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Women, Culture, and International Relations, by Vivienne Jabri and Eleanor O’Gorman (eds.)
9. Conclusion
The chapters in this book concentrate on the implications of difference and the construction of subjectivity for feminist theory and praxis. We see here an engagement with and reflections on the tensions that arise in any discourse with normative and praxiological content that seeks to take difference into account. The challenge of difference, and specifically cultural difference, brings into sharp focus the universalizing assumptions of modernist thought and its exclusionist implications. It could be said that nowhere are these implications more blatantly apparent than in the discipline of international relations, where a number of constructed universalisms have denied difference a space within the discipline’s conceptual schema. Whether such difference is based on culture, class, gender, sexuality, or any other mode of identification, the discipline has by and large ignored consideration of these, concentrating instead on foundations that seek to universalize and simplify and, with the dominance of neorealism, to reduce the complexity of human interaction to the assumed imperatives of the anarchic international system.
Dominant approaches in international relations owe their hegemony of the discipline to a claim for systematic and systemic explanations of global politics, largely defined as relations between states. Such claims are premised upon a certain assertion of inclusiveness where this is defined in terms of the unquestioned globalization of the Westphalian legacy and its attendant constructs, namely, sovereignty and territoriality. Questions of difference do not emerge here, and if they do, then the point of departure is differential power and its ramifications for balances and the emergence of hegemonic orders that determine state interaction. Where difference is differently defined—where we bring into the remit of the discipline such complexities as subjectivity, moral agency, gender, sexuality, race, and that most troublesome of constructs, culture—then such concerns are by and large challenged as belonging elsewhere, as being the purview of disciplines more concerned with domestic politics than with that special realm, international politics.
We have the option of, as Roland Bleiker suggests, “forgetting IR theory,” 1 simply disengaging from discourses that so seek to reduce the human condition to interstate balances. Such a strategy would imply a movement away from a continual effort at deconstructions of discipline–defining texts—those paragons of realism and its latter–day progenies, including neorealism and neoinstitutionalism. As Bleiker points out, “By articulating critique in relation to arguments advanced by orthodox IR theory, the impact of critical voices remains confined within the larger discursive boundaries that were established through the initial framing of debates.” 2 A move out of such confinement would entail a process of “forgetting the object of critique,” thereby enabling readings of global politics from a number of hitherto unconsidered or little–considered genres and perspectives.
A book devoted to feminism and the challenge of difference may easily be located in the ghetto, relegated to an increasingly widening margin, both included and excluded at one and the same time. The gesture fulfilled, ideas contained here remain on the outside of any core engagements in the discipline—the core being constituted around those reified concerns with state, the interstate, the sovereign, the international institution, the rules and norms of diplomatic behavior. These are the givens, the unquestioned elements of a baseline upon which the discipline’s identity is built. These are the givens impugned whenever attempts are made to incorporate into the hallowed space that is the core of the discipline—those elements that are at the core of the human condition, such as identity, gendered social relations, discrimination based on race or sexuality, or the multitude of other exclusionary practices faced by individuals and communities alike. Rather than being acknowledged as constitutive of and emergent through the discursive and institutional continuities that are the state, sovereignty, and global relations, these elements are deemed to be added extras, included in edited texts as the odd (and often last) chapter or in theory courses as the odd (and again last) lecture.
