Feminism Flashcards
What does Cynthia Enloe mean with the state question: not only where are the women, but which women are where?
There has been a conflict within feminism between the global south and north. Where the women from south have felt that feminism has been appropriated by the north. This especially during the late 70s and early 80s.
Between what years did the UN declare the “decade for women”. What UN programs were erected then?
1976-1985. United Nations Fund for Women (UN Women), the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INstraw), the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
What did Ester boserup’s book “Women’s Role in Economic Development”, published in 1970, prove?
It proved that women were essential to productive - as well as reproductive - processes and to developing nations’ economic and social progress.
This led to an entirely new development agenda the United Nations, “Women in Development”.
How did the feminist approach to International Relations fit into the larger discipline when it first made its entrance?
Feminist scholars had no interest in advocating or defending any particular dominant IR approach. The study of women would not only introduce a new subject, it would also demand a critical analysis of the presuppositions and presumptions of the existing discipline.
V. Spike Peterson describes these initial efforts as simultaneously deconstructive, in their critique of the state of teh field, and reconstructive, in introducing new methods and theories for understanding international politics.
What does it mean that states are Gender Unequal?
Women are underrepresented empirically, they are also neglected conceptually as their particular experiences and skills are not integrated into the practice of government.
Feminist theorists demonstrated that this tradition of thought, to which conventional international relations scholars turn (realism, liberalism etc.), was fundamentally predicated on the absence and insignificance of women, as well as highly constructed interpretations of women’s character and, essentially, reproductive heterosexuality.
How is “gendered states” reflected in the military?
The identity of a man as the protector/ruler is established through myths about male capabilities in war and women’s incapability. So, the fixed binary distinction of men (protector/ruler) and women (protected/ruled) is shown to be constructed through the interaction of beliefs, institutions, and politics, which in turn informs and reflects gendered states.
How has a gendered state emerged?
The regulation of of social and political relations that ground the state (marriage and the subordination of women) adn structure the state (military) are fundamentally relations of power which take women and gender as central to their operation.
State and miliatries must deconstruct any facile notions of protector/protected as a natural relationship.
What are, according to Elisabeth Prugl, the three views of gender?
1) An empirical variable that explains social, political, and economic inequalities, whereby gender is understood as the biological (sex) difference between men and women. Power, then, rests in social, political, and economic hierarchies. (liberal fem)
2) A social construct that exists in social practices, identities, and institutions. Gender vecomes the social interpretation of biological (sex) differences, and power rests in the practices, identities, and institutions that interpret and fix those differences. (critical Fem)
3) Gender is an effect of discourses of power. Gender is neither biological difference, nor is it the social interpretation of biological difference, but is itself constitutive of that difference. It is a “code” for the operation of power, and it becomes an analytical category that is not necessarily linked to male and female bodies. (poststructural fem)
How does Liberal feminists (IR) try to change the inequality?
LF does not challenge the epistemology of IR. They try to change institutions so that the rights and representations conventionally granted to men be extended to women.
How does Liberal feminists view unequal IR and violence?
Gender inequality makes conflict both within and among states more likely.
How does critical feminists approach IR?
Many highlight the broader social, economic, adn political relationships that structure relational power, and they often draw from Marxist theories to prioritize the role of the economy, specifically critiquuing the dominance of capitalism as the desired mode of exchange.
The system of the mode of production and class relations produces the class oppression and work alienation of most women.
How does postcolonial Feminists approach IR?
They seek to situate historical knowledge of the contours of colonialism and post-colonialism as intersecting with economic, social, and political oppression and change, highlighting the centrality of conceptions of gender and of women to colonial regimes and their continuing effects.
They also remind women that all women are not colonized equally.
effects of colonialism are not over. Muslim today, “travelling while brown”. Also, “white men saving brown women from brown men.”
What is gender to a poststructural feminist?
Gender is the social construction of sex, sex is in fact constructed by gender. This def, by butler, caused critique: without this fixed and permanent referent in sex itself (biological), how could it be that ‘women’ could exist, much less be united across differences of class, sexuality, race, and location?
What is gender performativity in postructural terms?
Gender is not what we are, but rather what we do. Socially, one becomes a woman by taking on the imperative to identify with the female/femininity and to desire the male/masculinity.
