Feminism Flashcards
Feminists IR: Visibility
“Where are women”? - Women’s supposed inferiority in Political Thoughts
•Aristotle: “The Male is by nature superior, and the female inferior: the one rules, and the other is ruled. This principle, of necessity, extends to all”
•Kant: women “lack civil personality” and should have no voice in public life. “Laborious learning or painful pondering, even if a woman should greatly succeed in it, destroys the merits that are proper to her sex…[and] they will weaken the charms with which she exercises her great power over the other sex.”
•Rousseau: “Women must be trained to… master their own caprices and to submit themselves to the will of others.”
Hans J Morgehtau’s Six Principles of Political Realism (Politics Among Nations, 1948)
- Politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature.
- The main signpost of political realism is the concept of interest defined in terms of power, which infuses rational order into the subject matter of politics
Ann J Tickner’s Response (1988) to Hans Morgenthau
- A feminist perspective believes that objectivity, as it is culturally defined, is associated with masculinity
- A feminist perspective believes that the national interest is multi-dimensional and contextually contingent
- Power cannot be infused with meaning that is universally valid
- A feminist perspective rejects the possibility of separating moral command from political action
Feminism’s challenge to the state
‘The question for feminism is: what is this state, from women’s point of view? The state is male in the feminist sense: the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women. The liberal state coercively and authoritatively constitutes the social order in the interest of men as a gender— through its legitimating norms, forms, relation to society, and substantive policies. The state’s formal norms recapitulate the male point of view on the level of design.’
Feminism’s challenge to the state: Pateman and the sexual contract
The social contract: Locke
•Individuals relinquish some of the liberties they have in exchange for security, property rights, and civil liberties. Contracting individuals take on obligations: citizenship, law, taxes, military service, etc.
The sexual contract: Pateman
•Locke’s theory requires an additional, patriarchal, contract: Women and children contract with men for protection and in return give ‘consent’ to be governed by a man.
•‘Feminist reinterpretation shows that, rather, the original contract is two‐dimensional. One dimension is the social contract that justified government of citizens by the state. The second dimension is the sexual contract that justified the government of women by men and thus the patriarchal structure of the modern state.’ (Pateman 2016)
Gender is IR
A. Gender as Biological Sex (liberal feminist, essentialist, empirical variable)
B. Gender as Social Construction (boys and girls to men and women, constructivist)
C. Gender as Power Relation ( performing: everyday practice of gender, difference as hierarchy)
Feminist Foreign Policy
What is FFP:
- gender as integral part of foreign policy and foreign policy as a tool to promote gender equality, rights representations and resources, states with FFP (Sweden, Canada, France etc.)
Criticisms:
- co-optation of feminism, imperialism, contradictions
Gender, War, and Security
A. Logic of Masculinist Protection (Young 2003)
- family, state
B. Citizenship (Havel Shalev and DaphnaTekoah 2019)
- war and citizenship, productive labour, social reproduction
C. Gender and Post-War
- peace process, rebuilding peace, social-political order
Gender & War in Ukraine : Analysis
- Women can fight
- Women need to break the stereotype
- Sense of duty and responsibility in the time of crisis
- Soldiering as an exceptional role in an exceptional time
- Gendered norms and discriminations in Army
- Post-war battles