We may therefore adopt a strategy of “forgetting” orthodoxy in IR theory and simply pursue our interest in expanding the agenda of the discipline, for this alone highlights its exclusions. There is no attempt implicated in such a strategy for seeking converts or for constructing another reified discourse. This is rather a reflexive attitude that occupies a form of interstitial space, one that recognizes its emergence from the discursive practices of the discipline but that is also highly aware of its alterity, its moment of difference. The ideas contained in a text such as this are not solely of interest to feminists or critical social theorists, but they touch at what we see to be of core importance in international relations, with inquiry into such themes as the constitution of moral agency, the move beyond easy dichotomies exemplified by cosmopolitanism and communitarianism, the implications of care as an ethical moment, inquiry into the notion of everyday resistance, the construction of identity and the aesthetic ethics of self–understanding, the consequences of development practices that pitch the general against the local, and, finally, how we in the affluent West construct the other through negation. These are themes that are related by a shared interest in difference, specifically cultural difference, its constitution, and its implications for the normative and praxiological content of international relations thought in general and feminist approaches in particular. 3
This book is an engagement with feminism and the challenge of cul– tural difference. There is an explicit normative content in a discourse that takes as given that ethics, gender, and culture matter in international relations and the texts we produce about the international. These categories or constructs are in themselves not taken as given, however, but are recognized as being framed around ontological complexities that may not be reduced to rarefied or even reified simplifications. There is also the related assumption that political identity, or the question of how we think “the political,” may not be confined to the state or global politics to the interstate. The discourse of sovereignty has so limited the political imagination that to think of the multiple sites of political presence, as the chapters in this collection do, is clearly to challenge the naturalization of the state as the only site of political affiliation, identity, or moral obligation.
The achievement of critical thought in international relations is that we may no longer take the state, sovereignty, or bounded community for granted. Nor can we base our theories of the international on an orthodoxy built upon dualisms of the domestic versus the international, the private as opposed to the public sphere, the universal versus the particular, the inside pitched against an alien other. The greatest challenge of critical thought, however, is also one that stems from precisely such reflection on the givens of social and political life, for, if the juxtaposition of sovereignty and political identity is questioned, the immediate imperative seems to call for alternative forms of political expression, a form of transformation of the notion of political community that transcends exclusionist practices and the institutions from which such practices emerge. But there are no blueprints contained here, nor is there a universal emancipatory project. What there is, however, is reflection on the challenge of difference in a discourse such as feminism that has a historically self–declared normative content. As Andrew Linklater has recently pointed out, “Questions about the relationship between moral universals and cultural difference have a central place in contemporary debates in international relations theory.” 4 But how do we think of or conceptualize difference; how is difference manifest in the situated lived experience of the individual; and how do our discourses on difference constitute the exclusionist practices we seek to transform?
These are questions that have manifest importance in the theories of international relations and the practices of inclusion and exclusion that take place in global politics. While orthodox approaches in the discipline have ignored questions of cultural difference, the linguistic turn in the broader social sciences and humanities, as well as critical international relations, have recognized the place of language and interpretation in social interaction and the epistemologies and ontologies that underpin social and political thought. The linguistic turn also marked a move away from positivism and its core assumptions, primary among which are the correspondence theory of truth and the dualism of fact and value. We could no longer conceive of theory and the language contained therein as an unproblematic “mirror of nature,” to use Rorty’s term, nor could we utilize linguistic categories as somehow representational of a pregiven reality. Just as gender could not be conceived in essentialist or biological terms but as social construct, so too the term culture or cultural difference could not be reduced to any firm boundaries or authentic origins.
With the globalization of all aspects of social relations comes a sharpened focus on culture and cultural difference. There is, however, a sense in which culture, like the state, is taken as ontologically unproblematic, a form of primitive bounded community aspiring toward the greater heights of abstract statehood/sovereignty. One consequence of this is a discourse that utilizes culture in terms that have predominated thought in interna– tional relations, namely, the inevitability of confrontation and the assertion of the requirement for balances and hegemonic systems. This form of reductionism is evident in Samuel Huntington’s recent evocation of a “clash of civilisations,” 5 where “civilisation” is defined in monolithic and essentialist terms, where any differences that exist within each category are denied a presence in a system of confrontation that is reminiscent of a neorealist conception of the interstate system. Those deemed “other” in civilizational terms come to constitute a threat against a monolithic West, itself conceived as coherent, and certain of its boundaries and achievements. This form of exclusionist discourse is also present in the triumphalist terms in which Francis Fukuyama proclaims the “end of history” as the moment when the liberal West comes to constitute the model according to which others may be judged. 6
What the chapters in this collection show is that culture, like gender, matters in international relations but that both are constructs that defy easy reductions and stable definitions. The exclusionist discourses presented by Huntington and Fukuyama are replicated in the empiricist literature, which treats both gender and culture as “independent variables.” These remain unproblematized, given categories that contain an essential core, such as biological difference, or clearly ascribed cultural markers, such as color, dress code, religious affiliation, or geographic origin. Such representations again assume a norm, usually inscribed as western man, against whom all others may be judged. If there are no easy reductions and definitions, how then do we justify the use of constructs such as “women” and “culture” in a collection of essays that is precisely geared to unravel and reflect upon the impact of difference on the theory and politics of feminist international relations?
