Feminism and post colonialism

Question 1

What is the tradition

Answer 1

• feminism runs through 20C and before
• Aus one of first to grant rights to women
• Focus post WW2 - many countries - France acquired only post WW2 -
• Civil rights activism
• Peace movements (straddled east and west divide)
  Note proximity between theory (from the ground) and practise - rare case - praxis is central to the theorising

Question 2

What is the ontological challenge?

Answer 2

• tabled in the 80s - liberal feminism in the 1980’s
• where are the women?
• Waltz as Classical Realist - 1959 - levels of analysis as the international (not system) - patriarchal assumptions about the state ( masculine object) and public space (reserved for men) ie state and war are associated with access to men - the domestic is the realm of women
• in practice, women are often the most affected by the some foreign policy practices in IR studies for example peace keeping, foreign intervention

liberal feminism expands the positivist framework to include women - Mary Caprioli looked at a gendered approach to democratic peace theory testing correlation between gender equality domestically and state use of violence abroad - gender as independent variable ie does not move

post positive says simply expanding the lens upholds the problems

Question 3

UNSC REs 1325

Answer 3

UN Security Council commands a peacekeeping operation to pay attention to women affected and including them in the solution to sustainable peace - from a liberal feminst perspective good. From a post positive perspective does this look at changing the status quo

Question 4

The epistemological challenge

Answer 4

The category of analysis needs to be looked at ie look at how being a woman is socially constructed ie the construction of the role needs to be the focus of the analysis - the category is gender change language - previously a biological category - gender a social construction

Question 5

Key research themes in feminism

Answer 5

1. power relations at all levels of analysis needs to be central
2. boundaries - between real and metaphorical - these are constructed - political borders have something to do with one another
3. frames for viewing and analysing the world
4. self reflexive - be aware of where you’re positioning yourself in a disciplinary way

Question 6

Postcolonial perspectives - one of the fastest growing parts of the discipline - emerged as a perspective

Answer 6

As most counties have a colonial history - you can’t look at the international system without the perspective of post colonial states - is the state the only way of looking at the international system - dece

Question 7

What does decentering mean

Answer 7

Frames and grids - the politics of mapping - Peter’s projection - Mercator vs Peter’s projection - explains a new way of calculating distances that is considered more accurate - maps are not neutral tools - riddled with power projections - idea of song lines - mapping different in different culture - mapping a function of power relations

Question 8

Postcolonial themes

Answer 8

The importance of location!

* need to be attentive to time and space “situated perspective” Donna Harraway for example sovereignty or survival

Question 9

Genealogies

Answer 9

• effect of truth rather than truth itself - rather than the policy being object of analysis look at the origins of the policies that we create unthinkingly

Question 10

Race

Answer 10

• a shaping factor of international ordering and disorder IR has only looked at violence as result of anarchy and war - production of order is deeply racialised - epistemic violence -

Question 11

Epistemic violence

Answer 11

Creation of ordering in the int’l system based on violence - who is barbaric - Gayatri Spivak - adds category of race

Question 12

Conclusions

Answer 12

The history of IR feminism ó
‘reflectivist’ approaches (80s/90s)
• BUT several forms of feminism => a key
distinction:
1) Feminism as an ontological challenge to
IR to include the women in the analysis
2) a more fundamental epistemological
challenge, foregrounding gender as a
category of analysis
Conclusion (2)
– Feminist & Postcolonial perspectives: exclusions
were key to making the int’l system => a common
concern tor rendering visible these marginalized
perspectives
– Post-positivist feminisms & postcolonialism: focus
on the taken-for-granted frames through which the
world is represented è representations:
• Gender à Feminism
• Race à postcolonialism
– Decolonisation is an on-going process:
‘decolonising the mind’ (Ngugi Wa Thiongo)and