitan and local cultures. She suggests that gender may serve as the bearer of other meanings besides the subordination or emancipation of women, sounding a cautious note against the rendering of either “development” or the “local culture” in monolithic terms.
As we indicated earlier, the dominant discourse in international relations has centered on the sovereign subject, assumed as masculine and white. This is the position of normalcy against which all others come to be inscribed. It is precisely this conception of the subject that underpins the triumphalism of western discourse on the course of change and that Nicholas Higgins addresses in his chapter. In evaluating the dialogue between Nancy Fraser and Richard Rorty on the place of feminism in social critique, Higgins seeks to challenge the dominant international political project that is increasingly modeled on the North Atlantic liberal democratic framework, which Rorty celebrates and Fraser questions. The dialogical setting of the chapter provides an insight into the relationship between philosophical pragmatism and feminism and the ways in which each may be constitutively built upon an antiessentialist and antifoundational conception of the self that takes account of difference. In a highly nuanced discussion between the two authors of the relationship between freedom and difference and in the disagreements they express specifically over public/private dualism, Higgins opens a space for self–reflexivity in western discourses that tend toward an untrammeled complacency in their negations of multiplicity and the figurations of gendered subjectivity.
Stephen Chan also takes up the challenge to western thought through a concern with the negation of the heterogeneities of the “other” in dominant discourses. He argues that even where room is permitted for the “other,” it is rendered as a presence that is undifferentiated and essentially unchallenging of the western academy’s notions of what emancipation involves and assumes. This emerges as a hegemony of defaults, and the default is accomplished by the permission of the other and the simultaneous silence imposed upon it. In a move that is shared throughout this collection, Chan suggests that when attempts are made to render the other as a speaker in terms of discourse, it is by means of typecastings, control of the academic media and publication, and assumptions that epistemologies and languages are compatible in their ontological origins. In typically proceeding by both story and essay, Chan outlines a gap in international relations thought, the major impediment to the closure of which is a sense of rationality that is universalist in its claims but partial and contingent outside of our essentially western discipline.
The challenge to set a ten–year agenda for feminist international relations is an ambitious one that is shared collectively by the community of feminist scholars. This book seeks to contribute to the setting of normative debates on that agenda. In the strong and exemplary traditions of feminist IR, this collection seeks to stimulate debate and extend the critical work of disturbing the boundaries of IR and transforming its constituencies. The editors return to this challenge in the concluding chapter.
Endnotes
Note 1: See, for example, Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Back.
Note 2: Peterson and Runyan, Global Gender Issues, pp. 7– 8. Back.
Note 3: Steans, Gender and International Relations, p. 46. Back.
Note 5: Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases in Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Back.
Note 6: Grant and Newland, Gender and International Relations, p.2 Back.
Note 7: See Mohanty, Russo, and Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism; Hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism; Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Back.
Note 8: Such deconstructions are drawing upon a growing literature on masculinities in social theory more broadly. Elshtain, Women and War; Connell, Masculinities; Hearn and Morgan, Men, Masculinities, and Social Theory; Pettman, Worlding Women, pp. 87– 95; Zalewski and Parpart, The ‘Man’ Question in International Relations. Back.
Note 9: See Pettman, Worlding Women. Back.
Note 10: Ibid., p. viii. Back.
Note 11: Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era, pp.219–222 Back.
Note 12: See, for example, Mohanty, Russo, and Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism; Alexander and Mohanty, Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. Back.
Note 13: Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” p. 63. Back.
Note 14: See Pettman, Worlding Women, pp. 41–44; Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters. Back.
Note 15: This is a term coined by Seyla Benhabib. Her understanding of the “generalized other” receives fuller treatment by Kimberly Hutchings in Chapter 2 of this book. Back.
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