As the chapters here make all too clear, there is no assumption of a singular category named “woman,” predefined or transcendent. The use of the plural term immediately points to the view that gender is socially constructed and is implicated in the identification of individuals in different social settings. The various modes of identification are, however, manifested differently across time and space, and it is this difference that distinguishes and determines the lived experiences of women in contingent social matrices. Practices and modes of signification that construct gender are in themselves interlaced with complex systems of meaning that define and constitute particular societies. This is the challenge that has for long faced feminist discourse as a normative project.
The challenge of difference, and specifically cultural difference, brings into sharp focus the universalizing assumptions of modernist thought and their exclusionist implications. Feminism as a political project emerges from the modernist tradition and in so doing comes into direct confrontation with questions related to subjectivity and difference. Rooted in eighteenth–century Enlightenment thought, the modernist vision of ethics and political transformation assumes a universal ontology based on reason and autonomy, where the agent of social change is the individual unencumbered by group membership and capable of deliberative reasoning on social norms and institutions. It is precisely this vision that early feminist thought, from Mary Wollstonecraft through the suffrage movement and the women’s movement of the 1960s, adopted as its aspiration. The critique of social forces that subjugate women—that confine them within oppressive, unequal, and exploitative relations—is here combined with the political aim of emancipation based on equality between women and men. That “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one,” 7 as Simone de Beauvoir so elegantly phrased the emergence of gendered relations, underpins the cry for equality, for the transformation of social relations toward justice, equality, and free participation within the public sphere. If femininity and masculinity are societal constructs, a transformative agenda would encompass the delegitimation of such constructs to build equality between the sexes. The main focus here is gender difference, and the aim of a feminist transformative project is the elimination of such difference. As Nancy Fraser points out:
The political task was thus clear: the goal of feminism was to throw off the shackles of “difference” and establish equality, bringing women and men under common measure. To be sure liberal feminists, radical feminists, and socialist feminists might dispute how best to achieve this goal, but they nevertheless shared a common vision of gender equity, which involved minimising gender difference. 8
Contained within this distinctly modernist vision is the view that women across the signifying divides of culture and society share a common agenda, irrespective of differences that define the lived experience of women. The aspiration of this vision is global in orientation, the implication being that we could form judgments of the lived experience of women elsewhere and campaign toward intervention in order to achieve equality where oppressive social and cultural practices are apparent. There is here a certain cosmopolitanism based on a discourse of universal rights, of the right to intervention where such rights are violated, and a political mobilization process that is truly global in scope and whose targets are not only governments and international institutions but women themselves.
As Kimberly Hutchings shows in her chapter, this powerful feminist vision has come under increasing scrutiny and reflection within the domain of feminist ethics. Seyla Benhabib’s critique of the Kantian project pre– cisely seeks to move the frame from the “generalized other,” which is the basis of the cosmopolitan project in feminism, to the so–called concrete other, where self and other come to be recognized in their situatedness in time and place. The form of situatedness that has preoccupied feminist ethics is predominantly related to gender difference and the celebration of such difference in place of its denial. Rooted in early–twentieth–century campaigns against war, this version of feminism found its place within feminist discourse in the late 1970s with the writings of Mary Daly and Adrienne Rich. 9 What has come to be known as “cultural feminism” has a clear epistemological, ontological, and ethical message that is at one and the same time a wholesale critique of what is seen as the masculinist discourse of Enlightenment reason and a celebration of attributes associated with women. The ontology that underpins this approach is homogeneous, unproblematized, and ahistorical woman; and it is this ontology that frames the epistemology of “standpoint feminism,” which takes the view that knowledge must be grounded in women’s lived experience. 10 The ethical position related to this is a belief in woman’s peaceful nature emergent from her role as nurturer, a position prominent among women peace activists in the 1980s and underlying the “care perspective” advocated by Carol Gilligan. 11 The autonomous self of Kantian reason is here replaced with the “relational self.”
In seeking to develop a nonexclusionist mode of ethics in an international context, Benhabib’s efforts at concretizing Habermasian discourse ethics through taking account of the situated self comes under interrogation in Hutchings’s chapter. What emerges from this interrogation is a critique of the search for moral certitude based on foundations that remain problematic in any discourse that seeks to move beyond exclusionist assumptions. What Hutchings seeks, through her use of Rortian phenomenology, is a move away from the epistemological grounding of moral claims, a grounding that must remain insecure since “there are no guarantees of the validity of moral judgments that are discoverable.”
Rather than asking how a universalist ethical project can be reconciled with difference, the view that emerges from Hutchings’s chapter is that we must look to how different social settings produce and come to constitute difference in moral expression. It is crucial, however, that we do not essentialize culture but see culture as a site upon which a plurality of subjectivities emerge through the self–understanding of the creative self. This is a position in Vivienne Jabri’s chapter that highlights the implications for normative discourses in international relations, including feminism, of the view that to account for the complexities of subjectivity is to recognize “the multiple narratives that constitute the self.” Arguing for a feminism of dissent, Jabri posits creativity and critique as the sites through which the self, as ethical subject, engages with a performative transformation and refiguration of the self’s relations to an established social order and its constitutive structures of signification/domination.
International relations theory, because of the contributions of feminist and other critical perspectives, is having to reflect on its situatedness in time and place. There is a tendency, as indicated above, to see the West as the baseline of all epistemologies and ontologies and to inscribe culture as a signifier applicable to the so–called nonwestern. A move out of such easy dichotomies requires precisely a problematization of subjectivity, so that both self and other are equally rendered sites of inscription and signification. Such a move allows for a recognition of difference as constituted around dominant modes of representation of the “other,” but as also being the site through which creativity emerges and dissent is made manifest. 12
The problematization of subjectivity and its implications for a feminist praxis is also a theme that is taken up by Nalini Persram and Eleanor O’Gorman. A number of issues emerge from both chapters that have direct bearing not only for international relations generally but for feminism’s account of epistemology. Where Persram points to the complexities of subjectivity through her interrogation of Spivak’s critique of subaltern studies, O’Gorman highlights the complexities of the resistant or revolutionary subject. A reading through Persram’s chapter points to a highly important, but little–developed, question in international relations thought, which is the question of how the excluded come to acquire voice and how our efforts to construct discourses around the marginalized come to constitute the very exclusionist practices we wish to transform.
O’Gorman’s chapter similarly opens out an agenda for international relations thought centered on the question of the revolutionary subject. Unlike orthodox approaches to this theme, exemplified in international relations by the dominant voice of theorists such as Theda Skocpol, O’Gorman points to the possibility of local and everyday forms of resistence. Traditionally in international relations thought, the idea of change and resistence is related to the state as agent, or to class and state, if more sociological approaches considered in the literature of the discipline are taken into account. What is significant in O’Gorman’s reading of resistance, specifically for international relations, is not only a questioning of what constitutes the revolutionary subject but also the idea that such subjectivity is tied into and constituted by the everyday and the local—locations that remain undertheorized in international relations.
The critical turn in international relations has been focused primarily on epistemological and ontological questions. There is, as Neufeld suggests, a concern with reflexivity, with how our theories and our understandings of the world construct the world that we know and that we make the remit of our discipline. 13 Theory is implicated, but the realm of practice stretches beyond the hallowed portals of academic international relations. Sarah White’s reflections on development policy are not only of relevance in highlighting the essentializing implications of development policies but point to the importance for international relations of reflecting on the relationship between theoretical discourse and the practices that emerge from established official and nonofficial institutions.
That the western conception of freedom and subjectivity cannot be taken as the paradigmatic model upon which other societies may build is a theme that is strongly reflected upon in the last two chapters of this collection. Where Nicholas Higgins concentrates on the challenge to western liberalism from feminist discourse as the West’s internal other, Stephen Chan provides a critique of the form of cultural triumphalism discussed above. Higgins’s “Supposing Truth to Be a Woman” directly explores the epistemological consequences for international relations of the inclusion of a multiplicity of meanings and inscriptions associated with the feminist critique, arguing for a philosophical pragmatism that is both reflexive and inclusive. Through an intricately explored dialogue between the liberal pragmatism of Richard Rorty’s and Nancy Fraser’s self–proclaimed socialist pragmatism, Higgins provides a dialogical narrative that problematizes the subject of western thought; but it is in itself a critique of epistemologies—including those within feminism—that assume singular hegemonic representations.
Chan has long been a prominant voice in the discipline, calling for the inclusion of other voices. In this collection, he points to the problems associated with mere gestures. Inclusion for Chan does not mean simply the addition of an “other” named nonwestern but rather a wholesale reflection on the epistemologies and ontologies that dominate the discipline, including some of its critical voices. As Chan indicates in his chapter, there is no singular voice named “other” that we may include or add to our discipline or our emancipatory projects—just as there is no epistemology that does not at the same time reflect a dominant ontology.
Chan’s concerns are reflected throughout Women, Culture, and International Relations. We have moved beyond the coherent subject of Cartesian thought and any view of a singular category named “woman” or even feminism. In so doing, we have reflected on the implications of such a move for feminist international relations, and our reflections are certainly not confined to readings in the discipline but move beyond its confines in a bid to move the debate forward—not just for feminist international relations but for the discipline of IR as a whole.
This collection of essays articulates what may be called a second–generation agenda for feminist international relations. The challenge to the feminist project as praxis relates to how we may incorporate difference in our attempts to reconceptualize politics and feminism’s historical concern with freedom from oppression and exploitation. The ontological challenge to feminism is that we could no longer adopt an essentialist category “woman” as the defining baseline of theory and praxis. If woman is made, and if she is made differently according to the contingent cultural matrices that surround her, the practical imperative is to recognize both gender oppression and the axes of power that contextualize such oppression in the particular societies in which women and/or feminists engage with the political.
We may therefore ask whither emancipation when the resisting subject and external liberator are questioned. The capitulation of the essential subject of feminism does not herald the death of dissent but opens out a multiplicity of creative possibilities emancipated from the limits of confined significations. Engaging with difference through the problematization of subjectivity does not have to threaten moments of collectivity across issues and cultures but must unmask an assumed sameness as a partial expression of solidarity, empathy, and unity. The implication, finally, is that the homogenizing effects of rhetorical globalizing pretensions must be countered through the effects of the personal and local struggles that create relations international.
Endnotes
Note 1: Bleiker, “Forget IR Theory.” Back.
Note 3: Linklater, “The Question of the Next Stage in International Relations Theory.” Back.
Note 4: Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community, p. 56. Back.
Note 5: Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations. See Chan’s critique of Huntington in Chan, “Too Neat and Under–thought a World Order.” Back.
Note 6: Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. Back.
Note 7: de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 301. Back.
Note 8: Fraser, in Justice Interruptus, p. 176. Fraser provides a useful account of the trajectory of feminist thought on the question of difference. See pp. 173–188 of Justice Interruptus. Back.
Note 9: See Daly, Gyn/Ecology; and Rich, Of Woman Born. Back.
Note 10: See Harding, The Science Question in Feminism. Back.
Note 11: Gilligan, In a Different Voice. Back.
Note 12: See Jabri, “Textualising the Self.” Back.
Note 13: Neufeld, The Restructuring of International Relations Theory. Back.
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